Uh, I was not advocating that capital punishment was logical, appropriate, or justified. I was merely pointing out that it is a bit of a stretch to compare the well-debated position of a society to the unilateral actions of a corporate boardmember.
Popular opinion does not determine morality, but clearly the majority position does command a far greater moral authority than an individual acting out of greed.
Funny how it's "democratically-established laws" when one agrees with it, but a 'corrupt, rigged, anti-democratic assault on personal rights' when one doesn't, isn't it?
I do believe I stated clearly that majority rule does not make right. However, it does place the matter into a different category.
There are tons of laws that I disagree with. However, I don't view a local police officer enforcing an order of the court repossessing a car from a grandmother to give it to the RIAA in the same way that I'd view the RIAA hiring a private security company to steal cars. Both may be unjust, but they are not equivalent situations.
Having said that, what I do have a real problem with is when individuals and society conflate punishment with retribution and/or vengeance...
I agree with you completely - however there is a difference when it is done by individuals vs society. And while there are a broad spectrum of opinions I think you'll find that many people who advocate capital punishment do not do so out of a desire for retribution or vengeance. That in itself doesn't make them right, but if you're going to debate an issue at least characterize the opposition view correctly.
Well, she did something that a lot of people with a lot of power have historically done. She assumed the moral high ground. In our society, it's illegal to murder people. Well, unless you're in Texas or Virginia where they appearantly take it upon themselves to murder someone as a penalty of justice. Kind of ironic that if someone commits a crime, we as a society take it upon ourselves to then commit what would normally be considered a great crime unto them.
Uh, without going into a dive into the morality of the death penalty, you do realize that it isn't just a few people in power who are enforcing it, but rather the democratically-established laws of the government? There is in fact a difference between the chair of the board of some company "assuming the high ground" and the voters of a nation writing laws. Sure, just because it is law doesn't make it right, but the people of a nation have a far greater moral authority than individuals acting in their own capacity or as heads of businesses.
If the phone records had been retrieved under warrant as part of a criminal investigation (into something other than exercise-of-free-speech) nobody would be complaining about it - this is a normal function of government. The issue is that some private citizen decided to exercise power in violation of the law in order to make money.
Now, the morality of capital punishment is obviously a controversial one, but you can't equate the actions of government endorsed by the voters with the actions of a lone person. It doesn't make it right, but the fact is that the voters of the states you mention do in fact support capital punishment - which makes your analogy flawed.
The people repeating those lies either know this and don't care, don't know this and don't care, or have trusted one of the first two.
Or perhaps they just don't live in CA?
Not having lived there I can't vouch for the quality of the schools - honestly, I'm skeptical but you might be right. However, if in fact your point is true then the solution is to embrace the laws your describe elsewhere. It certainly is not the standard state of affairs in the US.
Know any incompentent assholes in business? Politics? Academia? The military? Church? Why aren't they gone?
Sure, but the difference is that in most of these areas there are either some natural controls, lower impact of the problem, or free choice. If an idiot is running the church down the street there is usually a church one block further down. In the military the nature of the beast tends to be performance-oriented (at least where the goal is "blow up that building" - less so when it is "avoid torturing prisoners"), so it tends to self-mitigate. In business the owner is going to step in if things get out of control, and in any case I can choose which businesses I work for and purchase from. In politics most of the sheer incompetency is in the bureaucracy and they don't actually do anything positive or negative other than waste money. Education has a big impact on ordinary middle-class citizens, and this is why it is a hot political issue.
I guess my point is that sure, life isn't always fair, and nothing in life is 100% efficient. However, the fact that nothing on earth is perfect doesn't mean that you can't correct massive problems when you see them. No business is 100% perfect, but they're a heck of a lot closer to it than the typical public school.
I can certainly tell you that the massive influx of money is NOT going towards my salary. Everyone I know with a college degree earns generally far more than I do....snip... I am a science geek, I live, eat, and breathe science, however, most science teachers I know (especially at the middle school level) are NOT science oriented people.
Could it be that most people you know with college degrees are pursuing technical careers (science, IT, etc)?
One issue with public schools is the union - your salary is based on your seniority, PERIOD. Just like with aireline pilots the people working their first ten years barely make enough to live, and the ones in their last ten years are living quite well (especially for having 3 months off).
Science teachers get paid the same as English teachers. Anybody who is good with science/technology can make a mint in industry, so you end up with those who either really love the job (probably including yourself), or those who are incompetent (most of the rest). On the other hand, you may find decent teachers in the liberal arts, as there is little else you can do with this background other than teach (hey, nothing wrong with this, but wages are going to be low as a result).
No company pays its Java developers the same as its help desk analysts. Teaching positions should be paid at market prices. Along with this there must be accountability - if somebody isn't cutting it performance-wise they should be fired. This will certainly bring up the question of how to evaluate performance - the answer is simple. If their boss doesn't like them, they can hit the streets (to the extent this is allowed by state labor law). Almost all jobs have a degree of subjectivity when it comes to performance evaluation - in most states the boss can hire or fire at will. If the boss does a bad job of exercising this discretion, it will show and he will get fired by his boss. School boards should demand performance, and should audit performance just like any company board would.
Pay well and demand more, and there will be results.
Of course, this does not deal with another HUGE problem - the students and their parents. However, this problem is not so easily solved, and its existence should not be considered an excuse to tolerate poor teacher performance. Both problems need to be dealt with, but short of harsh measures I can't think of any fixes for the social aspects offhand.
Whether or not they call it "tenure" they almost certainly use a seniority system. That means that if for whatever reason a teacher needs to be fired, it is always the most recently hired one. If a teacher has been around for 20 years and wants to coast, as long as they clock in and out on time and make a slight effort at looking like they're teaching, they're essentially untouchable. That's just how unions work - and a big reason why union shops tend to be uncompetitive.
Well, in theory with competition the schools that don't fire the right people will just go out of business. The only way big corporations can survive with bad management is when government allows the stifling of competition (often via regulation, or failure to control monopolies).
This is false. This is beyond false. This is a vicious lie, repeated by witting or unwitting dupes of men with business plans to make money setting up for-their-personal-profit schools.
Uh, what public school are you thinking of?
I had a science teacher who gave a student a hard time for the crazy belief that a whale's blowhole was used for breathing, and who was certain that all aneroid barometers used units of millibars (despite the display ranging from 28-32). An important grading criteria was that notes were a verbatim copy of her overheads.
Another public school teacher that I knew had a teaching style that consisted of putting up one overhead at a time for students to copy while he graded papers, stopping only to inquire as to whether the students were ready for the next overhead.
One infamous teacher was frequently reamed out the day after grades were turned in year after year by a significant number of her students (this was an AP class I might comment). It was not infrequent for her students to require psychological counselling, although students didn't have much choice if they wanted to take the top-track class in her subject.
These issues were uncorrectable because teachers hold tremendous power over students and are almost impossible to discipline in any way. Parents avoid getting involved as their children will just be penalized, and even school administrators feel helpless to do anything.
Perhaps in some states the teacher's union is not nearly as entrenched, but in many states it is established as a matter of law - schools are not permitted by law to hire non-union teachers.
I'm sure that some public schools are wonderful paradises, but this is not a typical condition.
Actually, it works without being suid, but cannot set realtime priority or stuff like that.
In theory setting cdrecord suid isn't a huge liability. If designed right it should raise its priority, and immediate drop root privs. If it does this before processing input it would be ressitant to most attacks. The same applies to a lot of other software which drops root privs like a hot potato - the window of vulnerability is small and a careful audit of the code that runs as root is not difficult.
The IRIX utils were a different beast - they needed to perform privileged operations after receiving user input. So, an audit would have to cover the entirety of a windowed software package, with a ton of library calls.
Note to the wise - when your OS includes multi-MB suid executables you're going to be in for trouble... I'm sure the same applies to a few linux distros, but I for one am happy when kde asks me for my root password when it needs to do something dangerous...
It is a lousy position to have to take, but if you don't you just get what you have coming to you. For a while my wife worked a retail-oriented position that was appointment driven. They would book 12 people in an hour when at most they could really handle 4-5, but this was company policy. Customers would ROUTINELY wait upwards of 2+ hours with children in tow. Then they would be irate, and she would have to deal with them.
I felt horrible for her position, but couldn't agree with her position that the customers should just make the most of it. I encouraged her to find work elsewhere - the stress just wasn't worth it.
While I do feel bad for people in these bottom-rung positions, you can't just accept lousy service merely because the person giving it to you seems nice. They need to be empowered to give good service and not settle for less. They can't complain to their bosses, so we need to do so for them...
Couldn't agree more regarding the/dev/hd? support.
When I was still in linux learning mode I never did bother to get my cd-r to work - it was WAY too much of a pain. I didn't see the point in getting scsi emulation working on my cd-drive, when the think worked just fine as an ide drive with EVERYTHING by cdrecord. Isn't the whole idea of device files to shield the user from the low-level details? What if some cd-burner comes along and isn't even remotely scsi-based - shouldn't the low-level details be a matter of kernel drivers only?
While I do sympathize tremendously with the people in customer service roles, the fact is that the reason that they have no power is that their employer decided to make it that way. Therefore, when they can't help an irate customer the fault lies with their boss, not the customer.
If everybody gave the people on the bottom of the totem pole major attitude when stuff like this happens, and held up lines, etc., then there would be a change. For one, nobody would want these jobs, and therefore wages would rise - costing employers. Business would suffer as people would avoid these establishments since they don't want to end up in line behind an irate customer that wants to monopolize the line for two hours. The result would be that company policy would change.
If you work for a lousy employer then their policy becomes your policy. It stinks, and it is unfair, and I agree that most of those bottom-rung people only wish they could help. But, if they are allowed to be left alone then companies will get away with their main goal - to put some poor kid in a position of responsibility so that customers feel sorry for them and drop their gripe against the company.
Well, the only thing the insurance really needs to guarantee is that I got the house legally. The only way I should be able to lose it after that point is to sell it myself or otherwise enter into agreements on my own.
If somebody else tries to sell the house for me, I have not entered into an agreement, therefore I have not sold house, and therefore the house is not sold. All I should have to do is claim that it is mine and whoever bought it loses it. They would then have a claim against their title insurance.
The whole concept though is kind of silly - if all it takes to ensure that a house sale is legit is to do a database search then there really isn't much need for the insurance. On the other hand, if there is a lot more uncertainty then we need to expect insurers to actually pay out when something goes wrong...
title insurance company is just that - titles, leins, loans - paperwork recorded against the property
If the only purpose of the insurance is to check if paperwork is recorded against the property, then what is the point?
Wouldn't it just make sense for the bank to look up the paperwork themselves?
If the law is going to make you shell out hundreds of dollars for insurance, then there should be at least some scenario where the insurance will provide some benefit.
In theory the insurance is priced to cover expected losses, and spread them out. If you're going to owe the insurance company your life, why bother paying for the insurance at all? Just don't carry any insurance and then you owe the victim your life - not much difference from the position of the person paying for the mistake.
And the logic behind malpractice insurance is that anybody in any line of professional work is going to eventually make a mistake, no matter how hard they try to avoid this. Rather than spending exorbitant sums to prevent this from ever happening it makes more sense to spread out the cost of these mistakes so that essentially those who do not suffer from them end up paying for those who do.
No question that not having insurnace makes people more careful - and that applies to any aspect of life. People without health insurance tend to avoid skiing...:)
I should hope so. You're almost always required to buy it, for a considerable sum. And the only task the insurer has is to make sure the person who is selling the home owns it free and clear...
Pretty soon we'll be walking into Walmart with a big sign on the door saying "Everything in this store is FREE!!!!" with a note in 1-point font that a nominal restocking fee will be assessed for each item at the register.
I'm with you - advertise what it costs. It is one thing if it is a tax based on the final price. It is another thing if you're charging a "gas price surcharge" or a "electricity rate hike surcharge" or a "upstream bandwidth fee". When you buy a spatula at walmart it isn't 50 cents plus separate fees for assembly, pastic, steel, transport, wages for all the above, lunch for the trucker, etc...
If they just generate an SMTP error then the sending server should bounce the message. Now, if they say that the message was deliverd and don't do it, they're violating the RFCs and users are going to get annoyed when their messages just vanish without nary a warning. There really isn't any reason why ISPs can't at least generate bounce messages.
You save for a house don't you? Why should you not do the same thing for kids, those are bare min. 18+ year investments!!! It is like credit card debt...if you get into it without thinking...you gotta do what it takes to make it up and get out of it.
A few minor issues with this:
1. If people "invested" in their kids only so long as it was financially sensible we would be extinct as a species - rarely do kids pay back their parents on a financial level (unless you're in a 3rd-world kids-live-with-parents system).
2. Recently my wife and I broke down and bought a moderately-priced video camera (we're talking $300 here). Technically it might not be the best time for us to spend discretionarily, but if we waited until we have $100k in the bank the kids would be grown up, and then what would be the point? The same applies in many cases - most people with kids do not have a ton of spare cash until they are old - a time when they least need the cash. Going into debt allows people to spend money while they are young. In some sense it makes sense to target savings/debt so that you are in the maximum amount of debt possible at death.
3. Kids are a non-refundable investment. If somebody overspends on a car, they can at least get 80% of it back by turning around and selling it - or they can just stop making payments and the lender takes care of the details. You can't just return your kids to the store if your life takes a turn for the worse job-wise.
I do agree with you that people do need to plan for kids, but having 6-12 months of salary just sitting in the back "just in case" is a difficult savings goal. Many couples will not have the ability to save that much until a fairly late age, and starting late with having kids introduces a whole bunch of other issues that aren't great for families.
Don't get me wrong - I see your point and actually used to be an advocate of it myself. I am probably on the fence even today. However, despite having finances in pretty good order I found it difficult to raise kids - especially on a single income. There are all kinds of expenses that can come up, and the more you have the more you tend to spend on them.
Interestingly enough I've tended to take the opposite approach. I rarely check my voicemails and almost never answer the phone (I have a few exceptions - generally people that I know tend to raise genuine urgent issues).
My logic is that if somebody wants me to do something, if they write an email it forces them to organize their thoughts. When I check my voicemails it tends to be a lot of "hey, this is so and so, can you give me a call so that we can go over ". As a result I have to chat on the phone with somebody for 10 minutes before I even know what it is that they want. If they simply send me an email I can give them a call/email with the answer that they seek, rather than shooting from the hip.
And for complex issues a phone call forces me to pull out a notepad and transcribe a lot of detail (especially if it was left on a voicemail). Forget that - let them type it and I don't have to worry about getting it right.
Now, if an issue is fairly complex then the phone is probably the way to go, but even then I prefer that somebody gives me the background in an email ahead of time so that when we meet the time is productive.
The other big problem with the phone is that you are letting others dictate what you work on. With email I can skim the subject lines and take stuff in the order that makes sense to me.
Just a few random thoughts - most modes of communication have pros and cons and rarely does one size fit all...
Except, how do you ensure that the code is 100% theirs, and not derived from someone else's GPL'd code or has had even a minor change or bug fixes - which would mean your code would still be GPL'd even with a license. At least with commercial code you have a reasonable assurance that it is original and licensable by the owner.
Uh, how is the author's choice of license relevant to whether he obeys copyright? How do you know that the copy of Windows CE source that you licensed doesn't contain GPL conde? How do you know that it doesn't contain code stolen from SGI by spies? How do you know that it doesn't contain code bought by SGI but with a non-transferable license? In the end it has nothing to do with the fact that the software is non-GPL, but rather that you are inclined to trust a big company like MS to keep their code straight.
The sample applies to GPL software. If it were BSD or closed it would be no more likely to be clean. How do you know that the shareware app you're licensing wasn't developed on company time at the dev's day-job?
If you only trust big companies then there is nothing a small dev can do for you no matter what license they pick.
Are they in enclosed fixtures? The heat destroys the ballasts very quickly. I only use incandescents in any type of enclosed fixture and the fluorescents last a long time - but until I figured this out I went through quite a few of them. Unfortunately this greatly limits their usefulness.
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Uh, I was not advocating that capital punishment was logical, appropriate, or justified. I was merely pointing out that it is a bit of a stretch to compare the well-debated position of a society to the unilateral actions of a corporate boardmember.
Popular opinion does not determine morality, but clearly the majority position does command a far greater moral authority than an individual acting out of greed.
Funny how it's "democratically-established laws" when one agrees with it, but a 'corrupt, rigged, anti-democratic assault on personal rights' when one doesn't, isn't it?
I do believe I stated clearly that majority rule does not make right. However, it does place the matter into a different category.
There are tons of laws that I disagree with. However, I don't view a local police officer enforcing an order of the court repossessing a car from a grandmother to give it to the RIAA in the same way that I'd view the RIAA hiring a private security company to steal cars. Both may be unjust, but they are not equivalent situations.
Having said that, what I do have a real problem with is when individuals and society conflate punishment with retribution and/or vengeance...
I agree with you completely - however there is a difference when it is done by individuals vs society. And while there are a broad spectrum of opinions I think you'll find that many people who advocate capital punishment do not do so out of a desire for retribution or vengeance. That in itself doesn't make them right, but if you're going to debate an issue at least characterize the opposition view correctly.
Well, she did something that a lot of people with a lot of power have historically done. She assumed the moral high ground. In our society, it's illegal to murder people. Well, unless you're in Texas or Virginia where they appearantly take it upon themselves to murder someone as a penalty of justice. Kind of ironic that if someone commits a crime, we as a society take it upon ourselves to then commit what would normally be considered a great crime unto them.
Uh, without going into a dive into the morality of the death penalty, you do realize that it isn't just a few people in power who are enforcing it, but rather the democratically-established laws of the government? There is in fact a difference between the chair of the board of some company "assuming the high ground" and the voters of a nation writing laws. Sure, just because it is law doesn't make it right, but the people of a nation have a far greater moral authority than individuals acting in their own capacity or as heads of businesses.
If the phone records had been retrieved under warrant as part of a criminal investigation (into something other than exercise-of-free-speech) nobody would be complaining about it - this is a normal function of government. The issue is that some private citizen decided to exercise power in violation of the law in order to make money.
Now, the morality of capital punishment is obviously a controversial one, but you can't equate the actions of government endorsed by the voters with the actions of a lone person. It doesn't make it right, but the fact is that the voters of the states you mention do in fact support capital punishment - which makes your analogy flawed.
The people repeating those lies either know this and don't care, don't know this and don't care, or have trusted one of the first two.
Or perhaps they just don't live in CA?
Not having lived there I can't vouch for the quality of the schools - honestly, I'm skeptical but you might be right. However, if in fact your point is true then the solution is to embrace the laws your describe elsewhere. It certainly is not the standard state of affairs in the US.
Know any incompentent assholes in business? Politics? Academia? The military? Church? Why aren't they gone?
Sure, but the difference is that in most of these areas there are either some natural controls, lower impact of the problem, or free choice. If an idiot is running the church down the street there is usually a church one block further down. In the military the nature of the beast tends to be performance-oriented (at least where the goal is "blow up that building" - less so when it is "avoid torturing prisoners"), so it tends to self-mitigate. In business the owner is going to step in if things get out of control, and in any case I can choose which businesses I work for and purchase from. In politics most of the sheer incompetency is in the bureaucracy and they don't actually do anything positive or negative other than waste money. Education has a big impact on ordinary middle-class citizens, and this is why it is a hot political issue.
I guess my point is that sure, life isn't always fair, and nothing in life is 100% efficient. However, the fact that nothing on earth is perfect doesn't mean that you can't correct massive problems when you see them. No business is 100% perfect, but they're a heck of a lot closer to it than the typical public school.
I can certainly tell you that the massive influx of money is NOT going towards my salary. Everyone I know with a college degree earns generally far more than I do....snip... I am a science geek, I live, eat, and breathe science, however, most science teachers I know (especially at the middle school level) are NOT science oriented people.
Could it be that most people you know with college degrees are pursuing technical careers (science, IT, etc)?
One issue with public schools is the union - your salary is based on your seniority, PERIOD. Just like with aireline pilots the people working their first ten years barely make enough to live, and the ones in their last ten years are living quite well (especially for having 3 months off).
Science teachers get paid the same as English teachers. Anybody who is good with science/technology can make a mint in industry, so you end up with those who either really love the job (probably including yourself), or those who are incompetent (most of the rest). On the other hand, you may find decent teachers in the liberal arts, as there is little else you can do with this background other than teach (hey, nothing wrong with this, but wages are going to be low as a result).
No company pays its Java developers the same as its help desk analysts. Teaching positions should be paid at market prices. Along with this there must be accountability - if somebody isn't cutting it performance-wise they should be fired. This will certainly bring up the question of how to evaluate performance - the answer is simple. If their boss doesn't like them, they can hit the streets (to the extent this is allowed by state labor law). Almost all jobs have a degree of subjectivity when it comes to performance evaluation - in most states the boss can hire or fire at will. If the boss does a bad job of exercising this discretion, it will show and he will get fired by his boss. School boards should demand performance, and should audit performance just like any company board would.
Pay well and demand more, and there will be results.
Of course, this does not deal with another HUGE problem - the students and their parents. However, this problem is not so easily solved, and its existence should not be considered an excuse to tolerate poor teacher performance. Both problems need to be dealt with, but short of harsh measures I can't think of any fixes for the social aspects offhand.
Whether or not they call it "tenure" they almost certainly use a seniority system. That means that if for whatever reason a teacher needs to be fired, it is always the most recently hired one. If a teacher has been around for 20 years and wants to coast, as long as they clock in and out on time and make a slight effort at looking like they're teaching, they're essentially untouchable. That's just how unions work - and a big reason why union shops tend to be uncompetitive.
Well, in theory with competition the schools that don't fire the right people will just go out of business. The only way big corporations can survive with bad management is when government allows the stifling of competition (often via regulation, or failure to control monopolies).
This is false. This is beyond false. This is a vicious lie, repeated by witting or unwitting dupes of men with business plans to make money setting up for-their-personal-profit schools.
Uh, what public school are you thinking of?
I had a science teacher who gave a student a hard time for the crazy belief that a whale's blowhole was used for breathing, and who was certain that all aneroid barometers used units of millibars (despite the display ranging from 28-32). An important grading criteria was that notes were a verbatim copy of her overheads.
Another public school teacher that I knew had a teaching style that consisted of putting up one overhead at a time for students to copy while he graded papers, stopping only to inquire as to whether the students were ready for the next overhead.
One infamous teacher was frequently reamed out the day after grades were turned in year after year by a significant number of her students (this was an AP class I might comment). It was not infrequent for her students to require psychological counselling, although students didn't have much choice if they wanted to take the top-track class in her subject.
These issues were uncorrectable because teachers hold tremendous power over students and are almost impossible to discipline in any way. Parents avoid getting involved as their children will just be penalized, and even school administrators feel helpless to do anything.
Perhaps in some states the teacher's union is not nearly as entrenched, but in many states it is established as a matter of law - schools are not permitted by law to hire non-union teachers.
I'm sure that some public schools are wonderful paradises, but this is not a typical condition.
One will thus have to wait for particle physics experiments to rule out massive neutrinos to rule out MOND. Until then, place your bets...
Actually, my understanding is that we need only wait until experiments rule out 2 eV neutrinos - they can still be massive.
Actually, it works without being suid, but cannot set realtime priority or stuff like that.
In theory setting cdrecord suid isn't a huge liability. If designed right it should raise its priority, and immediate drop root privs. If it does this before processing input it would be ressitant to most attacks. The same applies to a lot of other software which drops root privs like a hot potato - the window of vulnerability is small and a careful audit of the code that runs as root is not difficult.
The IRIX utils were a different beast - they needed to perform privileged operations after receiving user input. So, an audit would have to cover the entirety of a windowed software package, with a ton of library calls.
Note to the wise - when your OS includes multi-MB suid executables you're going to be in for trouble... I'm sure the same applies to a few linux distros, but I for one am happy when kde asks me for my root password when it needs to do something dangerous...
It is a lousy position to have to take, but if you don't you just get what you have coming to you. For a while my wife worked a retail-oriented position that was appointment driven. They would book 12 people in an hour when at most they could really handle 4-5, but this was company policy. Customers would ROUTINELY wait upwards of 2+ hours with children in tow. Then they would be irate, and she would have to deal with them.
I felt horrible for her position, but couldn't agree with her position that the customers should just make the most of it. I encouraged her to find work elsewhere - the stress just wasn't worth it.
While I do feel bad for people in these bottom-rung positions, you can't just accept lousy service merely because the person giving it to you seems nice. They need to be empowered to give good service and not settle for less. They can't complain to their bosses, so we need to do so for them...
Couldn't agree more regarding the /dev/hd? support.
When I was still in linux learning mode I never did bother to get my cd-r to work - it was WAY too much of a pain. I didn't see the point in getting scsi emulation working on my cd-drive, when the think worked just fine as an ide drive with EVERYTHING by cdrecord. Isn't the whole idea of device files to shield the user from the low-level details? What if some cd-burner comes along and isn't even remotely scsi-based - shouldn't the low-level details be a matter of kernel drivers only?
Trouble was probably inevitable...
While I do sympathize tremendously with the people in customer service roles, the fact is that the reason that they have no power is that their employer decided to make it that way. Therefore, when they can't help an irate customer the fault lies with their boss, not the customer.
If everybody gave the people on the bottom of the totem pole major attitude when stuff like this happens, and held up lines, etc., then there would be a change. For one, nobody would want these jobs, and therefore wages would rise - costing employers. Business would suffer as people would avoid these establishments since they don't want to end up in line behind an irate customer that wants to monopolize the line for two hours. The result would be that company policy would change.
If you work for a lousy employer then their policy becomes your policy. It stinks, and it is unfair, and I agree that most of those bottom-rung people only wish they could help. But, if they are allowed to be left alone then companies will get away with their main goal - to put some poor kid in a position of responsibility so that customers feel sorry for them and drop their gripe against the company.
Well, the only thing the insurance really needs to guarantee is that I got the house legally. The only way I should be able to lose it after that point is to sell it myself or otherwise enter into agreements on my own.
If somebody else tries to sell the house for me, I have not entered into an agreement, therefore I have not sold house, and therefore the house is not sold. All I should have to do is claim that it is mine and whoever bought it loses it. They would then have a claim against their title insurance.
The whole concept though is kind of silly - if all it takes to ensure that a house sale is legit is to do a database search then there really isn't much need for the insurance. On the other hand, if there is a lot more uncertainty then we need to expect insurers to actually pay out when something goes wrong...
Well, maybe if you run a 32-bit browser...
title insurance company is just that - titles, leins, loans - paperwork recorded against the property
If the only purpose of the insurance is to check if paperwork is recorded against the property, then what is the point?
Wouldn't it just make sense for the bank to look up the paperwork themselves?
If the law is going to make you shell out hundreds of dollars for insurance, then there should be at least some scenario where the insurance will provide some benefit.
In theory the insurance is priced to cover expected losses, and spread them out. If you're going to owe the insurance company your life, why bother paying for the insurance at all? Just don't carry any insurance and then you owe the victim your life - not much difference from the position of the person paying for the mistake.
:)
And the logic behind malpractice insurance is that anybody in any line of professional work is going to eventually make a mistake, no matter how hard they try to avoid this. Rather than spending exorbitant sums to prevent this from ever happening it makes more sense to spread out the cost of these mistakes so that essentially those who do not suffer from them end up paying for those who do.
No question that not having insurnace makes people more careful - and that applies to any aspect of life. People without health insurance tend to avoid skiing...
I should hope so. You're almost always required to buy it, for a considerable sum. And the only task the insurer has is to make sure the person who is selling the home owns it free and clear...
Pretty soon we'll be walking into Walmart with a big sign on the door saying "Everything in this store is FREE!!!!" with a note in 1-point font that a nominal restocking fee will be assessed for each item at the register.
I'm with you - advertise what it costs. It is one thing if it is a tax based on the final price. It is another thing if you're charging a "gas price surcharge" or a "electricity rate hike surcharge" or a "upstream bandwidth fee". When you buy a spatula at walmart it isn't 50 cents plus separate fees for assembly, pastic, steel, transport, wages for all the above, lunch for the trucker, etc...
If they just generate an SMTP error then the sending server should bounce the message. Now, if they say that the message was deliverd and don't do it, they're violating the RFCs and users are going to get annoyed when their messages just vanish without nary a warning. There really isn't any reason why ISPs can't at least generate bounce messages.
You save for a house don't you? Why should you not do the same thing for kids, those are bare min. 18+ year investments!!! It is like credit card debt...if you get into it without thinking...you gotta do what it takes to make it up and get out of it.
A few minor issues with this:
1. If people "invested" in their kids only so long as it was financially sensible we would be extinct as a species - rarely do kids pay back their parents on a financial level (unless you're in a 3rd-world kids-live-with-parents system).
2. Recently my wife and I broke down and bought a moderately-priced video camera (we're talking $300 here). Technically it might not be the best time for us to spend discretionarily, but if we waited until we have $100k in the bank the kids would be grown up, and then what would be the point? The same applies in many cases - most people with kids do not have a ton of spare cash until they are old - a time when they least need the cash. Going into debt allows people to spend money while they are young. In some sense it makes sense to target savings/debt so that you are in the maximum amount of debt possible at death.
3. Kids are a non-refundable investment. If somebody overspends on a car, they can at least get 80% of it back by turning around and selling it - or they can just stop making payments and the lender takes care of the details. You can't just return your kids to the store if your life takes a turn for the worse job-wise.
I do agree with you that people do need to plan for kids, but having 6-12 months of salary just sitting in the back "just in case" is a difficult savings goal. Many couples will not have the ability to save that much until a fairly late age, and starting late with having kids introduces a whole bunch of other issues that aren't great for families.
Don't get me wrong - I see your point and actually used to be an advocate of it myself. I am probably on the fence even today. However, despite having finances in pretty good order I found it difficult to raise kids - especially on a single income. There are all kinds of expenses that can come up, and the more you have the more you tend to spend on them.
Interestingly enough I've tended to take the opposite approach. I rarely check my voicemails and almost never answer the phone (I have a few exceptions - generally people that I know tend to raise genuine urgent issues).
My logic is that if somebody wants me to do something, if they write an email it forces them to organize their thoughts. When I check my voicemails it tends to be a lot of "hey, this is so and so, can you give me a call so that we can go over ". As a result I have to chat on the phone with somebody for 10 minutes before I even know what it is that they want. If they simply send me an email I can give them a call/email with the answer that they seek, rather than shooting from the hip.
And for complex issues a phone call forces me to pull out a notepad and transcribe a lot of detail (especially if it was left on a voicemail). Forget that - let them type it and I don't have to worry about getting it right.
Now, if an issue is fairly complex then the phone is probably the way to go, but even then I prefer that somebody gives me the background in an email ahead of time so that when we meet the time is productive.
The other big problem with the phone is that you are letting others dictate what you work on. With email I can skim the subject lines and take stuff in the order that makes sense to me.
Just a few random thoughts - most modes of communication have pros and cons and rarely does one size fit all...
Except, how do you ensure that the code is 100% theirs, and not derived from someone else's GPL'd code or has had even a minor change or bug fixes - which would mean your code would still be GPL'd even with a license. At least with commercial code you have a reasonable assurance that it is original and licensable by the owner.
Uh, how is the author's choice of license relevant to whether he obeys copyright? How do you know that the copy of Windows CE source that you licensed doesn't contain GPL conde? How do you know that it doesn't contain code stolen from SGI by spies? How do you know that it doesn't contain code bought by SGI but with a non-transferable license? In the end it has nothing to do with the fact that the software is non-GPL, but rather that you are inclined to trust a big company like MS to keep their code straight.
The sample applies to GPL software. If it were BSD or closed it would be no more likely to be clean. How do you know that the shareware app you're licensing wasn't developed on company time at the dev's day-job?
If you only trust big companies then there is nothing a small dev can do for you no matter what license they pick.
Are they in enclosed fixtures? The heat destroys the ballasts very quickly. I only use incandescents in any type of enclosed fixture and the fluorescents last a long time - but until I figured this out I went through quite a few of them. Unfortunately this greatly limits their usefulness.