Going around your boss to their boss only makes sense if you have enough solid evidence to get your boss fired. Otherwise, you just took any pretense of a professional or even congenial relationship out back and shot it in the head.
If you're going to report the problems to your boss's boss, I would do it after you resigned - and make sure to include a clear declaration that you are not going to disclose the problems to any third party.
The problem with simply caring less is that if the company suffers from a well-publicized or otherwise expensive hack, your boss may manage to shift the blame onto you. Then you're looking for a job while unemployed. It's much easier to do a job search while you're still employed, because you can take your time and pick the best opportunity that comes up instead of grabbing the first thing available, even if it sucks, because you have no income.
I plan on buying AMD anyway, despite its inferiority, because I think the competition is good for everyone.
Eventually, maybe 5, 10, or 15 years out, I expect Intel's competition to be high end ARM chips. But for now, AMD is it. If we the consumers let AMD fold, we had better be satisfied with buying used desktop processors because I fully expect new ones to double in price per performance compared to what they are today, just because nothing will be available as an alternative.
Yes, this isn't an enthusiast part, it's a budget part.
To be fair, most of the PC market is budget. We the enthusiasts are the minority. This thing will probably play Starcraft 2, Crysis 3, Battlefield Whatever, BioShock Infinite Squared, etc... well enough for someone who doesn't mind 35 fps on an HD monitor. If you want 90 fps on a 4K monitor, you'll have to move up to Core i5 + mid level or better discrete graphics card.
Traction control and stability control are two different things. Stability control kicks in when the car is moving in a direction not in line with where the front wheels are pointed. The programming assumes the driver has lost control and selectively slows down wheels and possibly cuts back the throttle until the direction of travel matches where the wheels point.
Traction control is less complicated, I think it just works when wheel spin without movement is detected.
Agreed. If you want to drive like a lunatic, get a safety cage installed in your Carrera GT and take it to a track. If your 600 horsepower is just whipping you up to 70 mph on the highway and taking corners on a back road at the posted 35 mph speed limit, most drivers can handle the car easily.
Thanks for the tip. Someone should make that a browser add-on. (I realize the correct answer to that statement is, "Well, you are a someone, aren't you?")
I'll see about it. While I'm at it, I understand that some browser tracking comes from unique ordering of browser plugins and fonts from each machine. It should be a browser standard to provide that information in a fixed order, and there should be add-ons that do it for you until it's a standard.
There's the old story about the people in Germany during World War 2, something like, "When they came for the gays, I did not intervene because I was not gay. When they came for the gypsies, I did not intervene because I was not a gypsy. When they came for the Jews, I did not intervene because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, I looked around for help and realized there was no one left to intervene." I'm probably getting the quote wrong.
You're right, we the citizens of the US should have been raising hell when the Muslims or Communists were unfairly targeted, and we didn't. But I am paying attention now, and it's not too late yet.
Bittorrent. You can distribute huge amounts of information over bittorrent, and the only expenses are for the internet connection you're already paying to have, the electricity your computer uses to do the work involved in operating the Bittorrent protocol, and the computing device you already purchased. A social network can work the same way.
A centrally hosted social network can't work the same way, because someone has to pay for the server farm. But a decentralized, peer to peer social network can be the Bittorrent of social networks, and cost effectively almost nothing.
I disagree. The fact that Facebook is strongly established is the second problem. The first problem with Diaspora and Friendica, and for that matter Syme, is that you need hosted server nodes. So you have to either have enough skill in this field and financial resources to host your own instance, or you have to trust someone else to do it for you. There are too few of us with the skills and the money to matter, so someone else hosts - which means there is only a small privacy advantage over Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. I wish the Diaspora, Friendica, and Syme communities the best of luck, but at best I see them as experiments that other groups will use as examples to refine even better designs.
The solution to that first problem, if it ever exists, will be something that's one-click install (Android or iOS app, apt-get install or yum install or similar on Linux distributions, download and run on Windows or OS X), and completely peer to peer. Ideally it would have its own built in distributed encrypted backup system too, like the architecture of Wuala, so that someone stealing your iPhone or a hard drive failure doesn't mean you have to rebuild your user account from nothing. Then we can face the second problem.
That only makes sense if the health levels in the other countries and life expectancies in the other countries dropped down to a level similar to the UK. Instead even though their obesity levels are not as high as those in the UK, their levels drop lower.
The real drop seems to be in "Healthy Life Years Expectancy", which is not as easy to define as pure "Life Expectancy" (which is a simple dead vs. not dead). So I suspect the real difference is that some changes in the method or quality of measurements that contribute to HLYE ratings. Maybe they started counting some disorder as a disability that formerly was not, or something similar.
The Global Warming angle seems odd - if Global Warming was the culprit, wouldn't the drop have appeared much earlier and appeared more linear? To my knowledge, the world did not suddenly quadruple its use of fossil fuels in 2004.
I think you're looking at the situation incorrectly. I don't break any laws, and I'm careful not to post to social network anything that could negatively impact my career. The NSA's ability to read my Facebook page or track my habit of visiting websites about steam cars, Alexander the Great's military tactics, or women with big asses does not bother me because of the potential impact on my career or any criminal investigation.
My concern is that the NSA has access to all of this kind of information about every citizen. Say that the president in 2021, whoever it is, starts accusing people that annoy him of terrorism and have them held indefinitely without right to trial. A number of citizens are displeased with this, so we decide to hold a rally against it. The NSA can instantly identify all of us, and subject us to the same fate. If a group of people spontaneously hold a protest, the president may not be able to get a group of 100 soldiers to shoot innocent civilians but it only takes one obedient soldier to manage a drone strike.
The executive branch of the US government is systematically acquiring all of the tools it needs to create and maintain a totalitarian state.
My favorite PC games are turn-based strategy. If you enjoy those, like King's Bounty or Heroes of Might and Magic, I think it would fit your schedule just fine. Since it's turn-based, you don't lose anything from interruptions.
Of course, the down side is that they don't give you human-to-human interaction. I spent a very short period as a stay-at-home parent, and while it's wonderful to spend more time with your kids it's also difficult to go without adult conversation and social interaction. I imagine many MMOs give you at least something along those lines, and turn-based strategy does not.
You have to pay for the electricity that powers your EV. I think the Tesla Model S uses 0.3 kwh per mile, so if you pay $0.20 per kwh (which, by some strange coincidence, I do). So you have to look at the difference in cost per mile. Your 24.5 mpg car at $3.18 per gallon costs $0.13 per mile in fuel, a Tesla Model S would be $0.20 per kwh times 0.3 kwh per mile = $0.06 per mile. So electric saves you $0.07 per mile. $7500/$0.07 = 107142 miles
You have to play politician and spin the numbers for the Model S to work out. If you consider the styling cool, and you like the fact that there is no engine noise, and the torque response when you press the throttle is instant (no wait to build engine RPM, no wait for the transmission to drop a gear, etc...) then you can compare the Model S to, say, an equivalent price luxury car.
But for someone shopping it against, say, a Honda Accord, the numbers don't work out unless the battery pack lasts an exceedingly long time.
The Leaf has a reliable 65 mile range. In good conditions and at slower speeds, you'll get a 100 miles. So it won't run much past an hour or two anyway under most circumstances.
The Model S is painfully expensive. But it's got an 85 kwh battery pack - so each hour your battery is supplying energy to heat the car, that's less than 5% of its capacity.
I've driven over 20,000 miles a year for each year for the last 12. I drove more than 200 miles in a single day about 6 times a year. If I had an electric car with a 200 mile range, I would just rent something with a gasoline or diesel engine for the days I need it.
The problem isn't the range, it's the price. The Model S with the full range, and presumably the longest lasting battery pack, is ~$75,000. The shorter ranges of the Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus Electric, Mitsubishi iMiev, etc... mean that I'd exceed the range too frequently. A Chevy Volt would work for me.
As it is, I solved my transportation problem the best way I could - I have a full time telecommuting position now.
The startup costs for nuclear are largely high BECAUSE of government? What could industry do more cheaply without the government? Buy the land? Install adequate safety measures? Build the enormous facility? I don't see what industry could do to make the process cheaper.
Right. But if you look at all of the technological advances that resulted in the first space program, I think we have every reason to guess something similar would come out of the Mars program.
I spent most of the past five years arguing that the Democrats were the lesser of two evils. Then the Obama Administration and the NSA took the Fourth Amendment out back and shot it in the head. The Bush Administration may have started the PRISM program, but the Democrats had the opportunity to cut it back and instead they ran with it.
The One Party indeed. It's largely a wasted gesture, but I plan to vote third party or "none of the above" in every Presidential and Congressional election going forward. Too bad the US Pirate Party doesn't have a Pennsylvania branch, PRISM is enough for me to join.
The advantage of subsidizing the purchase price is that any company can benefit. The consumer picks a vendor, gets the lower price through the subsidy.
Subsidizing R&D means that the government picks the companies that get the subsidy, and either has to carefully regulate the company or hope the company behaves ethically. Maybe Solyndra did everything right and got hammered by dumping from the Chinese government. Maybe they spent the $535 in US department of energy money on hookers and cocaine. Whether the Obama administration picked a nearly optimal choice to subsidize or not, in general there's a very high risk of picking a company too corrupt or too inept to give the country a good return on the investment.
I'm not totally sold on a flat price subsidy, but I'm leaning in that direction.
It's not getting the oil in Iraq that matters. It's maintaining political stability in the Middle East so we can continue to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, etc....
Why did we get involved in Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran but not in Rwanda, Central African Republic, Uganda, Darfur? Because political instability in those parts of Africa doesn't substantially affect the US economy.
I think the idea is to invest in a technology so that eventually it becomes cheaper. Nuclear would have never gotten off the ground without government investment, the startup costs were too high. So it's possible that planned, carefully considered large scale investment in solar or some other form of renewable energy will pay off. I'm not opposed in principal.
The problem with nuclear is fuel, startup costs, spent fuel storage, and publicity. If Congress could authorize and fund a nuclear power plant today and have gobs of power output in 18 months, nuclear would be everywhere. Instead, you start paying the costs up front and you're likely to be long out of office before the investment pays off. That kind of long term thinking doesn't interact well with politics or publicly traded companies.
This country has been "20 years away from usable fusion power" for 60 years. I think an Apollo-program style investment in fusion power is the logical next step.
Look at the space program, a giant expenditure of taxpayer resources on what appeared to be a largely symbolic scientific research program. But the technologies that resulted and benefited the US economy are so big it's difficult to quantify them.
I'd argue that a mission to Mars or the asteroid belt would have an equally dramatic impact on the US economy and the rest of the world. But that's a side topic. Ignoring space, renewable energy has the potential to be incredibly useful, and disruptive. Solar panels, wind farms, tidal generators, etc... etc... need to be constructed from the same metals and plastics and silicon as any other kind of machinery, so it's no utopian technology. But once it's set up, the maintenance costs should be a fraction of what we spend on coal, gas, and oil.
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Going around your boss to their boss only makes sense if you have enough solid evidence to get your boss fired. Otherwise, you just took any pretense of a professional or even congenial relationship out back and shot it in the head.
If you're going to report the problems to your boss's boss, I would do it after you resigned - and make sure to include a clear declaration that you are not going to disclose the problems to any third party.
The problem with simply caring less is that if the company suffers from a well-publicized or otherwise expensive hack, your boss may manage to shift the blame onto you. Then you're looking for a job while unemployed. It's much easier to do a job search while you're still employed, because you can take your time and pick the best opportunity that comes up instead of grabbing the first thing available, even if it sucks, because you have no income.
I plan on buying AMD anyway, despite its inferiority, because I think the competition is good for everyone.
Eventually, maybe 5, 10, or 15 years out, I expect Intel's competition to be high end ARM chips. But for now, AMD is it. If we the consumers let AMD fold, we had better be satisfied with buying used desktop processors because I fully expect new ones to double in price per performance compared to what they are today, just because nothing will be available as an alternative.
Yes, this isn't an enthusiast part, it's a budget part.
To be fair, most of the PC market is budget. We the enthusiasts are the minority. This thing will probably play Starcraft 2, Crysis 3, Battlefield Whatever, BioShock Infinite Squared, etc... well enough for someone who doesn't mind 35 fps on an HD monitor. If you want 90 fps on a 4K monitor, you'll have to move up to Core i5 + mid level or better discrete graphics card.
Traction control and stability control are two different things. Stability control kicks in when the car is moving in a direction not in line with where the front wheels are pointed. The programming assumes the driver has lost control and selectively slows down wheels and possibly cuts back the throttle until the direction of travel matches where the wheels point.
Traction control is less complicated, I think it just works when wheel spin without movement is detected.
Agreed. If you want to drive like a lunatic, get a safety cage installed in your Carrera GT and take it to a track. If your 600 horsepower is just whipping you up to 70 mph on the highway and taking corners on a back road at the posted 35 mph speed limit, most drivers can handle the car easily.
Thanks for the tip. Someone should make that a browser add-on. (I realize the correct answer to that statement is, "Well, you are a someone, aren't you?")
I'll see about it. While I'm at it, I understand that some browser tracking comes from unique ordering of browser plugins and fonts from each machine. It should be a browser standard to provide that information in a fixed order, and there should be add-ons that do it for you until it's a standard.
I guess I have my work cut out.
There's the old story about the people in Germany during World War 2, something like, "When they came for the gays, I did not intervene because I was not gay. When they came for the gypsies, I did not intervene because I was not a gypsy. When they came for the Jews, I did not intervene because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, I looked around for help and realized there was no one left to intervene." I'm probably getting the quote wrong.
You're right, we the citizens of the US should have been raising hell when the Muslims or Communists were unfairly targeted, and we didn't. But I am paying attention now, and it's not too late yet.
Bittorrent. You can distribute huge amounts of information over bittorrent, and the only expenses are for the internet connection you're already paying to have, the electricity your computer uses to do the work involved in operating the Bittorrent protocol, and the computing device you already purchased. A social network can work the same way.
A centrally hosted social network can't work the same way, because someone has to pay for the server farm. But a decentralized, peer to peer social network can be the Bittorrent of social networks, and cost effectively almost nothing.
I disagree. The fact that Facebook is strongly established is the second problem. The first problem with Diaspora and Friendica, and for that matter Syme, is that you need hosted server nodes. So you have to either have enough skill in this field and financial resources to host your own instance, or you have to trust someone else to do it for you. There are too few of us with the skills and the money to matter, so someone else hosts - which means there is only a small privacy advantage over Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. I wish the Diaspora, Friendica, and Syme communities the best of luck, but at best I see them as experiments that other groups will use as examples to refine even better designs.
The solution to that first problem, if it ever exists, will be something that's one-click install (Android or iOS app, apt-get install or yum install or similar on Linux distributions, download and run on Windows or OS X), and completely peer to peer. Ideally it would have its own built in distributed encrypted backup system too, like the architecture of Wuala, so that someone stealing your iPhone or a hard drive failure doesn't mean you have to rebuild your user account from nothing. Then we can face the second problem.
That only makes sense if the health levels in the other countries and life expectancies in the other countries dropped down to a level similar to the UK. Instead even though their obesity levels are not as high as those in the UK, their levels drop lower.
The real drop seems to be in "Healthy Life Years Expectancy", which is not as easy to define as pure "Life Expectancy" (which is a simple dead vs. not dead). So I suspect the real difference is that some changes in the method or quality of measurements that contribute to HLYE ratings. Maybe they started counting some disorder as a disability that formerly was not, or something similar.
The Global Warming angle seems odd - if Global Warming was the culprit, wouldn't the drop have appeared much earlier and appeared more linear? To my knowledge, the world did not suddenly quadruple its use of fossil fuels in 2004.
I think you're looking at the situation incorrectly. I don't break any laws, and I'm careful not to post to social network anything that could negatively impact my career. The NSA's ability to read my Facebook page or track my habit of visiting websites about steam cars, Alexander the Great's military tactics, or women with big asses does not bother me because of the potential impact on my career or any criminal investigation.
My concern is that the NSA has access to all of this kind of information about every citizen. Say that the president in 2021, whoever it is, starts accusing people that annoy him of terrorism and have them held indefinitely without right to trial. A number of citizens are displeased with this, so we decide to hold a rally against it. The NSA can instantly identify all of us, and subject us to the same fate. If a group of people spontaneously hold a protest, the president may not be able to get a group of 100 soldiers to shoot innocent civilians but it only takes one obedient soldier to manage a drone strike.
The executive branch of the US government is systematically acquiring all of the tools it needs to create and maintain a totalitarian state.
That still doesn't protect you. http://samy.pl/evercookie/
My favorite PC games are turn-based strategy. If you enjoy those, like King's Bounty or Heroes of Might and Magic, I think it would fit your schedule just fine. Since it's turn-based, you don't lose anything from interruptions.
Of course, the down side is that they don't give you human-to-human interaction. I spent a very short period as a stay-at-home parent, and while it's wonderful to spend more time with your kids it's also difficult to go without adult conversation and social interaction. I imagine many MMOs give you at least something along those lines, and turn-based strategy does not.
You have to pay for the electricity that powers your EV. I think the Tesla Model S uses 0.3 kwh per mile, so if you pay $0.20 per kwh (which, by some strange coincidence, I do). So you have to look at the difference in cost per mile. Your 24.5 mpg car at $3.18 per gallon costs $0.13 per mile in fuel, a Tesla Model S would be $0.20 per kwh times 0.3 kwh per mile = $0.06 per mile. So electric saves you $0.07 per mile. $7500/$0.07 = 107142 miles
You have to play politician and spin the numbers for the Model S to work out. If you consider the styling cool, and you like the fact that there is no engine noise, and the torque response when you press the throttle is instant (no wait to build engine RPM, no wait for the transmission to drop a gear, etc...) then you can compare the Model S to, say, an equivalent price luxury car.
But for someone shopping it against, say, a Honda Accord, the numbers don't work out unless the battery pack lasts an exceedingly long time.
The Leaf has a reliable 65 mile range. In good conditions and at slower speeds, you'll get a 100 miles. So it won't run much past an hour or two anyway under most circumstances.
The Model S is painfully expensive. But it's got an 85 kwh battery pack - so each hour your battery is supplying energy to heat the car, that's less than 5% of its capacity.
I've driven over 20,000 miles a year for each year for the last 12. I drove more than 200 miles in a single day about 6 times a year. If I had an electric car with a 200 mile range, I would just rent something with a gasoline or diesel engine for the days I need it.
The problem isn't the range, it's the price. The Model S with the full range, and presumably the longest lasting battery pack, is ~$75,000. The shorter ranges of the Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus Electric, Mitsubishi iMiev, etc... mean that I'd exceed the range too frequently. A Chevy Volt would work for me.
As it is, I solved my transportation problem the best way I could - I have a full time telecommuting position now.
The startup costs for nuclear are largely high BECAUSE of government? What could industry do more cheaply without the government? Buy the land? Install adequate safety measures? Build the enormous facility? I don't see what industry could do to make the process cheaper.
Right. But if you look at all of the technological advances that resulted in the first space program, I think we have every reason to guess something similar would come out of the Mars program.
I spent most of the past five years arguing that the Democrats were the lesser of two evils. Then the Obama Administration and the NSA took the Fourth Amendment out back and shot it in the head. The Bush Administration may have started the PRISM program, but the Democrats had the opportunity to cut it back and instead they ran with it.
The One Party indeed. It's largely a wasted gesture, but I plan to vote third party or "none of the above" in every Presidential and Congressional election going forward. Too bad the US Pirate Party doesn't have a Pennsylvania branch, PRISM is enough for me to join.
The advantage of subsidizing the purchase price is that any company can benefit. The consumer picks a vendor, gets the lower price through the subsidy.
Subsidizing R&D means that the government picks the companies that get the subsidy, and either has to carefully regulate the company or hope the company behaves ethically. Maybe Solyndra did everything right and got hammered by dumping from the Chinese government. Maybe they spent the $535 in US department of energy money on hookers and cocaine. Whether the Obama administration picked a nearly optimal choice to subsidize or not, in general there's a very high risk of picking a company too corrupt or too inept to give the country a good return on the investment.
I'm not totally sold on a flat price subsidy, but I'm leaning in that direction.
It's not getting the oil in Iraq that matters. It's maintaining political stability in the Middle East so we can continue to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, etc....
Why did we get involved in Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran but not in Rwanda, Central African Republic, Uganda, Darfur? Because political instability in those parts of Africa doesn't substantially affect the US economy.
I think the idea is to invest in a technology so that eventually it becomes cheaper. Nuclear would have never gotten off the ground without government investment, the startup costs were too high. So it's possible that planned, carefully considered large scale investment in solar or some other form of renewable energy will pay off. I'm not opposed in principal.
The problem with nuclear is fuel, startup costs, spent fuel storage, and publicity. If Congress could authorize and fund a nuclear power plant today and have gobs of power output in 18 months, nuclear would be everywhere. Instead, you start paying the costs up front and you're likely to be long out of office before the investment pays off. That kind of long term thinking doesn't interact well with politics or publicly traded companies.
This country has been "20 years away from usable fusion power" for 60 years. I think an Apollo-program style investment in fusion power is the logical next step.
Look at the space program, a giant expenditure of taxpayer resources on what appeared to be a largely symbolic scientific research program. But the technologies that resulted and benefited the US economy are so big it's difficult to quantify them.
I'd argue that a mission to Mars or the asteroid belt would have an equally dramatic impact on the US economy and the rest of the world. But that's a side topic. Ignoring space, renewable energy has the potential to be incredibly useful, and disruptive. Solar panels, wind farms, tidal generators, etc... etc... need to be constructed from the same metals and plastics and silicon as any other kind of machinery, so it's no utopian technology. But once it's set up, the maintenance costs should be a fraction of what we spend on coal, gas, and oil.