You raise I good point I wish I saw addressed more on this page: How do you set good technical restrictions? I think that most of the comments bemoaning this judge's choice are ignoring that what the judge (probably) wants is just to keep the kid off of social media sites and ensure that he knows people can see what he is doing on the computer.
There seems little question that the judge lacks expertise in the technical descriptions for a computer's use, and maybe that should be better, but the critics don't have a lot of suggestions. I'd like to know, if you are a judge who wants to keep a kid off of social media and ensure that the kid knows people can see what he or she is doing on the computer, how do you write the restriction?
Oh, and I don't usually comment on spelling or grammar since they're really secondary to successful communication, but ouch! You really, really, need to practice proof reading your comments. I think I figured out what you meant to say, but it took a lot more work than it should have. Consider these as ways you could have better said what I thought you intended:
"He was also has an on going drug problem" - He had or has an ongoing drug problem
"In other words the judge could have thrown his but right in kiddie prison for violation of probation!" - In other words, the judge could have thrown his butt right in kiddie prison for violation of probation
"Not that harsh of a punishment If anything this should be a story..." - Not that harsh of a punishment. If anything, this should be a story...
"say that you can use PGP to send encrypted emails" - say that you can not use PGP to send encrypted emails
breadth of choices that exist between beating somebody until they're half dead
Totally! My daughter has had several bikes stolen (two locked, one unlocked, hard to say what lesson is being taught there) and I'm of the inclination that beating someone half to death with a pipe would be too much. Maybe a quarter of the way for a repeat offender, maybe an eighth of the way for the theft of a locked bike, maybe only a sixteenth of the way for stealing an unlocked bike. I'm not clear on exactly how much being beaten a sixteenth of the way to death is, but I'll bet it is a lot worse than a paper-cut.
Then there is the lopping off of appendages or branding option... well not for a bike unless you know, they're really a jerk about it. First time offenders, maybe just half a pinky toe for a bike but a whole pinky toe for a car. Maybe a second degree sunburn for jerks or just make them take a sip of really hot coffee and scald their tongue if they sound like they really mean it when they say they're sorry.
Freedom of speech means that you can burn an American flag. You can form groups based on hatred like the KKK. Americans think that examples like these mean that free speech is alive and well.
But there are significant exceptions:
you can't write mean emails to the president
you can't burn a Koran (Many people assume that it would be protected speech, but not according to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.)
Maybe before correcting someone, you should take a second to find out if you actually know what you're talking about.
Of course it could be British humor, since burgled would be proper there and burglarized is American English. If intended as humour, it could have done with a bit more buildup.
As a parent and as also an admin who has to worry that co-workers will act like kids, I have both some experience and some tips in this area. The most important tip is to know your kids and care about them. Train them to be safe and teach them morals. With my kids, I use the motto: Trust but verify.
Basic Security: The kids shouldn't have Administrator access, the bios needs a password you don't type in front of them and the boot sequence should be set to boot from hard drive first. They might still get around that security by moving drives around, so you may want tamper evident tape.
Command line tools: go ahead and install an ssh server on the windows clients, but do it the easy way with something like sshwindows*. You don't really need it if you enable RPC, but it does come in handy, particularly in combination with unixutils* and Sysinternals*.
Remote commands: I use winexe* and enable remote access services on the client machines. You can then run the shutdown command or pretty much any other command remotely. If you have set the boot password as required for startup, shutting the PC down is the same as locking it. I don't really recommend requiring a password for boot if you can avoid it since it is a pain, but if the situation calls for it, it is useful to know that you can. In most cases the bios will let you set a password for modification without requiring one for booting and this is usually much easier to work with, particularly when it comes to automatic updates that reboot.
IP tables with static IPs: Since you have admin and they don't, you can set static IPs on the workstations pretty reliably which also allows you to use IP tables effectively to limit or control access.
Logs and web control: If you use OpenDNS* and intercept DNS*, then you have pretty decent logs. If you use a transparent squid proxy in combination with strict IP tables rules, you can get really good logs. Beware of SSL proxies and VPNs.
All this comes with a cost of your time and effort. The tools built into the typical router can do a lot of the work for you, but you give up some control. Also, consider your target audience, if your kids are bright teenagers, then they will look at ways around the system. They will almost certainly try to browse by IP or through proxies. If this is a potential issue, then you should also look at setting up a transparent squid proxy and blocking 443 and other ports for addresses not explicitly allowed.
VNC: I didn't list VNC because I don't personally use it at the moment, but I have in the past and it can be a very useful tool. If you use it, I recommend you don't set it to run automatically, but rather start the service when you want to use it with remote commands. In a few cases I've done this so that I could monitor activity without any obvious indication.
In this case I honestly couldn't tell. When I think of repackaging and redistributing, it is the heard of every Linux distribution from the kernel and all the GNU stuff right on up through the package managers. Ubuntu has contributed quite a bit to the popularization of Linux in general and certainly to the feedback on what average users need to use it successfully as a home workstation. I've used both, and while neither is really what I personally prefer, I'd recommend Ubuntu in a heartbeat to a newbie over Debian, not because it is "better" but because they find it easier.
All that said, you could easily be writing satirically if you have the same perspective, or you could be thinking of all the development and testing that the Debian team does and considering it unreasonable that people overlook that when it comes to Ubuntu.
I am not a member, but I have sympathies with the tea party movement. I won't presume to speak for the "they" of the party, but as one who might join, let me answer:
Our justice system is a mess. The victimless crime I see most often referred to is recreational drug use, marijuana specifically. Given a chance, I would support decriminalization in favor of stringent regulation and outrageous taxation. As with any of the other "victimless crimes" I believe that we face the same problem we do with victim crimes, that is: The criminal system should be about successful rehabilitation and restitution. Instead we focus on punishment, not unimportant, but we do so unsuccessfully and ignore the more important issues. I'm open to seeing it fixed with care and forethought.
I have never talked to anyone who says "there is nothing wrong with the health care system" and I've never even talked to anyone who said "there is nothing wrong with the health care insurance system" but I have strong reservations about a system where you aren't "able to aquire health insurance" so much as "required to aquire health insurance." I'll grant you that being entitled to free insurance if you cannot afford health insurance sounds nice, but then I realize that somebody is paying, and if I'm paying taxes, it's probably at least partly me. (Not that I make enough money to pay much, but I'd like to someday.)
How you control the results of your labor, in this particular how you spend your money, is one of the most basic freedoms a person can exercise. Taxes, any form of taxes, are about exchanging a little freedom in return for being a part of a society. This is not necessarily a bad trade, but wanting to pay less taxes is about that freedom.
I'm not average in many ways. If I do join the movement, then I probably won't be "average" when I do. I'm just offering perspective from a potential member.
I've not traveled outside the US, but wish I had. I have no disagreement with your premise that another way might be better but changing things is not easy. Simply saying "It does work" doesn't come close to describing how to make a change. If it were that easy we'd all be using metric by now and relying on nuclear power. Strike that, we'd be relying on fusion since anybody can point to the sun and say "It does work."
How about this: I'll go about making suggestions on how incremental changes could be beneficial while you tell the world that it needs to be different.
If tomorrow lawmakers make it illegal to tip and change the minimum wage laws, or even if the majority of restaurants ban tipping and change their income and payment models then I bow to your superior methods of persuasion.
Ever heard of the Peter Principle? People will work exactly hard enough to keep from getting fired if their income doesn't reflect their effort. Why compensate an employee beyond what is absolutely necessary? Why push for excellent service if the pay is the same as barely sufficient service?
There is a reason fast food workers get minimum wage and servers get tips plus below standard minimum. "Stop making tips part of the expected wages" sounds suspiciously like "Step 3: ???"
Beware simple solutions to complex problems, they are rarely as simple as they sound and they almost never work.
I was in a sports bar for the Super Bowl and when my check came, in addition to the price, it had the amounts of tips for 15% and 20%. (It may also have 30% but I'm not sure now.) I was once a waiter and I also appreciated that it was considerate to the staff who would be considered rude if they offered the same information unbidden. I thought including it in the printout of the check was a polite way of letting the customer know what reasonable gratuities were expected. That experience, combined with another recent dining experience, where the menu included a bare integer beside the dish, has made me think.
Consider if the displayed price of every dish included the tip in bold with a clear note at the top saying something like "Our prices include a minimal gratuity since we expect our staff to provide a level of service to earn it. In the event that they do not, please let a manager know and we will gladly deduct it from your bill and work to improve." The bill should also obviously state "A gratuity is already included in your bill. If the service or quality of food has exceeded or failed to meet your expectations, please let us know so that we may adjust your bill and reward or train our staff accordingly."
My suspicion is that people who under-tip would be less inclined to skimp if they felt they needed to justify their actions, and people who are delighted with their service would be glad to be invited to praise the experience with management. The average experience should be good enough that it warrants a tip but I think that the average tip would be higher if the expectation was clearly stated.
Tips are really based on the idea of pairing marketing with feedback. Since the price of dining doesn't require disclosing the cost of including a tip, marketing dictates displaying the most attractive price. Since deciding on a tip provides the customer with a feeling of control, it is seen as a way of making the customer, to some degree, the boss. My work in IT leads me to believe that people don't like the "deciding" part and prefer to be given clear instructions to do things one way. Since I believe most diners already know that the tip is expected, I believe that marketing it upfront would provide them with a sense of dealing with a company that goes out of its way to be upfront and honest with them.
I do see one drawback to the scenario: Tips are commonly under-reported as wages. Reporting tips earned under the actual amount received causes less deduction for taxes from the paycheck of servers. As a server, I was unusual in trying to report my tips as accurately as possible. My logic was that higher reported income would increase my credit in the long term and that balanced my natural greed to take all the income I could. A strong sense of ethics also played a role for me, but I believe the logic alone should provide a desire to accurately report income as enlightened self interest.
If you're in a position to implement something like this, and I hope some readers will be, then I recommend the following implementation process:
Advise servers of the plan to implement the change in six months explaining that the goal is to raise the standard of tipping.
Make it clear that the percentage to be shown on the bill will be based in part on the income they report.
Have the menus printed for the first year showing the billed price in bold and the raw price in light and unbolded font (with a notice in the spirit of the one I mentioned earlier.)
After implementation, carefully track feedback from customers and reported income of the serving staff for nine months.
At the end of the nine month period, advise staff of the reasons for continuing, adjusting or stopping the policy.
If the policy is continued, then continue tracking (how rigorously should depend on the cost of tracking) and reviewing the results of the policy regularly.
I love PHP when I need to throw something together fast (like today) but don't expect a lot of heavy use. I love PHP when I want to get some handy tools that I can easily hack into doing what I really want. Still, when I have a significant project, and server load starts to matter, I loathe trying to use PHP and would usually rather write it as Perl, sometimes even compiling (gasp) Perl into something about as efficient and a whole lot more reliable than if I tried to write it in C. If I were really serious, I'd write it in C, but a day's work in C is 30 minutes in Perl or 10 in PHP.
Choice of language for me is about return on investment. I'm not a grand programmer, I don't have the luxury of getting comfortable programming, if I'm programming it means that I'm not spending time on the dozens of other issues confronting our IT department. Most of the time if we're doing any sort of serious project, we're buying service from somebody who does it better than I have time to, probably better than I could.
If this HH thing (no, can't stand to type the real name) gets momentum then it could be really good for shops like ours. We could turn the tools we don't have time to do well into things that don't suck so much and the tools that we wouldn't think were worth the hardware into things we can afford to run.
I aspire to have people think of me as the cautious driver, but that doesn't mean slow. Caution is about driving in a manner that doesn't take unnecessary risks and driving slower than traffic, I suspect, is the reason for half the wrecks that kill my drive time. In fact I have a tendency to speed when conditions are good (though in two counties I'm extra cautious as deferred adjudication can be only opted for once annually.) No, the corolla driver didn't have time to get stuck behind me, as I was still stuck in and trying to get out of the right lane just merged traffic. He was driving significantly faster than traffic in his own lane and needed the space to keep from slowing down, the space I was pulling into. He swerved right into an opening without noticing the guy already pulling into it from the far right. He was just being rude and stupid but hey, everyone has their moments.
I try to take a Zen attitude toward the idiots on the road, and just work around them or take a minute longer to get to my destination safely. I don't piss people off because, I mentioned I was driving in Dallas right, down he'ah we shoot people like dat. Okay, well once in a while I piss people off, but I try to make sure it is always intentional when I do.
The cell phone bans are happening not because they make a difference, but because most people think the other drivers suck. They support the ban because they want some way to make the other drivers stop being idiots. It is exactly like siblings who delight in seeing the other one get punished. I've ridden with people who have this constant anxiety that everyone is going too fast, or everyone else not being careful and those are the type of drivers who motivate cell bans and making it illegal for adults in the back seat to forgo a seat belt. It is an "everybody needs to be like me" attitude. I've also ridden with people who inspire the laws and I'm virtually certain that no ban is going turn them into reasonably safe drivers.
You're exactly right, and one of the few voices of clarity on the subject. It shouldn't be a question of "should be illegal" but, it instead a question of when and where. Drive 20mph or below and no cell phone in school zones? Okay. Nobody, anywhere or anytime because somewhere, sometime it might be dangerous... that's not rational thinking.
I'm vehemently opposed to littering. The more of my taxes that go toward sanitation, the less is spent on things that benefit me. Plus, it's ugly. (Thanks Dad, for teaching a thoughtless kid that even small actions have consequences.) Still though, if a gum wrapper shuts down the Interstate, I'd be tempted.;)
Can I see whether or not the car is still missile equipped? If so I can envision a new sport where I look for a missile-less car being tailgated by a missile-ready car and brake in front of the middle car. Extra points if you get a multi-missile pileup and escape without blame.
For the humor impaired with mod-points, this is just humor. I have no actual desire to see road rage turned into a murder sport.
3. I remember reading about a study where people rated themselves in terms of their driving skills. Nobody said "I'm a below average driver", even that the statistical probability of that being the case is very low. (Read: I bet you really, really suck at driving, dude.:-)
All drivers have a responsibility for their own and the safety of others on the road. Personally, I have trouble estimating the position of the passenger side of my car to closer than six inches so I avoid situations where that would be necessary; if traffic is tight I'll slow down to avoid driving between wide vehicles. I find that when when thinking about programming or other complex problems, I tend to take longer to notice the slowing of a car in front of me so I habitually leave much more than the average (as observed) distance between my own and the car in front of me. I'm not opposed to driving and texting or talking on the phone or discussing politics with a passenger or eating, but when in traffic I don't text, don't take calls, don't discuss politics and don't eat.
I'm not certain that I cannot manage any of these things, but I am certain that I need more focus in certain situations and devote all that I have when it just might turn out to be necessary. I've been hit once (no major damage) by someone who couldn't stop in time and now if the driver behind me insists on tailgating, I slow, switch lanes or even pull off to avoid that danger.
I may not be a better driver than average. My record is clean but I know that there have been times that I avoided a wreck only by the grace and foresight of another driver. I strive to ensure that I can do the same. If I fail, then it will not be due to distracted driving. (I use my turn signal so that the other drivers around me know what I plan to do. Swerving into the lane from behind at high speed that I'm already pulling into while I'm signaling, particularly without using your own turn signal is bad form. Yes, I'm talking to you Mr. Maroon Corolla Driver on 635 in Dallas earlier today.)
I have a long and significantly varied daily commute. There are rural portions with little traffic and stop lights where, if cautious, I can safely engage in any of the "multitasking" behaviors that I described. There are also portions where the other desires have to be put off as my priority for staying safe is primary.
Tell a child to brush their teeth, and quit eating donuts and they'll eat cinnamon buns and pretend they brushed their teeth. Ban cinnamon buns and tell them they'll be grounded if they don't brush their teeth and they'll wet their toothbrush and switch to twinkies. One dentist trip and some education about what causes cavities and you'll have someone serious about their oral hygiene. The point is that trying to nanny people into making better decisions rarely works, particularly with adult children. All the nanny "don't do this or that" laws aren't improving people's actual desire for safety. Personally, the desire to stay safe is enough, but I get an extra reminder how important my record is every time I pay my auto insurance bill.
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all. Now there is a way to fix this, though I'm interested in feedback before I try to do anything about it. What we need is a micro-payment aggregation service combined with an advertisement blocking proxy server. Opera is doing the rebuilding on the fly for smaller and faster page loads, and if they combined that with an ad-blocking service for $10/yr and had a "$.02" payment button that sites like Newsday could contract for, then everybody would win.
Yes of course they are, but then again, so are carrots, green beens and coconuts technically. I finally took the time to research what makes something a fruit and/or vegetable a couple years back, turns out it isn't just one or the other.
I think that sums up for me why I'd be interested in the project. I'm not interested in running Linux with a BSD kernel for work because I like things that are reliable and well tested and documented by a large userbase. I'm not running it personally because I don't want to spend the time on something without a strong obvious benefit, but I appreciate that someone is.
The goal of doing something like this isn't to produce a product that is better than anything else, it is to see what you can do and see what happens when you do something novel and complex. Think of it as a great experiment, and one that anyone who wants to invest the time can do. Even if nothing grand is the end product, the process and the lessons learned from trying new things are pretty cool on their own.
A whole lot of this makes sense, and I like the Google Talk on the topic. I haven't finished it yet, but have a question I haven't seen answered and would like feedback on, why isn't electromagnetic propulsion being considered? The US Navy is looking for railguns to deliver close to 13,000 mph from a ship mounted gun.
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a fork that got merged back into the Mozilla parent. When it was independent it crashed, didn't handle javascript right, or maybe not at all but it did tabbed browsing and blocked pop-ups. There has always been give and take between the people who want a browser to do the thing important to them and people who want it to be small and fast. When Firefox was merged back into Mozilla it started gaining huge ground in adoption, became a lot more stable and became a lot more capable.
There are forks of Firefox already, but odds are that even most die-hard Slashdot Linux geeks can't name them. Forking is a drastic step, admittedly sometimes necessary, but usually it is better to work within the herd.
Flamebait? Really? Okay, maybe the snarky Y chromosome thing, but come on, that's supposed to be humor.
The bit about the test being biased though, that's really pretty straight forward and honest. We all like to pretend that everyone is equal, and they should be in the eyes of the law, but reality is not equality. I'm far more reliable, wise and trustworthy than I was twenty years ago, and that's me compared to me. There are millions (probably billions) of people that I'd be considered smarter than, and likewise a similar number of people I'd be considered less intelligent than. That's inequality, it's not fair and it's the truth.
The test in this case (and yes, I actually read all of the article before posting) is the evaluation of testing in schools and various scores on other areas, but those scores do not necessarily reflect intelligence, in fact, intelligence tests don't necessarily reflect intelligence. Intelligence isn't some ruler that you stand someone's brain against to get a measurement, it is a combination of a variety of reasoning, memory, communication and recognition skills. No test is useful which is also free of the criticism of bias.
Disagree with me if you like, there is plenty of room within reasonable discourse and certainly both logical and statistical room to do so, but mislabeling, that's just petty.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise I good point I wish I saw addressed more on this page: How do you set good technical restrictions? I think that most of the comments bemoaning this judge's choice are ignoring that what the judge (probably) wants is just to keep the kid off of social media sites and ensure that he knows people can see what he is doing on the computer.
There seems little question that the judge lacks expertise in the technical descriptions for a computer's use, and maybe that should be better, but the critics don't have a lot of suggestions. I'd like to know, if you are a judge who wants to keep a kid off of social media and ensure that the kid knows people can see what he or she is doing on the computer, how do you write the restriction?
Oh, and I don't usually comment on spelling or grammar since they're really secondary to successful communication, but ouch! You really, really, need to practice proof reading your comments. I think I figured out what you meant to say, but it took a lot more work than it should have. Consider these as ways you could have better said what I thought you intended:
breadth of choices that exist between beating somebody until they're half dead
Totally! My daughter has had several bikes stolen (two locked, one unlocked, hard to say what lesson is being taught there) and I'm of the inclination that beating someone half to death with a pipe would be too much. Maybe a quarter of the way for a repeat offender, maybe an eighth of the way for the theft of a locked bike, maybe only a sixteenth of the way for stealing an unlocked bike. I'm not clear on exactly how much being beaten a sixteenth of the way to death is, but I'll bet it is a lot worse than a paper-cut.
Then there is the lopping off of appendages or branding option... well not for a bike unless you know, they're really a jerk about it. First time offenders, maybe just half a pinky toe for a bike but a whole pinky toe for a car. Maybe a second degree sunburn for jerks or just make them take a sip of really hot coffee and scald their tongue if they sound like they really mean it when they say they're sorry.
Freedom of speech means that you can burn an American flag. You can form groups based on hatred like the KKK. Americans think that examples like these mean that free speech is alive and well.
But there are significant exceptions:
That's funny, Merriam-Webster says burglarized is a word that would be used correctly in the way it was by Kymermosst.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/burglarized
Maybe before correcting someone, you should take a second to find out if you actually know what you're talking about.
Of course it could be British humor, since burgled would be proper there and burglarized is American English. If intended as humour, it could have done with a bit more buildup.
Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-our.2C_-or
As a parent and as also an admin who has to worry that co-workers will act like kids, I have both some experience and some tips in this area. The most important tip is to know your kids and care about them. Train them to be safe and teach them morals. With my kids, I use the motto: Trust but verify.
All this comes with a cost of your time and effort. The tools built into the typical router can do a lot of the work for you, but you give up some control. Also, consider your target audience, if your kids are bright teenagers, then they will look at ways around the system. They will almost certainly try to browse by IP or through proxies. If this is a potential issue, then you should also look at setting up a transparent squid proxy and blocking 443 and other ports for addresses not explicitly allowed.
VNC: I didn't list VNC because I don't personally use it at the moment, but I have in the past and it can be a very useful tool. If you use it, I recommend you don't set it to run automatically, but rather start the service when you want to use it with remote commands. In a few cases I've done this so that I could monitor activity without any obvious indication.
In this case I honestly couldn't tell. When I think of repackaging and redistributing, it is the heard of every Linux distribution from the kernel and all the GNU stuff right on up through the package managers. Ubuntu has contributed quite a bit to the popularization of Linux in general and certainly to the feedback on what average users need to use it successfully as a home workstation. I've used both, and while neither is really what I personally prefer, I'd recommend Ubuntu in a heartbeat to a newbie over Debian, not because it is "better" but because they find it easier.
All that said, you could easily be writing satirically if you have the same perspective, or you could be thinking of all the development and testing that the Debian team does and considering it unreasonable that people overlook that when it comes to Ubuntu.
I am not a member, but I have sympathies with the tea party movement. I won't presume to speak for the "they" of the party, but as one who might join, let me answer:
I'm not average in many ways. If I do join the movement, then I probably won't be "average" when I do. I'm just offering perspective from a potential member.
I don't see any mod point assignments so I'm not sure. Are you trying to be funny?
I've not traveled outside the US, but wish I had. I have no disagreement with your premise that another way might be better but changing things is not easy. Simply saying "It does work" doesn't come close to describing how to make a change. If it were that easy we'd all be using metric by now and relying on nuclear power. Strike that, we'd be relying on fusion since anybody can point to the sun and say "It does work."
How about this: I'll go about making suggestions on how incremental changes could be beneficial while you tell the world that it needs to be different.
If tomorrow lawmakers make it illegal to tip and change the minimum wage laws, or even if the majority of restaurants ban tipping and change their income and payment models then I bow to your superior methods of persuasion.
Ever heard of the Peter Principle? People will work exactly hard enough to keep from getting fired if their income doesn't reflect their effort. Why compensate an employee beyond what is absolutely necessary? Why push for excellent service if the pay is the same as barely sufficient service?
There is a reason fast food workers get minimum wage and servers get tips plus below standard minimum. "Stop making tips part of the expected wages" sounds suspiciously like "Step 3: ???"
Beware simple solutions to complex problems, they are rarely as simple as they sound and they almost never work.
I was in a sports bar for the Super Bowl and when my check came, in addition to the price, it had the amounts of tips for 15% and 20%. (It may also have 30% but I'm not sure now.) I was once a waiter and I also appreciated that it was considerate to the staff who would be considered rude if they offered the same information unbidden. I thought including it in the printout of the check was a polite way of letting the customer know what reasonable gratuities were expected. That experience, combined with another recent dining experience, where the menu included a bare integer beside the dish, has made me think.
Consider if the displayed price of every dish included the tip in bold with a clear note at the top saying something like "Our prices include a minimal gratuity since we expect our staff to provide a level of service to earn it. In the event that they do not, please let a manager know and we will gladly deduct it from your bill and work to improve." The bill should also obviously state "A gratuity is already included in your bill. If the service or quality of food has exceeded or failed to meet your expectations, please let us know so that we may adjust your bill and reward or train our staff accordingly."
My suspicion is that people who under-tip would be less inclined to skimp if they felt they needed to justify their actions, and people who are delighted with their service would be glad to be invited to praise the experience with management. The average experience should be good enough that it warrants a tip but I think that the average tip would be higher if the expectation was clearly stated.
Tips are really based on the idea of pairing marketing with feedback. Since the price of dining doesn't require disclosing the cost of including a tip, marketing dictates displaying the most attractive price. Since deciding on a tip provides the customer with a feeling of control, it is seen as a way of making the customer, to some degree, the boss. My work in IT leads me to believe that people don't like the "deciding" part and prefer to be given clear instructions to do things one way. Since I believe most diners already know that the tip is expected, I believe that marketing it upfront would provide them with a sense of dealing with a company that goes out of its way to be upfront and honest with them.
I do see one drawback to the scenario: Tips are commonly under-reported as wages. Reporting tips earned under the actual amount received causes less deduction for taxes from the paycheck of servers. As a server, I was unusual in trying to report my tips as accurately as possible. My logic was that higher reported income would increase my credit in the long term and that balanced my natural greed to take all the income I could. A strong sense of ethics also played a role for me, but I believe the logic alone should provide a desire to accurately report income as enlightened self interest.
If you're in a position to implement something like this, and I hope some readers will be, then I recommend the following implementation process:
I'm both sides.
I love PHP when I need to throw something together fast (like today) but don't expect a lot of heavy use. I love PHP when I want to get some handy tools that I can easily hack into doing what I really want. Still, when I have a significant project, and server load starts to matter, I loathe trying to use PHP and would usually rather write it as Perl, sometimes even compiling (gasp) Perl into something about as efficient and a whole lot more reliable than if I tried to write it in C. If I were really serious, I'd write it in C, but a day's work in C is 30 minutes in Perl or 10 in PHP.
Choice of language for me is about return on investment. I'm not a grand programmer, I don't have the luxury of getting comfortable programming, if I'm programming it means that I'm not spending time on the dozens of other issues confronting our IT department. Most of the time if we're doing any sort of serious project, we're buying service from somebody who does it better than I have time to, probably better than I could.
If this HH thing (no, can't stand to type the real name) gets momentum then it could be really good for shops like ours. We could turn the tools we don't have time to do well into things that don't suck so much and the tools that we wouldn't think were worth the hardware into things we can afford to run.
I aspire to have people think of me as the cautious driver, but that doesn't mean slow. Caution is about driving in a manner that doesn't take unnecessary risks and driving slower than traffic, I suspect, is the reason for half the wrecks that kill my drive time. In fact I have a tendency to speed when conditions are good (though in two counties I'm extra cautious as deferred adjudication can be only opted for once annually.) No, the corolla driver didn't have time to get stuck behind me, as I was still stuck in and trying to get out of the right lane just merged traffic. He was driving significantly faster than traffic in his own lane and needed the space to keep from slowing down, the space I was pulling into. He swerved right into an opening without noticing the guy already pulling into it from the far right. He was just being rude and stupid but hey, everyone has their moments.
I try to take a Zen attitude toward the idiots on the road, and just work around them or take a minute longer to get to my destination safely. I don't piss people off because, I mentioned I was driving in Dallas right, down he'ah we shoot people like dat. Okay, well once in a while I piss people off, but I try to make sure it is always intentional when I do.
The cell phone bans are happening not because they make a difference, but because most people think the other drivers suck. They support the ban because they want some way to make the other drivers stop being idiots. It is exactly like siblings who delight in seeing the other one get punished. I've ridden with people who have this constant anxiety that everyone is going too fast, or everyone else not being careful and those are the type of drivers who motivate cell bans and making it illegal for adults in the back seat to forgo a seat belt. It is an "everybody needs to be like me" attitude. I've also ridden with people who inspire the laws and I'm virtually certain that no ban is going turn them into reasonably safe drivers.
You're exactly right, and one of the few voices of clarity on the subject. It shouldn't be a question of "should be illegal" but, it instead a question of when and where. Drive 20mph or below and no cell phone in school zones? Okay. Nobody, anywhere or anytime because somewhere, sometime it might be dangerous... that's not rational thinking.
I'm vehemently opposed to littering. The more of my taxes that go toward sanitation, the less is spent on things that benefit me. Plus, it's ugly. (Thanks Dad, for teaching a thoughtless kid that even small actions have consequences.) Still though, if a gum wrapper shuts down the Interstate, I'd be tempted. ;)
Hey wait, don't I as a taxpayer partially own GM? I don't like where this is headed at all!
Can I see whether or not the car is still missile equipped? If so I can envision a new sport where I look for a missile-less car being tailgated by a missile-ready car and brake in front of the middle car. Extra points if you get a multi-missile pileup and escape without blame.
For the humor impaired with mod-points, this is just humor. I have no actual desire to see road rage turned into a murder sport.
3. I remember reading about a study where people rated themselves in terms of their driving skills. Nobody said "I'm a below average driver", even that the statistical probability of that being the case is very low. (Read: I bet you really, really suck at driving, dude. :-)
All drivers have a responsibility for their own and the safety of others on the road. Personally, I have trouble estimating the position of the passenger side of my car to closer than six inches so I avoid situations where that would be necessary; if traffic is tight I'll slow down to avoid driving between wide vehicles. I find that when when thinking about programming or other complex problems, I tend to take longer to notice the slowing of a car in front of me so I habitually leave much more than the average (as observed) distance between my own and the car in front of me. I'm not opposed to driving and texting or talking on the phone or discussing politics with a passenger or eating, but when in traffic I don't text, don't take calls, don't discuss politics and don't eat.
I'm not certain that I cannot manage any of these things, but I am certain that I need more focus in certain situations and devote all that I have when it just might turn out to be necessary. I've been hit once (no major damage) by someone who couldn't stop in time and now if the driver behind me insists on tailgating, I slow, switch lanes or even pull off to avoid that danger.
I may not be a better driver than average. My record is clean but I know that there have been times that I avoided a wreck only by the grace and foresight of another driver. I strive to ensure that I can do the same. If I fail, then it will not be due to distracted driving. (I use my turn signal so that the other drivers around me know what I plan to do. Swerving into the lane from behind at high speed that I'm already pulling into while I'm signaling, particularly without using your own turn signal is bad form. Yes, I'm talking to you Mr. Maroon Corolla Driver on 635 in Dallas earlier today.)
I have a long and significantly varied daily commute. There are rural portions with little traffic and stop lights where, if cautious, I can safely engage in any of the "multitasking" behaviors that I described. There are also portions where the other desires have to be put off as my priority for staying safe is primary.
Tell a child to brush their teeth, and quit eating donuts and they'll eat cinnamon buns and pretend they brushed their teeth. Ban cinnamon buns and tell them they'll be grounded if they don't brush their teeth and they'll wet their toothbrush and switch to twinkies. One dentist trip and some education about what causes cavities and you'll have someone serious about their oral hygiene. The point is that trying to nanny people into making better decisions rarely works, particularly with adult children. All the nanny "don't do this or that" laws aren't improving people's actual desire for safety. Personally, the desire to stay safe is enough, but I get an extra reminder how important my record is every time I pay my auto insurance bill.
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all. Now there is a way to fix this, though I'm interested in feedback before I try to do anything about it. What we need is a micro-payment aggregation service combined with an advertisement blocking proxy server. Opera is doing the rebuilding on the fly for smaller and faster page loads, and if they combined that with an ad-blocking service for $10/yr and had a "$.02" payment button that sites like Newsday could contract for, then everybody would win.
Yes of course they are, but then again, so are carrots, green beens and coconuts technically. I finally took the time to research what makes something a fruit and/or vegetable a couple years back, turns out it isn't just one or the other.
I think that sums up for me why I'd be interested in the project. I'm not interested in running Linux with a BSD kernel for work because I like things that are reliable and well tested and documented by a large userbase. I'm not running it personally because I don't want to spend the time on something without a strong obvious benefit, but I appreciate that someone is.
The goal of doing something like this isn't to produce a product that is better than anything else, it is to see what you can do and see what happens when you do something novel and complex. Think of it as a great experiment, and one that anyone who wants to invest the time can do. Even if nothing grand is the end product, the process and the lessons learned from trying new things are pretty cool on their own.
It's at about 25 min and I just got there and had my "oh." moment. Thanks though.
A whole lot of this makes sense, and I like the Google Talk on the topic. I haven't finished it yet, but have a question I haven't seen answered and would like feedback on, why isn't electromagnetic propulsion being considered? The US Navy is looking for railguns to deliver close to 13,000 mph from a ship mounted gun.
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a fork that got merged back into the Mozilla parent. When it was independent it crashed, didn't handle javascript right, or maybe not at all but it did tabbed browsing and blocked pop-ups. There has always been give and take between the people who want a browser to do the thing important to them and people who want it to be small and fast. When Firefox was merged back into Mozilla it started gaining huge ground in adoption, became a lot more stable and became a lot more capable.
There are forks of Firefox already, but odds are that even most die-hard Slashdot Linux geeks can't name them. Forking is a drastic step, admittedly sometimes necessary, but usually it is better to work within the herd.
Flamebait? Really? Okay, maybe the snarky Y chromosome thing, but come on, that's supposed to be humor.
The bit about the test being biased though, that's really pretty straight forward and honest. We all like to pretend that everyone is equal, and they should be in the eyes of the law, but reality is not equality. I'm far more reliable, wise and trustworthy than I was twenty years ago, and that's me compared to me. There are millions (probably billions) of people that I'd be considered smarter than, and likewise a similar number of people I'd be considered less intelligent than. That's inequality, it's not fair and it's the truth.
The test in this case (and yes, I actually read all of the article before posting) is the evaluation of testing in schools and various scores on other areas, but those scores do not necessarily reflect intelligence, in fact, intelligence tests don't necessarily reflect intelligence. Intelligence isn't some ruler that you stand someone's brain against to get a measurement, it is a combination of a variety of reasoning, memory, communication and recognition skills. No test is useful which is also free of the criticism of bias.
Disagree with me if you like, there is plenty of room within reasonable discourse and certainly both logical and statistical room to do so, but mislabeling, that's just petty.