The one that really has become a pet peeve as of late is asking to see my ID when I have a signed card. Now I don't have a reference link handy, but somewhere I've read that the merchant's agreement with the CC company actually forbids them from asking for ID if a signed card is presented. I consider this a good thing, because frankly, I don't trust that cute checkout girl at the grocery store, and I don't want to have to show her my ID.
Why, because she's going to memorize your driver's license number, address, birthdate, issue date and expiry date and create a fake ID from memory when she gets home? What's more likely, scenario #1 above or scenario #2 where somebody gets hold of forged credit card data (perhaps your own), makes a few fake cards and sells them for $100 apiece and you get stuck with the tab?
I now know who cares and who doesn't. I got a letter back within about a week from Jim Matheson, our Representative, who seemed very adamant about how wrong this proposed legislation is.
I have an experiment for those of you who contact your Congress Critters (or Members of (Provincial) Parliament up here north of the 49th); write one letter from yourself advocating your true stance on the issue (No Rate Hikes!) and another letter from a friend, neighbor, fictional character, whatever advocating the exact opposite. You'll have to use a real address to which you have access of course, and compare the responses.
The cynic in me believes you'll get two very different letters indeed.:P
Stop buying new CDs or MP3s is the first thing you can do.
... thereby proving their assertion that digital music / piracy is "bad" for their industry and inserting another nail in the coffin of digital rights. (The real kind, not the software enforced things that inhibit duplication of data.)
Anyone care to describe/transcribe this for those of us who can't render video?
Can't render video? As in your computer can't? I find it hard to believe that anybody in the targeted region of the world has a computer that can't render video. Is it a technical limitation or one of choice, I wonder?
...Japanese companies face little of this burden in Japan, where the government covers retirees' health care and pays a bigger share of workers' pensions.
{shaking head} This is all well and good, except that most of Toyota's North American product is produced in Cambridge, ON, the NUMA plant in California and their Texas manufacturing facilities. They're expecting to have 100% "Toyota" production for North America IN North America by about 2010.
The domestic problems are more systemic than health care costs. Union strife, inefficient plants, plant sprawl, poor designs, overburdened support (warranty) costs due to poor initial quality, etc. Much of the domestic product is also produced in foreign countries (Mexico, South Africa, South Korea) which, again, provides extremely cheap labour, virtually no health care overhead and massive tax benefits in the hosting third world nations.
It goes deeper even into the smaller details. Toyota actively encourages a healthier lifestyle for their workers, requiring the Cambridge employees to maintain a membership (free, BTW) for themselves and their family, to the on-site health club. They provide healthy, balanced meals in the cafeteria. Domestic plants, by contrast, offer the likes of pizza, fried foods, etc. in their cafeterias and the exersize plans include the long walk to the bar across the road for beer and wings on lunch break.
Because domestic workers, by and large, do one thing and one thing only (weld door seams, install windshields, etc.) for years on end, and because of the environment in which they work, they have no real pride of ownership in their product. In a Japanese run plant, after a certain number of years each and every employee can claim to have built an entire car - every single component assembled. They work in teams, they get a regular change of scenery so there's less doldrum, less stress, and better productivity.
Domestic workers are chastised for stopping the production line. Their profitability is measured in dollars/minute of line time. Japanese product workers are encouraged to stop the line if they spot a defect. As I said; pride of ownership.
Domestic workers have "pride" in domestic products under a union and propaganda inspired sense of self preservation, but it's a false notion. I live near, and for several years lived and worked in a plant town and saw the Good 'Ol Boys driving around with their "Buy Domestic - Save Our Jobs" plate frames on their vehicles. Many (most) of which were built in third world countries for dollars a day!
Except that he figured his car to be totaled for sure a friend of mine was considering buying one and installing it on the plate of his Corolla. 100% assembled by Ontario born and bred workers in Cambridge!
Actually, the license is to avoid patent disputes. Ford uses their own tech. Think of it as avoiding 1-Click lawsuits. GM in the meantime only currently offers partial hybrids, and Chrysler has nothing.
Partial points, but not quite accurate. Ford developed a hybrid system that was totally inefficient, so they scrapped it. They re-designed their system and found that, hey, this is almost identical to Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive. They licensed the technology from Toyota, tweaked their own production lines, and blam-o, we have a Hybrid Ford. Bring an Escape Hybrid to a Toyota dealership and they'll be perfectly suited to maintain it, save for the use the Ford's Duratec gasoline engine and other mechanical parts.
Hmm...well, hopefully by then, they will have designed them to be less butt ugly and more pleasing to the eye. Also, maybe they'll come out with some with better performance numbers.
Uhm, you can get the Camry and the Highlander in Hybrid models today and they're both very respectable looking vehicles. Also, Ford's Escape Hybrid looks identical (save a badge on the rear liftgate) to the gasoline variant and it's not a half bad looking vehicle (in its old and new designs).
Just because the Prius looks like the hardon from a sci-fi spaceship doesn't mean all hybrids are fugly.
Plus, I'm sure they'll always be used for specialty cars (eg, race cars)
NASCAR and the like (any stock car racing) still use the 'ol stick and clutch, probably because it's the Good 'Ol way of doing it. (Paddles are for pansies and the like.) However Formula 1 race cars have adopted electronic sequential manual transmissions. These require no clutch and can, in fact, shift gears faster than any human can be expected to clutch/shift/release. The current Mitsubishi Outlander (XLS) and Lancer (GTS) use this system with paddles and let me tell you, you can drop from 6th to 2nd just as fast as you can make your fingers move. I've tried; I can't outrun it. I've also tried speed shifting in my 2006 Ralliart and no matter how much coffee I've had I can't shift faster than those paddles.
In a couple years when the new Ralliart and/or GSX models hit the market I'll probably drop my stick obsession and go with paddles. The up side is that when I'm stuck in traffic I can put it in 'D'. When a fanboy in {insert souped-up all-show, no-go car here} tries to run me I'll just tap a paddle and show him my tail lights.:P
And how many bartenders do you know that DON'T smoke? I would say that the VAST MAJORITY of bartenders are smokers (and, of course, drinkers). This argument is totally and completely baseless. Don't like the smoke? Go work for a non-smoking bar. Want to smoke, go to work for a smoking bar. It's not hard.
Nope. In the Durham Region there are a lot of smokers who used to be bartenders. See, after the smoking ban hit several dozen bars were forced to close their doors increasing unemployment figures by several hundred people.
Even to this day there's always a demand for a spot outside the door to the local watering holes to get a spot to stand and smoke, patios that allow smoking are jam packed when weather permits, and bars in general are comatose compared to pre-ban days. When I can walk freely and converse at normal volume in a busy bar on a Friday night there's something wrong.
I'm still waiting for all the non-smokers and their families to start flooding into the bars; especially late at night. Funny thing is children were never allowed into bars past a certain time of night anyways - so why did we need to think of the children in this instance?
The worst part of the ban was the banning of smoking in private clubs. Clubs where the members voted amongst themselves and came to a consensus that yes, they would permit smoking within their facilities. Clubs, I might add, where members must pay annual fees to remain a member! Now, if they objected so greatly to smoking they could always "leave the bar" - but the fact that these people pay for the privilege of being members of an organization where smoking is allowed? Hell-ooo!
Just goes to show you that the vocal minority rule the land.
How do you know the submitter is not a competitor or otherwise has malicious intent? Let the law handle it, don't do the same thing you're accusing them of doing. What's the difference between you? Intention means nothing when the actions are the same.
Easy solution; phone the business (block your phone number first; *67 works here in Ontario, Canada), tell them you received an interesting fax about their business and gauge their reaction to it. If it's a positive "Oh, great, we were hoping that would work!" kind of reaction, feel free to publish their info on a "These People Are Scum Peddlers" website. If it's a "Oh, sorry about that, I don't know how it got there" kind of reaction you know where you stand.
We had junk faxes to the amount that it represented 90% of what it was used for. Then we got rid of it. If they can't email it, mail it, or call us. Then we don't want their business.
Every car dealership relies on the fax machine to expedite funding of deals. Sure, you can courier the documents to their funding centre but that delays funding by as much as 24 hours and costs a lot more than dropping them into the fax machine. When each deal requires upwards of 15-20 pages, averaging 5 deals delivered per business day that's a lot of paper to scan, save and e-mail. In the end it's a lot easier to drop them into the top tray, hit the appropriate speed dial button and press "Go".
When you're getting anywhere between $50-500k per day with your fax machine, you tend to pay for the upkeep and put up with the junk faxes.
Why should people who don't have kids be expected to work extra hard to cover for the pampering of people who do have kids?
While I disagree that people with kids shouldn't be on a different schedule (kids need parental attention) - why is the focus on the women (particularly in this article)? I said it not 10 minutes ago and I'll say it again; men have children too. Married men are 50% of the equation. Single men with custody are 100% of the equation.
What about compensating people on weird shifts and/or being on call in some way? More money, better office, more perks, more vacation time, access to the CEO's bathroom; whatever. Give them flex time through the week to compensate for being glued to a pager and worrying all the night before. If somebody doesn't want to take their turn and play fair, they get to pee in the dingy johns downstairs.
Men are as free to leave as anyone else. Women are just doing it more.
Yes, but men have children too. Is that the scapegoat?
I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
Here's an idea; let's make a new set of rules. You get hired based on your experience, qualifications, knowledge, education, and willingness to come to an accord as to the working conditions and requirements. Period. Forget the pigmentation of your skin, the tone of your accent, or the makeup of your chromosomes. If you're not cut out for the job - leave.
Is this still news? Better still - why is this still news?!?
Occationally they let extra bright kids skip ahead one grade or hold back a student that performed poorly, but both are very rare.
Here in Ontario, Canada elementary schools aren't permitted to hold students back without parental consent. Even if students fail literally every area of their studies they can be pushed through the system, becoming more and more difficult as they enter higher grades until they enter high school illiterate. There are actually students who enter high school on time only because they're such a handful it becomes an accepted norm for their elementary teachers to push them forward almost like a countdown until they're "someone else's problem".
Heck, I entered high school completely unable to comprehend French (a requirement from Gr. 3 through 9 in Ontario) and so was given a bye for my high school French credit. The time my school realized I wasn't going to fare well in my French course was the day I walked in 5 minutes late, my teacher said something that ended in "retard" and I said "What the %$*@ did you call me?" I do recall that was the last time I set foot in that classroom.:)
Don't get me started on the worthless "grading" in college these days.
Now that you've said it I have to bring it up; one of my college courses had a first term paper required that was expected to be 30 pages. We had 3 months to complete the project. Enough complaints were raised to the facilitator of the program that those who handed in 3 pages of double spaced text interspersed with large pictures were given grades equivalent to those of us who handed in 26+ pages in a bound cover with only enough graphics to further illustrate a point and were disappointed in ourselves for not meeting the challenge. Not surprisingly many of the students in this course were there because their parents were paying their way (rather than combinations of student loans and employment income to pay one's own way) and would often quip that this was the perfect class to sleep through and/or head to the student centre for beer.
What did that teach the students? If you whine enough about workload somebody else will do the work for you and you still get credit.
What did it teach me? To ensure that the higher ups are always kept in the loop about who's performing and who's slacking off / leeching credit so compensation can be doled out accordingly. It's underhanded, dirty and sneaky as hell but sitting silent and working through my day has cost me promotions, contract extensions and pay raises in the past and I've vowed not to let the lazy but ass-kissingly gifted succeed on the sweat off my back.
Sure. I can imagine situations where it would be useful too -- especially if you're backpacking your gear -- but most of the time Toughbook users are wasting their money.
Most of the time? The police, military, fire departments, field technicians and others who work in extreme environments are "wasting their money"? If they brought a traditional laptop to many places they need them on a day to day basis they wouldn't last more than a week. How practical is it to purchase 4 laptops per month when a single $3500 unit would last for years?
And it can be very easy to swap out hard drives if they're pcmcia. Psssst; part of the strength of the toughbook is the ruggedness of the hard drive enclosure.
Don't fix it if it ain't broke: up 292 days, 22:26 The reason for the short uptime, is PSU upgrades...
My Gentoo system was up 309 days before I realized that the PSU fan had stopped turning and the motherboard overheated and blew 6 capacitors which is why the clock got so far out of sync (the computer thought it was April when I rebooted it back in November) which explains the graph weirdness.
Prior to that I had an uptime well over 200 days ruined by a blackout that outlasted my UPS.
I perform updates here and there on my server periodically and perform a full-scale "bleeding edge" upgrade whenever I'm forced to reboot the machine.
I have been with Telus for a long time and I'll tell you that their phone suck (they don't allow using phones with removable SIM cards, the coverage sucks (well for me it is always bad, I live in Toronto,) the prices are high, there is no reasonable way to use Telus while traveling in Europe.
I can't argue about using the phones in Europe, but you're in the same boat with Bell there; they both use CDMA. Moving right along; I live in the GTA myself (east of the city in Durham) and work in both Scarborough and downtown. I've travelled all over the area for work (Oakville, Burlington, London, Kitchener/Waterloo, etc.) and never had a coverage problem.
As for their phones, I'm on my third one and I love it. I've been with them for 4 years, signed 3 year contracts twice and been able to upgrade my phone at the discounted price, break my contract and sign a new one for bonus air time and all other associated benefeits without penalty after two years each time. This time my plan got significantly better (earlier evening time, same daytime minutes, more features, much lower price).
Yeah, the SIM card thing is an annoyance, but hey I've lived with it thus far. It's only a pain when I upgrade phones which only happens every 2 years so it's not a big deal for me.
As for the billing someone else mentioned I have no problem with those either. I signed up for e-billing so I have the past 2 years worth of ebills in my home directory. No more stacks of paper. Their customer service reps are awesome. Any time I've had an issue they resolved it promptly, without question and most important of all they resolved it properly.
When I was with Rogers and Bell, well, they're next to impossible to get issues resolved, they're fanatacal about billing (threatening to cancel my service and charge ludicrous investigation and re-connection fees basically the week after my payment is due), Bell actually re-directed my entire service to their billing department because they can't understand how credit works (if I owe 3 months and I pay for 2, I pay for the oldest month 1 and 2 - NOT 2 and 3). I couldn't believe it when I called 911 and found myself talking to a billing rep. I told her I was upset, but that I'd talk about the issue if she'd kindly phone for a fire truck to my location. She told me matter of factly that she wouldn't do that.
Until I find a really, REALLY good reason to do so I won't be leaving Telus any time soon thanks.
The safeguards in place to keep bill prices low aren't enough as it is (phone companies have cheated enough parents of their money when their children are irresponsible with overage charges).
Here's a novel idea for those parents; take the cell phone away from the child(ren) and make them work to pay off the bill.
As an added bonus, the spoiled brats might gain a sense of responsibility and perhaps a bit of work ethic out of the deal. Then they might appreciate why 1000 primetime minutes is a big deal.
Oh, sorry, I forgot it was up to network television, telephone companies and other multi-national corporations to raise your children. Carry on.
I suggest we spam these stupid people with messages urging them not to buy things from spam messages, or else someone's gonna hunt them down and kill their pets and/or livestock.
Then you get into the old "which do you believe" argument. If a television show tells you that extensive television viewing is bad for you you'll find yourself in a serious connundrum.:)
Same thing for the assholes who drive whilst on the phone.
Bad drivers are bad drivers, period. The cell phone is just the latest excuse. There's putting on one's make-up, eating and/or drinking, smoking, talking to friends, changing radio/CD, etc. They're all scapegoats for people who are bad drivers and aren't able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Don't penalize the phone; penalize the driver.
When I started working at a local high school administering their network I found an amalgamation of two networks. One running primarily thinnet (10Base2) through the classrooms uplinked to 10BaseT hubs (three 16 port stackables) which were each connected to a 10BaseT switch ("the core"). The server ran Novell, the PCs ran a combination of DOS and Windows 3.11 which... worked.
Now the new network installed right beside it consisted of a mighty IBM NetFinity 5500 server with a RAID 5 array of about 50GB and a plethora of IBM switching equipment. The core switch wasn't high-tech or anything, but atleast it had 100MBit fibre running to the IDFs which ran switched 10BaseTX to the workstations. Now, this was all fine and dandy and wired real pretty-like by people who had no comprehension that the labs running PII-400s would most likely place more demand on the network than the labs running 486DX4s, so we had to re-wire the thing to balance the loads somewhat.:)
Shortly thereafter we installed a Linux server to handle DNS and HTTP cacheing for the 128KBit ISDN connection to the Internet (real practical for a network of some 400+ workstations eh?), revamped the configs on the workstations, re-configured the network from the core on outward, re-wrote the network wiring diagrams manually (they were, apparently, somewhat classified "need to know" information and we as system administrators did not "need to know") and generally made the place hospitable.
The network where I'm currently working (along with the phone system) was apparently installed by a monkey. All 19" rack-mountable equipment with its rack mount hardware installed in such a way as to be able to bolt them flat alongside three inner walls of a closet. There's a nice Panduit patch panel there - with about 4' of patch cables tempting their connections by gravity; they just sortof hang there in a loop before connecting to the Cisco switch installed above it. Not so much as a zip tie in sight!
There's a 3Com 16-port switch in there that was powered and creating plenty of heat and noise; but the strange thing is it's not connected to anything but the AC outlet. (Yes, it's now unplugged, but still hanging there all useless-like). I also find myself at a loss to explain why, with a single ADSL connection to the building, we require three (yes, three (3!)) DSL modems. Or why, when there were 2 spare electrical outlets even before I unplugged the 3COm someone felt the need to connect one of the devices to an extension cord running out the closet and 5' along the wall.
The network drops consist of a motley combination of mis-labelled jacks and broken wall mounts compensated for by the random installation of cheap hubs and duct-taped CAT5 cables running helter skelter around the place.
The network is so shaky it's not possible to install a centralized high capacity network printer as of now because, well, too many print jobs and something could catch fire in that closet. I can't WAIT to write up a cost benefeit analysis for my boss to justify the disposal of the dozen or so laser printers installed on various desktops around the place.:)
Oh, and these aren't mine, but they make me feel better about my own situation whenever I look at them.
"What are the best methods for removing almost any record of data?"
Have Chuck Norris give it a roundhouse kick.
-5 mod to any moderator giving this a negative mod! May Chuck Norris roundhouse kick your entire families for that! And remember; The "C-section" is named after Chuck Norris, for when he roundhouse kicked himself through his mothers stomach.
I'm sorry, but I don't have any way of publicly contesting this argument and still seem credible. And no offence, but even if I put forth the effort to satisfy your curiosity and yours alone (IE, can it be recovered, or is the data gone)...I feel my time would have been wasted. I'm sure if the tables were turned, you feel the same way.
The fact that I know people who work in criminal forensics labs and recover data for a living aside, you're obviously set in your opinion. I know however that they can recover data from drives that are more seriously mangled than a simple three pass overwrite. If you want to bet your money or your freedom on your opinion that's one thing, but is it too much to ask that you stop posing yourself as some kind of expert on the subject until you become further educated on the subject?
An aside, BTW; I'm tired of reading of the so-called "DoD specifications" for wiping a hard drive. Yes, they exist in the form of software tools etc. but they're for NON CLASSIFIED DATA ONLY. For top-level classification their specification to ensure data destruction remains to this day in the belly of an incinerator. If you don't want a casual user to recover your data with freely available tools and a few hours of spare time the utilities and methods posed will work just fine. If, however, you don't want your {insert law-voilating material here} to be found by actual law enforcement agents, you'd be best served to turn your hard drive and all memory devices into a molten pile of materials and let them have at it.
With a hard drive you can write and rewrite multiple times and still have data recovered by someone willing to spend the time, effort, and money.
BULLSHIT! If you write all zeros, then ones, and back to zeros again accross the entire drive (technically a mid-level format, a true low-level erases the servo tracks and renders the drive useless), you can NEVER, NEVER, EVER recover the data.
Please, stop spreading this myth. It's BS!
Sure. Write something incriminating to a hard drive, perform your procedure of choice then hand the drive off to your local neighborhood police data recovery lab. If you're in the neighborhood, hand one off to your local federal branch of investigators and have them give it a whirl.
Make sure your first phone call has access to a computer so they can let us know how it went.
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Why, because she's going to memorize your driver's license number, address, birthdate, issue date and expiry date and create a fake ID from memory when she gets home? What's more likely, scenario #1 above or scenario #2 where somebody gets hold of forged credit card data (perhaps your own), makes a few fake cards and sells them for $100 apiece and you get stuck with the tab?
I have an experiment for those of you who contact your Congress Critters (or Members of (Provincial) Parliament up here north of the 49th); write one letter from yourself advocating your true stance on the issue (No Rate Hikes!) and another letter from a friend, neighbor, fictional character, whatever advocating the exact opposite. You'll have to use a real address to which you have access of course, and compare the responses.
The cynic in me believes you'll get two very different letters indeed. :P
... thereby proving their assertion that digital music / piracy is "bad" for their industry and inserting another nail in the coffin of digital rights. (The real kind, not the software enforced things that inhibit duplication of data.)
Codec? Stop being obsessive about "OSS or die!" and use another player?!?
Can't render video? As in your computer can't? I find it hard to believe that anybody in the targeted region of the world has a computer that can't render video. Is it a technical limitation or one of choice, I wonder?
{shaking head} This is all well and good, except that most of Toyota's North American product is produced in Cambridge, ON, the NUMA plant in California and their Texas manufacturing facilities. They're expecting to have 100% "Toyota" production for North America IN North America by about 2010.
The domestic problems are more systemic than health care costs. Union strife, inefficient plants, plant sprawl, poor designs, overburdened support (warranty) costs due to poor initial quality, etc. Much of the domestic product is also produced in foreign countries (Mexico, South Africa, South Korea) which, again, provides extremely cheap labour, virtually no health care overhead and massive tax benefits in the hosting third world nations.
It goes deeper even into the smaller details. Toyota actively encourages a healthier lifestyle for their workers, requiring the Cambridge employees to maintain a membership (free, BTW) for themselves and their family, to the on-site health club. They provide healthy, balanced meals in the cafeteria. Domestic plants, by contrast, offer the likes of pizza, fried foods, etc. in their cafeterias and the exersize plans include the long walk to the bar across the road for beer and wings on lunch break.
Because domestic workers, by and large, do one thing and one thing only (weld door seams, install windshields, etc.) for years on end, and because of the environment in which they work, they have no real pride of ownership in their product. In a Japanese run plant, after a certain number of years each and every employee can claim to have built an entire car - every single component assembled. They work in teams, they get a regular change of scenery so there's less doldrum, less stress, and better productivity.
Domestic workers are chastised for stopping the production line. Their profitability is measured in dollars/minute of line time. Japanese product workers are encouraged to stop the line if they spot a defect. As I said; pride of ownership.
Domestic workers have "pride" in domestic products under a union and propaganda inspired sense of self preservation, but it's a false notion. I live near, and for several years lived and worked in a plant town and saw the Good 'Ol Boys driving around with their "Buy Domestic - Save Our Jobs" plate frames on their vehicles. Many (most) of which were built in third world countries for dollars a day!
Except that he figured his car to be totaled for sure a friend of mine was considering buying one and installing it on the plate of his Corolla. 100% assembled by Ontario born and bred workers in Cambridge!
Partial points, but not quite accurate. Ford developed a hybrid system that was totally inefficient, so they scrapped it. They re-designed their system and found that, hey, this is almost identical to Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive. They licensed the technology from Toyota, tweaked their own production lines, and blam-o, we have a Hybrid Ford. Bring an Escape Hybrid to a Toyota dealership and they'll be perfectly suited to maintain it, save for the use the Ford's Duratec gasoline engine and other mechanical parts.
Uhm, you can get the Camry and the Highlander in Hybrid models today and they're both very respectable looking vehicles. Also, Ford's Escape Hybrid looks identical (save a badge on the rear liftgate) to the gasoline variant and it's not a half bad looking vehicle (in its old and new designs).
Just because the Prius looks like the hardon from a sci-fi spaceship doesn't mean all hybrids are fugly.
NASCAR and the like (any stock car racing) still use the 'ol stick and clutch, probably because it's the Good 'Ol way of doing it. (Paddles are for pansies and the like.) However Formula 1 race cars have adopted electronic sequential manual transmissions. These require no clutch and can, in fact, shift gears faster than any human can be expected to clutch/shift/release. The current Mitsubishi Outlander (XLS) and Lancer (GTS) use this system with paddles and let me tell you, you can drop from 6th to 2nd just as fast as you can make your fingers move. I've tried; I can't outrun it. I've also tried speed shifting in my 2006 Ralliart and no matter how much coffee I've had I can't shift faster than those paddles.
In a couple years when the new Ralliart and/or GSX models hit the market I'll probably drop my stick obsession and go with paddles. The up side is that when I'm stuck in traffic I can put it in 'D'. When a fanboy in {insert souped-up all-show, no-go car here} tries to run me I'll just tap a paddle and show him my tail lights. :P
Nope. In the Durham Region there are a lot of smokers who used to be bartenders. See, after the smoking ban hit several dozen bars were forced to close their doors increasing unemployment figures by several hundred people.
Even to this day there's always a demand for a spot outside the door to the local watering holes to get a spot to stand and smoke, patios that allow smoking are jam packed when weather permits, and bars in general are comatose compared to pre-ban days. When I can walk freely and converse at normal volume in a busy bar on a Friday night there's something wrong.
I'm still waiting for all the non-smokers and their families to start flooding into the bars; especially late at night. Funny thing is children were never allowed into bars past a certain time of night anyways - so why did we need to think of the children in this instance?
The worst part of the ban was the banning of smoking in private clubs. Clubs where the members voted amongst themselves and came to a consensus that yes, they would permit smoking within their facilities. Clubs, I might add, where members must pay annual fees to remain a member! Now, if they objected so greatly to smoking they could always "leave the bar" - but the fact that these people pay for the privilege of being members of an organization where smoking is allowed? Hell-ooo!
Just goes to show you that the vocal minority rule the land.
Easy solution; phone the business (block your phone number first; *67 works here in Ontario, Canada), tell them you received an interesting fax about their business and gauge their reaction to it. If it's a positive "Oh, great, we were hoping that would work!" kind of reaction, feel free to publish their info on a "These People Are Scum Peddlers" website. If it's a "Oh, sorry about that, I don't know how it got there" kind of reaction you know where you stand.
Every car dealership relies on the fax machine to expedite funding of deals. Sure, you can courier the documents to their funding centre but that delays funding by as much as 24 hours and costs a lot more than dropping them into the fax machine. When each deal requires upwards of 15-20 pages, averaging 5 deals delivered per business day that's a lot of paper to scan, save and e-mail. In the end it's a lot easier to drop them into the top tray, hit the appropriate speed dial button and press "Go".
When you're getting anywhere between $50-500k per day with your fax machine, you tend to pay for the upkeep and put up with the junk faxes.
While I disagree that people with kids shouldn't be on a different schedule (kids need parental attention) - why is the focus on the women (particularly in this article)? I said it not 10 minutes ago and I'll say it again; men have children too. Married men are 50% of the equation. Single men with custody are 100% of the equation.
What about compensating people on weird shifts and/or being on call in some way? More money, better office, more perks, more vacation time, access to the CEO's bathroom; whatever. Give them flex time through the week to compensate for being glued to a pager and worrying all the night before. If somebody doesn't want to take their turn and play fair, they get to pee in the dingy johns downstairs.
Yes, but men have children too. Is that the scapegoat?
I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
Here's an idea; let's make a new set of rules. You get hired based on your experience, qualifications, knowledge, education, and willingness to come to an accord as to the working conditions and requirements. Period. Forget the pigmentation of your skin, the tone of your accent, or the makeup of your chromosomes. If you're not cut out for the job - leave.
Is this still news? Better still - why is this still news?!?
Here in Ontario, Canada elementary schools aren't permitted to hold students back without parental consent. Even if students fail literally every area of their studies they can be pushed through the system, becoming more and more difficult as they enter higher grades until they enter high school illiterate. There are actually students who enter high school on time only because they're such a handful it becomes an accepted norm for their elementary teachers to push them forward almost like a countdown until they're "someone else's problem".
Heck, I entered high school completely unable to comprehend French (a requirement from Gr. 3 through 9 in Ontario) and so was given a bye for my high school French credit. The time my school realized I wasn't going to fare well in my French course was the day I walked in 5 minutes late, my teacher said something that ended in "retard" and I said "What the %$*@ did you call me?" I do recall that was the last time I set foot in that classroom. :)
Now that you've said it I have to bring it up; one of my college courses had a first term paper required that was expected to be 30 pages. We had 3 months to complete the project. Enough complaints were raised to the facilitator of the program that those who handed in 3 pages of double spaced text interspersed with large pictures were given grades equivalent to those of us who handed in 26+ pages in a bound cover with only enough graphics to further illustrate a point and were disappointed in ourselves for not meeting the challenge. Not surprisingly many of the students in this course were there because their parents were paying their way (rather than combinations of student loans and employment income to pay one's own way) and would often quip that this was the perfect class to sleep through and/or head to the student centre for beer.
What did that teach the students? If you whine enough about workload somebody else will do the work for you and you still get credit.
What did it teach me? To ensure that the higher ups are always kept in the loop about who's performing and who's slacking off / leeching credit so compensation can be doled out accordingly. It's underhanded, dirty and sneaky as hell but sitting silent and working through my day has cost me promotions, contract extensions and pay raises in the past and I've vowed not to let the lazy but ass-kissingly gifted succeed on the sweat off my back.
Most of the time? The police, military, fire departments, field technicians and others who work in extreme environments are "wasting their money"? If they brought a traditional laptop to many places they need them on a day to day basis they wouldn't last more than a week. How practical is it to purchase 4 laptops per month when a single $3500 unit would last for years?
And it can be very easy to swap out hard drives if they're pcmcia. Psssst; part of the strength of the toughbook is the ruggedness of the hard drive enclosure.My Gentoo system was up 309 days before I realized that the PSU fan had stopped turning and the motherboard overheated and blew 6 capacitors which is why the clock got so far out of sync (the computer thought it was April when I rebooted it back in November) which explains the graph weirdness.
Prior to that I had an uptime well over 200 days ruined by a blackout that outlasted my UPS.
I perform updates here and there on my server periodically and perform a full-scale "bleeding edge" upgrade whenever I'm forced to reboot the machine.
I can't argue about using the phones in Europe, but you're in the same boat with Bell there; they both use CDMA. Moving right along; I live in the GTA myself (east of the city in Durham) and work in both Scarborough and downtown. I've travelled all over the area for work (Oakville, Burlington, London, Kitchener/Waterloo, etc.) and never had a coverage problem.
As for their phones, I'm on my third one and I love it. I've been with them for 4 years, signed 3 year contracts twice and been able to upgrade my phone at the discounted price, break my contract and sign a new one for bonus air time and all other associated benefeits without penalty after two years each time. This time my plan got significantly better (earlier evening time, same daytime minutes, more features, much lower price).
Yeah, the SIM card thing is an annoyance, but hey I've lived with it thus far. It's only a pain when I upgrade phones which only happens every 2 years so it's not a big deal for me.
As for the billing someone else mentioned I have no problem with those either. I signed up for e-billing so I have the past 2 years worth of ebills in my home directory. No more stacks of paper. Their customer service reps are awesome. Any time I've had an issue they resolved it promptly, without question and most important of all they resolved it properly.
When I was with Rogers and Bell, well, they're next to impossible to get issues resolved, they're fanatacal about billing (threatening to cancel my service and charge ludicrous investigation and re-connection fees basically the week after my payment is due), Bell actually re-directed my entire service to their billing department because they can't understand how credit works (if I owe 3 months and I pay for 2, I pay for the oldest month 1 and 2 - NOT 2 and 3). I couldn't believe it when I called 911 and found myself talking to a billing rep. I told her I was upset, but that I'd talk about the issue if she'd kindly phone for a fire truck to my location. She told me matter of factly that she wouldn't do that.
Until I find a really, REALLY good reason to do so I won't be leaving Telus any time soon thanks.
Here's a novel idea for those parents; take the cell phone away from the child(ren) and make them work to pay off the bill.
As an added bonus, the spoiled brats might gain a sense of responsibility and perhaps a bit of work ethic out of the deal. Then they might appreciate why 1000 primetime minutes is a big deal.
Oh, sorry, I forgot it was up to network television, telephone companies and other multi-national corporations to raise your children. Carry on.
Then you get into the old "which do you believe" argument. If a television show tells you that extensive television viewing is bad for you you'll find yourself in a serious connundrum. :)
Bad drivers are bad drivers, period. The cell phone is just the latest excuse. There's putting on one's make-up, eating and/or drinking, smoking, talking to friends, changing radio/CD, etc. They're all scapegoats for people who are bad drivers and aren't able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Don't penalize the phone; penalize the driver.
When I started working at a local high school administering their network I found an amalgamation of two networks. One running primarily thinnet (10Base2) through the classrooms uplinked to 10BaseT hubs (three 16 port stackables) which were each connected to a 10BaseT switch ("the core"). The server ran Novell, the PCs ran a combination of DOS and Windows 3.11 which ... worked.
Now the new network installed right beside it consisted of a mighty IBM NetFinity 5500 server with a RAID 5 array of about 50GB and a plethora of IBM switching equipment. The core switch wasn't high-tech or anything, but atleast it had 100MBit fibre running to the IDFs which ran switched 10BaseTX to the workstations. Now, this was all fine and dandy and wired real pretty-like by people who had no comprehension that the labs running PII-400s would most likely place more demand on the network than the labs running 486DX4s, so we had to re-wire the thing to balance the loads somewhat. :)
Shortly thereafter we installed a Linux server to handle DNS and HTTP cacheing for the 128KBit ISDN connection to the Internet (real practical for a network of some 400+ workstations eh?), revamped the configs on the workstations, re-configured the network from the core on outward, re-wrote the network wiring diagrams manually (they were, apparently, somewhat classified "need to know" information and we as system administrators did not "need to know") and generally made the place hospitable.
The network where I'm currently working (along with the phone system) was apparently installed by a monkey. All 19" rack-mountable equipment with its rack mount hardware installed in such a way as to be able to bolt them flat alongside three inner walls of a closet. There's a nice Panduit patch panel there - with about 4' of patch cables tempting their connections by gravity; they just sortof hang there in a loop before connecting to the Cisco switch installed above it. Not so much as a zip tie in sight!
There's a 3Com 16-port switch in there that was powered and creating plenty of heat and noise; but the strange thing is it's not connected to anything but the AC outlet. (Yes, it's now unplugged, but still hanging there all useless-like). I also find myself at a loss to explain why, with a single ADSL connection to the building, we require three (yes, three (3!)) DSL modems. Or why, when there were 2 spare electrical outlets even before I unplugged the 3COm someone felt the need to connect one of the devices to an extension cord running out the closet and 5' along the wall.
The network drops consist of a motley combination of mis-labelled jacks and broken wall mounts compensated for by the random installation of cheap hubs and duct-taped CAT5 cables running helter skelter around the place.
The network is so shaky it's not possible to install a centralized high capacity network printer as of now because, well, too many print jobs and something could catch fire in that closet. I can't WAIT to write up a cost benefeit analysis for my boss to justify the disposal of the dozen or so laser printers installed on various desktops around the place. :)
Oh, and these aren't mine, but they make me feel better about my own situation whenever I look at them.
Have Chuck Norris give it a roundhouse kick.
-5 mod to any moderator giving this a negative mod! May Chuck Norris roundhouse kick your entire families for that! And remember; The "C-section" is named after Chuck Norris, for when he roundhouse kicked himself through his mothers stomach.
The fact that I know people who work in criminal forensics labs and recover data for a living aside, you're obviously set in your opinion. I know however that they can recover data from drives that are more seriously mangled than a simple three pass overwrite. If you want to bet your money or your freedom on your opinion that's one thing, but is it too much to ask that you stop posing yourself as some kind of expert on the subject until you become further educated on the subject?
An aside, BTW; I'm tired of reading of the so-called "DoD specifications" for wiping a hard drive. Yes, they exist in the form of software tools etc. but they're for NON CLASSIFIED DATA ONLY. For top-level classification their specification to ensure data destruction remains to this day in the belly of an incinerator. If you don't want a casual user to recover your data with freely available tools and a few hours of spare time the utilities and methods posed will work just fine. If, however, you don't want your {insert law-voilating material here} to be found by actual law enforcement agents, you'd be best served to turn your hard drive and all memory devices into a molten pile of materials and let them have at it.
BULLSHIT! If you write all zeros, then ones, and back to zeros again accross the entire drive (technically a mid-level format, a true low-level erases the servo tracks and renders the drive useless), you can NEVER, NEVER, EVER recover the data.
Please, stop spreading this myth. It's BS!
Sure. Write something incriminating to a hard drive, perform your procedure of choice then hand the drive off to your local neighborhood police data recovery lab. If you're in the neighborhood, hand one off to your local federal branch of investigators and have them give it a whirl.
Make sure your first phone call has access to a computer so they can let us know how it went.