More thoughts on marijuana growing
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Vertical Farming
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· Score: 1
Generally speaking, indoor marijuana growers in the U.S. tend to bypass the meter and hook directly to the mains so that they can steal their electricity. You can then bribe the meter reader, if necessary, to skip your house. More often, though, the growers simply never deal with the power company; power company records would indicate the house was vacant.
Oftentimes they are caught when the police do helicopter fly-arounds with IR equipment and find that a particular house is incredibly hot. That leads to basement growers and elaborate systems to circulate cold air though the interstitial spaces around the growing area, thus hiding the heat signature of the building.
But why bother with all this, anyway? Their are lots of wild, isolated places in lots of cities where a small patch of marijuana will go unnoticed. Near my house, via google maps, check out this triangular area. It used to be a weed patch that's been harvested. The previous maps of that area had lots of little weed patches but they seem to be gone, now. Interesting; maybe the current photos were taken "out of season," so to speak. In any event, the little creek nearby is known for flooding (so there's no development at creekside) and the presence of lots of curiously serious recreational ATV riders who don't seem to appreciate outsiders poking around.
In that episode, the host spends a day working as a mushroom farm laborer in a coverted factory building near an urban area. Interesting, albeit smelly, stuff. Apparently, it's already quite profitable to grow some crops indoors with manual labor.
...car dealership...wouldn't accept my credit card...
I sincerely hope you filed a formal complaint with MC, Visa, AMEX, or whoever. A vendor signs a contract when they start taking credit cards. That contract invariably says they'll accept the card for purchases. If they can pick and choose, they'll deny the cc company valuable business. Card companies hate that.
Ever see at the cash reigster those little signs that say "Minimum credit card purchase $10"? A simple complaint to the card companies will usually result in a letter to the merchant telling them that they are obligated to accept the card for all purchases. A threat of pulling the merchant authorization is always included. Those little signs disappear in short order.
I can't imagine how strongly a cc company would hit a car dealership that robbed the cc company of as much business as you're talking about.
360 reviews are NOT expensive and they DO work. Just make sure you are truly anonymous.
I don't understand this.
The single best project I *ever* worked on used what we called 360 evaluations. Weekly, we met as a group. We explained what we were doing, with who, what we needed, etc.
Quarterly, we took a day for a meeting where each person on the team brought in an evaluation of every other person on the team. Every person publicly discussed their evaluation of every other person on the team. We *all* decided how well we *all* were doing. At the end of the day, we assigned a single rating to our group that was the rating for each of us, individually.
Nobody ever had any problem telling anybody what they did well or poorly. If we didn't like the way upper management was treating some portion of our job, we told our team leader he wasn't doing his job and laid out what goals he needed to reach and even suggested steps we thought he needed to take. If somebody screwed up, they admitted it. If somebody did well, they got complimented.
Upper management accepted our evaluation of ourselves without question. Our awards/bonuses were based on it, so you might think we just colluded amongst ourselves to defraud the award system by giving ourselves top marks. It didn't happen. We couldn't be that dishonest with each other. Roughly half the years we were in operation, we specifically rated ourselves low enough that we didn't get awards.
None of this could have happened if we tried to be anonymous about our feedback to each other. That gets in the way of actually getting problems out in the open and getting them solved. It would have to be a pretty piss-poor manager who took umbrage at having a failure pointed out publicly. Pointing out failures publicly is the only way to get the whole team on board to fix things.
I thought the whole point of 360 evals was that they were non-anonymous. What the hell good is it to have a manager able to tell me that I've screwed up if I can't tell her the same when she screws up? I just don't get it.
The complete lack of humorous sensibilities in most of the replies in this thread surprises me about as much as this whole situation. So, as the original poster, let me pick this post at semi-random to reply to everyone and actually get serious. (Something I didn't want to do, but, hey, this is Slashdot and it's apparently full to the brim with literalists pushing their affectation to the point of absurdity.)
You said that shooters have a right to protect property in Texas. Well, that's not exactly right. (No, IANAL but I have been through the concealed carry coursework in Texas and have, thus, more than a little training in the legal issues surrounding the use of force in the state. Also, I understand that you're thinking of a federal court action but the truth is that most shootings are going to be handled in state court under state law; that's what I address here.) The absolute requirements for using deadly force to protect property in Texas are, frankly, strange. The biggest surprise to most people is that using deadly force to protect property gets a blanket OK from the law after dark. That's right; it's unnecessary force to shoot someone in the back while they're stealing your TV set at noon. At midnight, you can fire away.
Realistically, no one does that. We're Texans, not savages. (And yes, I'm giving y'all an opening to prove to me you have *some* sense of humor. We like to poke fun at ourselves; feel free to join in.)
From a broader view, though, what impressed me about the whole article was the passive/agressive weirdness of the whole thing. This was a long chase, complete with conversations between the pursuer and pursued. That's a more or less workable illustration of cognitive dissonance. If the crook is a crook, catch 'em and be done with it. Dancing around the streets is, well, just weird.
In my neck of the woods, a more agressive approach to apprehending the suspect would have been tolerated. In the small town I grew up in, the woman could have simply asked the nearest couple of men for help and gotten it. In the big city I live in now, that might not happen. And, yes, people would scatter from the Starbucks if a gun got pulled. But the aftermath would have been a quicker resolution.
There was an attempt there to contrast public attitudes in the Republik of Kalifornia with those in Texas, but that flew right over the heads, it seems, of most readers. In my neck of the woods, the reaction to this story is most likely to be "Why didn't she just clock the bad guy?" California, it seems, would rather praise her for running around in the streets like two kids playing tag for an extended period of time. To me and lots of other folks, that's just strange.
One last thing. No, pulling a gun in a Starbucks doesn't place anyone in any danger except for the person being apprehended. On average, CCW license holders are at least as cognizant of where their gun is pointed as LEOs. We know that we carry as a privilege under a license subject to revocation for any misconduct. No one wants to risk that. Any CCW holder is going to keep their gun out of sight unless it's actually needed. My only point was that if an acceptably more aggressive approach were taken to the apprehension, such a need might have arisen and, at that point, the well-considered display of a gun would most likely have ended the proceeding more quickly and cleanly.
OK, sourpusses (That doesn't include you, PPH); have at it.
That long chase was ridiculous. If this had happened to my sister, for example, she would have held the criminal at gunpoint in the Starbucks where the chase started. None of this running all over creation and actually *talking* to the perp during the chase. WTF is up with that?! Hell, even in CA, would anyone have blamed her if she had simply picked up a chair, smashed the bitch over the head with it, and *then* called the police to report that she'd carried out a citizen's arrest? My God, I hope not.
OK, good point. But doesn't the text of a form 4473 (the form you fill out when you buy a gun) only ask if you've been "adjudicated mentally incompetent"? I realize that's not a perfect quote, but the idea is clear. A *judge* has to formally declare you have a problem. That means a formal process has occurred, not just some unsubstantiated report to a local law enforcement organization. And once such a formal process has happened, I don't think there's much of a privacy issue in requiring an extra step in the process - sending a notice of that judicial determination to the instant check database.
I've always felt that the language of the form, requiring a judges action before someone is supposed to be considered a risk, was necessarily conservative and properly balanced the right of individuals against public safety. AFAIK, this new legislation just says to the states that they must do a better job of reporting these clear cases (that are already at least semi-public information since they've been heard in front of a judge) for inclusion on the database. I can't really object to that.
The instant case isn't really about run of the mill crime. It's about nutjobs intent on doing major damage. In that line, the biggest mass murder in the modern-day U.S. was carried out by pouring a fairly small amount of gasoline on the steps at the walk-up entrance of a firetrap of a nightclub in NY. It was 1990 at the Happy Land club and the arsonist who killed 87 people was Julio Gonzalez.
Properly, then, we shouldn't even be concerned about "crime"; we should be concerned about nutjobs. I haven't actually read the legislation, but based on the news reports that the recent gun control legislatiion will provide some money to make sure that nutjobs actually get put in the instant-check database, I have to say I support this particular gun control bill.
Never in a million years did I ever think I would say I supported any gun control bill. Wow. Live and learn.
That story you heard from an oldster has been passed around since the Cold War and before. Supposedly the Soviets (or Chinese, depending on the storyteller) would manufacture arms that could use captured ammo from NATO countries while making their ammo just enough larger that the reverse would not be true. There's no truth to it, though the Russian 12.7mm round was (last I checked, 20 years ago, and my menory may not be reliable) somewhat similar to our.50 Browning. Still, you'll occasionally hear armchair warriors repeat these old, false notions even today. Don't beat up on yourself about it.
Mother of pearl looks great, so there's always been a "bling" element to its use. However, you should know that mother of pearl as well as ivory, bone, stag horn, and other decorative grip materials for pistols did, indeed, have a functional use back in the day.
Pre-1900, a number of pistol shooting competitions were a big deal, with near full-page coverage in major newspapers. There was a lot on the line and any small advantage was eagerly desired. Generally, the big matches took place over several days and competitors were prohibited from making sight adjustments during the match. To prevent anyone from making adjustments, the pistols would be impounded at night so they couldn't be touched. At the highest skill levels, competitors discovered that a radical change in humidity could make common wooden pistol grips swell or shrink overnight. When that happened, the recoil characteristics of the pistol changed and point of impact changed. That was a very, very bad thing.
Mother of pearl didn't absorb atmospheric moisture. It was stable. Today, we tend to use plastic, micarta, or laminated wood (in less critical applications) on target pistols or we shoot indoors so we don't think twice about moisture absorption. And I only know of one informal shooting sport that prohibits adjusting sights during a match, so lots of wood gets used today, too, since we can correct for any problems it causes. Back in the day, though, the stability of grip material translated directly into a stable point of impact. It could be the difference between winning and losing. Mother of pearl is functional.
Re:The Relief and Visceral Joy of a Hard Drive Cra
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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 1
Excellent questions!
Isn't backupping done centrally in your organization?
Central backup is available but, due to server space constraints, limited to 500mb per user. (This is the single biggest thing I think we could improve about our local infrastructure.) For MOST users, this is fine and dandy. They kick off a backup script icon on their desktop and their email, favorites, and documents folders are automatically synced to their network backup folder.
A substantial minority, however, have far more data. We try to accomodate them with larger network space allowances. Some people, however, fall far enough outside the norm that network backups don't work for them. I know more than one user who stores more than a gig of email per quarter.
And why is e-mail stored on peoples desktops?
Exchange server space is limited, so retained email for most users is kept in *.pst files created by Outlook. Those need to be kept on the local machine because *.pst files get flaky when you access them over a network. In the distant past, when no one dialed in via VPN, everyone was in the office with a rock-solid network connection, and email volumes were lower, it was common for people to keep their Outlook Personal folder (*.pst file) on their network server space. When remote connections became popular and retained email volumes simultaneously started growing more quickly some time ago, the number of corrupted *.pst files skyrocketed and lots of people lost their email. The only solution was to keep retained email on the local machine and try to get everyone to back up regularly.
Microsoft docs on the subject are fairly clear. Personal Folders used to store retained email by Outlook users are NOT intended to be accessed across the network. They should always be local files. We have to work with that as best we can.
Obviously, those lucky users who don't do much email and never keep more than 20-30 megs of the stuff can just leave it all on the Exchange server and never worry about it. For the other 90%+ of our users, that's not an option.
I can give you some insight into how much better things are here than your experiences have shown.
IT in some federal agencies is very scary.
Thank you for the qualifier "SOME federal agencies". Such may be the case, but not where I work - the IRS.
CAC cards are used, but terminal servers and websites for teleworking still allow username/password.
No access to our networks comes in from outside except via encrypted VPN. The phrase "website for teleworking" isn't in our vocabulary.
Blackberries get CAC card readers for encrypted email, while flash drives and external hard drives are thrown into purses and bags.
Where else would you carry your flash drives and external hard drives? All SBU (sensitive but unclassified) data on them, however, is required to be encrypted. The overwhelming majority of our users who are sophisticated enough to request external storage are complying with those requirements.
Remote computers co-located at contractor facilities STILL store LM hashes and don't have the physical security of a DoD office.
Any computer that a contractor needs to put on our network is bought by us and issued to that contractor. All the same security rules apply as to employees.
EVERYONE writes down passwords because they have a dozen passwords to keep track of and each one is kept very similar to the next.
Our security manual states that it's suboptimal to write down passwords but does not actually prohibit the practice. Many of our users wind up with far too many logins and passwords to keep track of (though we're working towards SSO) and writing them down is a reasonable way to deal with the situation. Typically, when I'm doing orientation for new employees or security training for old ones, I pull my wallet out of my pocket and show them a credit card. "See that number on there? That is, in effect, a password to my credit line. I don't mind the fact that it's written down. It's not a security risk for it to be written down. I simply have to make sure I never lose it." We do physical security checks and if anyone actually writes down passwords and leaves them, for example, under a keyboard, they get formally disciplined. People just don't do that kind of crap around here.
Most users would not think twice about freely giving their password in a social engineering attack because IT here has gotten everyone in the habit of handing out their password to IT to "make things easier."
Guilty in the past, but not any more. It's been a long time since we took the easy way out on this one and looked the other way as our IT staff asked users for their passwords. That sort of thing is now completely foreign to our work practices. I don't doubt that some users could be compromised by a well considered social engineering attack, but that will always be the case. Their numbers are small enough to tolerate the risk.
Everyone is a local administrator, so google toolbars and instant messaging programs pop up here and there. The creative users block group policy.
Almost nobody is a local admin. If you're not a desktop support tech, you don't get that kind of access. There are no google toolbars, no IMs. In fact, one of our newly-hired people plugged in a USB key with some software utilities on it. It was detected by the network, his connection locked out, and an emergency security report issued. Within 10 minutes, a security analyst was on the phone with his boss and it was days before they got around to letting him back on the network after substantial disciplinary action had been completed.
Don't even get me started on how the systems are managed. No folder redirection, no user storage on servers. Everyone stores their
GAO and IG reports to/on U.S. federal agencies are shared with the agency first. Typically, the agency writes a short response (Generally along the lines of "A, B, and C were cited as problems. At the time of the review: A was being revised and is now fixed; the methodology used to find problems in B were faulty and we refute the finding; C was a valid problem and we've formed a committee to find solutions.") that's normally added to the report as an addendum before it goes to final publishing. Only in rare cases is the agency not allowed to have a couple of pages at the back of the report to defend itself; that's a good sign of political shenanigans. In even rarer cases, if the agency points out grievous errors in the report, the GAO or IG authoring the report will go back and re-write. The authors of the report don't want to look stupid, so if the agency manages to catch them in a dumb mistake, they'll either fix it in the main body of the report or (I've seen this a couple of times) tack on an extra, typically single-paragraph appendix that replies to the agency reply.
The Relief and Visceral Joy of a Hard Drive Crash
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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've seen a related phenomenon at least a half-dozen times over the last couple of years. I work in a large organization where lots of people live and die by their email. Lots of computers also means a steady stream of drive failures. Despite all the warnings and training, some people will have no backups. Their entire careers, it seems, are in the contents of the Personal Folders they've created in Outlook and when I tell them it's all irrecoverably gone, they have a panic attack or something close to it.
Then, two days later, I run into them and they invariably tell me the same thing. They say that the loss of all that stored email was liberating. They feel free to work in the current moment instead of following up on old items that nobody *really* cared about anyway.
They were able to concentrate on what was important to their peers and bosses. Why? Because they told those people "All my email is gone; please re-send to me anything important" and found that what they got back was far less than they had been trying to keep track of previously.
I thought this was all very odd until I remembered how I lost my old ccMail files when we transitioned to Exchange so many years ago. I remember the feeling of having dropped the dead weight I'd been carrying for so long.
My point is that, no, email isn't dead. It is, however, an oppressive presence in the life of many people. Throwing it off and starting over, maybe greatly de-emphasizing its role, is not necessarily a bad thing.
...put it in terms that they understand...you'll need to make sure that you have a good understanding of what you're trying to express and a fair understanding of the terms you're trying to express it with.
Truer words and all that.
Illustration: I was once assigned to a team that was required to study a new and growing industry, understand their impact on current law and regulation, and make recommendations for new regulations and/or legislation. We're talking billions of dollars of economic impact per month and the industry had grown so quickly that our (I work for a large, U.S. federal agency) ability to administer the law was severely compromised. Good people in that industry were doing great things; crooks were getting away with murder.
Management was smart enough to put on the team people from every division that dealt with the industry. The chosen participants were all very, very sharp folks. I was low man, by far, and felt privileged just to participate. Theoretically, I was just there to support them with a variety of computer-related tasks. However, it became clear at our first meeting that we had big problems. Each division spoke a different language. Simple terms like "case" meant radically different things to different people.
I was the only person on the team who had, over the course of my career, shown so little ambition that I had allowed myself to drift from division to division, from project to project, from job to job. I had either worked in or closely with every division at the table and I understood all their languages. I literally spent half of my first six months on the project translating, in meetings and informally, for the others on the team. It was common that when two people from different divisions talked in the hall informally about something, they'd migrate to my desk and explicitly ask me to listen in to the conversation and correct any communication errors I heard.
I wound up editing our final report to the Cabinet Secretary and even wrote a chapter covering civil enforcement options for it. I firmly believe that project would, at best, have been delayed an extra year if I hadn't been there to constantly translate and help each participant understand the technical jargon of the others.
The situation doesn't matter. You have to understand both sides to communicate between them. My presence on that team was just a lucky accident. It's not really fair to ask the tech guy to explain things to the non-tech folks in more traditional business roles; they speak different languages. There should be someone in between who has extensive experience on both sides to moderate and translate. That person may have various titles like "Analyst" or "Subject Matter Expert" or even just "moderator", but they must exist. Different business models posit different ideal ways to set this up and, depending on where you learned your business processes, they all seem to make up their own names for the tasks, people, and workflows. Sometimes, it seems that virtually every business just wings it when the time comes to make decisions. But if you want to make the right decisions, you need more than just the business guy and the tech guy in the room. You need one more communications-savvy person who has worked both sides recently and extensively enough to still do both jobs. Without that person, you have to fall back on training tech guys to talk business or vice versa, something that never seems to *quite* work out.
Reasonable points. But I think a better one is that geek buyers are more influential. I know I'll order a Dell for my mom when they're available.
People ask me all the time what kind of new computer to buy. Once I get them to agree that they've completely given up on their current machine and written off all the data on it, I give them a CD with Ubuntu. I tell them to just put it into their old computer and boot it up. I give them just enough information for them to kick off an install. I tell them to let it do whatever it wants if it asks questions. In a couple of cases, I've had those users, clueless all, come back and tell me they appreciated having a working second computer for various basic tasks. None of them were dissuaded from buying that new Windows computer but at least there are more and more regular non-computer hobbyist types who are learning that there are OSes other than Win and Mac. I think that's how Linux will spread to "normal" users: via the recommendation of a trusted geek.
Now that Dell has it pre-installed, I can make that recommendation when they ask me what new computer to get after, of course, I verify they have no need of anything aggressively Windows-specific. Sometimes there are specific games involved and Linux is out of the question, but not as often as you might think. (I mostly deal with middle-aged folks.) Dell is providing us another way to fulfill the "spread via recommendation of a trusted geek" model.
I see that as a good thing. You may see it as no big deal or an idea doomed to failure. Time will tell if either, neither, or both of us is right.
No, no, no. WfW 3.11! I really miss the ability to set the number of tiles for my desktop background. I set the number high enough that nobody at work ever figured out that the abstract background on my computer screen was actually porn.
Seriously, if you want a fun experience, try Win 1.0 on a high-end 286 IBM tower. The hardware weighed a ton and had great build quality. It also worked fine. Of course, if was never connected to any network.:-)
several weeks ago when rebuilding an HP machine with XP just got too frustrating and time-consuming. Threw in an Edgy install disk and it worked perfectly. Upgraded to Feisty with no drama. I've been using it exclusively for over a month.
How can Dell be bad for Ubuntu? Yes, I RTFA and I think most of the potential problems are non-issues. The update mechanisms can scale; Dell can help if need be. I can buy support from Canonical or Dell can outsource it to them if Dell can't handle it.
I don't really see the downside. I'd love to see a few completely clueless oldsters accidentally get one of these Ubuntu Dell machines for their first and only computer. Then we'd have converts who simply didn't know any other way.
Even a clueless newbie can figure out Feisty. Now, I think there's another Slashdot post I want to read.
I believe the fundamental problem of system administration in any business environment is that you never see the benefit of good results. You only see costs of failures and people running around putting out fires all of the time. A good system administrator tends to work himself out of a justification for a job because there's no compelling business reason to keep employing someone expensive whose benefits to the organization are invisible.
You said it. I was one of two Unix SAs supporting a few dozen servers for which several hundred users depended for their jobs. If something went wrong, they called and, just like magic, things were fixed. They loved us and they loved the application. The worst thing that could happen would be a server death and when that happened, we'd call up the manageer of the affected group, ask them to have their people save their work locally and sit tight. Out of the closet would come a pre-configured replacement server. We'd plug it in, restore data from one of our three redundant back-up systems, and have those users up and running again in two hours, max.
I loved the work. Absolutely loved it. Because this was a government job with generous paid leave when one of us would be gone, having two of us meant there was always coverage and no downtime. Given that our users brought in 10s of millions of dollars a month, we were a paltry and perfectly justifiable expense.
Our problem was that nothing ever went wrong. Our big 'ol rack of servers hummed along with no drama and whenever the boss dropped by, he'd likely see us plodding through something routine like adding a user or checking system capacity reports. Every few days, we'd get bored and actually walk around the cube farm of the users, stick in our heads, and ask if everything was ok, can we do anything to make things work better? Our users loved us; our bosses didn't even seem to know what to write on our evaluations.
The Windows servers on the other side of the datacenter? Holy Cow, did those guys have the drama! Things were crashing all the time (We're back in the early NT days, mind you.) Whole populations of users suffered critical amounts of downtime. The admins put everything back together, of course, and were lauded as heroes because they had fixed the big, bad problems that had killed so many people's productivity for so long. They were HIGHLY visible to management. They got awards for fixing things. They were heroes.
Us Unix admins were those two people who sat over in the corner and never seemed to actually, visibly do anything.
You can see where this is leading, right? The Windows server side and the Windows front-line support side needed warm bodies, so I got thrown off Unix and into a GUI world I neither wanted nor understood. (Don't get me wrong, I've done the Windows work for years and I love helping people, but I'm not in love with the OS I now use and support.) Later, the other SA was tossed and our servers virtualized on mainframes. The number of SAs was cut to the bone and beyond. Virtualization was a nice concept and it works fine, but getting something fixed when it breaks is now a major red tape experience for our poor (former) users.
Fires to put out mean that firemen get chances to become heroes. Safety engineers who inspect your business and show you how clean the grease traps so nothing actually catches on fire are just needless expenses to be cut as soon as possible.
The moral is: Be a fireman. I figure they get more women, anyway.
This was nearly 3 decades ago. I was a new clerk and had never even had a computer. I had done a good job with my paper-shuffling, so much so that my boss lent me out to another function (big perk, goes on your record as a wider set of experience) where I was to work in the "NEC room." This was a tiny room with a big NEC computer hooked up to an even bigger line printer inside an acoustic shell that held pin-feed, 8-part forms. These forms were Revenue Agent Reports, the final results of all audits, the paperwork you sign to agree to a change in your taxes.
I *really* impressed those folks. Seriously. First off, they couldn't get the forms aligned in the printer; they were always printing everything a fraction of an inch too high or too low on the form. It seemed a simple job to me. I noted the position of the pin-feed holes relative to some random part of the printer, printed one report, changed the position of the forms relative to that printer part to a degree roughly designed to compensate for the error on the first form, then printed another sample form. It was, as expected, properly aligned. I had aligned a new box of report forms with just one test print. The long-time workers in that little room thought I was a god. Literally, mouths dropped opened. They were accustomed to spending hours and half a box of forms getting set up. They loved me.
Next, they had a bunch of garbage records in the database that kept printing out. It was pretty simple to figure out that if I deleted each record, they wouldn't start each day with 20 garbage prints. By this time, they loved me so much the manager stopped by to meet me, sent an official memo of praise to my boss (something normally never done until a detail is complete) and started making noises about creating a position for me in his group. I was flyin' high.
A couple of days later, I asked the question I'd been curious about since I got there but there was never anyone around who could answer. "What's the button for?" "What button?" "This big red one next to the door" I said as I pointed at it. I SWEAR that I didn't intend to touch it; the tip of my index finger just barely kissed the dome of the button.
KLUNK!
Every light in THE ENTIRE BUILDING went out. This was the emergency shut off for EVERYTHING, pre-dating the installation of the computer equipment and intended to be tripped only in case of fire. It took building maintenance about 6 hours to go floor by floor and get every circuit up and running again.
My temporary boss called my permanent boss who called me at home that night and informed me that not only was I no longer on the detail, I was not to set foot in that building until further notice. There were apparently about a hundred Revenue Agents who lost their cases (Remember, this was back in the days of dual-floppy computers without hard drives and saving your work meant deliberately pulling out a disk and inserting another) that morning and had to rebuild their files. Each and every one had apparently vowed to strangle me on sight.
I think those drivers are acting somewhat rationally. Their behavior is a bit extreme, but their thought process is that they have identified you as a slow driver and they don't want to be behind slow drivers. Granted they are approaching a red light or stop sign, but they are thinking ahead, and assume you will drive too slow after the stop. You may in fact not be a slow driver in general.
Excellent point. However, I strive to be an efficient driver. For example, internal combustion engines are most efficient at peak output, generally somewhere near wide open throttle. In recognition of that fact, when I reach the stop sign, I stop. (Sidebar - Actually stopping at the stop sign is apparently very unexpected behavior and I've been rear-ended a couple of times and nearly rear-ended more times than I can count.) Then I go - hard. I accelerate very briskly (my dear old mother says I obviously think I'm at the drag strip) to my target speed then hit the cruise control. After all, once you're up to speed, keeping a steady throttle improves efficiency, so I use my cruise control extensively. In fact, I'll use my cruise control to keep a steady throttle for as little as a couple of blocks.
By driving like this, I average over 22 miles per gallon in a full-size Mercury Grand Marquis, an old-school design with a big V-8. Occasionally, I'll break 24 mpg.
It never really occurred to me that people would try to anticipate how I drive in moving traffic based on how I drive in (virtually) stopped traffic. Seems like apples and oranges to me.
A traffic light stays green for a certain time period. The faster the line of cars can accelerate the more cars can pass through the intersection. The faster the better.
I agree. However, my original posting is addressing the specific case in my locale, where population growth is outstripping infrastructure improvements; we still have stop signs in many places where there should be traffic lights.
three minutes of coasting up to a red light or halted traffic
I often find myself in a half-mile back up of cars at a stop sign. I'm in a rural area that's quickly being developed and adequate traffic control devices (IOW, stop lights) haven't been installed everywhere. It's obvious as all hell that a perfectly reasonable way to get to the intersection is to just idle along. A gap will open in front of me then I'll idle through it. Before I get to the car in front of me, it will have again opened a gap and then stopped while I just idle smoothly along.
Sounds reasonable, right? Well, apparently not. I've had drivers behind me go into apoplectic fits, screaming and flipping me off, because I allowed a half-dozen car lengths to open ahead of me. I've had drivers pass me on the shoulder where there is no shoulder (I literally mean a two lane road with big, scary ditches on the sides) because they couldn't stand to see a gap in front of me. I've had drivers pull out of line, swerve in front of me, then watch their mirror as I idled up from behind and slam on the brakes as I approached, attempting to cause an accident that would be my fault. I hate to ascribe motives to people I don't know, but that seems to me to be just an attempt to "get" me for not driving like everybody else.
Hell, I've actually been stopped in a long line at a red light and had this happen. I was taught that you should stop far enough behind the car in front to see their rear tires on the ground. If they stall out, this gives you enough room to go around. Well, given the right combination of hood and bumper heights, this can also leave enough room in front to fit a small car. On three separate occasions over the past couple of years, I've had the car behind me whip out and pull in front of me (never *quite* fitting into the space) because I left too much room in front of me while we were ALL stopped at a light.
Nope, you can't drive steady in the U.S. It's apparently not allowed. You must floor the gas, roar up twenty feet, and slam on the brakes to stop every time someone in line in front of you clears the stop sign.
People are idiots. No wonder researchers tend to look for technological solutions to human problems.
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Generally speaking, indoor marijuana growers in the U.S. tend to bypass the meter and hook directly to the mains so that they can steal their electricity. You can then bribe the meter reader, if necessary, to skip your house. More often, though, the growers simply never deal with the power company; power company records would indicate the house was vacant.
Oftentimes they are caught when the police do helicopter fly-arounds with IR equipment and find that a particular house is incredibly hot. That leads to basement growers and elaborate systems to circulate cold air though the interstitial spaces around the growing area, thus hiding the heat signature of the building.
But why bother with all this, anyway? Their are lots of wild, isolated places in lots of cities where a small patch of marijuana will go unnoticed. Near my house, via google maps, check out this triangular area. It used to be a weed patch that's been harvested. The previous maps of that area had lots of little weed patches but they seem to be gone, now. Interesting; maybe the current photos were taken "out of season," so to speak. In any event, the little creek nearby is known for flooding (so there's no development at creekside) and the presence of lots of curiously serious recreational ATV riders who don't seem to appreciate outsiders poking around.
Try the March 7, 2006 episode of Dirty Jobs.
In that episode, the host spends a day working as a mushroom farm laborer in a coverted factory building near an urban area. Interesting, albeit smelly, stuff. Apparently, it's already quite profitable to grow some crops indoors with manual labor.
I sincerely hope you filed a formal complaint with MC, Visa, AMEX, or whoever. A vendor signs a contract when they start taking credit cards. That contract invariably says they'll accept the card for purchases. If they can pick and choose, they'll deny the cc company valuable business. Card companies hate that.
Ever see at the cash reigster those little signs that say "Minimum credit card purchase $10"? A simple complaint to the card companies will usually result in a letter to the merchant telling them that they are obligated to accept the card for all purchases. A threat of pulling the merchant authorization is always included. Those little signs disappear in short order.
I can't imagine how strongly a cc company would hit a car dealership that robbed the cc company of as much business as you're talking about.
I don't understand this.
The single best project I *ever* worked on used what we called 360 evaluations. Weekly, we met as a group. We explained what we were doing, with who, what we needed, etc.
Quarterly, we took a day for a meeting where each person on the team brought in an evaluation of every other person on the team. Every person publicly discussed their evaluation of every other person on the team. We *all* decided how well we *all* were doing. At the end of the day, we assigned a single rating to our group that was the rating for each of us, individually.
Nobody ever had any problem telling anybody what they did well or poorly. If we didn't like the way upper management was treating some portion of our job, we told our team leader he wasn't doing his job and laid out what goals he needed to reach and even suggested steps we thought he needed to take. If somebody screwed up, they admitted it. If somebody did well, they got complimented.
Upper management accepted our evaluation of ourselves without question. Our awards/bonuses were based on it, so you might think we just colluded amongst ourselves to defraud the award system by giving ourselves top marks. It didn't happen. We couldn't be that dishonest with each other. Roughly half the years we were in operation, we specifically rated ourselves low enough that we didn't get awards.
None of this could have happened if we tried to be anonymous about our feedback to each other. That gets in the way of actually getting problems out in the open and getting them solved. It would have to be a pretty piss-poor manager who took umbrage at having a failure pointed out publicly. Pointing out failures publicly is the only way to get the whole team on board to fix things.
I thought the whole point of 360 evals was that they were non-anonymous. What the hell good is it to have a manager able to tell me that I've screwed up if I can't tell her the same when she screws up? I just don't get it.
The complete lack of humorous sensibilities in most of the replies in this thread surprises me about as much as this whole situation. So, as the original poster, let me pick this post at semi-random to reply to everyone and actually get serious. (Something I didn't want to do, but, hey, this is Slashdot and it's apparently full to the brim with literalists pushing their affectation to the point of absurdity.)
You said that shooters have a right to protect property in Texas. Well, that's not exactly right. (No, IANAL but I have been through the concealed carry coursework in Texas and have, thus, more than a little training in the legal issues surrounding the use of force in the state. Also, I understand that you're thinking of a federal court action but the truth is that most shootings are going to be handled in state court under state law; that's what I address here.) The absolute requirements for using deadly force to protect property in Texas are, frankly, strange. The biggest surprise to most people is that using deadly force to protect property gets a blanket OK from the law after dark. That's right; it's unnecessary force to shoot someone in the back while they're stealing your TV set at noon. At midnight, you can fire away.
Realistically, no one does that. We're Texans, not savages. (And yes, I'm giving y'all an opening to prove to me you have *some* sense of humor. We like to poke fun at ourselves; feel free to join in.)
From a broader view, though, what impressed me about the whole article was the passive/agressive weirdness of the whole thing. This was a long chase, complete with conversations between the pursuer and pursued. That's a more or less workable illustration of cognitive dissonance. If the crook is a crook, catch 'em and be done with it. Dancing around the streets is, well, just weird.
In my neck of the woods, a more agressive approach to apprehending the suspect would have been tolerated. In the small town I grew up in, the woman could have simply asked the nearest couple of men for help and gotten it. In the big city I live in now, that might not happen. And, yes, people would scatter from the Starbucks if a gun got pulled. But the aftermath would have been a quicker resolution.
There was an attempt there to contrast public attitudes in the Republik of Kalifornia with those in Texas, but that flew right over the heads, it seems, of most readers. In my neck of the woods, the reaction to this story is most likely to be "Why didn't she just clock the bad guy?" California, it seems, would rather praise her for running around in the streets like two kids playing tag for an extended period of time. To me and lots of other folks, that's just strange.
One last thing. No, pulling a gun in a Starbucks doesn't place anyone in any danger except for the person being apprehended. On average, CCW license holders are at least as cognizant of where their gun is pointed as LEOs. We know that we carry as a privilege under a license subject to revocation for any misconduct. No one wants to risk that. Any CCW holder is going to keep their gun out of sight unless it's actually needed. My only point was that if an acceptably more aggressive approach were taken to the apprehension, such a need might have arisen and, at that point, the well-considered display of a gun would most likely have ended the proceeding more quickly and cleanly.
OK, sourpusses (That doesn't include you, PPH); have at it.
That long chase was ridiculous. If this had happened to my sister, for example, she would have held the criminal at gunpoint in the Starbucks where the chase started. None of this running all over creation and actually *talking* to the perp during the chase. WTF is up with that?! Hell, even in CA, would anyone have blamed her if she had simply picked up a chair, smashed the bitch over the head with it, and *then* called the police to report that she'd carried out a citizen's arrest? My God, I hope not.
OK, good point. But doesn't the text of a form 4473 (the form you fill out when you buy a gun) only ask if you've been "adjudicated mentally incompetent"? I realize that's not a perfect quote, but the idea is clear. A *judge* has to formally declare you have a problem. That means a formal process has occurred, not just some unsubstantiated report to a local law enforcement organization. And once such a formal process has happened, I don't think there's much of a privacy issue in requiring an extra step in the process - sending a notice of that judicial determination to the instant check database.
I've always felt that the language of the form, requiring a judges action before someone is supposed to be considered a risk, was necessarily conservative and properly balanced the right of individuals against public safety. AFAIK, this new legislation just says to the states that they must do a better job of reporting these clear cases (that are already at least semi-public information since they've been heard in front of a judge) for inclusion on the database. I can't really object to that.
The instant case isn't really about run of the mill crime. It's about nutjobs intent on doing major damage. In that line, the biggest mass murder in the modern-day U.S. was carried out by pouring a fairly small amount of gasoline on the steps at the walk-up entrance of a firetrap of a nightclub in NY. It was 1990 at the Happy Land club and the arsonist who killed 87 people was Julio Gonzalez.
Properly, then, we shouldn't even be concerned about "crime"; we should be concerned about nutjobs. I haven't actually read the legislation, but based on the news reports that the recent gun control legislatiion will provide some money to make sure that nutjobs actually get put in the instant-check database, I have to say I support this particular gun control bill.
Never in a million years did I ever think I would say I supported any gun control bill. Wow. Live and learn.
That story you heard from an oldster has been passed around since the Cold War and before. Supposedly the Soviets (or Chinese, depending on the storyteller) would manufacture arms that could use captured ammo from NATO countries while making their ammo just enough larger that the reverse would not be true. There's no truth to it, though the Russian 12.7mm round was (last I checked, 20 years ago, and my menory may not be reliable) somewhat similar to our .50 Browning. Still, you'll occasionally hear armchair warriors repeat these old, false notions even today. Don't beat up on yourself about it.
Mother of pearl looks great, so there's always been a "bling" element to its use. However, you should know that mother of pearl as well as ivory, bone, stag horn, and other decorative grip materials for pistols did, indeed, have a functional use back in the day.
Pre-1900, a number of pistol shooting competitions were a big deal, with near full-page coverage in major newspapers. There was a lot on the line and any small advantage was eagerly desired. Generally, the big matches took place over several days and competitors were prohibited from making sight adjustments during the match. To prevent anyone from making adjustments, the pistols would be impounded at night so they couldn't be touched. At the highest skill levels, competitors discovered that a radical change in humidity could make common wooden pistol grips swell or shrink overnight. When that happened, the recoil characteristics of the pistol changed and point of impact changed. That was a very, very bad thing.
Mother of pearl didn't absorb atmospheric moisture. It was stable. Today, we tend to use plastic, micarta, or laminated wood (in less critical applications) on target pistols or we shoot indoors so we don't think twice about moisture absorption. And I only know of one informal shooting sport that prohibits adjusting sights during a match, so lots of wood gets used today, too, since we can correct for any problems it causes. Back in the day, though, the stability of grip material translated directly into a stable point of impact. It could be the difference between winning and losing. Mother of pearl is functional.
Excellent questions!
Central backup is available but, due to server space constraints, limited to 500mb per user. (This is the single biggest thing I think we could improve about our local infrastructure.) For MOST users, this is fine and dandy. They kick off a backup script icon on their desktop and their email, favorites, and documents folders are automatically synced to their network backup folder.
A substantial minority, however, have far more data. We try to accomodate them with larger network space allowances. Some people, however, fall far enough outside the norm that network backups don't work for them. I know more than one user who stores more than a gig of email per quarter.
Exchange server space is limited, so retained email for most users is kept in *.pst files created by Outlook. Those need to be kept on the local machine because *.pst files get flaky when you access them over a network. In the distant past, when no one dialed in via VPN, everyone was in the office with a rock-solid network connection, and email volumes were lower, it was common for people to keep their Outlook Personal folder (*.pst file) on their network server space. When remote connections became popular and retained email volumes simultaneously started growing more quickly some time ago, the number of corrupted *.pst files skyrocketed and lots of people lost their email. The only solution was to keep retained email on the local machine and try to get everyone to back up regularly.
Microsoft docs on the subject are fairly clear. Personal Folders used to store retained email by Outlook users are NOT intended to be accessed across the network. They should always be local files. We have to work with that as best we can.
Obviously, those lucky users who don't do much email and never keep more than 20-30 megs of the stuff can just leave it all on the Exchange server and never worry about it. For the other 90%+ of our users, that's not an option.
I can give you some insight into how much better things are here than your experiences have shown.
Thank you for the qualifier "SOME federal agencies". Such may be the case, but not where I work - the IRS.
No access to our networks comes in from outside except via encrypted VPN. The phrase "website for teleworking" isn't in our vocabulary.
Where else would you carry your flash drives and external hard drives? All SBU (sensitive but unclassified) data on them, however, is required to be encrypted. The overwhelming majority of our users who are sophisticated enough to request external storage are complying with those requirements.
Any computer that a contractor needs to put on our network is bought by us and issued to that contractor. All the same security rules apply as to employees.
Our security manual states that it's suboptimal to write down passwords but does not actually prohibit the practice. Many of our users wind up with far too many logins and passwords to keep track of (though we're working towards SSO) and writing them down is a reasonable way to deal with the situation. Typically, when I'm doing orientation for new employees or security training for old ones, I pull my wallet out of my pocket and show them a credit card. "See that number on there? That is, in effect, a password to my credit line. I don't mind the fact that it's written down. It's not a security risk for it to be written down. I simply have to make sure I never lose it." We do physical security checks and if anyone actually writes down passwords and leaves them, for example, under a keyboard, they get formally disciplined. People just don't do that kind of crap around here.
Guilty in the past, but not any more. It's been a long time since we took the easy way out on this one and looked the other way as our IT staff asked users for their passwords. That sort of thing is now completely foreign to our work practices. I don't doubt that some users could be compromised by a well considered social engineering attack, but that will always be the case. Their numbers are small enough to tolerate the risk.
Almost nobody is a local admin. If you're not a desktop support tech, you don't get that kind of access. There are no google toolbars, no IMs. In fact, one of our newly-hired people plugged in a USB key with some software utilities on it. It was detected by the network, his connection locked out, and an emergency security report issued. Within 10 minutes, a security analyst was on the phone with his boss and it was days before they got around to letting him back on the network after substantial disciplinary action had been completed.
GAO and IG reports to/on U.S. federal agencies are shared with the agency first. Typically, the agency writes a short response (Generally along the lines of "A, B, and C were cited as problems. At the time of the review: A was being revised and is now fixed; the methodology used to find problems in B were faulty and we refute the finding; C was a valid problem and we've formed a committee to find solutions.") that's normally added to the report as an addendum before it goes to final publishing. Only in rare cases is the agency not allowed to have a couple of pages at the back of the report to defend itself; that's a good sign of political shenanigans. In even rarer cases, if the agency points out grievous errors in the report, the GAO or IG authoring the report will go back and re-write. The authors of the report don't want to look stupid, so if the agency manages to catch them in a dumb mistake, they'll either fix it in the main body of the report or (I've seen this a couple of times) tack on an extra, typically single-paragraph appendix that replies to the agency reply.
I've seen a related phenomenon at least a half-dozen times over the last couple of years. I work in a large organization where lots of people live and die by their email. Lots of computers also means a steady stream of drive failures. Despite all the warnings and training, some people will have no backups. Their entire careers, it seems, are in the contents of the Personal Folders they've created in Outlook and when I tell them it's all irrecoverably gone, they have a panic attack or something close to it.
Then, two days later, I run into them and they invariably tell me the same thing. They say that the loss of all that stored email was liberating. They feel free to work in the current moment instead of following up on old items that nobody *really* cared about anyway.
They were able to concentrate on what was important to their peers and bosses. Why? Because they told those people "All my email is gone; please re-send to me anything important" and found that what they got back was far less than they had been trying to keep track of previously.
I thought this was all very odd until I remembered how I lost my old ccMail files when we transitioned to Exchange so many years ago. I remember the feeling of having dropped the dead weight I'd been carrying for so long.
My point is that, no, email isn't dead. It is, however, an oppressive presence in the life of many people. Throwing it off and starting over, maybe greatly de-emphasizing its role, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Apparently, those ads have some content that some filters reject. At my employer, Tom's is blocked because it's categorized as a "malicious web site."
Truer words and all that.
Illustration: I was once assigned to a team that was required to study a new and growing industry, understand their impact on current law and regulation, and make recommendations for new regulations and/or legislation. We're talking billions of dollars of economic impact per month and the industry had grown so quickly that our (I work for a large, U.S. federal agency) ability to administer the law was severely compromised. Good people in that industry were doing great things; crooks were getting away with murder.
Management was smart enough to put on the team people from every division that dealt with the industry. The chosen participants were all very, very sharp folks. I was low man, by far, and felt privileged just to participate. Theoretically, I was just there to support them with a variety of computer-related tasks. However, it became clear at our first meeting that we had big problems. Each division spoke a different language. Simple terms like "case" meant radically different things to different people.
I was the only person on the team who had, over the course of my career, shown so little ambition that I had allowed myself to drift from division to division, from project to project, from job to job. I had either worked in or closely with every division at the table and I understood all their languages. I literally spent half of my first six months on the project translating, in meetings and informally, for the others on the team. It was common that when two people from different divisions talked in the hall informally about something, they'd migrate to my desk and explicitly ask me to listen in to the conversation and correct any communication errors I heard.
I wound up editing our final report to the Cabinet Secretary and even wrote a chapter covering civil enforcement options for it. I firmly believe that project would, at best, have been delayed an extra year if I hadn't been there to constantly translate and help each participant understand the technical jargon of the others.
The situation doesn't matter. You have to understand both sides to communicate between them. My presence on that team was just a lucky accident. It's not really fair to ask the tech guy to explain things to the non-tech folks in more traditional business roles; they speak different languages. There should be someone in between who has extensive experience on both sides to moderate and translate. That person may have various titles like "Analyst" or "Subject Matter Expert" or even just "moderator", but they must exist. Different business models posit different ideal ways to set this up and, depending on where you learned your business processes, they all seem to make up their own names for the tasks, people, and workflows. Sometimes, it seems that virtually every business just wings it when the time comes to make decisions. But if you want to make the right decisions, you need more than just the business guy and the tech guy in the room. You need one more communications-savvy person who has worked both sides recently and extensively enough to still do both jobs. Without that person, you have to fall back on training tech guys to talk business or vice versa, something that never seems to *quite* work out.
Reasonable points. But I think a better one is that geek buyers are more influential. I know I'll order a Dell for my mom when they're available.
People ask me all the time what kind of new computer to buy. Once I get them to agree that they've completely given up on their current machine and written off all the data on it, I give them a CD with Ubuntu. I tell them to just put it into their old computer and boot it up. I give them just enough information for them to kick off an install. I tell them to let it do whatever it wants if it asks questions. In a couple of cases, I've had those users, clueless all, come back and tell me they appreciated having a working second computer for various basic tasks. None of them were dissuaded from buying that new Windows computer but at least there are more and more regular non-computer hobbyist types who are learning that there are OSes other than Win and Mac. I think that's how Linux will spread to "normal" users: via the recommendation of a trusted geek.
Now that Dell has it pre-installed, I can make that recommendation when they ask me what new computer to get after, of course, I verify they have no need of anything aggressively Windows-specific. Sometimes there are specific games involved and Linux is out of the question, but not as often as you might think. (I mostly deal with middle-aged folks.) Dell is providing us another way to fulfill the "spread via recommendation of a trusted geek" model.
I see that as a good thing. You may see it as no big deal or an idea doomed to failure. Time will tell if either, neither, or both of us is right.
No, no, no. WfW 3.11! I really miss the ability to set the number of tiles for my desktop background. I set the number high enough that nobody at work ever figured out that the abstract background on my computer screen was actually porn.
:-)
Seriously, if you want a fun experience, try Win 1.0 on a high-end 286 IBM tower. The hardware weighed a ton and had great build quality. It also worked fine. Of course, if was never connected to any network.
several weeks ago when rebuilding an HP machine with XP just got too frustrating and time-consuming. Threw in an Edgy install disk and it worked perfectly. Upgraded to Feisty with no drama. I've been using it exclusively for over a month.
How can Dell be bad for Ubuntu? Yes, I RTFA and I think most of the potential problems are non-issues. The update mechanisms can scale; Dell can help if need be. I can buy support from Canonical or Dell can outsource it to them if Dell can't handle it.
I don't really see the downside. I'd love to see a few completely clueless oldsters accidentally get one of these Ubuntu Dell machines for their first and only computer. Then we'd have converts who simply didn't know any other way.
Even a clueless newbie can figure out Feisty. Now, I think there's another Slashdot post I want to read.
I said that firemen get more women than Unix SAs. Any positive integer exceeds zero, so I guess maybe that's not such a big deal.
You said it. I was one of two Unix SAs supporting a few dozen servers for which several hundred users depended for their jobs. If something went wrong, they called and, just like magic, things were fixed. They loved us and they loved the application. The worst thing that could happen would be a server death and when that happened, we'd call up the manageer of the affected group, ask them to have their people save their work locally and sit tight. Out of the closet would come a pre-configured replacement server. We'd plug it in, restore data from one of our three redundant back-up systems, and have those users up and running again in two hours, max.
I loved the work. Absolutely loved it. Because this was a government job with generous paid leave when one of us would be gone, having two of us meant there was always coverage and no downtime. Given that our users brought in 10s of millions of dollars a month, we were a paltry and perfectly justifiable expense.
Our problem was that nothing ever went wrong. Our big 'ol rack of servers hummed along with no drama and whenever the boss dropped by, he'd likely see us plodding through something routine like adding a user or checking system capacity reports. Every few days, we'd get bored and actually walk around the cube farm of the users, stick in our heads, and ask if everything was ok, can we do anything to make things work better? Our users loved us; our bosses didn't even seem to know what to write on our evaluations.
The Windows servers on the other side of the datacenter? Holy Cow, did those guys have the drama! Things were crashing all the time (We're back in the early NT days, mind you.) Whole populations of users suffered critical amounts of downtime. The admins put everything back together, of course, and were lauded as heroes because they had fixed the big, bad problems that had killed so many people's productivity for so long. They were HIGHLY visible to management. They got awards for fixing things. They were heroes.
Us Unix admins were those two people who sat over in the corner and never seemed to actually, visibly do anything.
You can see where this is leading, right? The Windows server side and the Windows front-line support side needed warm bodies, so I got thrown off Unix and into a GUI world I neither wanted nor understood. (Don't get me wrong, I've done the Windows work for years and I love helping people, but I'm not in love with the OS I now use and support.) Later, the other SA was tossed and our servers virtualized on mainframes. The number of SAs was cut to the bone and beyond. Virtualization was a nice concept and it works fine, but getting something fixed when it breaks is now a major red tape experience for our poor (former) users.
Fires to put out mean that firemen get chances to become heroes. Safety engineers who inspect your business and show you how clean the grease traps so nothing actually catches on fire are just needless expenses to be cut as soon as possible.
The moral is: Be a fireman. I figure they get more women, anyway.
Well, at least one office.
This was nearly 3 decades ago. I was a new clerk and had never even had a computer. I had done a good job with my paper-shuffling, so much so that my boss lent me out to another function (big perk, goes on your record as a wider set of experience) where I was to work in the "NEC room." This was a tiny room with a big NEC computer hooked up to an even bigger line printer inside an acoustic shell that held pin-feed, 8-part forms. These forms were Revenue Agent Reports, the final results of all audits, the paperwork you sign to agree to a change in your taxes.
I *really* impressed those folks. Seriously. First off, they couldn't get the forms aligned in the printer; they were always printing everything a fraction of an inch too high or too low on the form. It seemed a simple job to me. I noted the position of the pin-feed holes relative to some random part of the printer, printed one report, changed the position of the forms relative to that printer part to a degree roughly designed to compensate for the error on the first form, then printed another sample form. It was, as expected, properly aligned. I had aligned a new box of report forms with just one test print. The long-time workers in that little room thought I was a god. Literally, mouths dropped opened. They were accustomed to spending hours and half a box of forms getting set up. They loved me.
Next, they had a bunch of garbage records in the database that kept printing out. It was pretty simple to figure out that if I deleted each record, they wouldn't start each day with 20 garbage prints. By this time, they loved me so much the manager stopped by to meet me, sent an official memo of praise to my boss (something normally never done until a detail is complete) and started making noises about creating a position for me in his group. I was flyin' high.
A couple of days later, I asked the question I'd been curious about since I got there but there was never anyone around who could answer. "What's the button for?" "What button?" "This big red one next to the door" I said as I pointed at it. I SWEAR that I didn't intend to touch it; the tip of my index finger just barely kissed the dome of the button.
KLUNK!
Every light in THE ENTIRE BUILDING went out. This was the emergency shut off for EVERYTHING, pre-dating the installation of the computer equipment and intended to be tripped only in case of fire. It took building maintenance about 6 hours to go floor by floor and get every circuit up and running again.
My temporary boss called my permanent boss who called me at home that night and informed me that not only was I no longer on the detail, I was not to set foot in that building until further notice. There were apparently about a hundred Revenue Agents who lost their cases (Remember, this was back in the days of dual-floppy computers without hard drives and saving your work meant deliberately pulling out a disk and inserting another) that morning and had to rebuild their files. Each and every one had apparently vowed to strangle me on sight.
Excellent point. However, I strive to be an efficient driver. For example, internal combustion engines are most efficient at peak output, generally somewhere near wide open throttle. In recognition of that fact, when I reach the stop sign, I stop. (Sidebar - Actually stopping at the stop sign is apparently very unexpected behavior and I've been rear-ended a couple of times and nearly rear-ended more times than I can count.) Then I go - hard. I accelerate very briskly (my dear old mother says I obviously think I'm at the drag strip) to my target speed then hit the cruise control. After all, once you're up to speed, keeping a steady throttle improves efficiency, so I use my cruise control extensively. In fact, I'll use my cruise control to keep a steady throttle for as little as a couple of blocks.
By driving like this, I average over 22 miles per gallon in a full-size Mercury Grand Marquis, an old-school design with a big V-8. Occasionally, I'll break 24 mpg.
It never really occurred to me that people would try to anticipate how I drive in moving traffic based on how I drive in (virtually) stopped traffic. Seems like apples and oranges to me.
Live and learn. Thanks for the insight.
I agree. However, my original posting is addressing the specific case in my locale, where population growth is outstripping infrastructure improvements; we still have stop signs in many places where there should be traffic lights.
Believe me, I've tried.
I often find myself in a half-mile back up of cars at a stop sign. I'm in a rural area that's quickly being developed and adequate traffic control devices (IOW, stop lights) haven't been installed everywhere. It's obvious as all hell that a perfectly reasonable way to get to the intersection is to just idle along. A gap will open in front of me then I'll idle through it. Before I get to the car in front of me, it will have again opened a gap and then stopped while I just idle smoothly along.
Sounds reasonable, right? Well, apparently not. I've had drivers behind me go into apoplectic fits, screaming and flipping me off, because I allowed a half-dozen car lengths to open ahead of me. I've had drivers pass me on the shoulder where there is no shoulder (I literally mean a two lane road with big, scary ditches on the sides) because they couldn't stand to see a gap in front of me. I've had drivers pull out of line, swerve in front of me, then watch their mirror as I idled up from behind and slam on the brakes as I approached, attempting to cause an accident that would be my fault. I hate to ascribe motives to people I don't know, but that seems to me to be just an attempt to "get" me for not driving like everybody else.
Hell, I've actually been stopped in a long line at a red light and had this happen. I was taught that you should stop far enough behind the car in front to see their rear tires on the ground. If they stall out, this gives you enough room to go around. Well, given the right combination of hood and bumper heights, this can also leave enough room in front to fit a small car. On three separate occasions over the past couple of years, I've had the car behind me whip out and pull in front of me (never *quite* fitting into the space) because I left too much room in front of me while we were ALL stopped at a light.
Nope, you can't drive steady in the U.S. It's apparently not allowed. You must floor the gas, roar up twenty feet, and slam on the brakes to stop every time someone in line in front of you clears the stop sign.
People are idiots. No wonder researchers tend to look for technological solutions to human problems.