Fry: "Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus." *laughs* Leela: "I don't get it." Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all." Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?" Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you." Fry: "Hehe, no, no, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here."
I don't know about you, but Slashdot comment pages are slooow for me to load under Firefox 3.6. The initial story block loads quick, the sidebars fill in, and then there's the painful wait for the rest of the page to pop. Large comment sections can take long enough that I get bored and try flipping to another tab -- which doesn't work under Firefox and gives the "app is busy" cursor and shades the window as "not updating".
The latest Chrome: much faster. Zip, zip, done. 600 Comment article gives the busy-cursor for 3 seconds. And during those three seconds I can change tabs. FF 3.6? 8 seconds and the whole window goes to sleep. Same goes for opening a "Reply" section here.
That being said, I don't like Chrome for other reasons and probably won't use it. But it's nice to have something to aim for.
Absolutely, or even better, how about an inter-governmental panel that brings the foremost scientists and mathematicians from around the world into one giant committee of the world's best and brightest. And then how about we repeat it three or four times to make sure they come up with the same answers each time?
And how about we put on that panel those who are open minded and tolerant of dissenting opinions? Or a panel that doesn't claim "consensus" or "unanimity" when all they really have is a majority?
Absolutely 'NOT-AGW' is on the table too. And we should do nothing drastic one way or the other until we've proven that the current climate change cycle is a harmful trend and caused by human activity. (As opposed to ocean salinity changes, solar activity, natural plant/animal cycles, orbital changes, volcanoes under Antarctica, Cthulhu, whatever...) Applying the right fix to the wrong problem can cause more harm than good.
One fix to this would be for USPS to stop SHOVING my mailbox FULL with advertisements that they get paid to distribute, but I never once requested or signed up for!!!
The USPS doesn't know that you've [not] signed up for GameFly either, that your account is current and that the correct game is in the envelope. The mail is packaged correctly, adheres to postal rules, addressed to you, it has proper postage, so it gets delivered to you. The USPS should be neutral about the suitability of the material being delivered.
(It's like Net Neutrality, except that the spam is legitimately *paid for*.)
Even more extraordinary evidence is required when we're supposed to 1. do something about it and 2. when doing something about it could completely re-jigger how the world works. This shouldn't be overseen by a PhD in Statistics, but a Presidential Blue Ribbon Special Select Committee of PhD's in Statistics. And every other field involved too.
And all of this should have been done before mouthing off about causes and screaming for policy changes.
As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up. Not quite. While your salary might beat out the rate of inflation, other things need to be considered.
It's not just inflation, but consider taxes too.
Your taxes will go up as your pay increases -- and it's not a linear increase either for US workers. The tax rate itself increases. Some deductions just go away as your income increases (EIC). Some deductions are deductible as long as they exceed a percentage of your AGI (uncovered medical expenses, 7.5%). Other credits and allowances are simply capped.
Example: W2 earner, buying your house (2x annual income at 5%), are married, have 1 kid, and squirrel some money into a 401(k). The sweet spot right now seems to be about $60k. Below that, you pay almost no federal income taxes at all -- or shouldn't if you're doing it right. After about $75k, you've lost most of your "middle class" (mid/low income) deductions and start paying taxes for real on everything. At $100k there's very little you can do to keep money from the IRS and you'll have to pay your fair share -- and everyone else's too. There's no relief for a while after that.*
A $10k increase at $50k will represent most of a 20% increase in net (discounting state & local). A $20k increase at $100k won't net you nearly 20% at the end of the day -- not even close.
* At $106,800 there's a Social Security cap, but that's not Federal income taxes, strictly.
Pay the drivers on a per-delivery basis, allowing for things like distance driven and amount or weight of cargo to be variables that determine this rate. Then the drivers can decide how they wish to use that 20 minutes. If a driver can make 11 deliveries in X time, then he gets paid about 28% more than a driver who makes 8 deliveries in X time.
With that you get drivers rushing through their deliveries or trying to squeeze in an extra one or two runs per day. That's great and all and everyone wins, right? Until a driver that's taking drugs for alertness has a heart attack or one that doesn't falls asleep at the wheel. Cargo gets manhandled, customers get lousy service from cranky and rushed drivers, and the equipment takes a lot of abuse. The DEA starts sniffing around the employee lockers and trucks, insurance companies, workman's comp. adjusters, and lawsuit happy attorneys circle nearby.
The other suggestions (the LED one) I'm in favor of. Let the customer know he's (possibly) being cheated, and they can work it out from there.
So at low pressure the Apollo I fire scenario really isn't a problem. But having a high O2 environment whose failure mode is a sudden increase in pressure doesn't sound safe at all.
Anyone old enough to remember Osborne Computers? This is similar to the business model they used. And this is why only the old timers will remember them, and as a cautionary tale.
Tesla Motors is doomed to be just a $1600 question in Double Jeopardy.
Treat PayPal like the liquor store down the street that sells money orders and does Western Union wires. Sometimes they're a necessary evil to get money from point A to B. But you sure as hell don't keep your retirement money and the cash assets of your business in the store's cash register.
Perhaps what we should suggest is starting off with a nice long "advanced notice" period with a vendor, 2 or 3 months. Each time they fail to act within that window, you decrease it slightly for the next bug you report. With time, this might stabilize on a reliable period for that vendor. Of course, this only works if you have a long-term business relationship with that vendor. In many cases, people are likely to give up long before the asymptote is reached.
This requires an awful lot of patience and a fair degree of bookkeeping on the part of the submitter. And you're assuming that the organization on the other end of the bug report is actually learning from past mistakes in a cause-and-effect kind of way. "Hey! His report-to-release times are getting shorter! Maybe we should adjust!" In an organization of any size, this will be unnoticed even when pointed out plainly.
The more I think about it, the more receptive I get to this fellow's approach. Maybe after a while of "irresponsible disclosure" vendors will pay attention and he can fall back to giving advance notice.
Windows Developers need Local Admin access to the machine they write code on, debug, and run their local unit tests.
When "code goes wrong" not having admin privileges means that some debugging tools are right out. File and Process monitors, network sniffers, and some of the Visual Studio debugging features just don't work without some elevation. This situation gets worse under Vista and Windows 7 (which is actually a good thing for Windows).
I've had this fight at a few jobs and this is a deal-breaker. Give me Local Admin rights, look the other way while I subvert your system, or accept my resignation.
Test machines, servers, etc.. no, never. It's not necessary and (in the long run) subverts sane release procedures.
It's a week late, but I'd like to chime in on this. You're absolutely right. I spent the late 90's putting SGI workstations on the desktops of engineers for drafting and fluid analysis. Hot shit, really. But SGI relied way too heavily on their outstanding graphics hardware and completely missed the fact that... hardware vendors always lose eventually.
In the early 90's I worked for one of many minicomputer companies that were trying to sell terribly expensive hardware and give away the software for practically nothing. Eventually they all learned that the hardware really was just a commodity and it was the software that was the valuable bits. You can't turn the marketing around once the customer figures that out. 1989 hardware = $100k, software = free. 1992 Hardware = $10k, software = $100k. Doesn't work.
In the late 1980's I got to watch the PC market go through the same death throes. Any fool can build slightly outdated hardware for pennies on the dollar.
Detroit resident here, and a former resident of Flint, MI. We've got soot like you wouldn't believe. We've also got a good amount of snow.
The soot-covered snow melts more quickly.
If you don't believe me, you're welcome to stop by and tromp through our fields of snow and see for yourself. (It's not exactly the tourist destination everyone wants, but it's empirical science!) If you're afraid of Detroit and Flint, stop by Windsor or Sarnia Ontario. They're downwind of the remaining factories and should do just fine. Build some snowmen: the dirty snowman always melts first.
You may be mistaking the large piles of dirty snow next to the parking lots and roads as "soot-covered snow". That's dirt and asphalt bits mashed together in a giant ice ball. It appears to get dirtier as it melts, and seems to last until June. This is because eventually the mostly melted snow is completely covered in a thick protective layer of dirt, plastic bags, water bottles, shopping carts, car parts, and the occasional Teamsters boss.
If you manage to make a large pile of clean snow, get it tromped on by several kids for hours to pack it tight you'd see the difference. Those clean* snow piles take forever to melt if left alone.
* Yes, even clean snow usually has dust it it to provide a nucleation point for the flakes. Large trampled snow piles will also eventually contain lost gloves, sleds and the inexplicable (but inevitable) single left boot. Beware of the yellow snow.
With a DVR, I hadn't actually seen the ad in question until I read about the lawsuit. The next time I was flipping through commercials, I made it a point to stop at the Island of Misfit Toys ad to see what the hubbub was about. Good ad.*:)
The Streisand Effect is alive and well here. You're doing a heckuva job there, AT&T.
*I am currently a Verizon customer, but am equally biased against all telcos. They can all DIAF.
Electric clothes dryers sold in the US routinely come without a power cord. Usually the receptacle is a NEMA 14-30R or a 10-30R for either 3 or 4 wires.
Typically you have to buy the cord separately and attach it to the rear of the dryer during installation.
Thanks. "purveyor" captures what I wanted to say, but with a much better word. Other words that came to mind "pusher" (drugs) or "barker" (pitch-man)...
Slashdot Mirror
Shuttle makes it to LEO just fine, there's no "barely" about it.
Except for the blowing up, delayed launches, more delays, cancellations & un-cancellations, etc...
ObFuturama:
Fry: "Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus." *laughs*
Leela: "I don't get it."
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you."
Fry: "Hehe, no, no, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here."
I don't know about you, but Slashdot comment pages are slooow for me to load under Firefox 3.6. The initial story block loads quick, the sidebars fill in, and then there's the painful wait for the rest of the page to pop. Large comment sections can take long enough that I get bored and try flipping to another tab -- which doesn't work under Firefox and gives the "app is busy" cursor and shades the window as "not updating".
The latest Chrome: much faster. Zip, zip, done. 600 Comment article gives the busy-cursor for 3 seconds. And during those three seconds I can change tabs. FF 3.6? 8 seconds and the whole window goes to sleep. Same goes for opening a "Reply" section here.
That being said, I don't like Chrome for other reasons and probably won't use it. But it's nice to have something to aim for.
Absolutely, or even better, how about an inter-governmental panel that brings the foremost scientists and mathematicians from around the world into one giant committee of the world's best and brightest. And then how about we repeat it three or four times to make sure they come up with the same answers each time?
Oh wait, that sounds somewhat familiar....
And how about we put on that panel those who are open minded and tolerant of dissenting opinions? Or a panel that doesn't claim "consensus" or "unanimity" when all they really have is a majority?
Absolutely 'NOT-AGW' is on the table too. And we should do nothing drastic one way or the other until we've proven that the current climate change cycle is a harmful trend and caused by human activity. (As opposed to ocean salinity changes, solar activity, natural plant/animal cycles, orbital changes, volcanoes under Antarctica, Cthulhu, whatever...) Applying the right fix to the wrong problem can cause more harm than good.
Your argument is premature at this time.
One fix to this would be for USPS to stop SHOVING my mailbox FULL with advertisements that they get paid to distribute, but I never once requested or signed up for!!!
The USPS doesn't know that you've [not] signed up for GameFly either, that your account is current and that the correct game is in the envelope. The mail is packaged correctly, adheres to postal rules, addressed to you, it has proper postage, so it gets delivered to you. The USPS should be neutral about the suitability of the material being delivered.
(It's like Net Neutrality, except that the spam is legitimately *paid for*.)
Wish I had mod points. +1 for hitting it right on the head.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Even more extraordinary evidence is required when we're supposed to 1. do something about it and 2. when doing something about it could completely re-jigger how the world works. This shouldn't be overseen by a PhD in Statistics, but a Presidential Blue Ribbon Special Select Committee of PhD's in Statistics. And every other field involved too.
And all of this should have been done before mouthing off about causes and screaming for policy changes.
As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up. Not quite. While your salary might beat out the rate of inflation, other things need to be considered.
It's not just inflation, but consider taxes too.
Your taxes will go up as your pay increases -- and it's not a linear increase either for US workers. The tax rate itself increases. Some deductions just go away as your income increases (EIC). Some deductions are deductible as long as they exceed a percentage of your AGI (uncovered medical expenses, 7.5%). Other credits and allowances are simply capped.
Example: W2 earner, buying your house (2x annual income at 5%), are married, have 1 kid, and squirrel some money into a 401(k). The sweet spot right now seems to be about $60k. Below that, you pay almost no federal income taxes at all -- or shouldn't if you're doing it right. After about $75k, you've lost most of your "middle class" (mid/low income) deductions and start paying taxes for real on everything. At $100k there's very little you can do to keep money from the IRS and you'll have to pay your fair share -- and everyone else's too. There's no relief for a while after that.*
A $10k increase at $50k will represent most of a 20% increase in net (discounting state & local). A $20k increase at $100k won't net you nearly 20% at the end of the day -- not even close.
* At $106,800 there's a Social Security cap, but that's not Federal income taxes, strictly.
Pay the drivers on a per-delivery basis, allowing for things like distance driven and amount or weight of cargo to be variables that determine this rate. Then the drivers can decide how they wish to use that 20 minutes. If a driver can make 11 deliveries in X time, then he gets paid about 28% more than a driver who makes 8 deliveries in X time.
With that you get drivers rushing through their deliveries or trying to squeeze in an extra one or two runs per day. That's great and all and everyone wins, right? Until a driver that's taking drugs for alertness has a heart attack or one that doesn't falls asleep at the wheel. Cargo gets manhandled, customers get lousy service from cranky and rushed drivers, and the equipment takes a lot of abuse. The DEA starts sniffing around the employee lockers and trucks, insurance companies, workman's comp. adjusters, and lawsuit happy attorneys circle nearby.
The other suggestions (the LED one) I'm in favor of. Let the customer know he's (possibly) being cheated, and they can work it out from there.
So at low pressure the Apollo I fire scenario really isn't a problem. But having a high O2 environment whose failure mode is a sudden increase in pressure doesn't sound safe at all.
obJoke, and clarification:
Luck is finding a needle in a haystack.
Serendipity is finding the farmer's daughter.
White boards are slightly more effective than chalk boards; they're a technological improvement.
Yes they are. Chalk dust would give you allergies, while marker fumes will get you high. Vast improvement.
Only if you buy the ones that give off fumes in any quantity. Odorless whiteboard markers are available these days.
ObRalphWiggum:
I'm a unitard!
I'm Idaho!
I'm a viking!
I'm special!
This won't end well.
Anyone old enough to remember Osborne Computers? This is similar to the business model they used. And this is why only the old timers will remember them, and as a cautionary tale.
Tesla Motors is doomed to be just a $1600 question in Double Jeopardy.
Too bad it's +5, this should be +6 Insightful.
Treat PayPal like the liquor store down the street that sells money orders and does Western Union wires. Sometimes they're a necessary evil to get money from point A to B. But you sure as hell don't keep your retirement money and the cash assets of your business in the store's cash register.
And more importantly, whether Rule 34 applies to computer-targeted porn.
This requires an awful lot of patience and a fair degree of bookkeeping on the part of the submitter. And you're assuming that the organization on the other end of the bug report is actually learning from past mistakes in a cause-and-effect kind of way. "Hey! His report-to-release times are getting shorter! Maybe we should adjust!" In an organization of any size, this will be unnoticed even when pointed out plainly.
The more I think about it, the more receptive I get to this fellow's approach. Maybe after a while of "irresponsible disclosure" vendors will pay attention and he can fall back to giving advance notice.
Windows Developers need Local Admin access to the machine they write code on, debug, and run their local unit tests.
When "code goes wrong" not having admin privileges means that some debugging tools are right out. File and Process monitors, network sniffers, and some of the Visual Studio debugging features just don't work without some elevation. This situation gets worse under Vista and Windows 7 (which is actually a good thing for Windows).
I've had this fight at a few jobs and this is a deal-breaker. Give me Local Admin rights, look the other way while I subvert your system, or accept my resignation.
Test machines, servers, etc.. no, never. It's not necessary and (in the long run) subverts sane release procedures.
It's a week late, but I'd like to chime in on this. You're absolutely right. I spent the late 90's putting SGI workstations on the desktops of engineers for drafting and fluid analysis. Hot shit, really. But SGI relied way too heavily on their outstanding graphics hardware and completely missed the fact that... hardware vendors always lose eventually.
In the early 90's I worked for one of many minicomputer companies that were trying to sell terribly expensive hardware and give away the software for practically nothing. Eventually they all learned that the hardware really was just a commodity and it was the software that was the valuable bits. You can't turn the marketing around once the customer figures that out. 1989 hardware = $100k, software = free. 1992 Hardware = $10k, software = $100k. Doesn't work.
In the late 1980's I got to watch the PC market go through the same death throes. Any fool can build slightly outdated hardware for pennies on the dollar.
Detroit resident here, and a former resident of Flint, MI. We've got soot like you wouldn't believe. We've also got a good amount of snow.
The soot-covered snow melts more quickly.
If you don't believe me, you're welcome to stop by and tromp through our fields of snow and see for yourself. (It's not exactly the tourist destination everyone wants, but it's empirical science!) If you're afraid of Detroit and Flint, stop by Windsor or Sarnia Ontario. They're downwind of the remaining factories and should do just fine. Build some snowmen: the dirty snowman always melts first.
You may be mistaking the large piles of dirty snow next to the parking lots and roads as "soot-covered snow". That's dirt and asphalt bits mashed together in a giant ice ball. It appears to get dirtier as it melts, and seems to last until June. This is because eventually the mostly melted snow is completely covered in a thick protective layer of dirt, plastic bags, water bottles, shopping carts, car parts, and the occasional Teamsters boss.
If you manage to make a large pile of clean snow, get it tromped on by several kids for hours to pack it tight you'd see the difference. Those clean* snow piles take forever to melt if left alone.
* Yes, even clean snow usually has dust it it to provide a nucleation point for the flakes. Large trampled snow piles will also eventually contain lost gloves, sleds and the inexplicable (but inevitable) single left boot. Beware of the yellow snow.
It doesn't scale either.
With a DVR, I hadn't actually seen the ad in question until I read about the lawsuit. The next time I was flipping through commercials, I made it a point to stop at the Island of Misfit Toys ad to see what the hubbub was about. Good ad.* :)
The Streisand Effect is alive and well here. You're doing a heckuva job there, AT&T.
*I am currently a Verizon customer, but am equally biased against all telcos. They can all DIAF.
This is patently untrue.
Electric clothes dryers sold in the US routinely come without a power cord. Usually the receptacle is a NEMA 14-30R or a 10-30R for either 3 or 4 wires.
Typically you have to buy the cord separately and attach it to the rear of the dryer during installation.
Get a haircut, hippie. And get off my lawn.
Damned kids these days with their nostalgia...
Thanks. "purveyor" captures what I wanted to say, but with a much better word. Other words that came to mind "pusher" (drugs) or "barker" (pitch-man)...
Goats and Coward need to lighten up a bit...