Are you in one of those designated flood ways?
IIRC flood insurance is a federal program; the banks may collect the money but the feds set the rules. What do the feds say?
I work for a publicly held corporation. We have no guns. We have no right to take anyone's assets. We don't have the ability to use eminent domain; we have to buy everything in the open market just like anyone else. We are required to let private companies compete with us. Anyone can set up a shop, and offer the same product, and we are required to help them. Customers can choose one or the other. Guess what? Almost no-one chooses the private companies. Most customers use us because we're cheaper except in rare circumstances. No, we get no tax subsidies. But our customers are our shareholders, so any profits we make have to be used to reduce the price of what we sell. We are prohibited by law from making a profit. Plus we don't pay millions for our CEO, and none of us get huge bonuses. We do pay our workers almost double what the private industry does, and we offer full benefits, and we still manage to be cheaper. Go figure.
And stop drinking that cool-aid. Government cannot do any of the things you imagine it can.
It's not just healthcare. As you say, anything that doesn't have a profit motive. Clean drinking water. Sewage treatment. Roads. Basic fundamental research. Arts (real arts, not the crap from Hollywood). Public radio and TV. Public buildings. Public transportation. Lots of really good examples where the private industry doesn't do well.
Most government is accountable. It's just that people don't understand how accountable, and there is always some politician who will dig up one invoice and use it to tar the entire government. I'm not defending gov't waste; I'm simply saying that any large organization will have some waste.
How poorly executed and overly expensive does something have to be for the government to think that about it?:D
The vast amount of government operations as as efficient, if not more so, than private sector equivalents. Why do you think private enterprise is so afraid of govenrment competition? If government is so bad, then the health insurance industry should welcome the new healthcare law instead of spending millions/day to fitght it. If they can truly provide a better product at a lower price, what are they so afraid of?
Now that is not to say that government doesn't have spectacular failures, but so does the private sector. Bears & Sterns, anyone? Lots of even large companies go belly uip and disappear. We (American consumers) pay for that - even if you don't see it. We pay for it through higher taxes that support unemployment, higher prices on mortgages and consumer loans to repay the money the banks lost, higher prices on goods to repay investors, and so on. We pay for it all; just in different ways.
The main difference is that a government failure is trumpeted all over the place and tax payers get irate and a private failure is quietly swept under the rug leaving the investors holding the bag. No matter what we all pay for all failures.
The 'browser as an OS' concept is still stupid. Once you've made the browser so big that it encompasses all possible generic operating system needs, it is too bloated and someone else makes a smaller faster better browser.
This was not a security monitoring solution; this was a "let's see what's going on" sort of thing, to be used for PR and such and to see if I needed to go out there and see if anything interesting was going on. No different than, say, a traffic cam. If it got compromised, it would be wiped and started over. The whole point of my solution was to have no connection at all with the main network and thus no risk to the main network since we didn't have physical security at the remote location. Having a server with a VPN endpoint at a location that you don't control was a far greater risk than having a public facing IP cam.
Hehe. The last place I worked was the same way. I needed a webcam to monitor a remote construction site. I put together a request for an obsolete machine and an ipcam; the plan was to run motion on the machine and have a simple web interface on it. Having motion on it would allow the webcam to only record when there was activity, and would give me about 12FPS. All I needed was an internet connection with a static IP. There was no connection whatsoever to the company's network. Total cost was about $500.
This was rejected by IT with "That's not how we do enterprise".
It took 3 months to get IT's solution up and running. By then it morphed into an ipcam connected to a dedicated server onsite running VPN tunneling back into the main server room to another dedicated server, which provided me the amazing frame rate of 1 frame every 2 minutes - and no motion detection. The total cost, not including IT time, was about $5K billed to my project.
I could go on and on - but basically the IT department was all about "enterprise", which in their book meant each and every piece of software needed a dedicated server and a hefty alotment of manhours. Customer service and being cost-effective was not a part of their lexicon; saying "no" was only second to "give us more money".
You only get to do that if it's _your_ place. Or some place catering to kids, like an elementary school or a daycare. You don't get to child-proof the world (or the Internet), against the will of the adults who would like to live there. You certainly don't get to demand that others child-proof the world (or the Internet) for you.
I'm not asking to "child proof the internet". I'm asking for a "safe search" on youtube. Did you even read what this is about?
The same way I use OpenDNS to block certain things at home. There's no "child proofing the internet" involved here. Kids use Youtube a lot. How about providng a way to search so that "in general" inappropriate content doesn't come up? You don't have to use the search option. All I'm saying is that it would be nice to have.
Do you actually have kids? You obviously have no idea that a big part of parenting is letting kids explore on their own. It's our job to insure that in general, the place they are exploring is safe. So kids can hang out at the neighborhood playground, because in general there's lots of parents there who keep the baddies away. But we don't micromanage our kids.
The same way when my daughter goes to the school dance - I don't chaperone her. It's part of her life to explore. But I am secure in knowing that there are teachers there who in general won't let the kids get away with too much.
Youtube, OTOH, has no such broad supervision. You can get totally inappropriate videos right next to childrens' videos. It would be nice to be able to set search preferences so that in general most of the bad stuff is not there.
If you have kids, then you have a right to talk. Otherwise, take your attitude and STFU.
I owned a consulting company. There's a reason why you make so much. You work that much harder, and you put your entire financial future on the line every time you sign a big contract or fire an employee.
I now work for a public utility. Regular hours, no worries, and a regular paycheck. Yes it's half of what I used to make, but I have half the hours and a quarter of the stress.
Yup. I'd ask to buy shares, not "get" equity. But unless you bring something to the table, why would they sell you shares? Also, in a private company, shares are worth whatever the owners say they're worth. And forced buyouts are common.
Typically the share ownership is worded such that you have to be employed by the company to own shares. So you buy a bunch of shares at $100 each. Then you work like a dog, and you think your shares are now worth $1,000. But one day you get fired, and the company buys your shares back at $1.
If you want to know how to avoid this, talk to a lawyer. One who has experience with contracts for privately owned startups. Don't rely on anything you read on/.
OK, I'll give you a good example. We have construction crews. Now if you've ever worked with those guys, they are hard on equipment. Really hard. So our mgt doesn't want to give them cell phones with cameras because they cost more than the disposable POS phones we are given. So the tasks in my RT installation, which could be updated live from the crews by phone with pictures and comments, may get updated every few months. IF the crew remembers to go to the truck, find the camera, and IF the camera is charged, take some pics, and at the end of the day, remember to take the camera off the truck, download the pics, annotate them and upload them to RT. Not happening.
But pretty everyone on the crew has a personal iPhone or smartphone in their pocket. They take care of those really well. If our management got off their duff and paid those guys what we pay for the POS trash phones, they'd gladly use their personal phones to provide live uploads.
So here it makes sense to allow the use of personal IT equipment, if you classify smartphones as IT stuff.
I don't know about saving energy, but the tracks would be cheaper to build. Maglev tracks require magnets in every inch of rail; that's a lot of technologically complex stuff. This looks like it needs a concrete trough; something we can build with an extrusion machine if needed. (Look them up; they make extrusion machines for bridges; why not this?)
Lots cheaper and simpler. It will require lots of room and it will be ugly, and there are other issues - trash, water, etc - but that could all be handled somehow.
No doubt you will get flamed for that, but there's a lot of truth to that. One of the best engineers I ever hired and worked with had a degree in Ocean Engineering and subsequently dropped out of law school. Ended up working as a gopher for a law firm. One day she walked into my office and asked for a job. Just so happened I needed somebody to be a gopher so we hired her. In three years she was running an engineering office and managing multi-million dollar projects.
She never would have made it past the filters proposed here. Some people just take the scenic route through life, and if you just look at "accomplishments" instead of people you will miss out on some of the gems.
For one it's fun. It's OK to have fun. If we only do those things that need to have a (serious) reason, we'd never have any fun. You must have gone straight from diapers to curmudgeon, without the usual goofy and fun states.
For another, this would be great for a low-cost embedded project. I can easily see this being adapted to an embedded playroom I play with.
I've read reports of 70+ men on the team. Two Blackhawks for the initial strike, plus a bunch of Chinooks for the mopup crew, arab language experts to rifle files, and a few burly men to haul the loot back to the Chiniooks.
This is a company that does this for a living. They're located in Texas, a state known for notoriously weak consumer protection. The contract in question was signed in SC, the "collection agency" is in Texas, and I live in Oregon. No state AG will take this on. The feds aren't interested. I've checked.
The company is infamous for this behavior; they move every 6 months to make it more difficult to serve papers on them. They essentially extort money from people and if you don't pay they file a fraudulent default. Since none of the credit bureaus are required to verify any of the claims, there's nothing you can do short of hiring an interstate legal team, something that I can't afford.
The big deal is that your credit rating is determined by 3 private entities that have no practical oversight. Once you are subject to a fraudulent claim, you are screwed. There is no recourse and no way to clear your record.
I have a fraudulent claim by a bogus company on my record. I have no way to get them removed. They claim that I defaulted on a judgement; none of which is true. I've been told it would cost over $50K in attorney fees to try to get this removed.
So yes, maybe you can get your money back from Master Card or Visa, but basically you can be screwed on your credit rating for years.
AT&T can force you into binding arbitration. You are in Kentucky. AT&T's arbitration panel is in Delaware. You don't show, you lose.
You gonna drive up there, to be faced with a panel of AT&T attorneys and technical experts. They are going to counter every iinstance you make.
And the arbitator is on AT&T's payroll.
Who's gonna win? And who's gonna pay?
Keep in mind that AT&T can set up a kangaroo arbitration panel; they simply have a standing panel that every dispute has to come to. In effect, they can set up an AT&T court system that you are required to use if you want anything from AT&T. A court system where the attorneys, the judge, and the experts are all paid for by the defendant.
It can take days. You have to take time off work and travel there. So you're out what, $200+ to thousands (depending on how much you make). For, say, $5 overcharge/month every month for the last 2 years. Not a chance. It's a license to steal on a small scale from each and every one of your customers. A dollar here, and a dollar there, and pretty soon you're raking in millions - and if your customers find out, all they can get is the few pennies that you stole from them. And the customers don't even get their expenses paid. Such a deal!
Where I work (a water company) we are a publicly owned corporation. Not at all an unusual setup. We are owned by our customers and answer to an elected board of directors.
I work for a water company... I can lose my engineering license, I can be prosecuted for criminal (not civil) violations of the Clean Water act and a host of other state and federal laws. I can go to jail for a long, long time for failing to provide you with potable water.
Nothing like a "clean communications act" exists. The two are not at all related.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you in one of those designated flood ways? IIRC flood insurance is a federal program; the banks may collect the money but the feds set the rules. What do the feds say?
And stop drinking that cool-aid. Government cannot do any of the things you imagine it can.
Most government is accountable. It's just that people don't understand how accountable, and there is always some politician who will dig up one invoice and use it to tar the entire government. I'm not defending gov't waste; I'm simply saying that any large organization will have some waste.
How poorly executed and overly expensive does something have to be for the government to think that about it? :D
The vast amount of government operations as as efficient, if not more so, than private sector equivalents. Why do you think private enterprise is so afraid of govenrment competition? If government is so bad, then the health insurance industry should welcome the new healthcare law instead of spending millions/day to fitght it. If they can truly provide a better product at a lower price, what are they so afraid of? Now that is not to say that government doesn't have spectacular failures, but so does the private sector. Bears & Sterns, anyone? Lots of even large companies go belly uip and disappear. We (American consumers) pay for that - even if you don't see it. We pay for it through higher taxes that support unemployment, higher prices on mortgages and consumer loans to repay the money the banks lost, higher prices on goods to repay investors, and so on. We pay for it all; just in different ways. The main difference is that a government failure is trumpeted all over the place and tax payers get irate and a private failure is quietly swept under the rug leaving the investors holding the bag. No matter what we all pay for all failures.
The 'browser as an OS' concept is still stupid. Once you've made the browser so big that it encompasses all possible generic operating system needs, it is too bloated and someone else makes a smaller faster better browser.
Somehow I want to read Godel's theorem again...
This was not a security monitoring solution; this was a "let's see what's going on" sort of thing, to be used for PR and such and to see if I needed to go out there and see if anything interesting was going on. No different than, say, a traffic cam. If it got compromised, it would be wiped and started over. The whole point of my solution was to have no connection at all with the main network and thus no risk to the main network since we didn't have physical security at the remote location. Having a server with a VPN endpoint at a location that you don't control was a far greater risk than having a public facing IP cam.
Hehe. The last place I worked was the same way. I needed a webcam to monitor a remote construction site. I put together a request for an obsolete machine and an ipcam; the plan was to run motion on the machine and have a simple web interface on it. Having motion on it would allow the webcam to only record when there was activity, and would give me about 12FPS. All I needed was an internet connection with a static IP. There was no connection whatsoever to the company's network. Total cost was about $500.
This was rejected by IT with "That's not how we do enterprise".
It took 3 months to get IT's solution up and running. By then it morphed into an ipcam connected to a dedicated server onsite running VPN tunneling back into the main server room to another dedicated server, which provided me the amazing frame rate of 1 frame every 2 minutes - and no motion detection. The total cost, not including IT time, was about $5K billed to my project.
I could go on and on - but basically the IT department was all about "enterprise", which in their book meant each and every piece of software needed a dedicated server and a hefty alotment of manhours. Customer service and being cost-effective was not a part of their lexicon; saying "no" was only second to "give us more money".
Are politicians really that stupid?
Google Wiener. Yes, the really are that stupid.
Now make the gasoline and oil incentives go away too. After all, if the free market is good for the little guy, it should be good for the big guy.
You only get to do that if it's _your_ place. Or some place catering to kids, like an elementary school or a daycare. You don't get to child-proof the world (or the Internet), against the will of the adults who would like to live there. You certainly don't get to demand that others child-proof the world (or the Internet) for you.
I'm not asking to "child proof the internet". I'm asking for a "safe search" on youtube. Did you even read what this is about?
The same way I use OpenDNS to block certain things at home. There's no "child proofing the internet" involved here. Kids use Youtube a lot. How about providng a way to search so that "in general" inappropriate content doesn't come up? You don't have to use the search option. All I'm saying is that it would be nice to have.
Do you actually have kids? You obviously have no idea that a big part of parenting is letting kids explore on their own. It's our job to insure that in general, the place they are exploring is safe. So kids can hang out at the neighborhood playground, because in general there's lots of parents there who keep the baddies away. But we don't micromanage our kids.
The same way when my daughter goes to the school dance - I don't chaperone her. It's part of her life to explore. But I am secure in knowing that there are teachers there who in general won't let the kids get away with too much.
Youtube, OTOH, has no such broad supervision. You can get totally inappropriate videos right next to childrens' videos. It would be nice to be able to set search preferences so that in general most of the bad stuff is not there.
If you have kids, then you have a right to talk. Otherwise, take your attitude and STFU.
I owned a consulting company. There's a reason why you make so much. You work that much harder, and you put your entire financial future on the line every time you sign a big contract or fire an employee.
I now work for a public utility. Regular hours, no worries, and a regular paycheck. Yes it's half of what I used to make, but I have half the hours and a quarter of the stress.
Yup. I'd ask to buy shares, not "get" equity. But unless you bring something to the table, why would they sell you shares? Also, in a private company, shares are worth whatever the owners say they're worth. And forced buyouts are common.
Typically the share ownership is worded such that you have to be employed by the company to own shares. So you buy a bunch of shares at $100 each. Then you work like a dog, and you think your shares are now worth $1,000. But one day you get fired, and the company buys your shares back at $1.
If you want to know how to avoid this, talk to a lawyer. One who has experience with contracts for privately owned startups. Don't rely on anything you read on /.
OK, I'll give you a good example. We have construction crews. Now if you've ever worked with those guys, they are hard on equipment. Really hard. So our mgt doesn't want to give them cell phones with cameras because they cost more than the disposable POS phones we are given. So the tasks in my RT installation, which could be updated live from the crews by phone with pictures and comments, may get updated every few months. IF the crew remembers to go to the truck, find the camera, and IF the camera is charged, take some pics, and at the end of the day, remember to take the camera off the truck, download the pics, annotate them and upload them to RT. Not happening.
But pretty everyone on the crew has a personal iPhone or smartphone in their pocket. They take care of those really well. If our management got off their duff and paid those guys what we pay for the POS trash phones, they'd gladly use their personal phones to provide live uploads.
So here it makes sense to allow the use of personal IT equipment, if you classify smartphones as IT stuff.
Sort of except much bigger...
http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/rogersluoluo/product-detailGMkJqRbyCehL/China-Bridge-Fabrication-Machine.html
The one I was looking for is made by an Italian outfit but my google-fu is weak today....
I don't know about saving energy, but the tracks would be cheaper to build. Maglev tracks require magnets in every inch of rail; that's a lot of technologically complex stuff. This looks like it needs a concrete trough; something we can build with an extrusion machine if needed. (Look them up; they make extrusion machines for bridges; why not this?)
Lots cheaper and simpler. It will require lots of room and it will be ugly, and there are other issues - trash, water, etc - but that could all be handled somehow.
No doubt you will get flamed for that, but there's a lot of truth to that. One of the best engineers I ever hired and worked with had a degree in Ocean Engineering and subsequently dropped out of law school. Ended up working as a gopher for a law firm. One day she walked into my office and asked for a job. Just so happened I needed somebody to be a gopher so we hired her. In three years she was running an engineering office and managing multi-million dollar projects.
She never would have made it past the filters proposed here. Some people just take the scenic route through life, and if you just look at "accomplishments" instead of people you will miss out on some of the gems.
For one it's fun. It's OK to have fun. If we only do those things that need to have a (serious) reason, we'd never have any fun. You must have gone straight from diapers to curmudgeon, without the usual goofy and fun states.
For another, this would be great for a low-cost embedded project. I can easily see this being adapted to an embedded playroom I play with.
Lastly, ti's cool.
I've read reports of 70+ men on the team. Two Blackhawks for the initial strike, plus a bunch of Chinooks for the mopup crew, arab language experts to rifle files, and a few burly men to haul the loot back to the Chiniooks.
And you could cut and pase the codes just like text. The word "reveal codes" is not even a poor imitation; it's an "extinguish" feature.
This is a company that does this for a living. They're located in Texas, a state known for notoriously weak consumer protection. The contract in question was signed in SC, the "collection agency" is in Texas, and I live in Oregon. No state AG will take this on. The feds aren't interested. I've checked.
The company is infamous for this behavior; they move every 6 months to make it more difficult to serve papers on them. They essentially extort money from people and if you don't pay they file a fraudulent default. Since none of the credit bureaus are required to verify any of the claims, there's nothing you can do short of hiring an interstate legal team, something that I can't afford.
The big deal is that your credit rating is determined by 3 private entities that have no practical oversight. Once you are subject to a fraudulent claim, you are screwed. There is no recourse and no way to clear your record.
I have a fraudulent claim by a bogus company on my record. I have no way to get them removed. They claim that I defaulted on a judgement; none of which is true. I've been told it would cost over $50K in attorney fees to try to get this removed.
So yes, maybe you can get your money back from Master Card or Visa, but basically you can be screwed on your credit rating for years.
AT&T can force you into binding arbitration. You are in Kentucky. AT&T's arbitration panel is in Delaware. You don't show, you lose.
You gonna drive up there, to be faced with a panel of AT&T attorneys and technical experts. They are going to counter every iinstance you make.
And the arbitator is on AT&T's payroll.
Who's gonna win? And who's gonna pay?
Keep in mind that AT&T can set up a kangaroo arbitration panel; they simply have a standing panel that every dispute has to come to. In effect, they can set up an AT&T court system that you are required to use if you want anything from AT&T. A court system where the attorneys, the judge, and the experts are all paid for by the defendant.
Who's gonna win again?
Ever been to arbitration?
It can take days. You have to take time off work and travel there. So you're out what, $200+ to thousands (depending on how much you make). For, say, $5 overcharge /month every month for the last 2 years. Not a chance. It's a license to steal on a small scale from each and every one of your customers. A dollar here, and a dollar there, and pretty soon you're raking in millions - and if your customers find out, all they can get is the few pennies that you stole from them. And the customers don't even get their expenses paid. Such a deal!
Where I work (a water company) we are a publicly owned corporation. Not at all an unusual setup. We are owned by our customers and answer to an elected board of directors.
I work for a water company... I can lose my engineering license, I can be prosecuted for criminal (not civil) violations of the Clean Water act and a host of other state and federal laws. I can go to jail for a long, long time for failing to provide you with potable water.
Nothing like a "clean communications act" exists. The two are not at all related.