That's not a bad one, but how about doing something that combines Arduino AND Raspberry Pi? (why? Because the RPi is cheaper than an Ethernet shield for Arduino, and a hell of a lot more capable)
I just built the HeaterMeter v4.0 for Raspberry Pi to control my grill, although with a few small changes in settings you can also hook it up to a solid state relay and use it to do sous vide cooking. It's both cheaper (assuming that you count the time spent building it as recreation) and more capable than the commercial alternatives.
It looks like Ray is pursuing RPi integration for some of the advanced features it brings, like enough computing power to run a proper webserver. He mentions weather-compensating software for the OpenSprinkler, which is actually the only reason I would want to replace my existing sprinkler controller - I don't need a WiFi capable sprinkler system unless it's using the WiFi to turn it off when it's raining, just rained, or is about to rain.
What on earth are you talking about? The argument is, for me, fairly simple: private sector unions ostensibly correct an imbalance in the relative power of workers and owners. In the case of government, there is no such thing - the owners are your fellow citizens, and you are claiming the right to organize against them (and presumably to stop providing government services if you don't get what you want). Not only that, you can vote for politicians who will promise to raise your pay, etc. That situation is dripping with bad incentives.
I would support public sector unionism only if government employees were forbidden to vote. (And because I do part-time work for the state, I'd be one of them.) You don't get to control both sides of the coin.
Any "management" decision affects the workers more than anyone
Well, no, not really. Management decisions affect the owners a lot more than the workers, although there are a lot more of the latter.
Nice to hear some revolutionary socialist sense being talked on slashdot for once.
Let me know how that works out for you. The problem with revolutionary socialist states is that they're incredibly prone to capture by vicious assholes with guns.
The purpose of unions is to correct an imbalance of power between workers and the owners of capital. The owners of the government are their fellow citizens. Government workers don't work for a corporation whose goal is profit, which is then divided among the owners and the workers according to a plan. They also shouldn't get to strike, because by what right can they deprive their fellow citizens of government services? It's blackmail.
I understand that public sector unions are great for the Democratic Party, but I don't know why that should be a reason to let them exist.
We have just invented the greatest tool since Gutenberg for the dissemination of information. An almost incomprehensibly powerful tool for decentralizing problem solving.
And the reason it has worked is that we have not let governments kill it. Regardless of how you may feel about politics in every other area of life, please leave the Internet the fuck out of it. The Internet is the greatest accomplishment of humankind to date IMHO, and has transformed my life in ways I could never have imagined. I'm about the same age as the personal computer - born in the mid 70s - and I never even imagined any of this would be possible even when I was 12 and got my first modem.
Er, governments should not be making contracts with unions. Public employee unions should be illegal. Private sector unions should be in charge of pension funds, though. That way, when the workers get screwed, they don't have anyone to blame but themselves.
No, the union should have seen to it that their pensions were protected. I mean, if they won't do something that basic, what's the point of having a union? Why was the retirement plan in the hands of management ever? The delivery services union has a cross-company pension so that a driver who moves from FedEx to UPS to DHL has retirement savings regardless.
CDMA (though not LTE) phones in the US don't have SIM cards. Look anywhere you like for confirmation. Those that do have SIM cards are almost all carrier-locked.
No, I generally don't, except for the things I can't pay online. But I do occasionally try, just to see.
In practice, I put everything on a card, and all my cards are paid in full automatically. You can benefit from credit cards if you don't do stupid things with them.
though they've always credited within 24 hours, they aren't required to by law or their agreement,
But see, that's the money quote, if you'll pardon the pun. "We will make you whole" and "we will actually be able to get the fact that a check bounced while your account was cleaned out taken off your credit history" are two very different things, and in the meantime they have your money.
Some piece of shit stole one of my checks once. Bought stuff at Wal-Mart, didn't even sign the damned thing so you know there was employee collusion. Well, I reported the theft, and I got my money back, but to this day (over a decade later and with a different checking account) I can't write a check at Sams because of it.
saving their wealth, rather than investing and creating more
So, without savings, exactly where are they supposed to get the capital to be invested? Rich people don't save by stuffing it under mattresses, people.
every successful entrepreneur fails first and often
Actually, no, they don't. A few do. Mostly, successful entrepreneurs are defined by the fact that their companies don't fail. Without belaboring the point, this is the story of most big-name startups.
Some things are irreplaceable without being intrinsically valuable; e.g., I took my laptop on safari in Africa and downloaded all images to it every night. The camera battery, its charger, the camera itself, and laptop were irreplaceable items - they simply could not be purchased outside perhaps Nairobi and were the storage for the photographic record of the trip and thus held irreplaceable images.
Mod to undo inaccurate "redundant" mod. Parent is insightful. Hey, editors, when can I get a fucking "undo" button? It only has to be valid for fifteen seconds.
Had a long post, Chrome at it. Main point: fundamental attribution error. You have met doctors who are learning yet another system (many surgeons especially can practice at three hospitals a day with ease). They are overwhelmingly not happy to be there for the simple reason that it's another workload for them for which they don't get paid. It's probably after hours or Saturday. So you attribute to personality what is probably at least as much a situational problem - being unhappy to spend Saturday morning learning how to benefit someone else and not even being paid for it.
Yes, regular employees change things all the time. So do I. But when you upend their world, you have to pay them their normal salary while you train them on it. If their productivity falls, that's your problem, not theirs - you're not going to try to cut their pay, are you? Doctors, not so. Does it come with the turf? These days, it does. But it doesn't mean anyone is happy about that.
Slashdot Mirror
sample the IC's you need to make the freeduino
I have no idea what this sentence means. Would you mind explaining my ignorance away or pointing me somewhere that does?
That's not a bad one, but how about doing something that combines Arduino AND Raspberry Pi? (why? Because the RPi is cheaper than an Ethernet shield for Arduino, and a hell of a lot more capable)
I just built the HeaterMeter v4.0 for Raspberry Pi to control my grill, although with a few small changes in settings you can also hook it up to a solid state relay and use it to do sous vide cooking. It's both cheaper (assuming that you count the time spent building it as recreation) and more capable than the commercial alternatives.
It looks like Ray is pursuing RPi integration for some of the advanced features it brings, like enough computing power to run a proper webserver. He mentions weather-compensating software for the OpenSprinkler, which is actually the only reason I would want to replace my existing sprinkler controller - I don't need a WiFi capable sprinkler system unless it's using the WiFi to turn it off when it's raining, just rained, or is about to rain.
What on earth are you talking about? The argument is, for me, fairly simple: private sector unions ostensibly correct an imbalance in the relative power of workers and owners. In the case of government, there is no such thing - the owners are your fellow citizens, and you are claiming the right to organize against them (and presumably to stop providing government services if you don't get what you want). Not only that, you can vote for politicians who will promise to raise your pay, etc. That situation is dripping with bad incentives.
I would support public sector unionism only if government employees were forbidden to vote. (And because I do part-time work for the state, I'd be one of them.) You don't get to control both sides of the coin.
Any "management" decision affects the workers more than anyone
Well, no, not really. Management decisions affect the owners a lot more than the workers, although there are a lot more of the latter.
Nice to hear some revolutionary socialist sense being talked on slashdot for once.
Let me know how that works out for you. The problem with revolutionary socialist states is that they're incredibly prone to capture by vicious assholes with guns.
The purpose of unions is to correct an imbalance of power between workers and the owners of capital. The owners of the government are their fellow citizens. Government workers don't work for a corporation whose goal is profit, which is then divided among the owners and the workers according to a plan. They also shouldn't get to strike, because by what right can they deprive their fellow citizens of government services? It's blackmail.
I understand that public sector unions are great for the Democratic Party, but I don't know why that should be a reason to let them exist.
We have just invented the greatest tool since Gutenberg for the dissemination of information. An almost incomprehensibly powerful tool for decentralizing problem solving.
And the reason it has worked is that we have not let governments kill it. Regardless of how you may feel about politics in every other area of life, please leave the Internet the fuck out of it. The Internet is the greatest accomplishment of humankind to date IMHO, and has transformed my life in ways I could never have imagined. I'm about the same age as the personal computer - born in the mid 70s - and I never even imagined any of this would be possible even when I was 12 and got my first modem.
Er, governments should not be making contracts with unions. Public employee unions should be illegal. Private sector unions should be in charge of pension funds, though. That way, when the workers get screwed, they don't have anyone to blame but themselves.
No, the union should have seen to it that their pensions were protected. I mean, if they won't do something that basic, what's the point of having a union? Why was the retirement plan in the hands of management ever? The delivery services union has a cross-company pension so that a driver who moves from FedEx to UPS to DHL has retirement savings regardless.
If they don't have them now, it's only because of greed at the top, not something the union did.
If the union can't even be bothered to take control of its own members' pensions out of the hands of management, it's their fault.
CDMA (though not LTE) phones in the US don't have SIM cards. Look anywhere you like for confirmation. Those that do have SIM cards are almost all carrier-locked.
Not in the US, there aren't. A significant portion of American mobile phones don't even take SIM cards.
No, I generally don't, except for the things I can't pay online. But I do occasionally try, just to see.
In practice, I put everything on a card, and all my cards are paid in full automatically. You can benefit from credit cards if you don't do stupid things with them.
A unionized pilot in USA for one of the big airlines makes $250k to $500k.
They might have in the past, but the average pilot these days makes nothing like that.
though they've always credited within 24 hours, they aren't required to by law or their agreement,
But see, that's the money quote, if you'll pardon the pun. "We will make you whole" and "we will actually be able to get the fact that a check bounced while your account was cleaned out taken off your credit history" are two very different things, and in the meantime they have your money.
Some piece of shit stole one of my checks once. Bought stuff at Wal-Mart, didn't even sign the damned thing so you know there was employee collusion. Well, I reported the theft, and I got my money back, but to this day (over a decade later and with a different checking account) I can't write a check at Sams because of it.
Asshole. Some of us have things to do other than wait in line.
How much of the VISA fees built into existing prices do you think you actually receive in rewards compensation?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest the answer is probably "more than you do".
saving their wealth, rather than investing and creating more
So, without savings, exactly where are they supposed to get the capital to be invested? Rich people don't save by stuffing it under mattresses, people.
neocon cheerleaders
The guy who wrote The End of History is a neocon cheerleader in your book? Jesus, you need to get out more.
every successful entrepreneur fails first and often
Actually, no, they don't. A few do. Mostly, successful entrepreneurs are defined by the fact that their companies don't fail. Without belaboring the point, this is the story of most big-name startups.
I shoot targets on weekends and the idea of killing a person is appalling to me.
Then you should look into renting a storage unit at the range - centralized security and no risk of having it in your house.
Some things are irreplaceable without being intrinsically valuable; e.g., I took my laptop on safari in Africa and downloaded all images to it every night. The camera battery, its charger, the camera itself, and laptop were irreplaceable items - they simply could not be purchased outside perhaps Nairobi and were the storage for the photographic record of the trip and thus held irreplaceable images.
When you make vice a crime, crime becomes merely a vice.
DNA is a retrovirus. It inserts itself into host DNA. You could eliminate every virus particle from a human and they would not be cured.
Mod to undo inaccurate "redundant" mod. Parent is insightful. Hey, editors, when can I get a fucking "undo" button? It only has to be valid for fifteen seconds.
Had a long post, Chrome at it. Main point: fundamental attribution error. You have met doctors who are learning yet another system (many surgeons especially can practice at three hospitals a day with ease). They are overwhelmingly not happy to be there for the simple reason that it's another workload for them for which they don't get paid. It's probably after hours or Saturday. So you attribute to personality what is probably at least as much a situational problem - being unhappy to spend Saturday morning learning how to benefit someone else and not even being paid for it.
Yes, regular employees change things all the time. So do I. But when you upend their world, you have to pay them their normal salary while you train them on it. If their productivity falls, that's your problem, not theirs - you're not going to try to cut their pay, are you? Doctors, not so. Does it come with the turf? These days, it does. But it doesn't mean anyone is happy about that.