The watch also doesn't cost you 50 cents every time somebody texts you while you're overseas with it turned on - a charge you have no way of avoiding short of turning off a phone, which makes it of limited use as a chronometer.
From what I've seen the issue is that first class on domestic US flights doesn't have the same meaning it does on international flights. Likewise, the lounges in US airports (dominated by domestic routes) are nowhere near as nice as the ones internationally (for US carriers - since all their traffic is international).
Likewise the tickets aren't even remotely comparable. A domestic coach ticket might be $500 round-trip, and first class might cost you a few hundred more. On the other hand, coach to Asia might cost $1k, with business class costing $10k, and I don't even want to think about what first costs. As a result, business class to Asia is a LOT nicer than first class domestically.
However, the food, increased service, and MUCH greater room often makes the upgrade nice. I doubt I'd ever pay cash for it, but I find it a useful way to use miles on long flights...
The most efficient and fastest route is to let the autopilot keep the plane in cruise until the last possible minute, and then cut the power to idle and glide down all the way to the airport at the maximum speed possible.
However, often ATC wants you to start down sooner for various reasons, but often with some level of discretion. The pilot can basically start down any time they want, and the autopilot just does a slow powered descent at less than the maximum descent rate until it intercepts the path it would have taken and then it starts a full-rate descent. Descending early wastes fuel and time, since you're spending more distance in thicker atmosphere where there is more drag and a lower ground-speed.
Or, if the pilot wants to keep the plane in cruise longer he can, but at that point he has to deploy the spoilers to increase the descent rate until he intercepts the most efficient path at which point he stows them and the autopilot continues on the normal path.
So, there is quite a bit of play. Running the spoilers a little doesn't really waste that much fuel, and neither does descending a little earlier.
Now, if you wait too long then you end up having to hold/etc since you can't get into the pattern at the right altitude without ripping the wings off the plane or making everybody scream.
The other thing that I'd add is that most of the integration that adds polish to Android isn't FOSS. Without proprietary code, I don't believe that Android syncs your contacts, has access to Gmail/calendar/etc, has the market, or even has the ability to make phone calls.
If you want to know what is free on Android download the source, build it, and install it on the emulator. I'd say install it on a phone but the FOSS version of Android doesn't support running on real hardware. You do get a few apps, but not many of the ones you'd normally use all the time. If you want a minimal amount of proprietary code install CyanogenMod on your phone, minus the gapps package.
Much of what makes Android successful is the integration, which isn't FOSS.
It seems to me that having the same exact attorneys on the case is a clear violation of legal standards. The whole point of having a lawyer is that you can confide in them. To have that lawyer turn around and file suit against you in a matter similar to one they represented you in completely violates the attorney-client privilege. Obviously I don't know the details here, but this sounds like the sort of thing that could even get somebody disbarred.
I'm sure the judge will investigate and bar anybody with insider knowledge about Samsung from being involved in the litigation. I don't know that this would extend to the entire firm.
On the other hand, if Samsung loses they might actually have a malpractice tort against the opposing counsel. After all, if they did a proper job advising Samsung regarding patents then they wouldn't have prevailed against Samsung in court. How's that for a no-win situation?
Yup, and that would be because despite the claims of the summary, any surface has a boundary layer of motionless air next to it, whether it is moving or not. I guess it might break down in a near-vacuum - but a fan in a vacuum seems a bit pointless...
So, how is source code "free speech" but binary isn't? You can read either out loud. Either is understandable to somebody trained to understand it - as with any language. Either can be processed directly by a microchip as well...
Uh, because the reason Nevada is a great place to store trash is the reason that they don't generate it - nobody lives in half of the state's territory.
The places that generate the most trash are the worst places to store it - they're populated almost by definition and they're all next to rivers and oceans and stuff, which is why everybody lives there...
Governers can and have called out the national guard (ie. state-controlled military) to prevent waste from entering the state. Tanks, helicopters, and a company of heavily armed, and highly motivated national guardsman is a pretty big deterrent to a mere shipping company. It inevitably ends up as a standoff where the Federal Government backs down, because frankly, how good does it look to the rest of the World if the US uses its military on one of its own states for not allowing themselves to be the waste dump of the most dangerous stuff on Earth - espescially when the waste comes from thousands of miles away?
Oh, brother. Nobody is going to start a civil war over waste management. This is just political grandstanding, like everything else having to do with waste disposal. Oh, and everything in your list basically amounts to NIMBY. The whole point of having a Federal Government is that it isn't the prerogative of every state to decide how everything works.
Yup, we make lots of long-term plans, we just never stick to them. Of course, almost all the plans promise the world in 15 years, with massive tax increases just after the end of the current president's second term.
After all, we're returning to the Moon in 2020, with our first robotic missions starting three years ago, and going to Mars sometime after that. Oh, and the medicare doughnut hole will be closed in 2020. I'm sure somebody has a plan to balance the federal budget by 2018 as well.
Yukka mountain is apparently a bit too wet, and if that really is the case it's just a matter of finding somewhere better.
I think the problem is the quest for the "perfect solution." We want some place where we can just dump stuff and then even if mankind goes extinct it will stay buried for 100k years or whatever. That just doesn't make sense.
The choice isn't between Yukka mountain or "someplace better" - it is between Yukka mountain and a bazillion containment pools and warehouse all over the place.
The solution is to manage the waste, not bury it. Stick it in Yukka mountain, and then monitor it. It will be safer there than anyplace it is currently stored in. If in 50k years things change, then move it. And by all means we should do whatever we can to reduce waste volume.
it's much cheaper to just set it and "forget it" than process it which costs money. It's such a shame that it has been like this in the U.S.A.
Well, like many things in the US it is only because of external costs. The taxpayers pay the cost of storage, so storage is "free." In the same way, taxpayers pay to blow up people in the middle east, treat lung cancer, and ultimately relocate cities, which makes burning oil "cheaper."
If taxpayers are going to foot the bill for storage then they should just reprocess the waste. We're just saving ourselves money. By all means charge some kind of tariff to de-externalize some of the cost, but while you're at it pay for troops in the Middle East using tariffs on imported oil. With the external costs factored in, let the market sort it out. Of course, many "market advocates" don't have anything like this in mind - they just want to avoid any regulation at all.
Uh, the point of producing things is improving the human condition. In the absence of production we all starve to death in a few weeks. Of course, in such a state we all revert to foraging, which is just very inefficient production without much trade. Then somebody figures out that if you plant crops and I keep out the foxes, then we can both share a lot more food than we'd have if we both just went around eating leaves or whatever. Then we figure out that the division of labor gets really complicated really fast and thus we invent money to make it easier to trade a little of one work for a little of the product of somebody else's work. Then the doctor can eat even when the farmer isn't sick.
The money itself has no true societal value aside from being a convenient way to decouple trades. I sell you a bandaged wound, and then I buy an apple, some milk, and a part for my car, the result is that you've traded a fixed arm for an apple, some milk, and some car parts, and yet you didn't have to walk around town with me making deals with everybody else as I applied a few stitches at a time.
Now somebody comes along and convinces everybody to buy famine insurance. Indeed, they convince the bankers to require it before giving people money to buy seed. Then the bankers realize that they can make some money by buying their own famine insurance so that if there is a famine they get paid twice. Then the bankers realize that they can make even more money by selling famine insurance to each other as well since there hasn't been a famine in 50 years, so what could go wrong? Then one year there is a famine and we find out every $10k field is covered by $475M in famine insurance but nobody has the cash to pay it out and nobody can keep track of who owes money to who since both sides of the hundreds of transactions per field have been split and traded thousands of times. Now, in such a situation which is a more productive solution - investing in better farming technologies to actually feed people during a famine (which is the whole point of having a farm), or coming up with better computer programs so that next time we can have $900M in corn rust insurance per farm but lots of charts showing how nothing bad can come of it?
Yup, I've seen this firsthand in a different high-margin industry. The bean-counters will take a product with a 500% markup and try to eek 5% off the costs of manufacture. Then suddenly they start having supply problems, and that means lost sales. Those sales would have had a 500% markup (whoops - make that 505%). But, the defective products are 5% cheaper to throw away.
A bean-counter will put in jeopardy a million dollar profit to save a few dollars, unless you can quantify the risk of losing the sale. There is never such a thing as "enough" for them, but sooner or later you can't cut any more without the whole thing coming crashing down.
My whole point is that there is fundamentally no real fundamental difference between source code and binary code in the first place, so it seems a bit silly to treat them differently from a legal perspective. The difference at best comes down to intended use. If I email you a binary and tell you not to run it, does that make it non-infringing? If I email you source code and tell you to compile/run it, does that make it infringing? Where do you draw the line? I suspect it would come down to communication of intent, and if that is what we want to look at then why bother to distinguish between source and binary as it is completely orthogonal.
I was anticipating the argument that the difference between source and binary is that the former is human-readable. However, there is nothing that really makes source more readable than binary, other than the fact that it is usually written in languages more similar to European languages than the x86 instruction set or whatever. In fact, if you educated somebody in China WITHOUT any exposure to any European language (including programming languages that contain European words), and taught them to a graduate-level in Computer Science, they might find it easier to read binary code in a hex editor or dis-assembler output than in C.
And, for the record, I have spent time trying to learn Kanji and Hiragana, and the former is barely different from Chinese, having traveled to Japan several times. I am shocked as the next guy when people utter racial slurs, and I don't really consider picking a random language that not many who read Slashdot are likely to know as an example a slur. I could have picked French, but the fact is that French is fairly comprehensible to most of those around here. Maybe next time I'll pick Cuneiform, if that isn't considered a slur on archaeologists the world over.
What system would you propose? Ultimately whoever has the guns gets to decide what the rules are. Unless you want to start a revolution that would be the Federal Government.
And courts are more than happy to interpret laws applied to ordinary people too. Oh, and the executive branch is more than happy to interpret court interpretations. In the end everybody gets away with whatever they can get away with, from the top to the bottom, and including you and me as well...
Agreed. People who are truly good across the board are rare, but there is no excuse for not hiring them for executive positions. The problem is that executives are promoted from below, and the whole manage-by-spreadsheet mindset is too widespread...
Rather than reply to 5 different people below, I'll just reply once here.
I agree that in this case he might have grounds for a suit, even in an at-will state, since the firing is clearly linked to the vacation which was authorized (assuming he can prove that all this actually happened).
Most companies wouldn't fire somebody this way. They'd not complain at all about the guy not being back to fix the server during vacation. Then, three months later the guy is laid off as part of a large-scale restructuring or whatever. There would be no clear link between the cause and the firing, and the only reason given would be "we no longer require your services" or whatever.
If you want to fire somebody in an at-will state you don't ever give them a reason. You just pay them for the time they've worked and say "thanks for all your help but we don't need you any longer." The effect is the same as throwing them physically out the door, but it makes it almost impossible to sue.
I know anytime I go on vacation, it causes major headaches for those that try to prevent me from being completely buried by the time I get back...But I'm always buried when I return.
The problem I've seen is annual project planning. I'm given a list of big things I need to do by such-and-such a date. I can take off any time I want in-between now and that date, but I still have to complete the project. My being gone just tends to make whatever I'm working on stall, and thus going on vacation is self-inflicted punishment.
On the other hand, I do prefer this to having some manager tell me I'm not allowed to go on vacation or whatever.
Still, when everything is chronically understaffed it just takes incredible self-discipline to allow things to slide when I'm out...
For an IT person to be successful, they need to learn how their management hears things, and learn to talk to them in a way they will hear. Which means to get where you need to be and to get what you need you have to sell it by talking to them at their level. That may not be easy. Sometimes it involves golf games, sometimes fishing, whatever it takes to get to know management to understand what it is they see and hear (we all have filters)....
Should it be this way? Probably not, but it is, so we in IT have to learn to deal with it.
And this is why small businesses tend to get IT much more than large ones. If I'm the guy running IT for some 50 person company and have an idea that will make the company a load of money, I don't need to take the owner golfing and fishing to get him to listen to me. The fact that as owner he pockets every dime the company makes is all the motivation he needs.
The reason you have to take your manager fishing or whatever is that ultimately he doesn't care much about the welfare of the company - just his own compensation. Your "companionship" is just part of the package, especially if it involves groveling.
Managers just maintain the status quo, and cut the obligatory 10% off their budgets annually until things start falling apart, and then justify some huge project to rescue the company which makes them look good. Usually they move around often enough that nobody has to answer embarrassing questions.
Sounds like my work. Looking at my immediate workgroup there are about 5 direct contributors in it. The manager does no real direct work. In total there are 5 managers above us (not counting the board of directors). Those managers are all very "busy" but the reality is that all they do is attend meetings, and pass around spreadsheets. I'm not even including project managers/etc who sometimes do take on much more direct roles in the count of managers.
And my situation is typical to better-than-typical.
Companies just cut and cut until things start to break left and right, and then suddenly there are millions of dollars available to fix things. Whatever...
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th amendment forbids Congress the power to default on government obligations. The Supreme Court, per the Constitution, is the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.
In any case, nobody is going to default on anything. They'll just keep printing money. A few billions more dollars in circulation will not have the same effect on the US economy as defaulting on even a single $25 savings bond. And, as numerous others have pointed out, the US can solve this problem at any time by spending less, and taxing more to pay for the excess of the past. We're nowhere near the point where recovery is going to be impossible.
Just call them HD Video Cables. The average consumer doesn't know what an "RCA" cable is either, but they do know what a "Video" cable is that looks like the socket it plugs into. Besides, they just buy whatever the guy at the store tells them to, and of course they get the Monster digital cable since the 6' cable is rated for 2 mile runs.
Stop trolling, if you did not speak English this would also be unreadable to you.
Woosh!
Of course, but I do speak English, so I picked Chinese as a random example of a language I don't understand. And you're just proving my point - binary code is no less human readable than any language that you don't happen to know.
Slashdot Mirror
The watch also doesn't cost you 50 cents every time somebody texts you while you're overseas with it turned on - a charge you have no way of avoiding short of turning off a phone, which makes it of limited use as a chronometer.
From what I've seen the issue is that first class on domestic US flights doesn't have the same meaning it does on international flights. Likewise, the lounges in US airports (dominated by domestic routes) are nowhere near as nice as the ones internationally (for US carriers - since all their traffic is international).
Likewise the tickets aren't even remotely comparable. A domestic coach ticket might be $500 round-trip, and first class might cost you a few hundred more. On the other hand, coach to Asia might cost $1k, with business class costing $10k, and I don't even want to think about what first costs. As a result, business class to Asia is a LOT nicer than first class domestically.
However, the food, increased service, and MUCH greater room often makes the upgrade nice. I doubt I'd ever pay cash for it, but I find it a useful way to use miles on long flights...
That and when the descent can be made.
The most efficient and fastest route is to let the autopilot keep the plane in cruise until the last possible minute, and then cut the power to idle and glide down all the way to the airport at the maximum speed possible.
However, often ATC wants you to start down sooner for various reasons, but often with some level of discretion. The pilot can basically start down any time they want, and the autopilot just does a slow powered descent at less than the maximum descent rate until it intercepts the path it would have taken and then it starts a full-rate descent. Descending early wastes fuel and time, since you're spending more distance in thicker atmosphere where there is more drag and a lower ground-speed.
Or, if the pilot wants to keep the plane in cruise longer he can, but at that point he has to deploy the spoilers to increase the descent rate until he intercepts the most efficient path at which point he stows them and the autopilot continues on the normal path.
So, there is quite a bit of play. Running the spoilers a little doesn't really waste that much fuel, and neither does descending a little earlier.
Now, if you wait too long then you end up having to hold/etc since you can't get into the pattern at the right altitude without ripping the wings off the plane or making everybody scream.
The other thing that I'd add is that most of the integration that adds polish to Android isn't FOSS. Without proprietary code, I don't believe that Android syncs your contacts, has access to Gmail/calendar/etc, has the market, or even has the ability to make phone calls.
If you want to know what is free on Android download the source, build it, and install it on the emulator. I'd say install it on a phone but the FOSS version of Android doesn't support running on real hardware. You do get a few apps, but not many of the ones you'd normally use all the time. If you want a minimal amount of proprietary code install CyanogenMod on your phone, minus the gapps package.
Much of what makes Android successful is the integration, which isn't FOSS.
It seems to me that having the same exact attorneys on the case is a clear violation of legal standards. The whole point of having a lawyer is that you can confide in them. To have that lawyer turn around and file suit against you in a matter similar to one they represented you in completely violates the attorney-client privilege. Obviously I don't know the details here, but this sounds like the sort of thing that could even get somebody disbarred.
I'm sure the judge will investigate and bar anybody with insider knowledge about Samsung from being involved in the litigation. I don't know that this would extend to the entire firm.
On the other hand, if Samsung loses they might actually have a malpractice tort against the opposing counsel. After all, if they did a proper job advising Samsung regarding patents then they wouldn't have prevailed against Samsung in court. How's that for a no-win situation?
Yup, and that would be because despite the claims of the summary, any surface has a boundary layer of motionless air next to it, whether it is moving or not. I guess it might break down in a near-vacuum - but a fan in a vacuum seems a bit pointless...
So, how is source code "free speech" but binary isn't? You can read either out loud. Either is understandable to somebody trained to understand it - as with any language. Either can be processed directly by a microchip as well...
Uh, because the reason Nevada is a great place to store trash is the reason that they don't generate it - nobody lives in half of the state's territory.
The places that generate the most trash are the worst places to store it - they're populated almost by definition and they're all next to rivers and oceans and stuff, which is why everybody lives there...
Governers can and have called out the national guard (ie. state-controlled military) to prevent waste from entering the state. Tanks, helicopters, and a company of heavily armed, and highly motivated national guardsman is a pretty big deterrent to a mere shipping company. It inevitably ends up as a standoff where the Federal Government backs down, because frankly, how good does it look to the rest of the World if the US uses its military on one of its own states for not allowing themselves to be the waste dump of the most dangerous stuff on Earth - espescially when the waste comes from thousands of miles away?
Oh, brother. Nobody is going to start a civil war over waste management. This is just political grandstanding, like everything else having to do with waste disposal. Oh, and everything in your list basically amounts to NIMBY. The whole point of having a Federal Government is that it isn't the prerogative of every state to decide how everything works.
Yup, we make lots of long-term plans, we just never stick to them. Of course, almost all the plans promise the world in 15 years, with massive tax increases just after the end of the current president's second term.
After all, we're returning to the Moon in 2020, with our first robotic missions starting three years ago, and going to Mars sometime after that. Oh, and the medicare doughnut hole will be closed in 2020. I'm sure somebody has a plan to balance the federal budget by 2018 as well.
Yukka mountain is apparently a bit too wet, and if that really is the case it's just a matter of finding somewhere better.
I think the problem is the quest for the "perfect solution." We want some place where we can just dump stuff and then even if mankind goes extinct it will stay buried for 100k years or whatever. That just doesn't make sense.
The choice isn't between Yukka mountain or "someplace better" - it is between Yukka mountain and a bazillion containment pools and warehouse all over the place.
The solution is to manage the waste, not bury it. Stick it in Yukka mountain, and then monitor it. It will be safer there than anyplace it is currently stored in. If in 50k years things change, then move it. And by all means we should do whatever we can to reduce waste volume.
it's much cheaper to just set it and "forget it" than process it which costs money. It's such a shame that it has been like this in the U.S.A.
Well, like many things in the US it is only because of external costs. The taxpayers pay the cost of storage, so storage is "free." In the same way, taxpayers pay to blow up people in the middle east, treat lung cancer, and ultimately relocate cities, which makes burning oil "cheaper."
If taxpayers are going to foot the bill for storage then they should just reprocess the waste. We're just saving ourselves money. By all means charge some kind of tariff to de-externalize some of the cost, but while you're at it pay for troops in the Middle East using tariffs on imported oil. With the external costs factored in, let the market sort it out. Of course, many "market advocates" don't have anything like this in mind - they just want to avoid any regulation at all.
Uh, the point of producing things is improving the human condition. In the absence of production we all starve to death in a few weeks. Of course, in such a state we all revert to foraging, which is just very inefficient production without much trade. Then somebody figures out that if you plant crops and I keep out the foxes, then we can both share a lot more food than we'd have if we both just went around eating leaves or whatever. Then we figure out that the division of labor gets really complicated really fast and thus we invent money to make it easier to trade a little of one work for a little of the product of somebody else's work. Then the doctor can eat even when the farmer isn't sick.
The money itself has no true societal value aside from being a convenient way to decouple trades. I sell you a bandaged wound, and then I buy an apple, some milk, and a part for my car, the result is that you've traded a fixed arm for an apple, some milk, and some car parts, and yet you didn't have to walk around town with me making deals with everybody else as I applied a few stitches at a time.
Now somebody comes along and convinces everybody to buy famine insurance. Indeed, they convince the bankers to require it before giving people money to buy seed. Then the bankers realize that they can make some money by buying their own famine insurance so that if there is a famine they get paid twice. Then the bankers realize that they can make even more money by selling famine insurance to each other as well since there hasn't been a famine in 50 years, so what could go wrong? Then one year there is a famine and we find out every $10k field is covered by $475M in famine insurance but nobody has the cash to pay it out and nobody can keep track of who owes money to who since both sides of the hundreds of transactions per field have been split and traded thousands of times. Now, in such a situation which is a more productive solution - investing in better farming technologies to actually feed people during a famine (which is the whole point of having a farm), or coming up with better computer programs so that next time we can have $900M in corn rust insurance per farm but lots of charts showing how nothing bad can come of it?
Yup, I've seen this firsthand in a different high-margin industry. The bean-counters will take a product with a 500% markup and try to eek 5% off the costs of manufacture. Then suddenly they start having supply problems, and that means lost sales. Those sales would have had a 500% markup (whoops - make that 505%). But, the defective products are 5% cheaper to throw away.
A bean-counter will put in jeopardy a million dollar profit to save a few dollars, unless you can quantify the risk of losing the sale. There is never such a thing as "enough" for them, but sooner or later you can't cut any more without the whole thing coming crashing down.
My whole point is that there is fundamentally no real fundamental difference between source code and binary code in the first place, so it seems a bit silly to treat them differently from a legal perspective. The difference at best comes down to intended use. If I email you a binary and tell you not to run it, does that make it non-infringing? If I email you source code and tell you to compile/run it, does that make it infringing? Where do you draw the line? I suspect it would come down to communication of intent, and if that is what we want to look at then why bother to distinguish between source and binary as it is completely orthogonal.
I was anticipating the argument that the difference between source and binary is that the former is human-readable. However, there is nothing that really makes source more readable than binary, other than the fact that it is usually written in languages more similar to European languages than the x86 instruction set or whatever. In fact, if you educated somebody in China WITHOUT any exposure to any European language (including programming languages that contain European words), and taught them to a graduate-level in Computer Science, they might find it easier to read binary code in a hex editor or dis-assembler output than in C.
And, for the record, I have spent time trying to learn Kanji and Hiragana, and the former is barely different from Chinese, having traveled to Japan several times. I am shocked as the next guy when people utter racial slurs, and I don't really consider picking a random language that not many who read Slashdot are likely to know as an example a slur. I could have picked French, but the fact is that French is fairly comprehensible to most of those around here. Maybe next time I'll pick Cuneiform, if that isn't considered a slur on archaeologists the world over.
What system would you propose? Ultimately whoever has the guns gets to decide what the rules are. Unless you want to start a revolution that would be the Federal Government.
And courts are more than happy to interpret laws applied to ordinary people too. Oh, and the executive branch is more than happy to interpret court interpretations. In the end everybody gets away with whatever they can get away with, from the top to the bottom, and including you and me as well...
Agreed. People who are truly good across the board are rare, but there is no excuse for not hiring them for executive positions. The problem is that executives are promoted from below, and the whole manage-by-spreadsheet mindset is too widespread...
Rather than reply to 5 different people below, I'll just reply once here.
I agree that in this case he might have grounds for a suit, even in an at-will state, since the firing is clearly linked to the vacation which was authorized (assuming he can prove that all this actually happened).
Most companies wouldn't fire somebody this way. They'd not complain at all about the guy not being back to fix the server during vacation. Then, three months later the guy is laid off as part of a large-scale restructuring or whatever. There would be no clear link between the cause and the firing, and the only reason given would be "we no longer require your services" or whatever.
If you want to fire somebody in an at-will state you don't ever give them a reason. You just pay them for the time they've worked and say "thanks for all your help but we don't need you any longer." The effect is the same as throwing them physically out the door, but it makes it almost impossible to sue.
I know anytime I go on vacation, it causes major headaches for those that try to prevent me from being completely buried by the time I get back...But I'm always buried when I return.
The problem I've seen is annual project planning. I'm given a list of big things I need to do by such-and-such a date. I can take off any time I want in-between now and that date, but I still have to complete the project. My being gone just tends to make whatever I'm working on stall, and thus going on vacation is self-inflicted punishment.
On the other hand, I do prefer this to having some manager tell me I'm not allowed to go on vacation or whatever.
Still, when everything is chronically understaffed it just takes incredible self-discipline to allow things to slide when I'm out...
For an IT person to be successful, they need to learn how their management hears things, and learn to talk to them in a way they will hear. Which means to get where you need to be and to get what you need you have to sell it by talking to them at their level. That may not be easy. Sometimes it involves golf games, sometimes fishing, whatever it takes to get to know management to understand what it is they see and hear (we all have filters)....
Should it be this way? Probably not, but it is, so we in IT have to learn to deal with it.
And this is why small businesses tend to get IT much more than large ones. If I'm the guy running IT for some 50 person company and have an idea that will make the company a load of money, I don't need to take the owner golfing and fishing to get him to listen to me. The fact that as owner he pockets every dime the company makes is all the motivation he needs.
The reason you have to take your manager fishing or whatever is that ultimately he doesn't care much about the welfare of the company - just his own compensation. Your "companionship" is just part of the package, especially if it involves groveling.
Managers just maintain the status quo, and cut the obligatory 10% off their budgets annually until things start falling apart, and then justify some huge project to rescue the company which makes them look good. Usually they move around often enough that nobody has to answer embarrassing questions.
Sounds like my work. Looking at my immediate workgroup there are about 5 direct contributors in it. The manager does no real direct work. In total there are 5 managers above us (not counting the board of directors). Those managers are all very "busy" but the reality is that all they do is attend meetings, and pass around spreadsheets. I'm not even including project managers/etc who sometimes do take on much more direct roles in the count of managers.
And my situation is typical to better-than-typical.
Companies just cut and cut until things start to break left and right, and then suddenly there are millions of dollars available to fix things. Whatever...
OK, how the fuck do you get from : VALIDITY SHALL NOT BE QUESTIONED
to
Defaults are prohibited?
Simple, see Perry vs US.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th amendment forbids Congress the power to default on government obligations. The Supreme Court, per the Constitution, is the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.
In any case, nobody is going to default on anything. They'll just keep printing money. A few billions more dollars in circulation will not have the same effect on the US economy as defaulting on even a single $25 savings bond. And, as numerous others have pointed out, the US can solve this problem at any time by spending less, and taxing more to pay for the excess of the past. We're nowhere near the point where recovery is going to be impossible.
Yes, but most people who want higher taxes want those taxes to be on somebody else, for the most part.
I'm not saying this is wrong, but in America everybody wants their free pony... Or, at least a majority do, which is all it takes.
Just call them HD Video Cables. The average consumer doesn't know what an "RCA" cable is either, but they do know what a "Video" cable is that looks like the socket it plugs into. Besides, they just buy whatever the guy at the store tells them to, and of course they get the Monster digital cable since the 6' cable is rated for 2 mile runs.
Stop trolling, if you did not speak English this would also be unreadable to you.
Woosh!
Of course, but I do speak English, so I picked Chinese as a random example of a language I don't understand. And you're just proving my point - binary code is no less human readable than any language that you don't happen to know.