While I don't feel I am entitled to games for free, I feel I am entitled to make informed decisions about where my money goes, and to purchase a game if - and only if - I feel it is worth my money.
So, if someone to come up with some kind of store where video games were sold and where you could play current titles on an actual console for a short period of time to determine whether you like the game, then this whole piracy problem would go away?
Well, that is just awesome. Because it turns out that we already have places like that, and the pirates apparently just weren't aware of them. Attention pirates everywhere. You can go play the games at Best Buy, Gamestop, Wal-mart and numerous other places.
There, that should solve the problem.
But there is a vast chasm on this particular slippery slope in between the first things on the list which are all illegal and the last one, which has not done anything illegal.
The slippery slope argument works well when they are coming for things which they should have no cause to take action against, but which large numbers of the populace don't care about (guns, for example). That doesn't work for speeding tickets, because it is lawful to take action against, and large portions of the populace think they should take action against it.
Going 60 in a school zone because you're running late isn't okay. Kids are unpredictable (and don't learn how to deal with cars until they're between 9 and 11 years old), odds are you're texting
Really? What statistics are out there to show that greater than 50% of people driving in a school zone are texting? If texting while driving has gotten that prolific then we perhaps ought to just ban texting period, driving or not.
The last thing my kid can afford is a $100 speeding ticket.
Where can you go to find a $100 speeding ticket? The very cheapest speeding ticket you can get where I live is for 1-10 over, and is $296.
Would I become a thief if everyone else was a thief? Absolutely not. Just because everybody does it does not make it right. Most of the people on here saying that everybody does it are just trying to justify why they are thiefs. It is quite clear that everybody does not do it and they don't want to take responsibility for their own lack of morals so they pretend like everybody does it to make their conscience feel better.
Case in point: the other day, somebody deliberately walked up to my house, about 50 feet off the street, picked up two small packages that had been left* there, and walked off with them. They are a thief. Yet I did not become a thief just because somebody else is a thief.
* I say "left" rather than delivered, because delivered happens when you ring the doorbell, knock on the door or otherwise try to attract the attention of the multiple people who are at home at the time, and then when said person answers the door, you hand it to them. Delivered does not mean you place the items on the step and then leave.
I found a phone in the bathroom once. I called "Mom" and found that the phone belonged to somebody in my office. I returned it to him. He did not even act grateful, but returning it was the right thing to do. If I kept the phone, I would be a thief and not fit to live in our society.
But it's much easier than every store or business republishing opening times (or maintain summer/winter opening times), every school, every bin collection, every bus or train timetable, essentially everything would need changing just because it annoys you having to change the clock.
Even easier would be to not change the clocks AND not change any of those things. That is what I advocate.
You drive home tired as can be, directly into the sunrise.
Unless, of course, you don't live east of the city.
I don't know about other people, but I am plenty tired of my drive IN to work, probably more so than my drive home. i don't really get going until I have been awake for an hour or two. When I used to live near Chicago, I had to drive into the sun at about 6:00 in the morning in order to get to work by 7:30. That was absolutely miserable. Nowadays I have moved to a smaller city and I will never go back to sacrificing 4 hours a day to commuting. I am certainly a lot less tired on my drive in now that I leave the house at about 8:30 in the morning.
Oh, and just to keep on subject, I am vehemently opposed to ever switching the time on the clock. I really doubt that there is any kind of energy savings any more, and it is not worth the disruption of sleeping schedules.
You are correct, and to make it even more obvious Air Conditioners have been operating at greater than 100% efficiency for years, and no one is questioning the 2nd law with respect to Air Conditioners. The fact of the matter is, that neither an AC nor this LED are a closed system and energy is able to transfer in and out. With an Air Conditioner, you put some energy into compressing a fluid, raising the temperature to a point above the outside temperature, and the excess heat bleeds off. Then the fluid is allowed to decompress and evaporates into a gas. In order to do this, it must pull energy in. This energy comes from the air inside your evaporator, which was circulated in from your house, and the now cooler air will be blown back out. The gas is then compressed and the cycle continues. In terms of energy input by electricity, the total energy moved to outside your house from inside can be 400% or more. But the energy definitely came from somewhere.
"The law is overly broad, criminalizing not only commercial SPAM but also anonymous non-commercial bulk emails containing political and religious messages"
Sounds good to me. I don't want bulk e-mailed political or religious messages either. I consider them spam, therefore CAN-SPAM is not too broad.
Isn't it against the Terms of Use of Facebook to give your login credentials to someone else? They have just as much authority to raise a stink about this as the school district does, especially since she was also violating the ToS by being underage.
How is it the fault of he speaker of the listener has an incorrect understanding of a term? If I use "begs the question" properly am I at fault because 95% of other people who use the term use it incorrectly?
programmers can't self-manage themselves because they can't estimate how long a task will take because programming tasks aren't estimatable so I need to manage clients and their expectations without having any idea how long an employee is going to actually take to do something and since clients can cancel for being one day late and not start for not giving an estimate I need to promise a date and manage the client knowing full well that no one knows how long it'll take.
OK, so I quoted the whole run-on sentence. Now, if a programming task is not estimable, then how is a manager going to do a better job of estimating it than a programmer?
For the record, I disagree that programming task are not estimable. If you know what needs to be done, the time is easily estimated. Only if there are unknowns, such as a missing spec, or an interface that you are not familiar with does it become more of a gray area. But you can make reasonable assumptions about how long those will take.
and then there's the actual business side. would you want me, your boss, to throw away a new client because we're fully booked with existing client work? or would you rather I take on the new client, and screw over the time-line of the existing client? Here's a hint. the former gives us two clients, one slightly upset or understanding and the other with a full budget. the latter gives us one client with no remaining projects. so the former guarantees the employees work for another two to five cycles, while the latter gives the employees work only through to the end of the current cycle, then nothing.
I have unfortunately worked for several companies in the past that were more than happy to screw over a client who was already on the hook and unable to back out. Usually, the company lies about what it can deliver, but then takes two or three times as long, but the client has so much invested that they can't back out. i think that is low and underhanded.
I am not against looking for new work, but if it is going to overlap with a current client's timeline, then perhaps some temporary contract workers would be in order. but hey, be a contractor. that solves all of my problems. pay your own damn taxes, work when I have work for you and charge me nothing when I don't. deal with your own benefits, your own supplies, and your own time. then you can be a telecommuter all you like. I don't need to pay you until 30 days after you're done the work. that's perfect for me.
I would prefer to be a contractor, pay my own taxes, deal with my own benefits, supplies etc.. I would make a lot more money and have a lot more deductible expenses. But my employer doesn't want that. I started out as a contractor at my current employer, but they insisted I be an employee and said I wouldn't be able to participate in stock options if I didn't become an employee. As it turns out, I still haven't received any stock options 5.5 years later, so I would have been better off as a contractor, but I didn't realize at the time that they were lying to me.
If you're not feeling well, why not take a sick day? That's what they're there for.
At my company, there is no sick day. If you are sick, you work from home, but you still have to get your job done. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
If your job can be telecommuted, it can be outsourced.
Common misconception, but not necessarily true. I mean, if you are 8 or more timezones away, have absolutely no interaction with the office and know nothing about the companies inner workings, then you could make the case for outsourcing, but otherwise, you are a person who is more valuable than a faceless drone on the other side of the world.
The beauty of it is, if you can telecommute to do your job, then some dude in India can do it too for half the price!
Yeah, half the price, and twice the cost.
if any programmers could self-manage themselves well enough to estimate how long a task will take, and how many problems will come up along the way, that'd be swell.
You sure seem to have a low opinion of programmers. The ones I know are pretty middle of the road, but they have a much better idea of how long things take than a manager would, unless that manager knew how to write code. The real issue is people shoving other stuff in front of your primary project. That is what needs to be stopped and that is a management problem.
Whenever I estimate how long a project will take, I always give the time in man hours. I am currently working on a project which I estimated 6 weeks of development time. I made it quite clear that that was development time and not elapsed time. I have not completed the project yet. It has been 4 months. However, it has not been 6 weeks of development yet. I am still two weeks of development out and I will deliver it on time. Unfortunately, I am not able to stop other people (including the one who should be shielding me from distractions) from heaping more stuff on my plate, in front of what they declare almost daily, is my #1 priority.
yes there's a better way. you ask the employee how long it'll take. and then you hold them to it.
That would be great, if their boss is doing their job and preventing other people from inserting other items and also preventing scope creep on the project. You can't hold an employee to blame because their boss is not very good at managing. employees haven't the foggiest notion of self-management.
You must be a boss. As an employee, I find that I need no management. What I need is a goalie. The goalies job is to prevent other players from knocking additional tasks into my net. Unfortunately, in most situations, the boss is right there along with everyone else, insisting that this task get done RIGHT NOW, followed by another, and another, and then later they wonder why your number one priority task hasn't gotten anywhere in the last week.
But when I suspect an employee of knitting at home, I can't just fire him, I need to prove it. that's a waste of my time.
You don't need to prove it. Just fire him/her. It doesn't matter whether they were knitting or not. If they are not meeting your productivity requirements, then they need to be let go. If you go searching for reasons to fire them, you are searching for reasons that they can bring up a wrongful termination lawsuit. Fire them because they're fired.
Hmm, let's see how my workplace stacks up.
better desk and chair than I have at home Nope a bigger monitor Nope Work has faster internet access Nope better backups Nope People who will solder boards for me and people to get equipment from Nope. But then we are not in that line of work. the office has a nicely stocked refrigerator Nope free lunch Ah, yes, between twice weekly free lunch and other lunch meetings, I probably pay my own way 3 times a month. So finally one that I can say "Yes" to. a much better cleaning staff Nope. All they do is empty the garbage daily, and vacuum about once every 6 months There are people there to have lunch with, some who will willingly talk to you even if they don't have to OK, another point for the office. Fewer distractions at work too And Nope
OK, I AM the boss, and the problem is not that my telecommuting people aren't being productive, but rather that when you need them to do something or provide information that they uniquely possess, you can't get it from them on short notice, thus preventing other people from getting their jobs done.
Whereas in the office you can get them to provide that information on short notice to the detriment of whatever they are currently working on.
It seems that we have two schools of thought here. The ones in favor of telecommuting seem to think that communication is a distraction to getting the job done, while those that don't like telecommuting seem to think that communication is necessary to getting the job done.
For IM I hate it.
Me too. We've got a guy here who can't type for crap, and is well aware of it. So instead of typing a message, he will send an IM consisting solely of a record identifier, then walk to your office (about 15 seconds) and ask if you researched the record he just sent. Of course, I haven't because I am not just sitting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for work to come in via IM.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't feel I am entitled to games for free, I feel I am entitled to make informed decisions about where my money goes, and to purchase a game if - and only if - I feel it is worth my money.
So, if someone to come up with some kind of store where video games were sold and where you could play current titles on an actual console for a short period of time to determine whether you like the game, then this whole piracy problem would go away?
Well, that is just awesome. Because it turns out that we already have places like that, and the pirates apparently just weren't aware of them. Attention pirates everywhere. You can go play the games at Best Buy, Gamestop, Wal-mart and numerous other places.
There, that should solve the problem.
But there is a vast chasm on this particular slippery slope in between the first things on the list which are all illegal and the last one, which has not done anything illegal.
The slippery slope argument works well when they are coming for things which they should have no cause to take action against, but which large numbers of the populace don't care about (guns, for example). That doesn't work for speeding tickets, because it is lawful to take action against, and large portions of the populace think they should take action against it.
Going 60 in a school zone because you're running late isn't okay. Kids are unpredictable (and don't learn how to deal with cars until they're between 9 and 11 years old), odds are you're texting
Really? What statistics are out there to show that greater than 50% of people driving in a school zone are texting? If texting while driving has gotten that prolific then we perhaps ought to just ban texting period, driving or not.
The last thing my kid can afford is a $100 speeding ticket.
Where can you go to find a $100 speeding ticket? The very cheapest speeding ticket you can get where I live is for 1-10 over, and is $296.
Seems alarmist. Up until the last thing, those are all illegal and for good reason, then suddenly they came after me, but for what?
Would I become a thief if everyone else was a thief? Absolutely not. Just because everybody does it does not make it right. Most of the people on here saying that everybody does it are just trying to justify why they are thiefs. It is quite clear that everybody does not do it and they don't want to take responsibility for their own lack of morals so they pretend like everybody does it to make their conscience feel better.
Case in point: the other day, somebody deliberately walked up to my house, about 50 feet off the street, picked up two small packages that had been left* there, and walked off with them. They are a thief. Yet I did not become a thief just because somebody else is a thief.
* I say "left" rather than delivered, because delivered happens when you ring the doorbell, knock on the door or otherwise try to attract the attention of the multiple people who are at home at the time, and then when said person answers the door, you hand it to them. Delivered does not mean you place the items on the step and then leave.
I found a phone in the bathroom once. I called "Mom" and found that the phone belonged to somebody in my office. I returned it to him. He did not even act grateful, but returning it was the right thing to do. If I kept the phone, I would be a thief and not fit to live in our society.
...we should call them "Irony"-mous.
But it's much easier than every store or business republishing opening times (or maintain summer/winter opening times), every school, every bin collection, every bus or train timetable, essentially everything would need changing just because it annoys you having to change the clock.
Even easier would be to not change the clocks AND not change any of those things. That is what I advocate.
You drive home tired as can be, directly into the sunrise.
Unless, of course, you don't live east of the city.
I don't know about other people, but I am plenty tired of my drive IN to work, probably more so than my drive home. i don't really get going until I have been awake for an hour or two. When I used to live near Chicago, I had to drive into the sun at about 6:00 in the morning in order to get to work by 7:30. That was absolutely miserable. Nowadays I have moved to a smaller city and I will never go back to sacrificing 4 hours a day to commuting. I am certainly a lot less tired on my drive in now that I leave the house at about 8:30 in the morning.
Oh, and just to keep on subject, I am vehemently opposed to ever switching the time on the clock. I really doubt that there is any kind of energy savings any more, and it is not worth the disruption of sleeping schedules.
Physics still allows for C#, which is just a half-measure above. You mean a half step, and I won't even call you Shirley.
You are correct, and to make it even more obvious Air Conditioners have been operating at greater than 100% efficiency for years, and no one is questioning the 2nd law with respect to Air Conditioners. The fact of the matter is, that neither an AC nor this LED are a closed system and energy is able to transfer in and out. With an Air Conditioner, you put some energy into compressing a fluid, raising the temperature to a point above the outside temperature, and the excess heat bleeds off. Then the fluid is allowed to decompress and evaporates into a gas. In order to do this, it must pull energy in. This energy comes from the air inside your evaporator, which was circulated in from your house, and the now cooler air will be blown back out. The gas is then compressed and the cycle continues. In terms of energy input by electricity, the total energy moved to outside your house from inside can be 400% or more. But the energy definitely came from somewhere.
"The law is overly broad, criminalizing not only commercial SPAM but also anonymous non-commercial bulk emails containing political and religious messages"
Sounds good to me. I don't want bulk e-mailed political or religious messages either. I consider them spam, therefore CAN-SPAM is not too broad.
Isn't it against the Terms of Use of Facebook to give your login credentials to someone else? They have just as much authority to raise a stink about this as the school district does, especially since she was also violating the ToS by being underage.
How is it the fault of he speaker of the listener has an incorrect understanding of a term? If I use "begs the question" properly am I at fault because 95% of other people who use the term use it incorrectly?
programmers can't self-manage themselves because they can't estimate how long a task will take because programming tasks aren't estimatable so I need to manage clients and their expectations without having any idea how long an employee is going to actually take to do something and since clients can cancel for being one day late and not start for not giving an estimate I need to promise a date and manage the client knowing full well that no one knows how long it'll take.
OK, so I quoted the whole run-on sentence. Now, if a programming task is not estimable, then how is a manager going to do a better job of estimating it than a programmer?
For the record, I disagree that programming task are not estimable. If you know what needs to be done, the time is easily estimated. Only if there are unknowns, such as a missing spec, or an interface that you are not familiar with does it become more of a gray area. But you can make reasonable assumptions about how long those will take. and then there's the actual business side. would you want me, your boss, to throw away a new client because we're fully booked with existing client work? or would you rather I take on the new client, and screw over the time-line of the existing client? Here's a hint. the former gives us two clients, one slightly upset or understanding and the other with a full budget. the latter gives us one client with no remaining projects. so the former guarantees the employees work for another two to five cycles, while the latter gives the employees work only through to the end of the current cycle, then nothing. I have unfortunately worked for several companies in the past that were more than happy to screw over a client who was already on the hook and unable to back out. Usually, the company lies about what it can deliver, but then takes two or three times as long, but the client has so much invested that they can't back out. i think that is low and underhanded.
I am not against looking for new work, but if it is going to overlap with a current client's timeline, then perhaps some temporary contract workers would be in order.
but hey, be a contractor. that solves all of my problems. pay your own damn taxes, work when I have work for you and charge me nothing when I don't. deal with your own benefits, your own supplies, and your own time. then you can be a telecommuter all you like. I don't need to pay you until 30 days after you're done the work. that's perfect for me.
I would prefer to be a contractor, pay my own taxes, deal with my own benefits, supplies etc.. I would make a lot more money and have a lot more deductible expenses. But my employer doesn't want that. I started out as a contractor at my current employer, but they insisted I be an employee and said I wouldn't be able to participate in stock options if I didn't become an employee. As it turns out, I still haven't received any stock options 5.5 years later, so I would have been better off as a contractor, but I didn't realize at the time that they were lying to me.
If you're not feeling well, why not take a sick day? That's what they're there for.
At my company, there is no sick day. If you are sick, you work from home, but you still have to get your job done. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
If your job can be telecommuted, it can be outsourced.
Common misconception, but not necessarily true. I mean, if you are 8 or more timezones away, have absolutely no interaction with the office and know nothing about the companies inner workings, then you could make the case for outsourcing, but otherwise, you are a person who is more valuable than a faceless drone on the other side of the world.
The beauty of it is, if you can telecommute to do your job, then some dude in India can do it too for half the price!
Yeah, half the price, and twice the cost.
if any programmers could self-manage themselves well enough to estimate how long a task will take, and how many problems will come up along the way, that'd be swell.
You sure seem to have a low opinion of programmers. The ones I know are pretty middle of the road, but they have a much better idea of how long things take than a manager would, unless that manager knew how to write code. The real issue is people shoving other stuff in front of your primary project. That is what needs to be stopped and that is a management problem.
Whenever I estimate how long a project will take, I always give the time in man hours. I am currently working on a project which I estimated 6 weeks of development time. I made it quite clear that that was development time and not elapsed time. I have not completed the project yet. It has been 4 months. However, it has not been 6 weeks of development yet. I am still two weeks of development out and I will deliver it on time. Unfortunately, I am not able to stop other people (including the one who should be shielding me from distractions) from heaping more stuff on my plate, in front of what they declare almost daily, is my #1 priority.
yes there's a better way. you ask the employee how long it'll take. and then you hold them to it.
That would be great, if their boss is doing their job and preventing other people from inserting other items and also preventing scope creep on the project. You can't hold an employee to blame because their boss is not very good at managing.
employees haven't the foggiest notion of self-management.
You must be a boss. As an employee, I find that I need no management. What I need is a goalie. The goalies job is to prevent other players from knocking additional tasks into my net. Unfortunately, in most situations, the boss is right there along with everyone else, insisting that this task get done RIGHT NOW, followed by another, and another, and then later they wonder why your number one priority task hasn't gotten anywhere in the last week.
But when I suspect an employee of knitting at home, I can't just fire him, I need to prove it. that's a waste of my time.
You don't need to prove it. Just fire him/her. It doesn't matter whether they were knitting or not. If they are not meeting your productivity requirements, then they need to be let go. If you go searching for reasons to fire them, you are searching for reasons that they can bring up a wrongful termination lawsuit. Fire them because they're fired.
Hmm, let's see how my workplace stacks up. better desk and chair than I have at home Nope
a bigger monitor Nope
Work has faster internet access Nope
better backups Nope
People who will solder boards for me and people to get equipment from Nope. But then we are not in that line of work.
the office has a nicely stocked refrigerator Nope
free lunch Ah, yes, between twice weekly free lunch and other lunch meetings, I probably pay my own way 3 times a month. So finally one that I can say "Yes" to.
a much better cleaning staff Nope. All they do is empty the garbage daily, and vacuum about once every 6 months
There are people there to have lunch with, some who will willingly talk to you even if they don't have to OK, another point for the office.
Fewer distractions at work too And Nope
OK, I AM the boss, and the problem is not that my telecommuting people aren't being productive, but rather that when you need them to do something or provide information that they uniquely possess, you can't get it from them on short notice, thus preventing other people from getting their jobs done.
Whereas in the office you can get them to provide that information on short notice to the detriment of whatever they are currently working on.
It seems that we have two schools of thought here. The ones in favor of telecommuting seem to think that communication is a distraction to getting the job done, while those that don't like telecommuting seem to think that communication is necessary to getting the job done.
For IM I hate it.
Me too. We've got a guy here who can't type for crap, and is well aware of it. So instead of typing a message, he will send an IM consisting solely of a record identifier, then walk to your office (about 15 seconds) and ask if you researched the record he just sent. Of course, I haven't because I am not just sitting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for work to come in via IM.