statistical analysis of large data sets makes it increasingly easy to evaluate individual productivity, even if the employer has a fairly noisy data set about what is going on in the workplace.
This is only true if you know what to measure. Otherwise you are measuring activity. For example one programmer may type out lots of quick lines to empirically discover the format of a string a library returns for a given inputs, another might go directly to the documentation. One will press more keys, but which is more productive? I don't think you can always expect the correct answer if the statistic you use is average key presses per hour.
If someones job is to paint unpainted widgets in bin A and paint them and put them in bin B, that we can pretty accurately measure their productivity by determine how many widgets are in bin B each day and comparing them with others who do the same work, or can we? What about the defect rate? Measuring is hard, knowing what to measure is harder.
How do measure the productivity of a corporate staff attorney? What about route / switch admin? Is one who puts in more change requests more productive or does that just mean (s)he fails to plan ahead?
Be careful what you measure you will probably get favorable results, but its the side effects that will hurt you.
I don't disagree with you. If we are being intellectually honest then your argument is perfectly correct. If we care to do the right thing then your argument is perfectly correct, IMHO.
The problem is you had better be prepared for disappointment. The Feds abhor intellectual honesty "The law says we can't give aide to a country after a coup but it does not say we have to make the determination if a coup occurred." -- This is how they think. Any normal person I would consider having any sort of relationship other than strictly adversarial would recognize that as total bullshit, and that obviously laws or any sort of agreement do not need to contain a disclaimer that specifically states "you are not entitled to be willfully ignorant on matters relating or to ignore reality"
The defense of parallel construction will be that they don't lie about, but rather evade the question.
Defense Attorney: "How did you come to learn my client was in possession of $controlledSubstance" DEA Agent: "Well we might have discovered it during a traffic stop."
They are going to argue that its not 'fruit of poison' as long as they reasonably could found it thru normal means.
I don't see why the fundamentalists even need to deny it. They already believe God created Mars, the earth and basically everything, what doctrinal notion is violated by the idea their creator also put some bacteria on Mars? Intelligently designed of course.
I am sorry but the Pope is largely ignorant about most of the 'issues' he talks about. He should probably stick to religion. Anytime anyone from the media seriously questions him about issues, its clear he does not know who the players are and has not really thought it thru. I mean he admitted to having not given much thought to the middle class. I don't know you can put your self out there as an authority on income inequality without having thought about the middle class.
Frankly I think the current Pope is a dangerous propaganda spewing fool. It would have been wiser to arrange a CIA hit, than invite him to speak to congress.
If you don't you create a moral hazard though. Its just another from of To Big To Fail. Its not worth breaking to entire economy to protect a few unfortunate victims. If anything they should be made to qualify for unemployment insurance or something like in the case of a traditional layoff.
Then it all comes down to specs and interpretation. Does it have release no more than X amount of NOx in all conditions? normal conditions? be capable of operating within that constraint but not normally so? The guy building the ECU profile might not know the answers to that and might not need to.
Maybe he was told design a profile that meets this "spec" because the North America market requires that. Its completely common for slight changes to exist across models for different markets. If I am just creating a profile, I might not know or not be responsible for the other conditions that trigger its use, why I think that someone who asked me to developer a lower performance profile to meet an emissions requirement is doing something wrong?
Ditto for someone who is told hey build this wheel speed sensor to recognize unusual conditions like fronts are spinning but rears are not. That type of detection etc is often needed for things like traction control etc, it might even be a requirement to recognize such a test condition to disable features like that so the dino test can run properly. Again being asked to implement just that part might not raise any red flags with someone, especially if a credible false reason for it is given.
So in an organization as large as VM its easy to imagine a situation where a mixture of people that don't have a large enough view of the situation to know what is going on gets combined with a number of people acting on vague instructions and directives they got from the business side who also might only see part of the picture. In the end nobody is clearly responsible for anything.
I think my point remains though. Somebody somewhere along the line does have a fairly holistic view of the engine management system being built. That person would be in a position to make decisions to design in a cheat maybe with people doing the work below them being aware maybe without.
Then it all comes down to specs and interpretation. Does it have release no more than X amount of NOx in all conditions? normal conditions? be capable of operating within that constraint but not normally so? The guy building the ECU profile might not know the answers to that and might not need to.
Maybe he was told design a profile that meets this "spec" because the North America market requires that. Its completely common for slight changes to exist across models for different markets. If I am just creating a profile, I might not know or not be responsible for the other conditions that trigger its use, why I think that someone who asked me to developer a lower performance profile to meet an emissions requirement is doing something wrong?
Ditto for someone who is told hey build this wheel speed sensor to recognize unusual conditions like fronts are spinning but rears are not. That type of detection etc is often needed for things like traction control etc, it might even be a requirement to recognize such a test condition to disable features like that so the dino test can run properly. Again being asked to implement just that part might not raise any red flags with someone, especially if a credible false reason for it is given.
So in an organization as large as VM its easy to imagine a situation where a mixture of people that don't have a large enough view of the situation to know what is going on gets combined with a number of people acting on vague instructions and directives they from the business side who also might only see part of the picture. In the end nobody is clearly responsible for anything.
The trouble is all the vagaries. Consider this situation which I suspect is quite common. $CEO tells head of $[Region Operations], make are numbers this quarter or else?
$[Region Operations] asks $[Marketing Director] what will take to beat the competition and sell $X cars? $[Marketing Director], we would need to be able to advertise economy $Y on models $A, $B, and $C.
$[Region Operations] tells $[Engineering Team lead], we need the following cars to $Y make it happen or else!
Eventually $Engineer looking to get noticed "makes it happen". Nobody ever said, "go forth and flaunt the law" maybe $Engineer did not even realize what he was doing violated the testing rules. Get enough people involved and suddenly nobody is responsible for anything.
I don't know about CA but where I used to live in Ohio the folks doing the testing knew enough to plug in the ODBII connected and run the thing up to 55mph on the dyno and not much else. I highly doubt they would have the capability to check the firmware on site.
Probably not a big issue. My guess is some other automaker possibly one of the Chinese companies that have been making noise about wanting to enter the US market would see it as an opportunity to pick up a facility that would require minimal retooling with a skilled workforce near by waiting to be hired, again at probably favorable rates as they would be faced with the alternative of leaving or changing careers themselves otherwise.
There is no other body in our solar system that could sustain human life in any self-sustainable way
This is simply not true. The atoms we require are relatively abundant. Arranging them into the chemicals we need them and temperatures required is simply a question of energy and engineering. Neither the energy component or the engineering component are simple but I believe both are definable solvable problems. Possibly not on a short term of ten years but eventually. We are not 'stuck' on earth but leaving it might not look like the movies.
Running the program intelligently (and fixing bugs on the fly) is precisely the role I think the US President is supposed to fulfil on domestic matters.
No the role of the president should be to implement and execute the law as written by congress. If the time lines were supposed to be felible congress could have easily have said, "starting not before tax year 2014" and left it to the executive to determine the specific when. They did not write that though, they wrote specific dates, which the president then simply ignored and did his own thing, which he is not entitled to do.
The President has a chance to second guess Congress, its call the veto. if a law is so specific as to be unworkable the president should veto it, and tell Congress why. "I am vetoing this law that I generally like because I can't possibly implement it as written with resources allocated, either send me a version with looser constraints or give me a larger allocation of assets to work with" would be a perfectly presidential response IMHO. Just ignoring the parts you don't like or can't effect on the other hand is just illegal. The rest of us don't get to do that!
Sorry mister firemarshall I would have installed a centralized fire detection system while converting this to a commercial space but you known the building is old, and there was no way we were going to be able to run the cables in time... Would not fly.
Why should Google be responsible for Geo-locating request sources etc? That gets nasty quickly with things like VPNs etc.
I think Google should just update their TOS to say if you are in Europe you are not permitted to access Googles search services except via one of our EU based domains.
Then if the French come crying that when someone goes to www.google.com and still gets full search results. Google can just say well we never offered that service in the EU. People doing that are violating our terms of use, we are simply declining to pursue any legal action against these violators.
Oh please it does not work that way and you know it. First off its always going to go on up the chain that way until it gets to the CEO.
The kind of person who would order the commission of such a fraud is by definition not the sort that will step forward during the finger pointing when it happens. This person is dishonest and the promise of hefty fines or jail isn't usually the sort of thing that gets the dishonest to suddenly come forward. So pretty much no matter what the most guilty party is going to say 'my boss told me to do it.' That person who may be innocent is going to say 'wasn't me' etc on up the chain.
Then we get into if Bob the CXO says:
'Now Ted I don't care what you have to do, you will make the numbers this quarter or else you're fired!'
Does that mean the Bob induced Ted the director of North American operations to do something illegal? Certainly Bob will say its understand that there is an implied caveat that our company policy of complying with all laws an regulations would be flowed. Ted might not see it that way. You run into the "higher the vaguer" problem.
Maybe that depends on how the specs were gathered. For instance. US emissions checks are exactly that, they measure emissions at a certain "road speed". They don't care about HP or pickup etc. So if you plugin the ODBII connector and ask the ECM for an emissions test cycle and the result is that it dials down the performance to produce emissions numbers that look good at the cost of 25HP or something and then when you publish the HP and torque specs based on a system not running in test mode, you might very well not be delivering the specs paid for / advertized.
Unless you really want to make the argument "hey we never said you could get that level of output power AND those emissions numbers AT THE SAME TIME."
Which might be true but is highly deceptive.
When emissions controls when first into effect many imports had a "full throttle switch" which disabled early ECM systems use of the O2 sensor, for the most part, and would cause them to just run the maximum fuel injector duration. So if you had the pedal on the floor you would get a little extra performance and an engine condition that might not meet EPA specs. Still this was not really cheating, or not considered to be, because the specs are written for "normal conditions" and one does not normally drive around with the throttle wide open, but if your owners club had a track day or something you could still have fun without having to modify your car.
The forest fire bit is tricky. The problem we have is that lots of little naturally occurring lighting triggered fires are probably good. At least some of the larger older trees could survive them and therefore remained to provide habitat for displaced animals to return to and to reseed the forest. The fire at the same time burned away most of the dead and smaller brush.
Then we started building all over the place and for a good 75 years or so largely kept the forests from burning as they should. The fuel piled up. The fire ecology changed. Now when a fire gets started it burns decades of pent up fuel, it burns hotter and higher, it spreads over larger areas and kills EVERYTHING.
Its irrelevant. By the time you conclusively determine whatever killed the beasts isn't harmful to humans the meat will most likely have spoiled.
Lots of bacteria that might be destroyed by cooking fills the host will harmful toxins that may not be destroyed by cooking before the host dies. By the time you work all this out it will be to late for other reasons.
Basic survival rule: if you don't know what killed it, scratch eating it off the list of possibilities.
First the entire section about 3.x being hard to use has not supporting evidence. Anecdotally I can't recall anyone being especially confused by anything specific to the win 3.x ui. I can totally recall people who we not used to navigating nested menus having a terribly frustrating time using the Start menu. Explorer was a lot nicer than winfile I'll give you that but the rest of the claims run so counter to my experience I'd love to see some stats or a real usability study. I think timing had more to do with it personally '95 was about the time new Pentiums were getting affordable, the Internet had real things to do on that normal people wanted, so for so many Win95 was their first experience. Folks that were used to win3.x in the office spent much of their time using as a launch pad for DOS applications and terminal emulators so even for many of them '95 was "Windows". Its all a matter of what you got used to. Finally again speaking subjectively, the '95 ui was not all that good, certainly no where near as good as MacOS at the time or Norton Desktop on Windows 3.x.
The registry. Windows 3.x had a registry! It was not new in Windows 95.
Install wizards really? Plenty of Win 3.x software had easy to use very Wizard like setup programs calling that a new feature is laughable.
TCP/IP -- Again there were drivers for 3.x prior to the resale of Windows 95. You just had to install them I am not even taking about things like Trumpet etc, nope first party Windows NDIS drivers from Microsoft.
In short for the most part Windows 95, was nothing special. Plug and Play was the only real feature, otherwise it was just a fully loaded Win3.11. Which sometime not long after you could install the win32s on too.
Nope, and he basically already said he does not plan to do so. New systems are going to be EFI more and more which means they will use ELILO, not LILO for systems using BIOS the current release of LILO will probably be fine and remain so.
The biggest issue is if you have kids or not when you come into that sorta wealth. If I had children I would feel some obligation I think to retain said wealth for them and future generations.
Since I don't have kids though I think it would be fairly easy. First a billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money. If I am still a "billionaire" after paying the taxes on the windfall than I essentially have more money then I really know what to do with.
First) I'd probably make a gift to some family members of paying off their mortgages. That will probably run me a million or so. Hopefully that would be a sufficient gesture that they would not resent my sudden wealth and be glad that my good fortune has made what is probably the biggest monthly payment in their lives a thing of the past.
I don't think I'd move or anything but I could probably drop a 100K or remodeling my own place.
I'd certain acquire some new costs like hiring out the law work etc.
I'd probably blow another few hundered K building a bigger garage and picking up four or five fun cars, nothing nuts like a super car or anything stuff I could actually drive, a Tesla, Alfa 4C, Corvette, and couple interesting classics.
I'd travel and go cool places. Invite my current friends to go with with me on my tab. Again though nice hotels, good resturants etc, but no renting out the entire floor or anything nuts.
The rest I probably just live life as I do now with, for the most part. I guess I would on my own projects like OSS stuff rather than work a day job.
That is shitty customer service too though. The network should be available when you want to use it. Its like cable modems were in some neighbor hoods in the early days. If you tried to use one between 6-8pm in some places you might as well have been on dial up. Useless slow. That's been mostly fixed now days with smaller shared segments, faster signalling, and more bandwidth dedicated to data. That is less of an option on last mile and wireless.
I should be able to depend on being able to drive around down town and get enough data throughput to facilitate using my phones navigational functions. The right/fair/just thing to since spectrum is a finite resource is a low fixed cost to cover the overhead of having an account, and then a low rate per unit. Make it a penny or two per megabyte and let users manage their own usage.
The current situation with overages is what sucks. Go a handful of megs over and get pushed into the next pricing tier. That's BS. That makes you have to monitor exactly where you are constantly instead of just making the decision "am I willing to pay a couple dollars to stream this moving here and now." Overages and caps make you afraid to use all that you have already paid for fear of crossing some invisible line.
Why would any traffic need to be exempt. A byte should be a byte unless it has a higher priority class set by YOU. Maybe something with a low latency QOS tag costs a little more. I don't see anything wrong with that either.
I am talking about edge networks here. Obviously the rules have to work a little different for transit networks. Those are not usually described as last mile or wireless though.
Right 'we' and the service providers just need to admin reality: Last mile and wireless circuits have limited bandwidth. Its not practical to sell a limited resource at a single flat price. It violates the basic principles of economics.
I would like to see a single low fixed connection fee and a per megabyte charge, starting from megabyte 1. Just sell it like electricity or water. Every bit you use has a cost, so you have some incentive to minimize use. On the other hand you don't have to sit there going gee how far off is my cap this month. If you want to use it you can and you know download that extra iso image is going to run you another dollar or so rather than another $50.
People would not download stuff they have no real intention of looking at using, but could watch binge watch netflix knowing the price tag was going to be a few dollars for doing so without panicking about the prospect of some outrageous overage fee. Just like with electricity. If its blazing hot you turn on the A/C, if its on the cusp you try an open the windows.
Okay consider gasoline. What do think all the effort to achieve peace in the middle east and all the money lent or dolled out in foreign aide to evil regimes so they can militarize with our war machines is for?
It might be a little indirect but all the jet fighters and military equipment gets paid for quite often out of our treasury. One of the reasons for that is stabilize the region, so we can keep access to oil, cheap or not. If we just left things go (as I think we actually should over all) we would probably see 70s style price shocks in oil and gas with some frequency. You income taxes subsidize the price you pay at the pump even if its a long lossy process.
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statistical analysis of large data sets makes it increasingly easy to evaluate individual productivity, even if the employer has a fairly noisy data set about what is going on in the workplace.
This is only true if you know what to measure. Otherwise you are measuring activity. For example one programmer may type out lots of quick lines to empirically discover the format of a string a library returns for a given inputs, another might go directly to the documentation. One will press more keys, but which is more productive? I don't think you can always expect the correct answer if the statistic you use is average key presses per hour.
If someones job is to paint unpainted widgets in bin A and paint them and put them in bin B, that we can pretty accurately measure their productivity by determine how many widgets are in bin B each day and comparing them with others who do the same work, or can we? What about the defect rate? Measuring is hard, knowing what to measure is harder.
How do measure the productivity of a corporate staff attorney? What about route / switch admin? Is one who puts in more change requests more productive or does that just mean (s)he fails to plan ahead?
Be careful what you measure you will probably get favorable results, but its the side effects that will hurt you.
I don't disagree with you. If we are being intellectually honest then your argument is perfectly correct. If we care to do the right thing then your argument is perfectly correct, IMHO.
The problem is you had better be prepared for disappointment. The Feds abhor intellectual honesty "The law says we can't give aide to a country after a coup but it does not say we have to make the determination if a coup occurred." -- This is how they think. Any normal person I would consider having any sort of relationship other than strictly adversarial would recognize that as total bullshit, and that obviously laws or any sort of agreement do not need to contain a disclaimer that specifically states "you are not entitled to be willfully ignorant on matters relating or to ignore reality"
The defense of parallel construction will be that they don't lie about, but rather evade the question.
Defense Attorney: "How did you come to learn my client was in possession of $controlledSubstance"
DEA Agent: "Well we might have discovered it during a traffic stop."
They are going to argue that its not 'fruit of poison' as long as they reasonably could found it thru normal means.
"God created the heavens and the Earth"
I don't see why the fundamentalists even need to deny it. They already believe God created Mars, the earth and basically everything, what doctrinal notion is violated by the idea their creator also put some bacteria on Mars? Intelligently designed of course.
I am sorry but the Pope is largely ignorant about most of the 'issues' he talks about. He should probably stick to religion. Anytime anyone from the media seriously questions him about issues, its clear he does not know who the players are and has not really thought it thru. I mean he admitted to having not given much thought to the middle class. I don't know you can put your self out there as an authority on income inequality without having thought about the middle class.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
Frankly I think the current Pope is a dangerous propaganda spewing fool. It would have been wiser to arrange a CIA hit, than invite him to speak to congress.
If you don't you create a moral hazard though. Its just another from of To Big To Fail. Its not worth breaking to entire economy to protect a few unfortunate victims. If anything they should be made to qualify for unemployment insurance or something like in the case of a traditional layoff.
Then it all comes down to specs and interpretation. Does it have release no more than X amount of NOx in all conditions? normal conditions? be capable of operating within that constraint but not normally so? The guy building the ECU profile might not know the answers to that and might not need to.
Maybe he was told design a profile that meets this "spec" because the North America market requires that. Its completely common for slight changes to exist across models for different markets. If I am just creating a profile, I might not know or not be responsible for the other conditions that trigger its use, why I think that someone who asked me to developer a lower performance profile to meet an emissions requirement is doing something wrong?
Ditto for someone who is told hey build this wheel speed sensor to recognize unusual conditions like fronts are spinning but rears are not. That type of detection etc is often needed for things like traction control etc, it might even be a requirement to recognize such a test condition to disable features like that so the dino test can run properly. Again being asked to implement just that part might not raise any red flags with someone, especially if a credible false reason for it is given.
So in an organization as large as VM its easy to imagine a situation where a mixture of people that don't have a large enough view of the situation to know what is going on gets combined with a number of people acting on vague instructions and directives they got from the business side who also might only see part of the picture. In the end nobody is clearly responsible for anything.
I think my point remains though. Somebody somewhere along the line does have a fairly holistic view of the engine management system being built. That person would be in a position to make decisions to design in a cheat maybe with people doing the work below them being aware maybe without.
Then it all comes down to specs and interpretation. Does it have release no more than X amount of NOx in all conditions? normal conditions? be capable of operating within that constraint but not normally so? The guy building the ECU profile might not know the answers to that and might not need to.
Maybe he was told design a profile that meets this "spec" because the North America market requires that. Its completely common for slight changes to exist across models for different markets. If I am just creating a profile, I might not know or not be responsible for the other conditions that trigger its use, why I think that someone who asked me to developer a lower performance profile to meet an emissions requirement is doing something wrong?
Ditto for someone who is told hey build this wheel speed sensor to recognize unusual conditions like fronts are spinning but rears are not. That type of detection etc is often needed for things like traction control etc, it might even be a requirement to recognize such a test condition to disable features like that so the dino test can run properly. Again being asked to implement just that part might not raise any red flags with someone, especially if a credible false reason for it is given.
So in an organization as large as VM its easy to imagine a situation where a mixture of people that don't have a large enough view of the situation to know what is going on gets combined with a number of people acting on vague instructions and directives they from the business side who also might only see part of the picture. In the end nobody is clearly responsible for anything.
The trouble is all the vagaries. Consider this situation which I suspect is quite common. $CEO tells head of $[Region Operations], make are numbers this quarter or else?
$[Region Operations] asks $[Marketing Director] what will take to beat the competition and sell $X cars?
$[Marketing Director], we would need to be able to advertise economy $Y on models $A, $B, and $C.
$[Region Operations] tells $[Engineering Team lead], we need the following cars to $Y make it happen or else!
Eventually $Engineer looking to get noticed "makes it happen". Nobody ever said, "go forth and flaunt the law" maybe $Engineer did not even realize what he was doing violated the testing rules. Get enough people involved and suddenly nobody is responsible for anything.
I don't know about CA but where I used to live in Ohio the folks doing the testing knew enough to plug in the ODBII connected and run the thing up to 55mph on the dyno and not much else. I highly doubt they would have the capability to check the firmware on site.
Probably not a big issue. My guess is some other automaker possibly one of the Chinese companies that have been making noise about wanting to enter the US market would see it as an opportunity to pick up a facility that would require minimal retooling with a skilled workforce near by waiting to be hired, again at probably favorable rates as they would be faced with the alternative of leaving or changing careers themselves otherwise.
Capitalism, despite what the Pope says, it works!
There is no other body in our solar system that could sustain human life in any self-sustainable way
This is simply not true. The atoms we require are relatively abundant. Arranging them into the chemicals we need them and temperatures required is simply a question of energy and engineering. Neither the energy component or the engineering component are simple but I believe both are definable solvable problems. Possibly not on a short term of ten years but eventually. We are not 'stuck' on earth but leaving it might not look like the movies.
Running the program intelligently (and fixing bugs on the fly) is precisely the role I think the US President is supposed to fulfil on domestic matters.
No the role of the president should be to implement and execute the law as written by congress. If the time lines were supposed to be felible congress could have easily have said, "starting not before tax year 2014" and left it to the executive to determine the specific when. They did not write that though, they wrote specific dates, which the president then simply ignored and did his own thing, which he is not entitled to do.
The President has a chance to second guess Congress, its call the veto. if a law is so specific as to be unworkable the president should veto it, and tell Congress why. "I am vetoing this law that I generally like because I can't possibly implement it as written with resources allocated, either send me a version with looser constraints or give me a larger allocation of assets to work with" would be a perfectly presidential response IMHO. Just ignoring the parts you don't like or can't effect on the other hand is just illegal. The rest of us don't get to do that!
Sorry mister firemarshall I would have installed a centralized fire detection system while converting this to a commercial space but you known the building is old, and there was no way we were going to be able to run the cables in time... Would not fly.
Why should Google be responsible for Geo-locating request sources etc? That gets nasty quickly with things like VPNs etc.
I think Google should just update their TOS to say if you are in Europe you are not permitted to access Googles search services except via one of our EU based domains.
Then if the French come crying that when someone goes to www.google.com and still gets full search results. Google can just say well we never offered that service in the EU. People doing that are violating our terms of use, we are simply declining to pursue any legal action against these violators.
Oh please it does not work that way and you know it. First off its always going to go on up the chain that way until it gets to the CEO.
The kind of person who would order the commission of such a fraud is by definition not the sort that will step forward during the finger pointing when it happens. This person is dishonest and the promise of hefty fines or jail isn't usually the sort of thing that gets the dishonest to suddenly come forward. So pretty much no matter what the most guilty party is going to say 'my boss told me to do it.' That person who may be innocent is going to say 'wasn't me' etc on up the chain.
Then we get into if Bob the CXO says:
'Now Ted I don't care what you have to do, you will make the numbers this quarter or else you're fired!'
Does that mean the Bob induced Ted the director of North American operations to do something illegal? Certainly Bob will say its understand that there is an implied caveat that our company policy of complying with all laws an regulations would be flowed. Ted might not see it that way. You run into the "higher the vaguer" problem.
That would give them the specs they paid for.
Maybe that depends on how the specs were gathered. For instance. US emissions checks are exactly that, they measure emissions at a certain "road speed". They don't care about HP or pickup etc. So if you plugin the ODBII connector and ask the ECM for an emissions test cycle and the result is that it dials down the performance to produce emissions numbers that look good at the cost of 25HP or something and then when you publish the HP and torque specs based on a system not running in test mode, you might very well not be delivering the specs paid for / advertized.
Unless you really want to make the argument "hey we never said you could get that level of output power AND those emissions numbers AT THE SAME TIME."
Which might be true but is highly deceptive.
When emissions controls when first into effect many imports had a "full throttle switch" which disabled early ECM systems use of the O2 sensor, for the most part, and would cause them to just run the maximum fuel injector duration. So if you had the pedal on the floor you would get a little extra performance and an engine condition that might not meet EPA specs. Still this was not really cheating, or not considered to be, because the specs are written for "normal conditions" and one does not normally drive around with the throttle wide open, but if your owners club had a track day or something you could still have fun without having to modify your car.
The forest fire bit is tricky. The problem we have is that lots of little naturally occurring lighting triggered fires are probably good. At least some of the larger older trees could survive them and therefore remained to provide habitat for displaced animals to return to and to reseed the forest. The fire at the same time burned away most of the dead and smaller brush.
Then we started building all over the place and for a good 75 years or so largely kept the forests from burning as they should. The fuel piled up. The fire ecology changed. Now when a fire gets started it burns decades of pent up fuel, it burns hotter and higher, it spreads over larger areas and kills EVERYTHING.
Its irrelevant. By the time you conclusively determine whatever killed the beasts isn't harmful to humans the meat will most likely have spoiled.
Lots of bacteria that might be destroyed by cooking fills the host will harmful toxins that may not be destroyed by cooking before the host dies. By the time you work all this out it will be to late for other reasons.
Basic survival rule: if you don't know what killed it, scratch eating it off the list of possibilities.
That article is so much bull shit and ignorance.
First the entire section about 3.x being hard to use has not supporting evidence. Anecdotally I can't recall anyone being especially confused by anything specific to the win 3.x ui. I can totally recall people who we not used to navigating nested menus having a terribly frustrating time using the Start menu. Explorer was a lot nicer than winfile I'll give you that but the rest of the claims run so counter to my experience I'd love to see some stats or a real usability study. I think timing had more to do with it personally '95 was about the time new Pentiums were getting affordable, the Internet had real things to do on that normal people wanted, so for so many Win95 was their first experience. Folks that were used to win3.x in the office spent much of their time using as a launch pad for DOS applications and terminal emulators so even for many of them '95 was "Windows". Its all a matter of what you got used to. Finally again speaking subjectively, the '95 ui was not all that good, certainly no where near as good as MacOS at the time or Norton Desktop on Windows 3.x.
The registry. Windows 3.x had a registry! It was not new in Windows 95.
Install wizards really? Plenty of Win 3.x software had easy to use very Wizard like setup programs calling that a new feature is laughable.
TCP/IP -- Again there were drivers for 3.x prior to the resale of Windows 95. You just had to install them I am not even taking about things like Trumpet etc, nope first party Windows NDIS drivers from Microsoft.
In short for the most part Windows 95, was nothing special. Plug and Play was the only real feature, otherwise it was just a fully loaded Win3.11. Which sometime not long after you could install the win32s on too.
Because all of Islam is a fraud. Muhammad shows up and claims "I am a profit and oh by the way I am last one" (seal of the profits).
I mean seriously how scamy is that? It rates right up there with "now all your friends are going to tell you this is to good to be true".
I am not arguing here about the validity of the rest of the Abrahamic but its painful clear Muhammad was just a con man.
Nope, and he basically already said he does not plan to do so. New systems are going to be EFI more and more which means they will use ELILO, not LILO for systems using BIOS the current release of LILO will probably be fine and remain so.
The biggest issue is if you have kids or not when you come into that sorta wealth. If I had children I would feel some obligation I think to retain said wealth for them and future generations.
Since I don't have kids though I think it would be fairly easy. First a billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money. If I am still a "billionaire" after paying the taxes on the windfall than I essentially have more money then I really know what to do with.
First) I'd probably make a gift to some family members of paying off their mortgages. That will probably run me a million or so. Hopefully that would be a sufficient gesture that they would not resent my sudden wealth and be glad that my good fortune has made what is probably the biggest monthly payment in their lives a thing of the past.
I don't think I'd move or anything but I could probably drop a 100K or remodeling my own place.
I'd certain acquire some new costs like hiring out the law work etc.
I'd probably blow another few hundered K building a bigger garage and picking up four or five fun cars, nothing nuts like a super car or anything stuff I could actually drive, a Tesla, Alfa 4C, Corvette, and couple interesting classics.
I'd travel and go cool places. Invite my current friends to go with with me on my tab. Again though nice hotels, good resturants etc, but no renting out the entire floor or anything nuts.
The rest I probably just live life as I do now with, for the most part. I guess I would on my own projects like OSS stuff rather than work a day job.
That is shitty customer service too though. The network should be available when you want to use it. Its like cable modems were in some neighbor hoods in the early days. If you tried to use one between 6-8pm in some places you might as well have been on dial up. Useless slow. That's been mostly fixed now days with smaller shared segments, faster signalling, and more bandwidth dedicated to data. That is less of an option on last mile and wireless.
I should be able to depend on being able to drive around down town and get enough data throughput to facilitate using my phones navigational functions. The right/fair/just thing to since spectrum is a finite resource is a low fixed cost to cover the overhead of having an account, and then a low rate per unit. Make it a penny or two per megabyte and let users manage their own usage.
The current situation with overages is what sucks. Go a handful of megs over and get pushed into the next pricing tier. That's BS. That makes you have to monitor exactly where you are constantly instead of just making the decision "am I willing to pay a couple dollars to stream this moving here and now." Overages and caps make you afraid to use all that you have already paid for fear of crossing some invisible line.
Why would any traffic need to be exempt. A byte should be a byte unless it has a higher priority class set by YOU. Maybe something with a low latency QOS tag costs a little more. I don't see anything wrong with that either.
I am talking about edge networks here. Obviously the rules have to work a little different for transit networks. Those are not usually described as last mile or wireless though.
Right 'we' and the service providers just need to admin reality: Last mile and wireless circuits have limited bandwidth. Its not practical to sell a limited resource at a single flat price. It violates the basic principles of economics.
I would like to see a single low fixed connection fee and a per megabyte charge, starting from megabyte 1. Just sell it like electricity or water. Every bit you use has a cost, so you have some incentive to minimize use. On the other hand you don't have to sit there going gee how far off is my cap this month. If you want to use it you can and you know download that extra iso image is going to run you another dollar or so rather than another $50.
People would not download stuff they have no real intention of looking at using, but could watch binge watch netflix knowing the price tag was going to be a few dollars for doing so without panicking about the prospect of some outrageous overage fee. Just like with electricity. If its blazing hot you turn on the A/C, if its on the cusp you try an open the windows.
Okay consider gasoline. What do think all the effort to achieve peace in the middle east and all the money lent or dolled out in foreign aide to evil regimes so they can militarize with our war machines is for?
It might be a little indirect but all the jet fighters and military equipment gets paid for quite often out of our treasury. One of the reasons for that is stabilize the region, so we can keep access to oil, cheap or not. If we just left things go (as I think we actually should over all) we would probably see 70s style price shocks in oil and gas with some frequency. You income taxes subsidize the price you pay at the pump even if its a long lossy process.