I have 2 kids, 2.5 and 1.5 they both have always had video games around I mean they probably heard Zelda In utero. They both know how to move a guy on the screen with a d-pad, they both know how to push buttons, how to get a game to boot up on a gameboy (insert game switch power on).
There's a kid out there that was 3 when he started flying hard core 3D aerobatics with a real (physical not simulated) remote control nitro heli, and he learnt using one of the r/c aircraft simulators. He wows the crowds but has to use his palm (not thumbs or fingers) to manipulate the r/c radio. I don't think you can start them too young.
My wife and I have a running joke that I'm so obsessed with flight sims that when we have a child they'll be flying r/c and full sized flight sims before they can speak. We speak in baby talk with a lisp that's like a kid that can bearly say words like "Transition to flight" or "Cwoss-wind wanding".
Teacher: "Time for show and tell. What did you do on the weekend little Johnny?" Johnny: "I flew an F-18 out of Richmond airbase and landed in Townsville" Teacher: "Now Johnny, go see the principle. We don't like liars here" Johnny: "But miss, it's true"... Me: "Let my kid out of detention. We did exactly what he said, on MS flight sim"....Or...
Me: "Now Johnny you know the rules, no supper before you finish your cross wind landing"
In reality I know not to push a kid - if they're interested fantastic, if not I'll find something else they like, but it's an awesome running joke, even if only my wife and I really appreciate it.
When you find somebody who's really qualified to give "expert" opinions on how random people should raise their kids (keeping in mind situations and kids and parents are all different in many ways), you let me know.
Careful, you'll have every religious person cite their deity and their holy book.
That was a serious and honest observation. I wonder if it'll get modded troll.
Right, and housing in most cities is cheap. Philly is one of the richest metro areas in the entire world, yet you can buy a townhouse in the city for peanuts.
Where I live a small 1 bedroom unit in the city will run you the same as a 4 bedroom house in the 'burbs.
If course, since all of the money fled a long time ago, it would be a miserable existence: high crime, languishing infrastructure, dirty, etc. I think that you are only thinking of the "gentrified" places in the city with their high real estate values. Even NYC has huge depressed areas.
As I said, you're in favour of creating ghettos. Thanks for supporting my argument.
As you pointed out earlier, the poor don't pay much in taxes, so to them the roads are mostly free.
Moronic argument. Poor people who don't pay taxes don't own cars either you jerk. The only use they get out of the roads is indirect - like if they walk down to the supermarket and buy what meagre food they can afford, that food was delivered by truck. Just as it is for you, so your precious tax dollars aren't being wasted.
Those that are working class and need to get to work pay more taxes. They subsidize both the roads and They use the road and get what they pay for.
I don't want it back in ways that hurt society, thank you very much. If they are just going to keep expanding roads with the money just so that they can clog back up again, I'd just assume not give up the money in the first place.
Yeah creating GHETTOS is a much better use of your money. You're just a sour fool who wants to punish everyone else because you've had to give up your car.
but then you say you drive to the train? You can't get rid of your car!
Yeah, I said I can't get rid of my car BECAUSE THE BUSES ARE SO BAD THEY'RE IMPRACTICAL. Basically if I relied on them I'd lose my job. I'm using my car for a very small fraction of my journey SO THAT I can use public transport the rest of the way. Instead of praising this behaviour you criticize me for it. You're being unreasonable. No, I'll revise that. You're being a complete ass.
More to the point, if they made the train better it would be like New York City (the commuter rail, not the subway). Here, the train is so crowded that it is anything but pleasant, you really can't get much done on your laptop
You have a very strange concept of the word "better". Clearly if what you're describing is true of New York City commuter rail, those trains are running well above capacity. Public transport has to be a BETTER alternative than the car. Yes that means spending more on it and yes that means catering for ontime running, and NO CROWDING even during peak.
and the roads are STILL completely congested even with the best public transit in the country!
Well if that's the best public transport in your country is it any wonder your roads are crowded???
Same reason people do in New York. The train would relieve some congestion on the roads
What fantasy is this? People take the mode of transport that is most convenient and practical to them. They don't do it because they're trying to decongest the roads!
Public transit can only temporarily relieve a road. Demand for roads will always grow to exceed supply if they are free or nearly free
Only if the public transport is CRAP.
I'd like to see ANY evidence that suburban sprawl leads to lower poverty, less crime, or greater freedom.
You're talking pure bunk again.
Check your crime statistics for city vs country.
There's a heap of things you're free to do in the 'burbs that you can't do in the city. From owning animals, to having room to store things.
LOL, wow! I expect lack of social grace from Slashdot weenies, but wow! Thanks for the chuckle.
See this kind of crap is why I felt the need to respond. You're rude, you're childish and the attack is personal. I was going to end the discussion because it was clear we don't and won't agree. Do you even realize the irony of your putdown given that you've just insulted slashdot users ("weenies") other than myself? (Great way to win friends and influence people) Not only do you have a such a narrow view of life that you expect everyone else would be happy with the tradeoffs you've made (and if they don't tough luck), not only do you think it's appropriate to take money from the poor, but you are also a hypocrite since you're displaying the manners and social skills of a grizzly bear.
I think if you had your way I'd live in a cardboard box in the city. There would be no roads or if there were roads there would be a toll booth on every corner. (See that's another thing, you rant about what's good for business but don't understand that roads are required to conduct that business. How the hell do you think they get food to your city supermarket you jerk?)
"Art is not simply something that someone made that you like to look at/listen to/read/etc." Yeah, actually it is. No, actually it isn't. And never has been.
Now, if we were talking about science, mathematics (or to a lesser degree law and politics) I could ask for a rational discussion based on argument and evidence.
Bloody arts students;-)
Hint: There is a smiley above. Don't flamez me bro.
. Right now it is cheaper to buy a house in the burbs and live out there. This makes no sense at all - distribution is more difficult, travel is more difficult, density is lower... how can it possibly be cheaper to live in the burbs?
Sorry missed this one point in my last point.
The reason houses are more expensive in the city is supply and demand. There's already a lot of incentive to live in the city. You get to roll out of bed and go to work or go shopping etc. It has nothing to do with government favouring suburban living as you put it. I suppose your way of tackling this would be to heavily tax suburban housing. That would price a lot of people out of housing. You've just evicted everyone from your ghetto.
By the way roads aren't "mostly free". They didn't just get handed to you. Your tax dollars paid for them. You should be getting every cent of your taxes back in some way shape or form.
I am REALLY glad you don't make decisions in my area.
Completely impossible. Not just "hard" or "expensive". Public transit will NEVER be more attractive than a car for people out in the burbs.
Pure nonsense. I don't drive to work. However I do take a car to the station every day, because catching the bus isn't practical. With my laptop the hour's journey (WHEN the trains are running to schedule) is mine. I get to read, write code, watch dvds, read a book etc. Even though the trip is longer, and even though we have a terrible rail system here I still put up with it because the alternative of driving would drive me insane and rob me of any time for myself.
Imagine then if the trains ran on time, they stopped removing seating from the crowded city stations and actually upgraded them, they maintained the trains so air conditioning worked. How much more attractive would it be to a person like me. Imagine if transport was well enough connected that I could get across this city (Sydney Australia) in under 2 hours. (It takes half that time by car if the roads aren't conjested). Why would I then drive myself?
How about my trips out of town. To get to my wife's parent's holiday house up the coast takes 1.5 hours or less if you get a good run by car. My car broke down a couple of weeks ago and I ended up having to catch a train to make it in for work. It took almost 4 hours, and only that short a time because I arranged getting a lift to and from train stations. If I'm hauling a lot of gear up there public transport isn't going to work, but if I wanted to go up there for the day right now I'd be planning a 6-8 hour trip instead of a 3 hour one if I took public transport. That's the difference between making it feasible and not. Worse, the more people I put in a car the more cost effective it is for me. By contrast the more people take public transport the more it costs them. Even worse here if you make a mistake like sleep on the train and go past your stop, you're treated like a criminal and fined $200. It simply doesn't need to work like that or be that inefficient, but it means putting money into public infrastructure which neither business nor government seem prepared to do at the moment.
Is that true? You are happy with suburban sprawl? You like congested roads and unsustainable living? I think that you meant that our methods are different, but I doubt our goals are much different.
Suburban sprawl and conjestion are an inconvenience I'm prepared to tolerate if it means less poverty, less crime, and greater freedom. As for sustainability, yes things must change but I don't see the need to oppress anyone to do it or price people out of privelleges like using a car when we can find a balance.
At this point I'm terminating my end of the discussion. Feel free to respond but I won't.
I fully agree on that, but some people feel the need to be offensive and can't take it to be reasonable and polite at all times
Yes and unfortunately though most of those people end up shooting themselves in the foot some of those people prosper. Take the unprofessional behaviour of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs most of us have read about. Regardless it is risky because people who don't like you generally won't co-operate with you or worse might feel the need to get their revenge.
And most important, if you do that you will avoid to do the work you get paid for and waste your time doing email.
Okay I can see how that might be taken literally. You at least skim the email. If it's of no value you don't read the whole thing. I get a lot of email that I only skim. I don't get the time to read it all. However I do occasionally miss something important and the only way I could think of to avoid that would be to read everything. I don't do this as I accept that it's impractical.
No, actually not. The point is, you get evaluated on how well you reach your assigned tasks and projects. Now most of the time, the email flood contains stuff in addition to that, and if you take the time to get involved there, you end up cutting your time to do what you should in the first place.
I think this is very much a work culture thing. Part of my job is to respond to email and provide a service to other areas of the business. I am evaluated on it. The only time I've seen a manager actually yell where I work is when an email addressed to our group wasn't answered in a timely manner.
There has to be some common sense applied. I skim all email, and if in the process of skimming I find the message is important I allocate more time to it.
A final advice I missed but was raised by other people was, to read email only 3 or 4 times a day. On one hand, that reduces the time wasted switching tasks, on the other hand, the delay often resolve problems without intervention.
Sometimes delays (of minutes or hours) do mean the issues resolve themselves but it's rare. I work on a critical system. Not responding to a problem isn't an option. Large sums of money are at stake, not to mention confidence in my employer.
I don't have a lot of time so quickly and in point form
1) I completely disagree that the only way to get people out of their cars is to price them out. It places no burden whatsoever on the rich and plenty of burden on those who can least afford it.
2) In the long run pricing people out of their cars is not good for the economy, or for society. It directly impacts the standard of living and people's ability to find work, especially in those places where public transport isn't a viable option (which happens to be most of the world). The answer is better public transport. When there's no advantage to owning a car, you won't need to cause hardship.
3) Of course there will be another gas crisis. Alternate fuels will take over at some point and there will be some pain. Not that it needs to be this way but that's what's most profitable for car and oil companies.
4) What I'm seeing is arguments to force people out of their cars from a man who has been forced out of his own car. You've been forced so others should be too. I don't think you're being objective at all, and I don't think your claims at empathy for your fellow man are consistent with your attitude.
5) Forcing people into the cities is a terrible suggestion, and unworkable. In fact the higher he demand for city housing the less affordable it will be.
I'd like one shred of evidence that toll roads build ghettos
Dude. Seriously. Check what I said. What I said was that making public transport more expensive is one way to help create a ghetto. What exactly don't you understand about the idea that making the cost of living more expensive when you're on the borderline of poverty will push you into poverty? Why do you feel the need to simplify so much that your argument becomes a strawman.
We are talking about a way to increase (and decrease!) tolls based on traffic volume
Making toll roads more expensive when people are forced to use them to get to work is one way to increase their cost of living. What's so difficult to grasp?
So the buses suck just as much as the regular city buses.:) Actually, they are quite a bet cleaner and more punctual.
I'd say best case for privitization is exactly what you're describing. A slight increase in performance. The cost of privitization if you've already got a public infrasructure isn't worth it. If you're building a new infrastructure you have to watch the private partners like hawks to prevent gouging or the imposition of ridiculous anti-competition clauses. Here in Sydney Australia we have a number of private toll roads run by different companies. Every time one is opened they force the closure of public roads to force people onto them and traffic actually gets WORSE.
If I didn't care about their hardship, I'd say "Fuck 'em" and leave it at that.
That's basically what you are saying, just more politely. Your gist was that you didn't feel like funding their choice to live away from where they work.
I was showing you how private business reacts to a shortage of menial labor as an example of how the hardship can be overcome.
Whose hardship and how is it being overcome? Minimum wage labour absorbs the cost and hardship, or gives way to other minimum wage labour that does. Meanwhile there is no hardship for the business. All you're showing here is that you're advocating that low paid labour should be treated as a disposable commodity. Completely ignoring I might add that the people tossed aside are still part of society and still contribute to the quality of it. This is an argument for greedy businessmen interested in short term gains, not those who care about hardship.
That their life sucks is not my doing, and modulating tolls may not help them any in the short run - but my contention is that in the long run it will improve their situation by giving the local economy a boost.
Someone who's lost their job is not going to give a shit that the economy is strong. They're still going to be living in poverty. Again you're advocating changes that disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged, while bolstering those who don't need the extra cash.
'd rather get the working poor out of their cars in a controlled manner rather than wait for the next gas crises to do it in a completely uncontrolled way....and the way to do that is to make cars too expensive for them while the public transport system isn't adequate? Just because you seem to live in an area where public transport is good (I assume you use it? Or are you just saying that everyone else should be forced out of their cars?) doesn't make that the norm. Nor does it make it practical for every profession and every situation.
Do you own a car? How would you like to be forced out of it in a controlled manner? Check the morality of what you're saying here!
Yes, and that's a perfect example of why we need to make our existing infrastructure more efficient and get fewer cars on the road.
Fine. Then, since you seem to advocate it how about YOU stop using cars, and leave minimum wage workers the fuck alone.
One day a large fraction of the population will wake up and realize that they can't afford to put gas in the tank. Uh-oh. A toll change, on the other hand, can be phased in.
Hogwash. Ghettos exist right now, and they were not created by businesses for the purpose of cheap labor, nor were they created by tolls on the interstate highway system.
When did I say that ghettos don't already exist? Or that all ghettos are created by big business for cheap labour? Or by tolls on interstate highways? I said that your suggestion was one way to create a ghetto. Quit with the straw men.
That was my point! In Philly the public transport system was inadequate and so the private industry ran buses to fill in the gap.
Where I live there's plenty of privatised bus routes and they're as bad as the government run ones if not worse. Governments can get inefficient. Private business can be more efficient (though not always) but is motivated by profit, NOT providing a public service, and must therefore be overseen by inefficent government to ensure they don't just service profitable routes.
What are you talking about? Why would private industry providing transportation make these folks lives harder?
I am talking about the fact that you don't seem to care that these people will suffer hardship and that you think that somehow they'll find a way to get to work. Private industry providing transportation had nothing to do with it. It was your attitude that i was talking about since you said you've known and talked to some of "these people".
That wasn't my point at all! I was pointing out that the jobs won't vaporize. If a company was paying to have its floors swept, they are STILL going to need their floors swept.
Yes but the business isn't going to suddenly pay above minimum wage because transport costs go up now are they?
If they can't find anyone who can drive in, they will have to take measures to secure a floor sweeper.
So you'll rely on someone more desperate willing to work for less to come in. Again you're building ghettos.
is in an employer of menial labor's best interest to have access to menial labor, and that won't change just because the tolls go up....but the employee's standard of living will go down. Unless they're forced out of the job altogether and it's taken over by someone more desperate.
The same thing goes for clerks, factory jobs, etc. A highway toll is not the apocalypse, and it is not new.
No it's not the apocalypse but transport continues to get harder and more expensive. Have you even been paying attention to the price of petrol? People don't need to be slugged more. This idea to price tolls based on demand is motivated by nothing more than profiteering. Employees don't have an easy way to avoid having to get to work.
Many public transit systems have peak and off-peak rates. You could even mitigate it by offering tax breaks or credits to people below a certain income level - though I honestly don't think that would be necessary.
I use one, I'm not exactly living in poverty and I still think the idea STINKS.
Why relying on tax credits to compensate low income earners (who don't have a lot of money to be taxed in the first place and can't afford to loan it to their government) is a whole other discussion. You talk about lowly paid workers but you make it clear that you never care for them or understand them.
Well you certainly get points for setting the tone for the rest of your message. An insult disguised as praise.
I'd challenge you to actually record the times that you leave work, and measure the variance by day of week to see if your claims are actually all that you claim
I don't need to record it, I have a detailed roster that goes back a few years.
Where I work there are 5 people covering four shifts in summer (starting 7:15am, 9am, 11:15am, 1:15pm) with the 4th of those dropped in winter. 1 of us must be here at all times. We do rotating shifts making room for people to take rostered days, annual leave etc. If we want to change our shift we must swap with someone else. Last week I was on the 11:15am shift. Week before it was the 1:15pm shift. This week I'm on 7:15am (but public transport is bad so I get in at 6:30 in case a train is cancelled when I'm on that shift. It means I get up at 4:30). Tomorrow I have an appointment so I've swapped with the guy on late shift. Sometimes our boss has to go to great effort to cover shifts while allowing people the leave they want. If she can't make it work we simply don't get the leave.
My variation by weekday for the last few weeks has been pretty wild.
however, you seem intent on deciding that you can't possibly make it convenient to you.
See above. By the way I use to know a couple of people who worked where I do and live in my area. Arrangements have changed. They're working closer to where I live. I am not.
I base this primarily on your loose argument; for instance, the 20% carpool time example I provided assumed that any one given person carpooled with one and only one other person one day a week.
That doesn't make any of what I've said over the last 2 messages any less applicable. Carpooling isn't always easy. It only really works in situations where you and your carpooling buddies have the same schedules (primary/high school, identical shifts) AND live and work in the same area and even then it's still hard.
You proceed to then suggest that 'errands' happen every single day - and stop right there, because I might suggest that if you're spending extra fuel every day for errands you might group into one night, well then you have a whole separate layer of waste.
Perhaps you don't know what it's like to be responsible for a family. Errands can and do happen every single day. Also as the group of carpoolers gets larger, so does the chance that anyone wishes to take on an errand. Another example of your mentality "It works for me so it must work for everyone and if it doesn't it is because they are lazy and/or stupid". Bad assumption. I'd love to save money I spend on transport and I don't want to turn this green earth into a wasteland. However feeling guilty or making bone headed lifestyle choices isn't going to fix the problem.
But lets return to the main point; obviously in a carpool situation there would have to be some compromises. You'd have to, you know, at lunch or whenever call your carpool partner (or, if you're really gung ho, partners) and let them know whats up with you....that is if you don't have something pressing happening at lunch. I got to lunch an hour later today and some days I don't get much time for it. No matter, if that were the only inconvenience I'd find a way.
You might also have to cancel on occasion because something came up. However, this is no different than working out a schedule with a spouse, other family or a friend you have a regular arrangement with. It's entirely within your skill set - or should be.
Oh how I adore the delicious arrogance on slashdot. Now you're telling me what my skillset should be. Buddy your solution was a blanket statement that covered more than just me - there are people out there who struggle to read let alone schedule their carpool and find time to make phonecalls at work.
You're forgetting the other side - businesses need the menial labor as much as the menial labor needs jobs. There will be some way for the poor to get to work.
It's called creating a ghetto.
In Philly the suburban office parks pay for buses to run between the regional rail lines and the office parks, because in Philly the poor live in the city (and as such largely have no car) but the job growth is all in the burbs.
More often than not public transport is inadequate and doesn't come to the rescue.
When I was in college I took that bus quite a bit to get to my co-op job and talked with these people. Most of them had multiple jobs and really had it tough... so I think they qualify as the type of person you are referring to.
All the more damning than that you have no sympathy for these hard working folk and are happy for their lives to become even harder. Would YOU like to work multiple jobs and have it really tough?
So yeah, you are right - people need to get to work. But work also needs people, and so it will happen.
If your only interest is in business getting employees that's well and good but what I was arguing was that this approach further decreases the standard of living of the poor which in turn feeds back into the society in which you live through crime, increased poverty etc. These things are not good even if they don't "directly" affect you. In the long run you are part of society and you are affected.
What is this? Ass covering 101? Some of us actually take pride in their work.
First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.
The technology and people change together. If that were not the case we'd never have moved from paper and typewriter (or papyrus for that matter).
Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it.
Fantastic advice...
Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat.
Terrible advice. There's consequences for that too. People who dislike you won't help you get things done and will often take any opportunity to get you back including testifying against you in court. Try this instead "Never be offensive at work in any form. If you need to vent do it elsewhere and don't name people or divulge information you shouldn't".
Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.
Same for verbal. You'll never know who it'll get to.
About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.
You could avoid anything from a minor work disaster to huge amounts of overtime if you read every email you get and reply judiciously if required.
For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.
This is an excellent way to get reprimanded and appear lazy. If everyone took that approach no work would be done at all. There's good reason to send mail to a group - eg. a support group where different people are on different shifts etc. Instead ask if you're the most qualified to reply and if appropriate let the rest of the group in To: know you're handling the email before tackling it in detail (e.g. if it's going to take a while to reply).
Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.
It may not be productive, but doing this will mean you: 1) Miss vital information which will affect you down the line 2) May miss that something was said that was attributed to you, and by your silence you're implying agreement
All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it....but I bet it comes up in discussion if your job security or salary come into question.
For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them....and the less people expect of you, the less of a liability the loss of your position becomes.
If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant
I'm all for helping people with education, health, and that sort of thing. But I'm not really on board with subsidizing their commute so that they can choose to live in one place and work in another. I'm finding it very hard to swallow that a long commute for everyone hurts the economy less than the good that is done by letting a guy drive 45 minutes to sweep floors.
If it costs $30 to commute, and the guy only makes $10/hr it's hard to justify bothering to work, since you're really suggesting the guy should work next to nothing. The guy might really love the idea of living in the city, but his house out in the 'burbs is the only one he can afford to rent, so he's not really making a lifestyle choice. The office buildings are in the city and he can't afford to live there. Not
Those with little money have little choice. The way you're talking I'm guessing you're use to dealing with the tradeoffs of the middle class or even upper middle class rather than the poor. Fortunately so am I but I can see that they do have less opportunity than such a dismissive attitude might suggest.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring
Wow what bad logic. Do you not understand that a different level of safety can apply for the worker than to the consumer in an industry. For example a coal miner may be at large risk of the mine collapsing on his sorry behind, the power engineer could be sitting on a power plant that's about to go ka-boom, whereas the end user is sitting by that cozy electric radiator. More pertinant to this discussion a worker might be contaminated with a pathogen due to lax internal controls while the external perimeter is much harder to penetrate. Pilots are the exception not the rule - if they go down the customers go down.
My point is that generally speaking you could, if you put an ounce of effort into it, find a workable carpool solution. Lots of people do, who recognize that resources aren't infinite - their's or the world's. And if everyone carpooled even 20% of the time that they commute, that's a big difference - a 10% decrease in cars on the road. So why is it that it's such an impossible thing? Is it really that un-doable, or does it just necessitate a change and the acceptance that to-date you haven't been doing it the optimal way?
Nicely argued but there's a very big problem with your premise and that is that a "workable carpool solution" exists. I don't know about you but while I have plenty of control over what time I start work, I often find myself held back at the end of the day anywhere from half an hour (common) to many hours (very uncommon). I'm not the GP but I personally can't simply tell my employer "Sorry boss, car pool's leaving, gotta run" when there are people being held up doing their work, or there's something critical going on that is a disaster if not taken care of. So in order to car pool sensibly I must: 1) Be able to firmly predict when my day ends 2) Be able to find others whose schedule coincides with mine 3) Live in the same area, and work in the same area 4) Constantly monitor changes to each and every person's schedule in the carpooling arrangement (sickness, holidays, change of job)
Tell me how a shift worker is suppose to do that, particularly if the reason they're working the shift is to provide out of ours coverage (meaning colleagues work opposing shifts)? That's exactly the situation I'm in. Makes public transport sound like a heavenly option.
Then consider all the things that people do on their way to and from work. Just stop in to do some shopping etc. You can't do that if you carpool otherwise journey times blow out and people get impatient and upset. Asking 3 people to wait while one does the weekly grocery shopping or goes to see a doctor isn't practical. So what do these people do? Carpool to and from work then drive back out to the shopping center or doctor. That'll eat into your 20% savings quick smart.
Making people feel bad about polluting their environment has become big business but I don't see how asking people to do things that they find complicates their lives and impacts their lifestyle is going to help the environment at all, especially when what you ask isn't practical.
Now, I understand the appeal of helping out the poor. But this isn't health insurance or food stamps or housing.
Actually increasing their job prospects gives them the opportunity to no longer be poor.
The "right to drive a car to work" is not exactly a basic human right.
For some people there is no practical alternative than driving to work. Restricting these people's job prospects damages their lives, their childrens lives, and the economy as a whole.
See the bugger-the-rest-of-you-I'm-alright-jack school of thought is actually self-destructive over the long term. Those people whose livelihoods you restrict today, are the criminals you build gated communities to keep out tomorrow.
Re:Software is under the eyes of regulators
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They did, they just did checks in the outer interface functions, rather than in every *d++ = *s++. Remember C was written for professionals, not hobbyists.
That something is built for professionals and not hobbyists does not mean you don't include safety features. In fact it's a good reason to add more safety features e.g. Both race cars and road vehicles have safety features.
Yeah, they just wrote it to run the AT&T telephone network, while it was still a monopoly. Nothing large or critical, there.
I said large BUSINESS systems. Controlling 1950s and 1960s phone hardware is a very different game to writing a bank system and you employ different people.
Re:Software is under the eyes of regulators
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Easy to say, but rather less likely than you might imagine. Ten years ago there was a large market for pirated satellite decoders. The security systems used for satellite TV are nowhere close to the security of EMV Chip and PIN but there really hasn't been a viable pirate decoder market since Season 7 in the mid 90s. The satellite systems are a much harder proposition because the communication is unidirectional and the attacker can physically destroy one or many cards to extract the keys.
Apples to oranges. How much money can a criminal expect to make selling illegal satellite decoders? By contrast, how much money can a fraudster make defeating bank security? It should minimize the petty fraud, but not ellminate all fraud. I think improving bank security is a fantastic idea and it should be done (provided it's done well). I don't think it will eliminate electronic fraud.
Put it this way, banks are all about making money. Why do you think improved security hasn't been implemented? Could it be that it is 1) not so easy to do and 2) not as cost effective doing risky wholesale replacements as doing them carefully and incrementally (despite the added risk due to maintaining compatibility with existing systems)
Regarding your comments on Algol, you clearly know the language much better than I, so I'd be a fool to argue why it failed to grab more of a market share without doing some more research so I can form an informed opinion.
However I do know Pascal and to say Pascal is a broken language, when variants have been used with great success in niche markets is something I find hard to agree with. (eg. Borland Pascal compilers and then Delphi, also Miranda though not commercially). In any case it wasn't a counter example as such...it just demonstrates that the author himself lost interest in the Algol language and moved on, which to me suggests Algol was far from perfect.
Re:Software is under the eyes of regulators
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Every successful attack against Chip and PIN to date has been against the transition arrangements to support legacy systems....because they're currently the weakest link.
Anyway that's a rather sweeping statement.
While smartcards are not invulnerable (Pau Kocher's timing attacks etc) they are more than sufficient to mitigate risk....until the entire infrastructure moves and there is no more "low hanging fruit" for the criminals to pick. Anyway you're assuming smartcards can be implemented perfectly. They can't.
Mind you I'm NOT saying this would be a waste of time. I agree that the current banking infrastructre (particularly credit card arrangements) are not fit for purpose and need to be replaced. Smartcards are cetainly one way to improve security IF implemented correctly.
The point is that we can stop pretty much all the Internet crimes that hit the headlines today by changing the banking infrastructure.
I think you'd find you'd just up the ante. Criminals would respond.
The machines they were using were several orders of magnitude faster than the ones that Hoare and co wrote Algol 60 on. Algol 60 had bounds checking. Hoare argued against it at the time - it was the subject of his Turing award lecture....and yet Algol 60 never took off the way C did. why?
For starters no standard file access: "ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other."
A casual observation of the hello world looks rather clunky.
The language's developer eventually moved on to Pascal, which did for a time try to compete with C but wasn't seen to be as powerful because it didn't allow for direct memory access etc.
The difference was the switch from batch mode to interactive. Running in batch the cost of a mistake is much greater - it costs an entire run. Running interactive you are waiting for the result.
Batch and interactive modes are good for different things. The systems I work with have a real time component and a batch component. Neither one could do the job of the other.
Even so, I find it somewhat incongruous for folk to praise UNIX and flame Microsoft for a type of security bug that was introduced by the UNIX architects and identified as a mistake at the time.
Every system is a compromise, and has its limitations. If you use C, you must handle bounds correctly. Microsoft have always been aware of this - it was a known issue when the company was started. Microsoft have failed to do their bounds checking often and therefore the bug count has been high. It's not the original design of C that people are criticizing MS for, it's the poor usage and failure to do the checking the system requires. As for why people praise Unix and denegrate Windows I find that there are valid criticisms for both operating systems. Unfortunately geeks often treat their favourite operating systems like religious artifacts instead of looking at them scientifically.
I make a living as a Java programmer. I enjoy the work I do and feel that no other language/platform can even touch Java's capabilities in team and enterprise development. Even for single-programmer development, there are a lot of situations where Java is the solution to end all solutions.
I work as a Java developer and having seen how convoluted the J2EE and other common framework libraries are I have to disagree big time. I don't know if I've simply seen more systems than you (I've used a variety of languages and only specialized in Java in the last 3-4 years) and therefore know what's out there but I have to say things were being done much more effectively in the mid to late 90s. Most of the team and enterprise development products for Java aren't revolutionary either. I really don't know how you can hold this view. In fact I think we've gone backwards in the last few years. Ever since everything went web based mixing the hodge-podge of Javascript/JScript to accomplish things on the client side with the travesty that is inconsistent HTML and CSS, with libraries that generate Java on the fly or wrap everything in proxy clsses on the server side, WYSIWYG and RAD development have gone out the window. What use to take a few hours to code now takes a few days. I've even seen the tools make a mockery of incremental compilation leaving you to recompile large code bases for each little change, test them, and rinse repeat.
Re:Software is under the eyes of regulators
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I think you'll find that while improving security is easy over the current situation, provided you're willing to wear the cost of doing so (which unfortunately may be the difference between a company or technology being technologically viable and not), the idea that a perfect attack-proof system could be built is a fallacy.
It's way too easy to blame the initial inventors of the C language for not checking for buffer overflows, but that too is a mistake. They wrote the system in the 60s for machines that today are routinely outdone by desktop calculators. They did not write it intending for it to be used to build large business systems, nor could anyone have envisioned just how far computing would come in so short a time. They were remarkable pioneers, and it may even have made sense for early pioneers to use C. Heck even in the early 90s when windows was written computers were small and slow enough that the speed advantage of C was needed to make systems practical. There wsa a cost to that. Hindsight is as they say 20/20. However we are only now moving on to other languages, because in the meantime people had gotten a lot of experience with C, and there was a lot of software out there that could be used and re-used.
Thanks for the info. I'm sure I've come across that number somewhere. I think from memory it's built to use whichever network is available regardless of carrier (whereas 000 only uses your own mobile carrier).
Slashdot Mirror
I have 2 kids, 2.5 and 1.5 they both have always had video games around I mean they probably heard Zelda In utero. They both know how to move a guy on the screen with a d-pad, they both know how to push buttons, how to get a game to boot up on a gameboy (insert game switch power on).
... ...Or...
There's a kid out there that was 3 when he started flying hard core 3D aerobatics with a real (physical not simulated) remote control nitro heli, and he learnt using one of the r/c aircraft simulators. He wows the crowds but has to use his palm (not thumbs or fingers) to manipulate the r/c radio. I don't think you can start them too young.
My wife and I have a running joke that I'm so obsessed with flight sims that when we have a child they'll be flying r/c and full sized flight sims before they can speak. We speak in baby talk with a lisp that's like a kid that can bearly say words like "Transition to flight" or "Cwoss-wind wanding".
Teacher: "Time for show and tell. What did you do on the weekend little Johnny?"
Johnny: "I flew an F-18 out of Richmond airbase and landed in Townsville"
Teacher: "Now Johnny, go see the principle. We don't like liars here"
Johnny: "But miss, it's true"
Me: "Let my kid out of detention. We did exactly what he said, on MS flight sim".
Me: "Now Johnny you know the rules, no supper before you finish your cross wind landing"
In reality I know not to push a kid - if they're interested fantastic, if not I'll find something else they like, but it's an awesome running joke, even if only my wife and I really appreciate it.
When you find somebody who's really qualified to give "expert" opinions on how random people should raise their kids (keeping in mind situations and kids and parents are all different in many ways), you let me know.
Careful, you'll have every religious person cite their deity and their holy book.
That was a serious and honest observation. I wonder if it'll get modded troll.
Right, and housing in most cities is cheap. Philly is one of the richest metro areas in the entire world, yet you can buy a townhouse in the city for peanuts.
Where I live a small 1 bedroom unit in the city will run you the same as a 4 bedroom house in the 'burbs.
If course, since all of the money fled a long time ago, it would be a miserable existence: high crime, languishing infrastructure, dirty, etc. I think that you are only thinking of the "gentrified" places in the city with their high real estate values. Even NYC has huge depressed areas.
As I said, you're in favour of creating ghettos. Thanks for supporting my argument.
As you pointed out earlier, the poor don't pay much in taxes, so to them the roads are mostly free.
Moronic argument. Poor people who don't pay taxes don't own cars either you jerk. The only use they get out of the roads is indirect - like if they walk down to the supermarket and buy what meagre food they can afford, that food was delivered by truck. Just as it is for you, so your precious tax dollars aren't being wasted.
Those that are working class and need to get to work pay more taxes. They subsidize both the roads and They use the road and get what they pay for.
I don't want it back in ways that hurt society, thank you very much. If they are just going to keep expanding roads with the money just so that they can clog back up again, I'd just assume not give up the money in the first place.
Yeah creating GHETTOS is a much better use of your money. You're just a sour fool who wants to punish everyone else because you've had to give up your car.
Well, I was going to stop...
but then you say you drive to the train? You can't get rid of your car!
Yeah, I said I can't get rid of my car BECAUSE THE BUSES ARE SO BAD THEY'RE IMPRACTICAL. Basically if I relied on them I'd lose my job. I'm using my car for a very small fraction of my journey SO THAT I can use public transport the rest of the way. Instead of praising this behaviour you criticize me for it. You're being unreasonable. No, I'll revise that. You're being a complete ass.
More to the point, if they made the train better it would be like New York City (the commuter rail, not the subway). Here, the train is so crowded that it is anything but pleasant, you really can't get much done on your laptop
You have a very strange concept of the word "better". Clearly if what you're describing is true of New York City commuter rail, those trains are running well above capacity. Public transport has to be a BETTER alternative than the car. Yes that means spending more on it and yes that means catering for ontime running, and NO CROWDING even during peak.
and the roads are STILL completely congested even with the best public transit in the country!
Well if that's the best public transport in your country is it any wonder your roads are crowded???
Same reason people do in New York. The train would relieve some congestion on the roads
What fantasy is this? People take the mode of transport that is most convenient and practical to them. They don't do it because they're trying to decongest the roads!
Public transit can only temporarily relieve a road. Demand for roads will always grow to exceed supply if they are free or nearly free
Only if the public transport is CRAP.
I'd like to see ANY evidence that suburban sprawl leads to lower poverty, less crime, or greater freedom.
You're talking pure bunk again.
Check your crime statistics for city vs country.
There's a heap of things you're free to do in the 'burbs that you can't do in the city. From owning animals, to having room to store things.
LOL, wow! I expect lack of social grace from Slashdot weenies, but wow! Thanks for the chuckle.
See this kind of crap is why I felt the need to respond. You're rude, you're childish and the attack is personal. I was going to end the discussion because it was clear we don't and won't agree. Do you even realize the irony of your putdown given that you've just insulted slashdot users ("weenies") other than myself? (Great way to win friends and influence people) Not only do you have a such a narrow view of life that you expect everyone else would be happy with the tradeoffs you've made (and if they don't tough luck), not only do you think it's appropriate to take money from the poor, but you are also a hypocrite since you're displaying the manners and social skills of a grizzly bear.
I think if you had your way I'd live in a cardboard box in the city. There would be no roads or if there were roads there would be a toll booth on every corner. (See that's another thing, you rant about what's good for business but don't understand that roads are required to conduct that business. How the hell do you think they get food to your city supermarket you jerk?)
"Art is not simply something that someone made that you like to look at/listen to/read/etc."
;-)
Yeah, actually it is.
No, actually it isn't. And never has been.
Now, if we were talking about science, mathematics (or to a lesser degree law and politics) I could ask for a rational discussion based on argument and evidence.
Bloody arts students
Hint: There is a smiley above. Don't flamez me bro.
. Right now it is cheaper to buy a house in the burbs and live out there. This makes no sense at all - distribution is more difficult, travel is more difficult, density is lower... how can it possibly be cheaper to live in the burbs?
Sorry missed this one point in my last point.
The reason houses are more expensive in the city is supply and demand. There's already a lot of incentive to live in the city. You get to roll out of bed and go to work or go shopping etc. It has nothing to do with government favouring suburban living as you put it. I suppose your way of tackling this would be to heavily tax suburban housing. That would price a lot of people out of housing. You've just evicted everyone from your ghetto.
By the way roads aren't "mostly free". They didn't just get handed to you. Your tax dollars paid for them. You should be getting every cent of your taxes back in some way shape or form.
I am REALLY glad you don't make decisions in my area.
Completely impossible. Not just "hard" or "expensive". Public transit will NEVER be more attractive than a car for people out in the burbs.
Pure nonsense. I don't drive to work. However I do take a car to the station every day, because catching the bus isn't practical. With my laptop the hour's journey (WHEN the trains are running to schedule) is mine. I get to read, write code, watch dvds, read a book etc. Even though the trip is longer, and even though we have a terrible rail system here I still put up with it because the alternative of driving would drive me insane and rob me of any time for myself.
Imagine then if the trains ran on time, they stopped removing seating from the crowded city stations and actually upgraded them, they maintained the trains so air conditioning worked. How much more attractive would it be to a person like me. Imagine if transport was well enough connected that I could get across this city (Sydney Australia) in under 2 hours. (It takes half that time by car if the roads aren't conjested). Why would I then drive myself?
How about my trips out of town. To get to my wife's parent's holiday house up the coast takes 1.5 hours or less if you get a good run by car. My car broke down a couple of weeks ago and I ended up having to catch a train to make it in for work. It took almost 4 hours, and only that short a time because I arranged getting a lift to and from train stations. If I'm hauling a lot of gear up there public transport isn't going to work, but if I wanted to go up there for the day right now I'd be planning a 6-8 hour trip instead of a 3 hour one if I took public transport. That's the difference between making it feasible and not. Worse, the more people I put in a car the more cost effective it is for me. By contrast the more people take public transport the more it costs them. Even worse here if you make a mistake like sleep on the train and go past your stop, you're treated like a criminal and fined $200. It simply doesn't need to work like that or be that inefficient, but it means putting money into public infrastructure which neither business nor government seem prepared to do at the moment.
Is that true? You are happy with suburban sprawl? You like congested roads and unsustainable living? I think that you meant that our methods are different, but I doubt our goals are much different.
Suburban sprawl and conjestion are an inconvenience I'm prepared to tolerate if it means less poverty, less crime, and greater freedom. As for sustainability, yes things must change but I don't see the need to oppress anyone to do it or price people out of privelleges like using a car when we can find a balance.
At this point I'm terminating my end of the discussion. Feel free to respond but I won't.
I fully agree on that, but some people feel the need to be offensive and can't take it to be reasonable and polite at all times
Yes and unfortunately though most of those people end up shooting themselves in the foot some of those people prosper. Take the unprofessional behaviour of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs most of us have read about. Regardless it is risky because people who don't like you generally won't co-operate with you or worse might feel the need to get their revenge.
And most important, if you do that you will avoid to do the work you get paid for and waste your time doing email.
Okay I can see how that might be taken literally. You at least skim the email. If it's of no value you don't read the whole thing. I get a lot of email that I only skim. I don't get the time to read it all. However I do occasionally miss something important and the only way I could think of to avoid that would be to read everything. I don't do this as I accept that it's impractical.
No, actually not. The point is, you get evaluated on how well you reach your assigned tasks and projects. Now most of the time, the email flood contains stuff in addition to that, and if you take the time to get involved there, you end up cutting your time to do what you should in the first place.
I think this is very much a work culture thing. Part of my job is to respond to email and provide a service to other areas of the business. I am evaluated on it. The only time I've seen a manager actually yell where I work is when an email addressed to our group wasn't answered in a timely manner.
There has to be some common sense applied. I skim all email, and if in the process of skimming I find the message is important I allocate more time to it.
A final advice I missed but was raised by other people was, to read email only 3 or 4 times a day. On one hand, that reduces the time wasted switching tasks, on the other hand, the delay often resolve problems without intervention.
Sometimes delays (of minutes or hours) do mean the issues resolve themselves but it's rare. I work on a critical system. Not responding to a problem isn't an option. Large sums of money are at stake, not to mention confidence in my employer.
I don't have a lot of time so quickly and in point form
1) I completely disagree that the only way to get people out of their cars is to price them out. It places no burden whatsoever on the rich and plenty of burden on those who can least afford it.
2) In the long run pricing people out of their cars is not good for the economy, or for society. It directly impacts the standard of living and people's ability to find work, especially in those places where public transport isn't a viable option (which happens to be most of the world). The answer is better public transport. When there's no advantage to owning a car, you won't need to cause hardship.
3) Of course there will be another gas crisis. Alternate fuels will take over at some point and there will be some pain. Not that it needs to be this way but that's what's most profitable for car and oil companies.
4) What I'm seeing is arguments to force people out of their cars from a man who has been forced out of his own car. You've been forced so others should be too. I don't think you're being objective at all, and I don't think your claims at empathy for your fellow man are consistent with your attitude.
5) Forcing people into the cities is a terrible suggestion, and unworkable. In fact the higher he demand for city housing the less affordable it will be.
6) We definitely don't share the same goals.
I'd like one shred of evidence that toll roads build ghettos
:) Actually, they are quite a bet cleaner and more punctual.
...and the way to do that is to make cars too expensive for them while the public transport system isn't adequate? Just because you seem to live in an area where public transport is good (I assume you use it? Or are you just saying that everyone else should be forced out of their cars?) doesn't make that the norm. Nor does it make it practical for every profession and every situation.
Dude. Seriously. Check what I said. What I said was that making public transport more expensive is one way to help create a ghetto. What exactly don't you understand about the idea that making the cost of living more expensive when you're on the borderline of poverty will push you into poverty? Why do you feel the need to simplify so much that your argument becomes a strawman.
We are talking about a way to increase (and decrease!) tolls based on traffic volume
Making toll roads more expensive when people are forced to use them to get to work is one way to increase their cost of living. What's so difficult to grasp?
So the buses suck just as much as the regular city buses.
I'd say best case for privitization is exactly what you're describing. A slight increase in performance. The cost of privitization if you've already got a public infrasructure isn't worth it. If you're building a new infrastructure you have to watch the private partners like hawks to prevent gouging or the imposition of ridiculous anti-competition clauses. Here in Sydney Australia we have a number of private toll roads run by different companies. Every time one is opened they force the closure of public roads to force people onto them and traffic actually gets WORSE.
If I didn't care about their hardship, I'd say "Fuck 'em" and leave it at that.
That's basically what you are saying, just more politely. Your gist was that you didn't feel like funding their choice to live away from where they work.
I was showing you how private business reacts to a shortage of menial labor as an example of how the hardship can be overcome.
Whose hardship and how is it being overcome? Minimum wage labour absorbs the cost and hardship, or gives way to other minimum wage labour that does. Meanwhile there is no hardship for the business. All you're showing here is that you're advocating that low paid labour should be treated as a disposable commodity. Completely ignoring I might add that the people tossed aside are still part of society and still contribute to the quality of it. This is an argument for greedy businessmen interested in short term gains, not those who care about hardship.
That their life sucks is not my doing, and modulating tolls may not help them any in the short run - but my contention is that in the long run it will improve their situation by giving the local economy a boost.
Someone who's lost their job is not going to give a shit that the economy is strong. They're still going to be living in poverty. Again you're advocating changes that disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged, while bolstering those who don't need the extra cash.
'd rather get the working poor out of their cars in a controlled manner rather than wait for the next gas crises to do it in a completely uncontrolled way.
Do you own a car? How would you like to be forced out of it in a controlled manner? Check the morality of what you're saying here!
Yes, and that's a perfect example of why we need to make our existing infrastructure more efficient and get fewer cars on the road.
Fine. Then, since you seem to advocate it how about YOU stop using cars, and leave minimum wage workers the fuck alone.
One day a large fraction of the population will wake up and realize that they can't afford to put gas in the tank. Uh-oh. A toll change, on the other hand, can be phased in.
Th
Hogwash. Ghettos exist right now, and they were not created by businesses for the purpose of cheap labor, nor were they created by tolls on the interstate highway system.
...but the employee's standard of living will go down. Unless they're forced out of the job altogether and it's taken over by someone more desperate.
When did I say that ghettos don't already exist? Or that all ghettos are created by big business for cheap labour? Or by tolls on interstate highways? I said that your suggestion was one way to create a ghetto. Quit with the straw men.
That was my point! In Philly the public transport system was inadequate and so the private industry ran buses to fill in the gap.
Where I live there's plenty of privatised bus routes and they're as bad as the government run ones if not worse. Governments can get inefficient. Private business can be more efficient (though not always) but is motivated by profit, NOT providing a public service, and must therefore be overseen by inefficent government to ensure they don't just service profitable routes.
What are you talking about? Why would private industry providing transportation make these folks lives harder?
I am talking about the fact that you don't seem to care that these people will suffer hardship and that you think that somehow they'll find a way to get to work. Private industry providing transportation had nothing to do with it. It was your attitude that i was talking about since you said you've known and talked to some of "these people".
That wasn't my point at all! I was pointing out that the jobs won't vaporize. If a company was paying to have its floors swept, they are STILL going to need their floors swept.
Yes but the business isn't going to suddenly pay above minimum wage because transport costs go up now are they?
If they can't find anyone who can drive in, they will have to take measures to secure a floor sweeper.
So you'll rely on someone more desperate willing to work for less to come in. Again you're building ghettos.
is in an employer of menial labor's best interest to have access to menial labor, and that won't change just because the tolls go up.
The same thing goes for clerks, factory jobs, etc. A highway toll is not the apocalypse, and it is not new.
No it's not the apocalypse but transport continues to get harder and more expensive. Have you even been paying attention to the price of petrol? People don't need to be slugged more. This idea to price tolls based on demand is motivated by nothing more than profiteering. Employees don't have an easy way to avoid having to get to work.
Many public transit systems have peak and off-peak rates. You could even mitigate it by offering tax breaks or credits to people below a certain income level - though I honestly don't think that would be necessary.
I use one, I'm not exactly living in poverty and I still think the idea STINKS.
Why relying on tax credits to compensate low income earners (who don't have a lot of money to be taxed in the first place and can't afford to loan it to their government) is a whole other discussion. You talk about lowly paid workers but you make it clear that you never care for them or understand them.
I trust you're smarter than all that.
...that is if you don't have something pressing happening at lunch. I got to lunch an hour later today and some days I don't get much time for it. No matter, if that were the only inconvenience I'd find a way.
Well you certainly get points for setting the tone for the rest of your message. An insult disguised as praise.
I'd challenge you to actually record the times that you leave work, and measure the variance by day of week to see if your claims are actually all that you claim
I don't need to record it, I have a detailed roster that goes back a few years.
Where I work there are 5 people covering four shifts in summer (starting 7:15am, 9am, 11:15am, 1:15pm) with the 4th of those dropped in winter. 1 of us must be here at all times. We do rotating shifts making room for people to take rostered days, annual leave etc. If we want to change our shift we must swap with someone else. Last week I was on the 11:15am shift. Week before it was the 1:15pm shift. This week I'm on 7:15am (but public transport is bad so I get in at 6:30 in case a train is cancelled when I'm on that shift. It means I get up at 4:30). Tomorrow I have an appointment so I've swapped with the guy on late shift. Sometimes our boss has to go to great effort to cover shifts while allowing people the leave they want. If she can't make it work we simply don't get the leave.
My variation by weekday for the last few weeks has been pretty wild.
however, you seem intent on deciding that you can't possibly make it convenient to you.
See above. By the way I use to know a couple of people who worked where I do and live in my area. Arrangements have changed. They're working closer to where I live. I am not.
I base this primarily on your loose argument; for instance, the 20% carpool time example I provided assumed that any one given person carpooled with one and only one other person one day a week.
That doesn't make any of what I've said over the last 2 messages any less applicable. Carpooling isn't always easy. It only really works in situations where you and your carpooling buddies have the same schedules (primary/high school, identical shifts) AND live and work in the same area and even then it's still hard.
You proceed to then suggest that 'errands' happen every single day - and stop right there, because I might suggest that if you're spending extra fuel every day for errands you might group into one night, well then you have a whole separate layer of waste.
Perhaps you don't know what it's like to be responsible for a family. Errands can and do happen every single day. Also as the group of carpoolers gets larger, so does the chance that anyone wishes to take on an errand. Another example of your mentality "It works for me so it must work for everyone and if it doesn't it is because they are lazy and/or stupid". Bad assumption. I'd love to save money I spend on transport and I don't want to turn this green earth into a wasteland. However feeling guilty or making bone headed lifestyle choices isn't going to fix the problem.
But lets return to the main point; obviously in a carpool situation there would have to be some compromises. You'd have to, you know, at lunch or whenever call your carpool partner (or, if you're really gung ho, partners) and let them know whats up with you.
You might also have to cancel on occasion because something came up. However, this is no different than working out a schedule with a spouse, other family or a friend you have a regular arrangement with. It's entirely within your skill set - or should be.
Oh how I adore the delicious arrogance on slashdot. Now you're telling me what my skillset should be. Buddy your solution was a blanket statement that covered more than just me - there are people out there who struggle to read let alone schedule their carpool and find time to make phonecalls at work.
Not that my circumstances above pr
You're forgetting the other side - businesses need the menial labor as much as the menial labor needs jobs. There will be some way for the poor to get to work.
It's called creating a ghetto.
In Philly the suburban office parks pay for buses to run between the regional rail lines and the office parks, because in Philly the poor live in the city (and as such largely have no car) but the job growth is all in the burbs.
More often than not public transport is inadequate and doesn't come to the rescue.
When I was in college I took that bus quite a bit to get to my co-op job and talked with these people. Most of them had multiple jobs and really had it tough... so I think they qualify as the type of person you are referring to.
All the more damning than that you have no sympathy for these hard working folk and are happy for their lives to become even harder. Would YOU like to work multiple jobs and have it really tough?
So yeah, you are right - people need to get to work. But work also needs people, and so it will happen.
If your only interest is in business getting employees that's well and good but what I was arguing was that this approach further decreases the standard of living of the poor which in turn feeds back into the society in which you live through crime, increased poverty etc. These things are not good even if they don't "directly" affect you. In the long run you are part of society and you are affected.
I wish there was a way to mod your comment above +5
What is this? Ass covering 101? Some of us actually take pride in their work.
...but I bet it comes up in discussion if your job security or salary come into question.
...and the less people expect of you, the less of a liability the loss of your position becomes.
First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.
The technology and people change together. If that were not the case we'd never have moved from paper and typewriter (or papyrus for that matter).
Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it.
Fantastic advice...
Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat.
Terrible advice. There's consequences for that too. People who dislike you won't help you get things done and will often take any opportunity to get you back including testifying against you in court. Try this instead "Never be offensive at work in any form. If you need to vent do it elsewhere and don't name people or divulge information you shouldn't".
Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.
Same for verbal. You'll never know who it'll get to.
About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.
You could avoid anything from a minor work disaster to huge amounts of overtime if you read every email you get and reply judiciously if required.
For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.
This is an excellent way to get reprimanded and appear lazy. If everyone took that approach no work would be done at all. There's good reason to send mail to a group - eg. a support group where different people are on different shifts etc. Instead ask if you're the most qualified to reply and if appropriate let the rest of the group in To: know you're handling the email before tackling it in detail (e.g. if it's going to take a while to reply).
Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.
It may not be productive, but doing this will mean you:
1) Miss vital information which will affect you down the line
2) May miss that something was said that was attributed to you, and by your silence you're implying agreement
All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it.
For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them.
If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant
I'm all for helping people with education, health, and that sort of thing. But I'm not really on board with subsidizing their commute so that they can choose to live in one place and work in another. I'm finding it very hard to swallow that a long commute for everyone hurts the economy less than the good that is done by letting a guy drive 45 minutes to sweep floors.
If it costs $30 to commute, and the guy only makes $10/hr it's hard to justify bothering to work, since you're really suggesting the guy should work next to nothing. The guy might really love the idea of living in the city, but his house out in the 'burbs is the only one he can afford to rent, so he's not really making a lifestyle choice. The office buildings are in the city and he can't afford to live there. Not
Those with little money have little choice. The way you're talking I'm guessing you're use to dealing with the tradeoffs of the middle class or even upper middle class rather than the poor. Fortunately so am I but I can see that they do have less opportunity than such a dismissive attitude might suggest.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring
Wow what bad logic. Do you not understand that a different level of safety can apply for the worker than to the consumer in an industry. For example a coal miner may be at large risk of the mine collapsing on his sorry behind, the power engineer could be sitting on a power plant that's about to go ka-boom, whereas the end user is sitting by that cozy electric radiator. More pertinant to this discussion a worker might be contaminated with a pathogen due to lax internal controls while the external perimeter is much harder to penetrate. Pilots are the exception not the rule - if they go down the customers go down.
My point is that generally speaking you could, if you put an ounce of effort into it, find a workable carpool solution. Lots of people do, who recognize that resources aren't infinite - their's or the world's. And if everyone carpooled even 20% of the time that they commute, that's a big difference - a 10% decrease in cars on the road. So why is it that it's such an impossible thing? Is it really that un-doable, or does it just necessitate a change and the acceptance that to-date you haven't been doing it the optimal way?
Nicely argued but there's a very big problem with your premise and that is that a "workable carpool solution" exists. I don't know about you but while I have plenty of control over what time I start work, I often find myself held back at the end of the day anywhere from half an hour (common) to many hours (very uncommon). I'm not the GP but I personally can't simply tell my employer "Sorry boss, car pool's leaving, gotta run" when there are people being held up doing their work, or there's something critical going on that is a disaster if not taken care of. So in order to car pool sensibly I must:
1) Be able to firmly predict when my day ends
2) Be able to find others whose schedule coincides with mine
3) Live in the same area, and work in the same area
4) Constantly monitor changes to each and every person's schedule in the carpooling arrangement (sickness, holidays, change of job)
Tell me how a shift worker is suppose to do that, particularly if the reason they're working the shift is to provide out of ours coverage (meaning colleagues work opposing shifts)? That's exactly the situation I'm in. Makes public transport sound like a heavenly option.
Then consider all the things that people do on their way to and from work. Just stop in to do some shopping etc. You can't do that if you carpool otherwise journey times blow out and people get impatient and upset. Asking 3 people to wait while one does the weekly grocery shopping or goes to see a doctor isn't practical. So what do these people do? Carpool to and from work then drive back out to the shopping center or doctor. That'll eat into your 20% savings quick smart.
Making people feel bad about polluting their environment has become big business but I don't see how asking people to do things that they find complicates their lives and impacts their lifestyle is going to help the environment at all, especially when what you ask isn't practical.
Now, I understand the appeal of helping out the poor. But this isn't health insurance or food stamps or housing.
Actually increasing their job prospects gives them the opportunity to no longer be poor.
The "right to drive a car to work" is not exactly a basic human right.
For some people there is no practical alternative than driving to work. Restricting these people's job prospects damages their lives, their childrens lives, and the economy as a whole.
See the bugger-the-rest-of-you-I'm-alright-jack school of thought is actually self-destructive over the long term. Those people whose livelihoods you restrict today, are the criminals you build gated communities to keep out tomorrow.
They did, they just did checks in the outer interface functions, rather than in every *d++ = *s++. Remember C was written for professionals, not hobbyists.
That something is built for professionals and not hobbyists does not mean you don't include safety features. In fact it's a good reason to add more safety features e.g. Both race cars and road vehicles have safety features.
Yeah, they just wrote it to run the AT&T telephone network, while it was still a monopoly. Nothing large or critical, there.
I said large BUSINESS systems. Controlling 1950s and 1960s phone hardware is a very different game to writing a bank system and you employ different people.
Easy to say, but rather less likely than you might imagine. Ten years ago there was a large market for pirated satellite decoders. The security systems used for satellite TV are nowhere close to the security of EMV Chip and PIN but there really hasn't been a viable pirate decoder market since Season 7 in the mid 90s. The satellite systems are a much harder proposition because the communication is unidirectional and the attacker can physically destroy one or many cards to extract the keys.
Apples to oranges.
How much money can a criminal expect to make selling illegal satellite decoders?
By contrast, how much money can a fraudster make defeating bank security? It should minimize the petty fraud, but not ellminate all fraud. I think improving bank security is a fantastic idea and it should be done (provided it's done well). I don't think it will eliminate electronic fraud.
Put it this way, banks are all about making money. Why do you think improved security hasn't been implemented? Could it be that it is 1) not so easy to do and 2) not as cost effective doing risky wholesale replacements as doing them carefully and incrementally (despite the added risk due to maintaining compatibility with existing systems)
Regarding your comments on Algol, you clearly know the language much better than I, so I'd be a fool to argue why it failed to grab more of a market share without doing some more research so I can form an informed opinion.
However I do know Pascal and to say Pascal is a broken language, when variants have been used with great success in niche markets is something I find hard to agree with. (eg. Borland Pascal compilers and then Delphi, also Miranda though not commercially). In any case it wasn't a counter example as such...it just demonstrates that the author himself lost interest in the Algol language and moved on, which to me suggests Algol was far from perfect.
Every successful attack against Chip and PIN to date has been against the transition arrangements to support legacy systems. ...because they're currently the weakest link.
...until the entire infrastructure moves and there is no more "low hanging fruit" for the criminals to pick. Anyway you're assuming smartcards can be implemented perfectly. They can't.
...and yet Algol 60 never took off the way C did. why?
Anyway that's a rather sweeping statement.
While smartcards are not invulnerable (Pau Kocher's timing attacks etc) they are more than sufficient to mitigate risk.
Mind you I'm NOT saying this would be a waste of time. I agree that the current banking infrastructre (particularly credit card arrangements) are not fit for purpose and need to be replaced. Smartcards are cetainly one way to improve security IF implemented correctly.
The point is that we can stop pretty much all the Internet crimes that hit the headlines today by changing the banking infrastructure.
I think you'd find you'd just up the ante. Criminals would respond.
The machines they were using were several orders of magnitude faster than the ones that Hoare and co wrote Algol 60 on. Algol 60 had bounds checking. Hoare argued against it at the time - it was the subject of his Turing award lecture.
Read more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL
For starters no standard file access: "ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other."
A casual observation of the hello world looks rather clunky.
The language's developer eventually moved on to Pascal, which did for a time try to compete with C but wasn't seen to be as powerful because it didn't allow for direct memory access etc.
The difference was the switch from batch mode to interactive. Running in batch the cost of a mistake is much greater - it costs an entire run. Running interactive you are waiting for the result.
Batch and interactive modes are good for different things. The systems I work with have a real time component and a batch component. Neither one could do the job of the other.
Even so, I find it somewhat incongruous for folk to praise UNIX and flame Microsoft for a type of security bug that was introduced by the UNIX architects and identified as a mistake at the time.
Every system is a compromise, and has its limitations. If you use C, you must handle bounds correctly. Microsoft have always been aware of this - it was a known issue when the company was started. Microsoft have failed to do their bounds checking often and therefore the bug count has been high. It's not the original design of C that people are criticizing MS for, it's the poor usage and failure to do the checking the system requires. As for why people praise Unix and denegrate Windows I find that there are valid criticisms for both operating systems. Unfortunately geeks often treat their favourite operating systems like religious artifacts instead of looking at them scientifically.
I make a living as a Java programmer. I enjoy the work I do and feel that no other language/platform can even touch Java's capabilities in team and enterprise development. Even for single-programmer development, there are a lot of situations where Java is the solution to end all solutions.
I work as a Java developer and having seen how convoluted the J2EE and other common framework libraries are I have to disagree big time. I don't know if I've simply seen more systems than you (I've used a variety of languages and only specialized in Java in the last 3-4 years) and therefore know what's out there but I have to say things were being done much more effectively in the mid to late 90s. Most of the team and enterprise development products for Java aren't revolutionary either. I really don't know how you can hold this view. In fact I think we've gone backwards in the last few years. Ever since everything went web based mixing the hodge-podge of Javascript/JScript to accomplish things on the client side with the travesty that is inconsistent HTML and CSS, with libraries that generate Java on the fly or wrap everything in proxy clsses on the server side, WYSIWYG and RAD development have gone out the window. What use to take a few hours to code now takes a few days. I've even seen the tools make a mockery of incremental compilation leaving you to recompile large code bases for each little change, test them, and rinse repeat.
I think you'll find that while improving security is easy over the current situation, provided you're willing to wear the cost of doing so (which unfortunately may be the difference between a company or technology being technologically viable and not), the idea that a perfect attack-proof system could be built is a fallacy.
It's way too easy to blame the initial inventors of the C language for not checking for buffer overflows, but that too is a mistake. They wrote the system in the 60s for machines that today are routinely outdone by desktop calculators. They did not write it intending for it to be used to build large business systems, nor could anyone have envisioned just how far computing would come in so short a time. They were remarkable pioneers, and it may even have made sense for early pioneers to use C. Heck even in the early 90s when windows was written computers were small and slow enough that the speed advantage of C was needed to make systems practical. There wsa a cost to that. Hindsight is as they say 20/20. However we are only now moving on to other languages, because in the meantime people had gotten a lot of experience with C, and there was a lot of software out there that could be used and re-used.
Thanks for the info. I'm sure I've come across that number somewhere. I think from memory it's built to use whichever network is available regardless of carrier (whereas 000 only uses your own mobile carrier).