You completely ignored parental involvement to go into your rant on teachers' unions.
Parental involvement in the education of their children is the primary reason why private schools do better. Those parents are willing to invest time and money into their kids education, and it shows.
Stop trying to champion your anti-union cause and start trying to figure out how to make parents care more about their kids.
Wouldn't you claim that your account was incorrectly debited $500 from an ATM transaction that you didn't make if you could get away with it? Sure you would. So would everyone else in your city.
Some people have morals even without the threat of punishment for misdeed.
That's just prone to fail. Were I to enter politics, it would be the end of my engineering career. After falling behind on my skills for four or six years, how many companies would want to hire me to do development work? What if they though I might decided to leave again to run for another office? My engineering career would be over.
So my options would be to find a career that I got based on my time in office, or to stay in office forever (if possible). Under your plan only the super rich (who never need work again) or the self-employed (who can afford to stop their business and pick it up again) would ever be able to run for office. And, to be honest, that's 70% of what's wrong with elected officials today.
So provide universal preventative care to all Americans for free, and let insurance companies continue to provide catastrophic insurance for major illnesses.
If someone walks into an emergency room having lived through a car accident, then yeah, the doctors will treat them regardless. But if a person gets cancer and requires expensive, lengthy, and regular treatments, they better have insurance or a good church or nonprofit to help them out, or they're not going to get the help they need.
Auto insurance companies don't offer plans that pay for 80% of your oil changes and brake services, but then decline to pay for your work at Jiffy Lube because, while they location is "in the plan", your work was performed by Bill, who's not a covered mechanic.
In fact, laws (at least in my state) require that auto insurance companies pay for repairs no matter who performs the work; they can't force you to use "their" mechanics in "their" approved facilities.
Catastrophic insurance is fine and good for both situations - if they pay out. Maybe the restructuring of health insurance should get those companies out of the routine care & maintenance - driving down the prices for the sort of care that prevents serious conditions - and leave the insurance companies to fight for that catastrophic coverage.
Indeed. We took my iPod Touch (and my wife's iPhone) with us to Austria and Germany for a vacation earlier this month, and were quite dismayed to find very few hotspots at all, and none free anywhere we went, from little town to major city like Vienna or Munich. Only the last three of our hotels (of seven) offered wifi for guests - and that was all we had.
(Perhaps there were hotspots in other places in the towns, away from the city centers and other public places that we visited. But without reliable web access we couldn't find them.)
Well if the citizens of Alaska decide that he can still represent them, and if he choses to stay in office, then the senate still has rules that will result in his censure:
- He'll be stripped of committee leadership positions (i.e. he won't be the ranking republican any more)
- He may lose those committee positions entirely
- It may be harder for him to beg favors (here, slip this into your bill) from colleagues who won't want to be tainted by him
In other words his influence will without a doubt diminish, or it will be eliminated. If Alaskans still like that, so be it.
It would be far cheaper to grant politicians in key positions generous allowances for the rest of their lives
Indeed. Instead, we have many people (including many on Slashdot) advocating for term limits, which force those politicians to immediately start thinking about their income post-service, and what they can do now to ensure it.
I've always thought that being a lifetime public servant, if your constituents allow it, is far better than being another revolving door politician heading from a law degree into a cushy PR position at a company paying for the laws you gave them.
Obviously Ted Stevens decided he could keep the office and get the payback, too; he should have retired six years ago, after which time he could have gotten all the house upgrades he desired for the work he'd already performed for the oil industry.
Shouldn't there be some law to protect the American people from legislators who commit felonies relating to their position?
if he is reelected
Didn't you answer your own question? We already have election law and it allows us to choose to replace our criminal legislators, or, if we feel that they are still able to competently serve us, choose to return them to office.
Fortunately most ballots have elections for many, many offices, some of which are very unimportant. I note, for example, that on the ballot I cast a few days ago, there were at least six judge positions up for election where there was only one candidate.
Theoretically, I could have voted for a made-up write-in candidate on one of those elections. It would in no way change the outcome, but I could then verify that my vote was counted (at least for that election) by confirming that vote.
Anyone remember those older ATMs that had the eight buttons, four on each side of the screen? Let's use those instead. Take the touchscreen out of the equation entirely.
I think every ATM I've used in the past two years still has those buttons, so I wouldn't call them "old". The credit card machines on most gas pumps use the same scheme.
I have problems using those every time. Since most machines are designed to be used by those in a wheelchair, I'm always looking down at the screen. It's very difficult to line up the text on the screen to the correct button, such as when I want to select Debit or Credit at the gas pump, or when I want to confirm if my pin was entered correctly at an ATM.
In other words, these have the exact same problem as the touch screens being used for voting.
For example, have each voter receive a receipt for their vote with a unique identifier code. This code would not make it possible to track a vote back to the individual who voted, but it allow them to log into a website the day after the election and confirm that their vote was accurately counted.
This would allow their vote to be bought or influenced, because their boss or local mob affiliate could be with them when they logged into the website to verify their vote, and "correct" the problem if they voted for the wrong candidate.
Your idea only works, perhaps, if the website confirms that your vote was counted, but cannot confirm who the vote was for.
I would rely on the video example of the problem occurring, as reproduced by an election official on a sample machine in the presence of a CNN reporter and camera crew.
So a claim was made as to a problem, and then it was reproduced by a (more) neutral third party in a (more) controlled setting. It's not scientific proof, but it's enough to show that they aren't just lying about a nonexistent UI flaw.
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
Energy content of gasoline --- 36.6 kWh/US gallon. Let's assume that your engine works at the absolute thermodynamic limit (40%) for a combustion engine so you get 16 KWH of work out of it.
And what if you can capture some of the excess heat energy and use it to charge an electrical assist? It seems that you just derived the maximum theoretical mpg for a combustion engine, but you didn't derive the theoretical mpg for a car that may have a combustion engine + other parts.
It probably depends on how you look at your use of the scope. If you define your need as "look at the signal" then it probably hasn't changed much. But if you define your need as, say "determine if the rise and fall time of these signals are in spec, and check the channel to channel skew", then you'll find that you can do a lot more with a modern scope.
Both boxes and PC plug-in scopes offer processing capabilities to do that sort of analysis. That's probably what you wanted anyway; you're just used to having to do that extra work yourself.
You mean like the "completely ridiculous" three-year-old Dell on my desktop, that was $800 new, which can stream via PCI Express at very usable speeds?
You do know that processing power in off-the-shelf PCs has grown tremendously in the last decade, right? Half of the other "box" scopes on the market probably run an embedded OS on a process anyway, making most of their features also "software".
Depending on the resources in your lab, and its purposes, you might find that a software-defined interface is more flexible for your needs. You can add any sort of interface or processing capabilities you want. http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/205615
If it's a research lab, something like the above may be just what you want. If it's a teaching lab, and you want students to have access to real knobs and buttons, then my experience is specifically with Tektronix scopes that I use at work. Again, without knowing your price range, there are a wide range of options out there.
At the low end, the TDS5054B series has an interface likely identical to that of your old scope; they did a reasonable job of replicating the older style of analog interface but added on some processing utilities. http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/tds5000b/
I've used a scope the DPO400 series as well. I found it's interface to be rather, well, different at first, with all the options not in the places I'd usually expect them to be with my other Tek scopes. But I eventually grew used to it and found it all perfectly fine - except that the probe connections for some reason don't allow use of our current probes. They work fine on all other scopes, and I see no reason why they molded the plastic on this scope to exclude them. http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/dpo4000/
Finally, at the high end, you have something like the DSA8200. This scope runs windows, which you can get to to do some data analysis, but the scope itself is controlled through the Tek application. It looks and behaves like a piece of software; there are buttons on the front for some features, but they are just macro buttons to execute the commands; it's often faster to just use a mouse since the buttons only offer limited functionality. http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/dsa8200/
Note how the Tek scopes are all mostly more expensive than the NI scope, with more limited flexiblity in the interface. Again, if I knew what bandwidth you needed or what your budget was or the purpose of your lab, I could give better recommendations.
I agree that's popular, but I don't think it's a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable?
When adding a new feature that might take 2-3 weeks to be "stable", do you use a different system to back up your work each day? Wouldn't it be easier to make a branch you could commit to back up to each day, then merge it in when your branch is stable?
That seems very plausible. Vendors could see economies of scale by selling higher volumes in the U.S., while maintaining high margins for maximum profit in their home territory. This even allows for degradation of the brand name in the foreign territory while retaining the higher name at home.
I'm registered to vote twice (not intentionally). I registered and voted at age 18 in my parents' city, then went off to college in another state, continuing to vote in my home state via absentee ballot. (I never registered in my temporary state even though they allowed college kids to do so.)
After college I moved back to my parents' state, in a different city, and registered to vote in my new precinct when I updated my driver's license. Now, eight years later, my name still appears on the voter rolls in my parents' precinct. (How do I know? My dad has been precinct chair and seen it.) My dad has pointed it out personally to the registrar that I'm on the rolls there, haven't voted there in eight years, and indeed am registered and voting somewhere else in the state, and that I should be removed. The registrar said he could and would do nothing about it.
Actually, I'm upset that I'm listed twice and wish they would remove me. My state keeps talking about one of those state-wide voter database laws, with clauses to kick anyone with questionable registrations. I worry one of these years that I'll walk in to vote and be told that I can't because my registration was questionable and I was kicked off the rolls in both places.
It might just be the company's pricing scheme, not a tax thing. We just got back to the U.S. from a vacation to Germany. While there, we visited the new BMW museum and chatted with one of their sales reps about the availability of a 3-series diesel convertible in the U.S. market.
The rep was very clear that their pricing scheme made it vital that I work with my local dealer in the U.S. to order such a car, even if I want to pick it up in Munich. A 3-series BMW lists for, say, $40,000 in the U.S. (and you can talk the dealer down to $35k), but the exact same car lists at e40.000 in Europe - as much as 50% more.
Why? Well why not? They don't sell their cars based on the cost to build, they sell them based on their perceived value given the prestige of the brand name. To avoid having to constantly fluctuate their prices, they set them to be equal dollars and euros. As it happens the very weak dollar has made them very, very cheap in the U.S. market - cheap enough that a European could find it wise to fly to the U.S., buy their new car, then ship it back home.
That's the same thing you heard about Macs, just with easier shipping costs.
Suppose there's a teenager who is gifted and has plans to become a doctor and cure cancer. Would it be "evil" of him to run into a burning building to save the life of an older lady? After all, the short-term benefit of keeping that old lady alive a little while longer are dwarfed by the long-term well-being of all human life if cancer was cured, and the teenager is risking it all by putting his life in danger to save another.
Let's say the teenager choses not to run in even though he could have saved her, and instead let's her die. Is that "good"? Or, because he put a slight risk to himself over the life of another, is that "evil"?
Don't those shares then act as a disincentive to jump ship? When a company hires a good CEO, shouldn't they expect at least five years of good service out of him? I don't see that as a problem because any good CEO can control his/her own destiny to last sufficiently long in the job and sell the shares.
Slashdot Mirror
You completely ignored parental involvement to go into your rant on teachers' unions.
Parental involvement in the education of their children is the primary reason why private schools do better. Those parents are willing to invest time and money into their kids education, and it shows.
Stop trying to champion your anti-union cause and start trying to figure out how to make parents care more about their kids.
Wouldn't you claim that your account was incorrectly debited $500 from an ATM transaction that you didn't make if you could get away with it? Sure you would. So would everyone else in your city.
Some people have morals even without the threat of punishment for misdeed.
That's just prone to fail. Were I to enter politics, it would be the end of my engineering career. After falling behind on my skills for four or six years, how many companies would want to hire me to do development work? What if they though I might decided to leave again to run for another office? My engineering career would be over.
So my options would be to find a career that I got based on my time in office, or to stay in office forever (if possible). Under your plan only the super rich (who never need work again) or the self-employed (who can afford to stop their business and pick it up again) would ever be able to run for office. And, to be honest, that's 70% of what's wrong with elected officials today.
So provide universal preventative care to all Americans for free, and let insurance companies continue to provide catastrophic insurance for major illnesses.
If someone walks into an emergency room having lived through a car accident, then yeah, the doctors will treat them regardless. But if a person gets cancer and requires expensive, lengthy, and regular treatments, they better have insurance or a good church or nonprofit to help them out, or they're not going to get the help they need.
Auto insurance companies don't offer plans that pay for 80% of your oil changes and brake services, but then decline to pay for your work at Jiffy Lube because, while they location is "in the plan", your work was performed by Bill, who's not a covered mechanic.
In fact, laws (at least in my state) require that auto insurance companies pay for repairs no matter who performs the work; they can't force you to use "their" mechanics in "their" approved facilities.
Catastrophic insurance is fine and good for both situations - if they pay out. Maybe the restructuring of health insurance should get those companies out of the routine care & maintenance - driving down the prices for the sort of care that prevents serious conditions - and leave the insurance companies to fight for that catastrophic coverage.
Indeed. We took my iPod Touch (and my wife's iPhone) with us to Austria and Germany for a vacation earlier this month, and were quite dismayed to find very few hotspots at all, and none free anywhere we went, from little town to major city like Vienna or Munich. Only the last three of our hotels (of seven) offered wifi for guests - and that was all we had.
(Perhaps there were hotspots in other places in the towns, away from the city centers and other public places that we visited. But without reliable web access we couldn't find them.)
Well if the citizens of Alaska decide that he can still represent them, and if he choses to stay in office, then the senate still has rules that will result in his censure:
- He'll be stripped of committee leadership positions (i.e. he won't be the ranking republican any more)
- He may lose those committee positions entirely
- It may be harder for him to beg favors (here, slip this into your bill) from colleagues who won't want to be tainted by him
In other words his influence will without a doubt diminish, or it will be eliminated. If Alaskans still like that, so be it.
It would be far cheaper to grant politicians in key positions generous allowances for the rest of their lives
Indeed. Instead, we have many people (including many on Slashdot) advocating for term limits, which force those politicians to immediately start thinking about their income post-service, and what they can do now to ensure it.
I've always thought that being a lifetime public servant, if your constituents allow it, is far better than being another revolving door politician heading from a law degree into a cushy PR position at a company paying for the laws you gave them.
Obviously Ted Stevens decided he could keep the office and get the payback, too; he should have retired six years ago, after which time he could have gotten all the house upgrades he desired for the work he'd already performed for the oil industry.
Shouldn't there be some law to protect the American people from legislators who commit felonies relating to their position?
if he is reelected
Didn't you answer your own question? We already have election law and it allows us to choose to replace our criminal legislators, or, if we feel that they are still able to competently serve us, choose to return them to office.
Fortunately most ballots have elections for many, many offices, some of which are very unimportant. I note, for example, that on the ballot I cast a few days ago, there were at least six judge positions up for election where there was only one candidate.
Theoretically, I could have voted for a made-up write-in candidate on one of those elections. It would in no way change the outcome, but I could then verify that my vote was counted (at least for that election) by confirming that vote.
Anyone remember those older ATMs that had the eight buttons, four on each side of the screen? Let's use those instead. Take the touchscreen out of the equation entirely.
I think every ATM I've used in the past two years still has those buttons, so I wouldn't call them "old". The credit card machines on most gas pumps use the same scheme.
I have problems using those every time. Since most machines are designed to be used by those in a wheelchair, I'm always looking down at the screen. It's very difficult to line up the text on the screen to the correct button, such as when I want to select Debit or Credit at the gas pump, or when I want to confirm if my pin was entered correctly at an ATM.
In other words, these have the exact same problem as the touch screens being used for voting.
For example, have each voter receive a receipt for their vote with a unique identifier code. This code would not make it possible to track a vote back to the individual who voted, but it allow them to log into a website the day after the election and confirm that their vote was accurately counted.
This would allow their vote to be bought or influenced, because their boss or local mob affiliate could be with them when they logged into the website to verify their vote, and "correct" the problem if they voted for the wrong candidate.
Your idea only works, perhaps, if the website confirms that your vote was counted, but cannot confirm who the vote was for.
Who's to say that these people aren't just liars?
I would rely on the video example of the problem occurring, as reproduced by an election official on a sample machine in the presence of a CNN reporter and camera crew.
So a claim was made as to a problem, and then it was reproduced by a (more) neutral third party in a (more) controlled setting. It's not scientific proof, but it's enough to show that they aren't just lying about a nonexistent UI flaw.
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
Energy content of gasoline --- 36.6 kWh/US gallon. Let's assume that your engine works at the absolute thermodynamic limit (40%) for a combustion engine so you get 16 KWH of work out of it.
And what if you can capture some of the excess heat energy and use it to charge an electrical assist? It seems that you just derived the maximum theoretical mpg for a combustion engine, but you didn't derive the theoretical mpg for a car that may have a combustion engine + other parts.
It probably depends on how you look at your use of the scope. If you define your need as "look at the signal" then it probably hasn't changed much. But if you define your need as, say "determine if the rise and fall time of these signals are in spec, and check the channel to channel skew", then you'll find that you can do a lot more with a modern scope.
Both boxes and PC plug-in scopes offer processing capabilities to do that sort of analysis. That's probably what you wanted anyway; you're just used to having to do that extra work yourself.
You mean like the "completely ridiculous" three-year-old Dell on my desktop, that was $800 new, which can stream via PCI Express at very usable speeds?
You do know that processing power in off-the-shelf PCs has grown tremendously in the last decade, right? Half of the other "box" scopes on the market probably run an embedded OS on a process anyway, making most of their features also "software".
Depending on the resources in your lab, and its purposes, you might find that a software-defined interface is more flexible for your needs. You can add any sort of interface or processing capabilities you want.
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/205615
If it's a research lab, something like the above may be just what you want. If it's a teaching lab, and you want students to have access to real knobs and buttons, then my experience is specifically with Tektronix scopes that I use at work. Again, without knowing your price range, there are a wide range of options out there.
At the low end, the TDS5054B series has an interface likely identical to that of your old scope; they did a reasonable job of replicating the older style of analog interface but added on some processing utilities.
http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/tds5000b/
I've used a scope the DPO400 series as well. I found it's interface to be rather, well, different at first, with all the options not in the places I'd usually expect them to be with my other Tek scopes. But I eventually grew used to it and found it all perfectly fine - except that the probe connections for some reason don't allow use of our current probes. They work fine on all other scopes, and I see no reason why they molded the plastic on this scope to exclude them.
http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/dpo4000/
Finally, at the high end, you have something like the DSA8200. This scope runs windows, which you can get to to do some data analysis, but the scope itself is controlled through the Tek application. It looks and behaves like a piece of software; there are buttons on the front for some features, but they are just macro buttons to execute the commands; it's often faster to just use a mouse since the buttons only offer limited functionality.
http://www.tek.com/products/oscilloscopes/dsa8200/
Note how the Tek scopes are all mostly more expensive than the NI scope, with more limited flexiblity in the interface. Again, if I knew what bandwidth you needed or what your budget was or the purpose of your lab, I could give better recommendations.
I agree that's popular, but I don't think it's a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to have every check-in be stable?
When adding a new feature that might take 2-3 weeks to be "stable", do you use a different system to back up your work each day? Wouldn't it be easier to make a branch you could commit to back up to each day, then merge it in when your branch is stable?
That seems very plausible. Vendors could see economies of scale by selling higher volumes in the U.S., while maintaining high margins for maximum profit in their home territory. This even allows for degradation of the brand name in the foreign territory while retaining the higher name at home.
I'm registered to vote twice (not intentionally). I registered and voted at age 18 in my parents' city, then went off to college in another state, continuing to vote in my home state via absentee ballot. (I never registered in my temporary state even though they allowed college kids to do so.)
After college I moved back to my parents' state, in a different city, and registered to vote in my new precinct when I updated my driver's license. Now, eight years later, my name still appears on the voter rolls in my parents' precinct. (How do I know? My dad has been precinct chair and seen it.) My dad has pointed it out personally to the registrar that I'm on the rolls there, haven't voted there in eight years, and indeed am registered and voting somewhere else in the state, and that I should be removed. The registrar said he could and would do nothing about it.
Actually, I'm upset that I'm listed twice and wish they would remove me. My state keeps talking about one of those state-wide voter database laws, with clauses to kick anyone with questionable registrations. I worry one of these years that I'll walk in to vote and be told that I can't because my registration was questionable and I was kicked off the rolls in both places.
It might just be the company's pricing scheme, not a tax thing. We just got back to the U.S. from a vacation to Germany. While there, we visited the new BMW museum and chatted with one of their sales reps about the availability of a 3-series diesel convertible in the U.S. market.
The rep was very clear that their pricing scheme made it vital that I work with my local dealer in the U.S. to order such a car, even if I want to pick it up in Munich. A 3-series BMW lists for, say, $40,000 in the U.S. (and you can talk the dealer down to $35k), but the exact same car lists at e40.000 in Europe - as much as 50% more.
Why? Well why not? They don't sell their cars based on the cost to build, they sell them based on their perceived value given the prestige of the brand name. To avoid having to constantly fluctuate their prices, they set them to be equal dollars and euros. As it happens the very weak dollar has made them very, very cheap in the U.S. market - cheap enough that a European could find it wise to fly to the U.S., buy their new car, then ship it back home.
That's the same thing you heard about Macs, just with easier shipping costs.
heh, that's pretty funny in that context
I think those definitions are naively simple.
Suppose there's a teenager who is gifted and has plans to become a doctor and cure cancer. Would it be "evil" of him to run into a burning building to save the life of an older lady? After all, the short-term benefit of keeping that old lady alive a little while longer are dwarfed by the long-term well-being of all human life if cancer was cured, and the teenager is risking it all by putting his life in danger to save another.
Let's say the teenager choses not to run in even though he could have saved her, and instead let's her die. Is that "good"? Or, because he put a slight risk to himself over the life of another, is that "evil"?
Don't those shares then act as a disincentive to jump ship? When a company hires a good CEO, shouldn't they expect at least five years of good service out of him? I don't see that as a problem because any good CEO can control his/her own destiny to last sufficiently long in the job and sell the shares.