Tell that to the couple in the ROK who let their infant starve to death because they spent all their time in Internet Cafes playing games and just left her alone in her crib all day until she died of malnutrition. That's what he's talking about, and there are more than a few people that far into virtual reality.
People who get addicted to online porn to the point of letting it ruin their real lives are not thin on the ground, either.
For an old guy who probably doesn't use computers much, if at all, himself, he's showing an outstanding grasp of the problem. Far greater than that shown by people who throw shallow criticism without trying to understand the issue or what he's saying.
OK, I'll bite. What MS products are more accessible to the consumer?
They sell lots of MS products at (for example) Fry's. They sell lots of Apple products at Fry's. Over the Internet, too. Sounds equally accessible.
Both have good, free online knowledge bases and communities of expert users willing to help. Sounds equally accessible.
Windows is easier to use and more reliable than it used to be. Apple products are easier to use and more reliable than they used to be. On the whole, easier to use and more reliable than MS products, too.
For developers, MS has lots of stuff available for free through MSDN. Apple has lots of stuff available for free through their equivalent. Forget what they call it.
Ubuntu? Not much available in computer stores, but you can download the OS for free or order a CD cheap. Once you have it, it's easier to install than either Windows. Maybe easier than Mac. You can get it pre-installed if you really want, but that does limit your choice of hardware/vendors.
Online support is free and very good. As with Windows and Mac, lots of knowledgeable people will help you for free.
Ubuntu is easier to use and more reliable than it used to be. Easier than or equal to Windows in most areas. Easier than or equal to Mac in a few.
For developers? It's all free. Knock yourself out.
Ubuntu may be still a bit rough around the edges in some areas compared to Windows, and more so compared to Mac, but it also beats them both (especially Windows) so soundly in areas such as ease of software installation and updates, price, and security that I would call it a three-way tie in terms of accessibility to both users and devs.
Considering how much farther ahead Win and Mac were when I first tried Linux over 10 years ago, I suspect that 3 - 5 years from now, it may be game/set/match Ubuntu in terms of accessibility.
I'm in my late 40s and two of the five guys on my team are older than me. One is somewhat younger and one is far younger. We have a few straight-from-college people on other teams, but not a lot. We mostly only hire experienced people, and when we do hire fresh grads, we're mostly hiring from schools with "name" CS departments, like UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.
WRT the original topic, no one here got a bonus last year, and no one got a raise unless it was because of a promotion. This year, I got an outstanding review, a modest raise (but hey, it's way better than last year) and an exceptional bonus.
Sure, a lot of people in IT have gone a while without a raise or bonus. The recovery thus far has been slow and weak for most companies. Mine is doing well but still cautious on raises (this year's was by far my smallest despite my great review), but many aren't to this point yet. I don't know what makes people think the grass might be greener in some other field, though. Change careers and a pay cut is even possible. I would only leave IT if I were moving into a career which I was beyond certain would offset any initial pay cut. Or to buy or open a bait and tackle shop when I retire:-)
The problem there (let me guess, you didn't RTFA; this is/., after all) do not live in the legal jurisdiction of the town that has the fire department. That means that the town cannot enforce a legal penalty for not paying the fee. It also cannot enforce a "business penalty" by having the firefighters whip out a contract and say "Sign here and we'll put out the fire. This contract requires you to pay the $75 now, before we even pick up a hose, and a $100,000 penalty within 30 days." Using that number because you through it out there, but the number doesn't matter. The contract would never survive a legal challenge because it would quite clearly have been signed under duress. Not only the penalty, but probably even the $75 fee, would be thrown out for that person.
The only practical ways to handle it are:
1) The way they are doing it now ("If you haven't paid, we won't even roll a truck").
2) Provide no firefighting service in the county at all. Or put another way, "You're the ones who, for whatever reason and through whatever process, have chosen not to have a county-wide fire department. Maybe you should think about getting one."
3) Get the county to agree to pay - in advance - the per-house fee for the service and to be responsible for collecting it from the county residents. This could best be accomplished through a special local property tax assessment.
I feel for the guy, having gambled that his house wouldn't burn and lost, but come on, it was his choice. You'll note that even the reporter who wrote TFA seems to not believe him. When he says he forgot to pay it, "forgot" is in quotes. I bet he's "forgotten" to pay it every year.
I'll also bet that the day after the fire, a huge number of people who also "forgot" suddenly remembered.
If I don't pay my garbage bill, they'll stop collecting my garbage. If I don't pay my gas and electric bill, they'll turn off my gas and electric. If I don't pay my water bill, they'll turn off my water. They can't turn off my sewer service, but it's included in the property tax bill, so they *know* they're getting that money.
Or to look at it another way, if he "forgot" to pay his fire insurance and the company canceled his policy and a month later his house burned down and he was upset that the insurance company wouldn't pay, he'd still be wrong. The insurance company would have no relationship with him and no obligation to pay. The fire department had no relationship with him either, and thus no obligation to put out the fire.
It especially bugs me to see a volunteer fire department being criticized like this; it's not like they are being paid to be on call in the fire house in case they are needed; when they get a call, they have to leave their regular jobs to go fight the fire. Not unreasonable that they didn't go.
I hear that. While many monitors will rotate (including mine), who actually does that.
My solution when my wife told me that my 21" CRT would not be moving with us, was to buy a Dell U2410. It's a wonderful monitor: 24", 1920 x 1200, so I get the extra 120 vertical pixels that really matter. I didn't even consider a 1080P monitor, even though I could have bought two quite good ones for the price of a single U2410. If I had the scratch for a second one, I would put it right next to this one, but in portrait mode. That would be the best of both worlds. Granted, I could get by with a 1080P in portrait mode, but I like to keep my monitors the same size in dual-head configs. Plus, just about anything else would look like crap next to this U2410, even most other Dells. I have a Dell E248 24" at work, and it's quite good - good enough that I considered buying a used one until I saw how much people wanted for them - but not as good as the U2410.
Of course, for people who really have the scratch, the solution is simple: get an Apple 30" Cinema Display or a 27" or 30" Dell. They all go way beyond 1080P in both the vertical and the horizontal. A colleague of mine has a 30" Apple monitor and that thing rocks!
Well, if you're going to copy something, isn't it better to copy OS X than to copy Windows? After all, KDE very heavily copies the look and feel of Windows. Before anybody jumps me, I'm not dissing KDE; I like it a lot and the only reasons I recently stopped using it is because of how broken the dual-head support is, and that AWN works a lot better in GNOME (I decided to copy the Mac way). As you may have noticed, Apple continues to sell tons of computers, and it's not the hardware driving that (lots of companies make excellent high-end hardware), it's OS X that's driving the sales. After I replaced my wife's old notebook with a MacBook Pro, she found out for herself that it's true: once you go Mac, you never go back. At least not to Windows; I do now and always will prefer Linux to Mac overall.
As for GNOME, well it goes its own way on some stuff (these are usually the parts of GNOME that suck the most) sort of copies Mac on some stuff (top panel) and Windows on some stuff, but I think overall it feels more Mac-ish than not.
Now, if somebody wants to really push the envelope of UI design and come up with something that leapfrogs both Apple and MSFT, I certainly support that and would definitely try it. If I liked it, I'd switch. I'm very What Have You Done For Me Lately? about desktop environments. Over the years I've used FVWM 95 AfterStep, Window Maker, GNOME 1.x, KDE 3.0 - 4.4 am currently back on GNOME, and I'm pretty sure I'm leaving out at least one DE or window manager, maybe two. Oh, yeah; Enlightenment!
However, the current state of the art of What Works Best For Me is the Mac UI. That doesn't mean the Mac itself is best for me, although I do have one at work and it's pretty darned good, but the UI design. That's why my Ubuntu desktops at both home and work look a lot like a Mac and use the AWN dock. A dock with integrated task and launcher items is really the way to go, at least for me.
Uhh, not true. An instructor has the formal right to allow (or not) a calculator or any other device during exams, or even in the classroom at all. That was true at every school I attended, and I imagine it was true at every school you attended and/or were kicked out of. A person need not be God to have that right, or hadn't you heard?
Hey, you aren't the "Don't taze me, bro!" dude, are you?
However, insofar as those who think that progressive taxation is a good idea are typically leftists, I'll stand by my code word assertion even in the context of taxation.
Why is wanting low tax rates considered conservative? Because we conservatives want low taxes and liberals want high taxes. Note that I'm not saying "Republican" here; show me a Republican who claims to be a conservative and the odds are somewhere north of 50% that I can show you a liar.
What would happen in an economy without progressive taxation? Hmmm...
1) The government would have far less money to spen^H^H^H waste, and would have to seriously re-think spending;
2) All the people who currently think they are getting some kind of free government money would - under a flat tax - quickly become acquainted with the TANSTAAFL principle when instead of getting free money they had to pay their fair share like everyone else;
3) Those same people in point 2 would very quickly start holding government accountable; the nightmare of the vast majority of both Republicrats and Democans.
You know, I'm sure, that 100 years ago, the United States did not have an income tax; the primary means of taxation was property taxes. The income tax was supposed to be a temporary tax to help finance our (mistaken) involvement in WW I. That's why you should never, ever support a temporary tax or a temporary increase in an existing tax; it's an even better gauge of when a politician is lying than "her/his lips are moving."
Yes, I know that a property tax is a form of progressive tax, but it's a much less dysfunctional one than an income tax and tends to better encourage liquidity in the economy while simultaneously avoiding penalizing financial success the way any income tax - but especially a progressive one - does.
By the way, yes, I do believe that corporate income tax should be abolished, at least on domestic profits; it's just smoke and mirrors to help keep people in the dark about how much they are really paying; we're the ones who really pay that corporate tax, because it just gets folded into the price we pay for goods and services as part of the cost of doing business, the same as with paying bribes in corrupt countries.
And then, the income tax should be abolished completely; government could still pay its bills, after some badly needed re-alignment of priorities.
What's wrong with that? The days of the framing of the Constitution were certainly far freer than now. If those people were around today, they would not recognize this nation.
Is Obama a Muslim? Highly unlikely, although there are doubtless Muslims who regard him as something like one due to his paternal line.
Is he a radical Christian? Most certainly not. Wright is a racist, narrow-minded bigot (probably not insane, but then, neither are those who listen to Beck) and doesn't strike me as being terribly Christian. Obama himself doesn't really seem like one, either; I think he just plays a Christian on TV.
If you think the left hasn't seriously screwed things up here, you just aren't old enough to know just how much better it used to be.
Fair enough, but consider who it was that established those "progressive" (usually a code word for socialist or communist, used by those without the courage to call themselves what they really are); the left. It just took this long to get the tax rates as low as they are now, but they are still way too high. Think of it: for income in the top marginal bracket (currently 28%, IIRC) and when you add in the state cut for those states that have an income tax, you lose somewhere in the area of 50% of your top-bracket income to taxation. Half. That's insane. Sure, it used to be worse when the top bracket was an unbelievable 90%, but that doesn't mean it's not still way too high.
You'd have a hard time convincing me that income tax should have any brackets above 10%, or even that it should be progressive at all, but even if you could convince me of that to some extent, a 28% marginal tax rate is ridiculously high.
Dude, you can't even see the rock bottom from here:)
When I lived in Japan I actually went to Atami once, with an actual living, breathing female. It's a nice place; I can't help but think that it's a less nice place with all those creepy otaku types around.
In some places, but not in home networks, where even 100baseT is still generally fast enough. Keep in mind that many (most?) home networks are purely wireless and that even 802.11N doesn't provide as much throughput as a switched FE network. For most people, 802.11G is still quite sufficient; I'm still on it, with no plans to upgrade anytime soon. My uplink, which is 15 mbps down and some number less than 1 mbps up is still the bottleneck.
Even at work - and I work at a Really Big Networking Company Whose Name You All Recognize - the desktop wired networks are all GigE (who knows, might even be FE in some places) and I haven't heard of any plans to go to 10 GigE for the desktops; for now and the foreseeable future, 10 GigE will remain a core switching speed, not a desktop speed.
100 GigE take over in all the places where 1 GigE is in use today? Maybe not in my lifetime.
Yes, definitely hard to read an all-hiragana text, but that could be a matter of our not being used to it; long ago, Korean was written with Chinese characters but they successfully transitioned to an alphabet. Vietnamese was also formerly written with Chinese characters; they also transitioned to an alphabet. Japan could, if it wished to, phase out kanji and use only kana or romaji, but there would certainly be challenges dealing with ambiguity of meaning, because of the relatively high number of words that are "spelled" the same way in kana but are written differently in kanji. Of course, maybe Korean also had to solve the same problem? Not sure, I don't speak or read Korean, but I do know the phonemic inventories of Japanese and Korean are nearly identical (Korean has a couple of sounds that Japanese doesn't), as are the syntactic structures and to a great extent, even the speaking rhythms. In fact, many years ago when I was first learning Japanese, I often found it very difficult to distinguish between spoken Japanese and spoken Korean on TV. That being the case, maybe Korean also had to deal with words that sound alike and are spelled alike?
Can any Korean speakers here comment on that? If there are a lot of those words, how does the Korean alphabet address that?
I'm definitely wapuro-baka these days. Since leaving Japan some years ago after 8 years of residence, I have gradually lost my ability to write Japanese by hand to the point where I can now write only the simplest of kanji without the help of a computer.
I don't even know absolutely for certain that the Linux binaries that I apt-get install aren't trojaned. Even if I had the time to audit the source and make sure it compiles to the binary I'm getting, I don't really have the ability to do that, especially if I the bar is set to "Never miss one."
However, I'm more confident in those binaries than I am in the proprietary binaries I install on my Mac. At least the.debs are signed and there are some people out there checking.
1) Rationed care 2) Legal system works better/limited malpractice suits 3) Lower-quality care just costs less
I've lived in a UHC country and so has my wife, and while I would stop short of calling the care bad, but to say that it's as good as what we have in the US would be to flat-out lie.
Sure, you can get care there that is as good as ours or pretty close, but you're going pay for it out of your pocket; UHC won't cover it.
Colplay (is an English-derived Japanese word referring to a sexual practice (paid for in cash more often than not) in which the female dresses up in a costume (often anime-derived) for the male's entertainment.
It does *not* mean dressing up in costume at a con.
Which one? Cisco IOS or Apple's iOS? Wait until a year or two from now and you're googling to solve a problem you're having with a switch or router and all you can find is info about iOS. Fun and Hilarity ensue:p
I'm glad somebody brought up the biological angle, although it can be more nuanced than the AC states. First, the ratio of live male births to live female births is (at least in the industrialized world) 1.05:1.00, although studies report there is a long term falling trend on male births, such that 1:1 appears to be coming.
That said, since many men (most, perhaps?) have a predilection toward fathering either boys or girls, the fact that one of the children is known to be a boy may influence the likelihood away from 50/50. I knew an anecdote is not a statistic, but enough of them can look a lot like a statistic, so here are a few:
-My dad fathered three sons, no daughters. -I fathered four daughters, no sons. -My next door neighbors has three sons, no daughters. -The majority of the kids my daughters go to school with come from families where the siblings are predominantly one gender, and in many of them, the siblings are all of the same gender.
So, while I'm not a mathematician and I may be talking out my arse statistically, it seems to me that knowing one of the children in question is a boy raises the chance that the other is also a boy to some (possibly indeterminable) number well above fifty percent.
I wish I had some mod points to give you, your analysis is spot on.
To the clueless unwashed masses defending the network and jumping on its critics, get real: you all know perfectly well what they meant by it, and if you think "Fuck my dad" is OK, I'm glad I have a better relationship with my father than you have with yours and my kids have a better relationship with me than yours do with you. Sheesh.
I'm going to take a different tack from most responders and ask why, if the IT department is sufficiently concerned about security to require whole-disk encryption on all machines connecting to the network (as a member of the security industry, I applaud their decision), do they allow people to connect their personal machines to the network? Especially in a HIPAA environment, that's nuts. How do they ensure that you retain no confidential data on your personal computer if you quit? In such an environment, no one should be allowed to use personal equipment on the network, but if they are, they should all be required to sign a contract that upon leaving employment (voluntarily or not), they will turn over any personal machines used to connect to the hospital network so that the disk(s) can be removed and destroyed.
That said, if they are going to let you connect your personal gear and you are dead-set on doing it, install whole-disk encryption yourself and bring the machine in for them to inspect it. They'll probably want the passphrase, too.
If they won't budge, then you either stop using your personal machine or you let them install their encryption solution on it. You may not like their decisions (I don't like all of my employer's IT decisions either), but it's the hospital's network, not yours, which means they get to make the rules. If you find this one so onerous that you can't live with it, I recommend seeking work elsewhere before it gets to bug you so much that it harms your job performance. Otherwise, you may wind up seeking work elsewhere anyway, but under less good circumstances.
While I agree that he was in part railroaded because he exposed incompetence (and from the description of his manager in TFA, I think it's clear that his manager was not competent to manage him), I think it's also clear that he broke the law. I have worked as both a sysadmin and neteng in the past, and at every employer at which I had those positions, there was never a system to which I had root access to which my boss was not also entitled to have root, and in fact had it. It was from my boss that both my authority to have root and the root password itself flowed.
At any of those jobs, if I changed the root passwords and refused to tell my boss the new ones - even if I believed he would immediately disclose them to someone who I did not believe to be an authorized user - I would have been liable for (at least) termination. Since you're apparently an admin as well, that's likely true where you work, too. Childs was told by his boss to surrender the admin password and refused to do so. No matter what, his boss was authorized to have that password. Sure, there are some jobs in the world where things are so compartmentalized that people are authorized to access things that their bosses are not, but those jobs typically have those controls clearly spelled out and are also typically at three-letter federal government agencies. Childs' job was not one of those.
Management went wrong on two points, which led to the situation with Childs. First, as mentioned by the juror in TFA, is that his boss was rather, well, weak-willed and pretty much let Childs get away with anything he wanted, for years. That set the stage for this whole thing. Second, they allowed him to build a network on which he was the_only one_ with admin access. WTF is up with that? I've never worked anywhere where such a stupid thing would be allowed to happen. What if Childs had been run over by a bus and incapacitated or killed? They would have been just as inable to admin the network as they were when he refused to hand over the passwords. This specific management failure is an instantiation of management's general failure to set bounds and expectations for Childs. I'm sure there are many other instantiations of that general failure in that workplace.
So yes, in part he was railroaded, but at the end of the day he took, with full knowledge, actions that would reasonably be expected to result in at least termination and probably prosecution. In this case, it resulted in both, and he could have avoided all of this by turning over the passwords to his boss, a person authorized to know them by any reasonable definition thereof.
Well, no, operating vehicles at high speeds is widely available on many public thoroughfares, especially freeways. YMMV (so to speak) depending on where you live, but I see someone driving at 90 on the freeway pretty much every time I'm on it, and at 100 pretty often. How do I know they're going that fast? Because I'm usually going 75-80 and they blow by me like I was standing still.
I wouldn't call 90 reckless, but it's getting close. 100 is crossing the line of reckless in most areas.
My analogy holds, and I'll show you why in terms of yours.
Let's say you have at least one race track in pretty much every city. Larger ones will typically have several. Anyone can take her/his car to the track, pay the entrance fee, and get out there and race. Racing is clearly legal. Then, the government passes a law to make racing illegal for people who own one type of car, but not others. It's not a vehicle safety issue, it's just arbitrary. Maybe it's FWD cars, while RWD and AWD remain race-legal. Or maybe it's Japanese cars that aren't allowed to race. Or Swedish cars. Or red ones. Or white ones. Ones whose model or make name starts with O. Whatever, just some arbitrary class of cars isn't allowed to race.
Are the owners of that class of car likely to stop racing just because they can't go to the track? Speaking as a former street racer, the answer to that is most definitely "No." They will find a place and a way to race. That being the case, you're far better off from a revenue standpoint to let them keep going to the track and paying their entrance fees to race legally. You know that they are most definitely going to race anyway.
Switching back to playing poker online, people are going to play anyway. I can think of one online poker site that sends you your winnings as a check. Nothing on the check identifies at as a check from an online casino, and it's never been a problem to take one to the bank, even though the bank doesn't accept online transfers to or from said online poker site. People will find a way to play online poker anyway, so the government is far better off to keep it legal and taxed, with licensed online poker sites operating in the US. So are the players, since we could have more confidence in a site operated in Vegas than we can in a site operated offshore somewhere, under dubious (if any) oversight.
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Tell that to the couple in the ROK who let their infant starve to death because they spent all their time in Internet Cafes playing games and just left her alone in her crib all day until she died of malnutrition. That's what he's talking about, and there are more than a few people that far into virtual reality.
People who get addicted to online porn to the point of letting it ruin their real lives are not thin on the ground, either.
For an old guy who probably doesn't use computers much, if at all, himself, he's showing an outstanding grasp of the problem. Far greater than that shown by people who throw shallow criticism without trying to understand the issue or what he's saying.
OK, I'll bite. What MS products are more accessible to the consumer?
They sell lots of MS products at (for example) Fry's. They sell lots of Apple products at Fry's. Over the Internet, too. Sounds equally accessible.
Both have good, free online knowledge bases and communities of expert users willing to help. Sounds equally accessible.
Windows is easier to use and more reliable than it used to be. Apple products are easier to use and more reliable than they used to be. On the whole, easier to use and more reliable than MS products, too.
For developers, MS has lots of stuff available for free through MSDN. Apple has lots of stuff available for free through their equivalent. Forget what they call it.
Ubuntu? Not much available in computer stores, but you can download the OS for free or order a CD cheap. Once you have it, it's easier to install than either Windows. Maybe easier than Mac.
You can get it pre-installed if you really want, but that does limit your choice of hardware/vendors.
Online support is free and very good. As with Windows and Mac, lots of knowledgeable people will help you for free.
Ubuntu is easier to use and more reliable than it used to be. Easier than or equal to Windows in most areas. Easier than or equal to Mac in a few.
For developers? It's all free. Knock yourself out.
Ubuntu may be still a bit rough around the edges in some areas compared to Windows, and more so compared to Mac, but it also beats them both (especially Windows) so soundly in areas such as ease of software installation and updates, price, and security that I would call it a three-way tie in terms of accessibility to both users and devs.
Considering how much farther ahead Win and Mac were when I first tried Linux over 10 years ago, I suspect that 3 - 5 years from now, it may be game/set/match Ubuntu in terms of accessibility.
I'm in my late 40s and two of the five guys on my team are older than me. One is somewhat younger and one is far younger. We have a few straight-from-college people on other teams, but not a lot. We mostly only hire experienced people, and when we do hire fresh grads, we're mostly hiring from schools with "name" CS departments, like UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.
WRT the original topic, no one here got a bonus last year, and no one got a raise unless it was because of a promotion. This year, I got an outstanding review, a modest raise (but hey, it's way better than last year) and an exceptional bonus.
Sure, a lot of people in IT have gone a while without a raise or bonus. The recovery thus far has been slow and weak for most companies. Mine is doing well but still cautious on raises (this year's was by far my smallest despite my great review), but many aren't to this point yet. I don't know what makes people think the grass might be greener in some other field, though. Change careers and a pay cut is even possible. I would only leave IT if I were moving into a career which I was beyond certain would offset any initial pay cut. Or to buy or open a bait and tackle shop when I retire :-)
The problem there (let me guess, you didn't RTFA; this is /., after all) do not live in the legal jurisdiction of the town that has the fire department. That means that the town cannot enforce a legal penalty for not paying the fee. It also cannot enforce a "business penalty" by having the firefighters whip out a contract and say "Sign here and we'll put out the fire. This contract requires you to pay the $75 now, before we even pick up a hose, and a $100,000 penalty within 30 days." Using that number because you through it out there, but the number doesn't matter. The contract would never survive a legal challenge because it would quite clearly have been signed under duress. Not only the penalty, but probably even the $75 fee, would be thrown out for that person.
The only practical ways to handle it are:
1) The way they are doing it now ("If you haven't paid, we won't even roll a truck").
2) Provide no firefighting service in the county at all. Or put another way, "You're the ones who, for whatever reason and through whatever process, have chosen not to have a county-wide fire department. Maybe you should think about getting one."
3) Get the county to agree to pay - in advance - the per-house fee for the service and to be responsible for collecting it from the county residents. This could best be accomplished through a special local property tax assessment.
I feel for the guy, having gambled that his house wouldn't burn and lost, but come on, it was his choice. You'll note that even the reporter who wrote TFA seems to not believe him. When he says he forgot to pay it, "forgot" is in quotes. I bet he's "forgotten" to pay it every year.
I'll also bet that the day after the fire, a huge number of people who also "forgot" suddenly remembered.
If I don't pay my garbage bill, they'll stop collecting my garbage. If I don't pay my gas and electric bill, they'll turn off my gas and electric. If I don't pay my water bill, they'll turn off my water. They can't turn off my sewer service, but it's included in the property tax bill, so they *know* they're getting that money.
Or to look at it another way, if he "forgot" to pay his fire insurance and the company canceled his policy and a month later his house burned down and he was upset that the insurance company wouldn't pay, he'd still be wrong. The insurance company would have no relationship with him and no obligation to pay.
The fire department had no relationship with him either, and thus no obligation to put out the fire.
It especially bugs me to see a volunteer fire department being criticized like this; it's not like they are being paid to be on call in the fire house in case they are needed; when they get a call, they have to leave their regular jobs to go fight the fire. Not unreasonable that they didn't go.
I hear that. While many monitors will rotate (including mine), who actually does that.
My solution when my wife told me that my 21" CRT would not be moving with us, was to buy a Dell U2410. It's a wonderful monitor: 24", 1920 x 1200, so I get the extra 120 vertical pixels that really matter. I didn't even consider a 1080P monitor, even though I could have bought two quite good ones for the price of a single U2410. If I had the scratch for a second one, I would put it right next to this one, but in portrait mode. That would be the best of both worlds. Granted, I could get by with a 1080P in portrait mode, but I like to keep my monitors the same size in dual-head configs. Plus, just about anything else would look like crap next to this U2410, even most other Dells. I have a Dell E248 24" at work, and it's quite good - good enough that I considered buying a used one until I saw how much people wanted for them - but not as good as the U2410.
Of course, for people who really have the scratch, the solution is simple: get an Apple 30" Cinema Display or a 27" or 30" Dell. They all go way beyond 1080P in both the vertical and the horizontal. A colleague of mine has a 30" Apple monitor and that thing rocks!
Well, if you're going to copy something, isn't it better to copy OS X than to copy Windows? After all, KDE very heavily copies the look and feel of Windows. Before anybody jumps me, I'm not dissing KDE; I like it a lot and the only reasons I recently stopped using it is because of how broken the dual-head support is, and that AWN works a lot better in GNOME (I decided to copy the Mac way). As you may have noticed, Apple continues to sell tons of computers, and it's not the hardware driving that (lots of companies make excellent high-end hardware), it's OS X that's driving the sales. After I replaced my wife's old notebook with a MacBook Pro, she found out for herself that it's true: once you go Mac, you never go back. At least not to Windows; I do now and always will prefer Linux to Mac overall.
As for GNOME, well it goes its own way on some stuff (these are usually the parts of GNOME that suck the most) sort of copies Mac on some stuff (top panel) and Windows on some stuff, but I think overall it feels more Mac-ish than not.
Now, if somebody wants to really push the envelope of UI design and come up with something that leapfrogs both Apple and MSFT, I certainly support that and would definitely try it. If I liked it, I'd switch. I'm very What Have You Done For Me Lately? about desktop environments. Over the years I've used FVWM 95 AfterStep, Window Maker, GNOME 1.x, KDE 3.0 - 4.4 am currently back on GNOME, and I'm pretty sure I'm leaving out at least one DE or window manager, maybe two. Oh, yeah; Enlightenment!
However, the current state of the art of What Works Best For Me is the Mac UI. That doesn't mean the Mac itself is best for me, although I do have one at work and it's pretty darned good, but the UI design. That's why my Ubuntu desktops at both home and work look a lot like a Mac and use the AWN dock. A dock with integrated task and launcher items is really the way to go, at least for me.
Uhh, not true. An instructor has the formal right to allow (or not) a calculator or any other device during exams, or even in the classroom at all. That was true at every school I attended, and I imagine it was true at every school you attended and/or were kicked out of. A person need not be God to have that right, or hadn't you heard?
Hey, you aren't the "Don't taze me, bro!" dude, are you?
However, insofar as those who think that progressive taxation is a good idea are typically leftists, I'll stand by my code word assertion even in the context of taxation.
Why is wanting low tax rates considered conservative? Because we conservatives want low taxes and liberals want high taxes. Note that I'm not saying "Republican" here; show me a Republican who claims to be a conservative and the odds are somewhere north of 50% that I can show you a liar.
What would happen in an economy without progressive taxation? Hmmm...
1) The government would have far less money to spen^H^H^H waste, and would have to seriously re-think spending;
2) All the people who currently think they are getting some kind of free government money would - under a flat tax - quickly become acquainted with the TANSTAAFL principle when instead of getting free money they had to pay their fair share like everyone else;
3) Those same people in point 2 would very quickly start holding government accountable; the nightmare of the vast majority of both Republicrats and Democans.
You know, I'm sure, that 100 years ago, the United States did not have an income tax; the primary means of taxation was property taxes. The income tax was supposed to be a temporary tax to help finance our (mistaken) involvement in WW I. That's why you should never, ever support a temporary tax or a temporary increase in an existing tax; it's an even better gauge of when a politician is lying than "her/his lips are moving."
Yes, I know that a property tax is a form of progressive tax, but it's a much less dysfunctional one than an income tax and tends to better encourage liquidity in the economy while simultaneously avoiding penalizing financial success the way any income tax - but especially a progressive one - does.
By the way, yes, I do believe that corporate income tax should be abolished, at least on domestic profits; it's just smoke and mirrors to help keep people in the dark about how much they are really paying; we're the ones who really pay that corporate tax, because it just gets folded into the price we pay for goods and services as part of the cost of doing business, the same as with paying bribes in corrupt countries.
And then, the income tax should be abolished completely; government could still pay its bills, after some badly needed re-alignment of priorities.
What's wrong with that? The days of the framing of the Constitution were certainly far freer than now. If those people were around today, they would not recognize this nation.
Is Obama a Muslim? Highly unlikely, although there are doubtless Muslims who regard him as something like one due to his paternal line.
Is he a radical Christian? Most certainly not. Wright is a racist, narrow-minded bigot (probably not insane, but then, neither are those who listen to Beck) and doesn't strike me as being terribly Christian. Obama himself doesn't really seem like one, either; I think he just plays a Christian on TV.
If you think the left hasn't seriously screwed things up here, you just aren't old enough to know just how much better it used to be.
Fair enough, but consider who it was that established those "progressive" (usually a code word for socialist or communist, used by those without the courage to call themselves what they really are); the left. It just took this long to get the tax rates as low as they are now, but they are still way too high. Think of it: for income in the top marginal bracket (currently 28%, IIRC) and when you add in the state cut for those states that have an income tax, you lose somewhere in the area of 50% of your top-bracket income to taxation. Half. That's insane. Sure, it used to be worse when the top bracket was an unbelievable 90%, but that doesn't mean it's not still way too high.
You'd have a hard time convincing me that income tax should have any brackets above 10%, or even that it should be progressive at all, but even if you could convince me of that to some extent, a 28% marginal tax rate is ridiculously high.
Dude, you can't even see the rock bottom from here :)
When I lived in Japan I actually went to Atami once, with an actual living, breathing female. It's a nice place; I can't help but think that it's a less nice place with all those creepy otaku types around.
In some places, but not in home networks, where even 100baseT is still generally fast enough. Keep in mind that many (most?) home networks are purely wireless and that even 802.11N doesn't provide as much throughput as a switched FE network. For most people, 802.11G is still quite sufficient; I'm still on it, with no plans to upgrade anytime soon. My uplink, which is 15 mbps down and some number less than 1 mbps up is still the bottleneck.
Even at work - and I work at a Really Big Networking Company Whose Name You All Recognize - the desktop wired networks are all GigE (who knows, might even be FE in some places) and I haven't heard of any plans to go to 10 GigE for the desktops; for now and the foreseeable future, 10 GigE will remain a core switching speed, not a desktop speed.
100 GigE take over in all the places where 1 GigE is in use today? Maybe not in my lifetime.
Yes, definitely hard to read an all-hiragana text, but that could be a matter of our not being used to it; long ago, Korean was written with Chinese characters but they successfully transitioned to an alphabet. Vietnamese was also formerly written with Chinese characters; they also transitioned to an alphabet. Japan could, if it wished to, phase out kanji and use only kana or romaji, but there would certainly be challenges dealing with ambiguity of meaning, because of the relatively high number of words that are "spelled" the same way in kana but are written differently in kanji. Of course, maybe Korean also had to solve the same problem? Not sure, I don't speak or read Korean, but I do know the phonemic inventories of Japanese and Korean are nearly identical (Korean has a couple of sounds that Japanese doesn't), as are the syntactic structures and to a great extent, even the speaking rhythms. In fact, many years ago when I was first learning Japanese, I often found it very difficult to distinguish between spoken Japanese and spoken Korean on TV. That being the case, maybe Korean also had to deal with words that sound alike and are spelled alike?
Can any Korean speakers here comment on that? If there are a lot of those words, how does the Korean alphabet address that?
I'm definitely wapuro-baka these days. Since leaving Japan some years ago after 8 years of residence, I have gradually lost my ability to write Japanese by hand to the point where I can now write only the simplest of kanji without the help of a computer.
I don't even know absolutely for certain that the Linux binaries that I apt-get install aren't trojaned. Even if I had the time to audit the source and make sure it compiles to the binary I'm getting, I don't really have the ability to do that, especially if I the bar is set to "Never miss one."
However, I'm more confident in those binaries than I am in the proprietary binaries I install on my Mac. At least the .debs are signed and there are some people out there checking.
Don't look now, but the US standard of living hasn't exactly been advancing since the 1960s.
Why do they spend less?
1) Rationed care
2) Legal system works better/limited malpractice suits
3) Lower-quality care just costs less
I've lived in a UHC country and so has my wife, and while I would stop short of calling the care bad, but to say that it's as good as what we have in the US would be to flat-out lie.
Sure, you can get care there that is as good as ours or pretty close, but you're going pay for it out of your pocket; UHC won't cover it.
Colplay (is an English-derived Japanese word referring to a sexual practice (paid for in cash more often than not) in which the female dresses up in a costume (often anime-derived) for the male's entertainment.
It does *not* mean dressing up in costume at a con.
Which one? Cisco IOS or Apple's iOS? Wait until a year or two from now and you're googling to solve a problem you're having with a switch or router and all you can find is info about iOS. Fun and Hilarity ensue :p
I'm glad somebody brought up the biological angle, although it can be more nuanced than the AC states. First, the ratio of live male births to live female births is (at least in the industrialized world) 1.05:1.00, although studies report there is a long term falling trend on male births, such that 1:1 appears to be coming.
That said, since many men (most, perhaps?) have a predilection toward fathering either boys or girls, the fact that one of the children is known to be a boy may influence the likelihood away from 50/50. I knew an anecdote is not a statistic, but enough of them can look a lot like a statistic, so here are a few:
-My dad fathered three sons, no daughters.
-I fathered four daughters, no sons.
-My next door neighbors has three sons, no daughters.
-The majority of the kids my daughters go to school with come from families where the siblings are predominantly one gender, and in many of them, the siblings are all of the same gender.
So, while I'm not a mathematician and I may be talking out my arse statistically, it seems to me that knowing one of the children in question is a boy raises the chance that the other is also a boy to some (possibly indeterminable) number well above fifty percent.
I wish I had some mod points to give you, your analysis is spot on.
To the clueless unwashed masses defending the network and jumping on its critics, get real: you all know perfectly well what they meant by it, and if you think "Fuck my dad" is OK, I'm glad I have a better relationship with my father than you have with yours and my kids have a better relationship with me than yours do with you. Sheesh.
I'm going to take a different tack from most responders and ask why, if the IT department is sufficiently concerned about security to require whole-disk encryption on all machines connecting to the network (as a member of the security industry, I applaud their decision), do they allow people to connect their personal machines to the network? Especially in a HIPAA environment, that's nuts. How do they ensure that you retain no confidential data on your personal computer if you quit? In such an environment, no one should be allowed to use personal equipment on the network, but if they are, they should all be required to sign a contract that upon leaving employment (voluntarily or not), they will turn over any personal machines used to connect to the hospital network so that the disk(s) can be removed and destroyed.
That said, if they are going to let you connect your personal gear and you are dead-set on doing it, install whole-disk encryption yourself and bring the machine in for them to inspect it. They'll probably want the passphrase, too.
If they won't budge, then you either stop using your personal machine or you let them install their encryption solution on it. You may not like their decisions (I don't like all of my employer's IT decisions either), but it's the hospital's network, not yours, which means they get to make the rules. If you find this one so onerous that you can't live with it, I recommend seeking work elsewhere before it gets to bug you so much that it harms your job performance. Otherwise, you may wind up seeking work elsewhere anyway, but under less good circumstances.
While I agree that he was in part railroaded because he exposed incompetence (and from the description of his manager in TFA, I think it's clear that his manager was not competent to manage him), I think it's also clear that he broke the law. I have worked as both a sysadmin and neteng in the past, and at every employer at which I had those positions, there was never a system to which I had root access to which my boss was not also entitled to have root, and in fact had it. It was from my boss that both my authority to have root and the root password itself flowed.
At any of those jobs, if I changed the root passwords and refused to tell my boss the new ones - even if I believed he would immediately disclose them to someone who I did not believe to be an authorized user - I would have been liable for (at least) termination. Since you're apparently an admin as well, that's likely true where you work, too. Childs was told by his boss to surrender the admin password and refused to do so. No matter what, his boss was authorized to have that password. Sure, there are some jobs in the world where things are so compartmentalized that people are authorized to access things that their bosses are not, but those jobs typically have those controls clearly spelled out and are also typically at three-letter federal government agencies. Childs' job was not one of those.
Management went wrong on two points, which led to the situation with Childs. First, as mentioned by the juror in TFA, is that his boss was rather, well, weak-willed and pretty much let Childs get away with anything he wanted, for years. That set the stage for this whole thing. Second, they allowed him to build a network on which he was the_only one_ with admin access. WTF is up with that? I've never worked anywhere where such a stupid thing would be allowed to happen. What if Childs had been run over by a bus and incapacitated or killed? They would have been just as inable to admin the network as they were when he refused to hand over the passwords. This specific management failure is an instantiation of management's general failure to set bounds and expectations for Childs. I'm sure there are many other instantiations of that general failure in that workplace.
So yes, in part he was railroaded, but at the end of the day he took, with full knowledge, actions that would reasonably be expected to result in at least termination and probably prosecution. In this case, it resulted in both, and he could have avoided all of this by turning over the passwords to his boss, a person authorized to know them by any reasonable definition thereof.
Well, no, operating vehicles at high speeds is widely available on many public thoroughfares, especially freeways. YMMV (so to speak) depending on where you live, but I see someone driving at 90 on the freeway pretty much every time I'm on it, and at 100 pretty often. How do I know they're going that fast? Because I'm usually going 75-80 and they blow by me like I was standing still.
I wouldn't call 90 reckless, but it's getting close. 100 is crossing the line of reckless in most areas.
My analogy holds, and I'll show you why in terms of yours.
Let's say you have at least one race track in pretty much every city. Larger ones will typically have several. Anyone can take her/his car to the track, pay the entrance fee, and get out there and race. Racing is clearly legal. Then, the government passes a law to make racing illegal for people who own one type of car, but not others. It's not a vehicle safety issue, it's just arbitrary. Maybe it's FWD cars, while RWD and AWD remain race-legal. Or maybe it's Japanese cars that aren't allowed to race. Or Swedish cars. Or red ones. Or white ones. Ones whose model or make name starts with O. Whatever, just some arbitrary class of cars isn't allowed to race.
Are the owners of that class of car likely to stop racing just because they can't go to the track? Speaking as a former street racer, the answer to that is most definitely "No." They will find a place and a way to race. That being the case, you're far better off from a revenue standpoint to let them keep going to the track and paying their entrance fees to race legally. You know that they are most definitely going to race anyway.
Switching back to playing poker online, people are going to play anyway. I can think of one online poker site that sends you your winnings as a check. Nothing on the check identifies at as a check from an online casino, and it's never been a problem to take one to the bank, even though the bank doesn't accept online transfers to or from said online poker site. People will find a way to play online poker anyway, so the government is far better off to keep it legal and taxed, with licensed online poker sites operating in the US. So are the players, since we could have more confidence in a site operated in Vegas than we can in a site operated offshore somewhere, under dubious (if any) oversight.