3 cubic acres of money is trans-dimensional, that is beyond our normal 3 physical dimensions. Even if it were all pennies, SMcD's fortune would easily eclipse the $29 billion mark. I believe that the Tardis was based on the money bin design.
And we are talking about 1951 dollars.
Saying Uncle Sam's resources are infinite is a cop-out. Scrooge McDuck has accumulated wealth where not even the Ferengi have been able to go.
The article is clearly biased against ducks who have manged to acquire wealth and power.
Say the company cut the sq ft per employee in half by going to non-dedicated workspace for when employees are in the office, and say we are talking about IT workers in central office tower space that is Class A or B. I used the following reference:
On page 92, for the city of Ottawa and an urban location, the savings per employee are significant. They give a figure of about 18,000 per employee but I would think that figure is high (the calculation includes costs of setting up space as well as operational costs, and also estimates zero on-site time for the telecommuter).
Still, using much more conservative numbers, a business with an existing employee base and location could easily look to save 5,000 per employee per year in space rental costs, hvac savings, and reduced power/lighting costs. Insurance rates could be affected as well.
I don't see why the employee would opt for a pay cut to save the employer money.
FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.
Sun was never a big FOSS-friendly company. They picked and chose certain things to put into the open source domain but for the most part, they didn't "get it". Look at all the fits and starts with Solaris on the x86. Besides, they were a hardware/os company and not a software vendor at the core. They went down not because of their support for FOSS but because of their poor performance with one of their two business pillars: servers and CPUs. OpenOffice was a distraction to them.
Their foray into FOSS was born more of desperation than as a value of their business model.
It remains to be seen what Larry can do with Solaris and the Sun h/w products. They have lost a huge amount of business to IBM.
Lots of comments about waste of money, etc., but it depends on what and how it works.
First off: without some independent metrics, how is the FCC to gain an understanding of the status of broadband quality? Sure they can infer somethings from stats provided by ISPs but I am sure there are all kinds of issues with using secondhand data from parties with vested interests.
Given that the FCC should have an independent understanding of broadband deployment and quality in the US, then sticking 10,000 data collectors out there is not a bad idea. I would guess that the routers have custom firmware and call home to a server on a regular basis. Putting the metric collector on the router instead of a program on a local PC is obviously the way to go: always on, known behaviour, and relatively free from user fiddling.
I hear you. I was the only guy in the financial office of a large industrial firm. About $50 million / week of transactions. Customized Oracle Financials. Plus they had several projects on the go: automated invoice intake and they were big into real-time financial analysis. Not to mention generating database reports for the accountants. Oh and EDI (don't complain about XML until you deal with EDI).
I complained to my boss that it was just too much work... so he advanced the implementation date for the next project instead of spreading things out or hiring someone else.
I quit and they brought in a pair of expen$ive consultants to fill in while they spent two months hiring another fool.
Contrary to your opinion, gasoline is extremely dangerous. You obviously have never had to deal with a fire caused by a static discharge by someone filling a plastic gas can. It is true that as a liquid without vapours and oxygen, gasoline is not a problem. We can drive down the road and as long as the car's tank maintains its integrity, we are ok. Of course, things can happen. It still took us (people) a long time to remove gas tanks from pick up truck cabs, and to place them inside the frame instead of outside. Not to mention flaming Pintos (the car). And don't be reaching into your vehicle for your ringing cell phone while fuelling. Another good way to create a static discharge and fire.
Simplistically, the potential explosive danger in a situation is proportional to the amount of stored energy of the device/product in question.
The risk is the likelihood of a bad thing happening.
Standing near the base of the Hoover dam would put myself in the path of a more powerful potential energy dump than any battery or car gas tank but I would feel pretty comfortable about the risk of the dam collapsing.
OTOH, both gas tanks and powerful batteries are fairly risky. However, we tend to ignore the risks because we like the convenience and we have mitigated the risk sufficiently to maintain the veneer of comfort.
Absolutely, they keep records and detailed logs. But having done the systems architecture for such a system I can say without reservation that although most of the information is accurate, there are erroneous records. And it is almost impossible to tell which records are correct and which are false without a lot of work.
So... if the law came to us and we gave them an IP record, and they asked about my confidence in it then I would say my confidence is high. If a defence attorney asked me if the records were ever wrong (ie: the subscriber to IP match is wrong) I would have to say yes. Then I could name at least a dozen issues that we have experienced that resulted in some erroneous records.
Also, I would have to attest that it is possible for someone to corrupt a lease record or even hijack a lease under certain conditions and within some limits.
That is all that the discussion is about. Not whether or not the ISP could trace back to you but whether the dynamic IP to subscriber record is certain and whether courts should take the IP to subscriber match at face value. Having worked with these systems I would say emphatically no, not without supporting evidence that the record is correct.
Usually it doesn't matter from an ISP point of view since most customers are on monthly billing plans and 98% of them never exceed their plan limits (what a change from dial-up!). So if no money is involved, what do we or the customer care if a few records are wrong? After all, we generate millions of DHCP log lines per day so what's misplaced IP, reverse lookup, or time event here or there? Point is, although in our system the records are very very accurate, they are not perfect.
Our original IP provisioning system was very bad. Sigh. Our records were terrible.
What's the lesson: the court should not assume that the records are accurate. Just because ISP xx has good records and systems doesn't mean ISP yy does. The ISP should have to show that the records are correct and also indicate how they could be wrong and what the likelyhood is. They should also have to show some kind of track record for the accuracy of the system. All of this is doable and is no more than you would expect from, say, a speed trap camera system in court. Police departments have to show that the device is calibrated, the operator is trained, the device has an accurate history, etc.
ROTFL Thanks for that! You're bringing back painful memories of an ISP our company absorbed. Their servers were all compromised by their star sysadmin who had rooted and compromised all of the servers and firewalls for his own admin (and other) convenience. The bad ol' days.
Best defence against that kind of thing is promotion and maintenance of a high standard of professionalism. You can put in all of the monitoring systems you want but the shop culture often determines how vulnerable you are to an inside job. My 2 cents anyways.
I meant that you can clone MAC addresses (a common feature on home routers) or you can set them to whatever you want. You can't assume that a MAC address will be unique outside of a LAN segment. IP collisions are easy to create by setting a static IP on your machine, but so are MAC collisions. Some people like to try to get other people's service features by copying MACs. Doesn't usually work because of other issues but you still get people trying it.
It just goes back to the original point that identifying someone definitively by their IP and information from the ISP has lots of room for error. Even if the ISP has excellent record keeping and systems, other people can throw a monkey wrench into things. It should take a fair amount of effort to prove without a doubt that a given IP was actually provisioned to a given location at a given time. Even more to prove that a specific person was using that IP.
I was referring to big iron routers re: ACLs and so forth. Not your little DLINK home WAP.
Even MACs are dynamic. There are very few hard coded MAC addresses in devices anymore. Probably he wanted to make sure that he was looking at the same thing that you were.
The stuff I mentioned above are just on the ISP side. Unbelievably (tongue in cheek here), subscribers do all kinds of odd and unauthorized things. Neighbours and friends will swap, trade, loan and sell their set top boxes and modems. The curious sort will install custom firmware on the ISPs device, or they'll stick a transparent BSD box on the wire to see what fun they can have.
The IP allocation system will include a lot of devices that the end user may be surprised about. Of course there are the DHCP servers and the systems that mange them (set and query), but configuration of routers is often involved even to the provisioning of a single subscriber for access control, QoS, virtual circuits, etc etc. It is one big state machine and if someone monkeys with it (er... sets an illegal or unforseen state) then all bets are off as to how it operates.
This stuff is only simple on a small scale or from a distance.
It also depends on the accuracy of the ISP dynamic IP records.
The IP records, if they keep them, are subject to a number of accuracy issues. So much of the ability to trace the given IP at a given time back to a particular subscriber line or dataset depends on accurate configuration of many devices and databases... and on the people that manage all of it.
eg1: Allocation of routable IP address ranges to DHCP servers changes more often than you might think, primarily due to the scarcity of IPV4 addresses. Depending on how the ISP handles these changes, you could easily have a situation where a subscriber endpoint is returned that is no longer correct.
eg2: Say we're talking about DSL. In all of the millions of pairs of wires that have been connected by hand, there are bound to be errors, either in the actual jumpering or in the record keeping about the jumpers and the end points. Believe me, this happens and it can go undetected for a long time.
eg3: Systemic errors in the provisioning software that manages the DHCP servers. As long as the billing records don't come into question and the subscribers get their service, it is unlikely that anyone is going to notice that there is a problem with the generation of the reverse lookup name. If the dynamic IP to dynamic name relationship is not always correct, who is going to notice? This one in particular can be a real bugger to find.
eg4: You would think that everything is kept straight by monolithic, standardized allocation software and methods that are tried and true, but all you need is one manual step in a process to throw everything into question. Excel spreadsheets crop up in the most unexpected places.
Basically, IP tracking by an ISP is an inventory management issue and even with relatively static warehouses it is nigh on impossible to get two counts to agree. The larger the inventory and the more dynamic the flow, the more likely there will be problems.
hee.. hee... Canada has a statutory minimum campaign length of 36 days.
So... a max of 11 elections per year, but more likely about 5 given other procedural issues. Could we afford $1.5 billion per year on federal elections if it kept Ottawa busy and out of our hair?
Damn straight we could! We'll just take it out of the Quebec / Ottawa split from the "Old Harry" oilfield in the St. Lawrence.
Yes, true enough. There are various kinds of dynamics that can develop depending on sizes and numbers of factions. Some times less desirable than others. Still, a small swing party has to be careful as well: if they force something too unpopular they may just find themselves locked out completely.
The only downside is the cost of each election. That is an issue...
You're the same kind of person who would give up sovereign currency because "the cost of currency conversion is too high".
Don't be saying I'm that "kind of person". I never said the cost was too high; I just said the cost was a downside... and it is. Elections aren't cheap and when you have a bunch in a few years the question has to come up about value. That is all part of the democratic dialogue.
I thought I was pretty clear that I support elections and I don't mind greatly if the minority government in power has to go back to the electorate to check to see if they still have confidence in them. I think its a great way to put a check on the excesses that are inevitable with anyone who stays in power for too long.
OTOH, a federal election in Canada costs the public about $250 to $300 million apiece. This will be our fifth election in eleven years. It is valid to question the expenditure and talk about it.
Take this election for example: both the conservatives and the opposition parties have acted in a manner that the non-confidence vote was almost a sure thing. It is like they were all playing political chicken. There are no burning public issues driving this election (May 2, BTW... so a 36 or 37 day campaign depending on how you count the days). I'm happy that the DMCA died on the table but there is a bunch of other legislation which is important that died as well. Some of it seems to have been deliberately delayed knowing it would die so that fingers could be pointed during the election campaign. Politically astute but not good management of our country.
It would be nice if they would all work at co-operating a bit more and put that money to better use. Pie-in-the-sky but a valid wish. After all, we (Canadians) are constitutionally entitled to POGG (peace, order, and good government), with my emphasis on GG.;->
The upside to minority governments is that they get so busy fighting and posturing that they have little left to go about interfering with their countrymen. Anything that gets passed has to be done with some consensus from the other parties. Eh, can't get along well with others then down you come.
We get a regular chance to vote the b*stards out, which of course is the main purpose of any election: vote out the incumbent before they get too ensconced in their positions of power. Even if they get back in as a minority, they still have to mind themselves or they have to go back and roll the dice again.
The only downside is the cost of each election. That is an issue... but a lot of out of work folks make some money working temp for Elections Canada. Better than other money hand-out programs.
Canadian campaigns tend to be limited in length, from min 36 days to the record of 74 days. Usually about six or seven weeks. No year long brain damaging onslaught of political party dogma and drivel.
And we mark paper ballots with pencil. No voting machines. Close results have meaningful and accurate recounts.
Here's hoping for another minority government! Cheers!
While I agree that in many jobs there is no need for the employer to do drug tests because the private time activities don't infringe on work time, I believe you are being disingenuous. You sound like you've been around the block so you know that effects do linger and that many people learn to cope in a sober manner when they are at work, even though they are impaired. I've seen this and it has made the workplace unsafe.
So a store clerk can be hung over or moderately impaired from the night before and it doesn't matter. Other jobs it does. The local railroad is hiring and they make it extremely clear in the hiring conditions that for the first two years or so while the employee is effectively on call 7/24, there is to be no drug or alcohol consumption. They basically said "go away we don't want you if you can't give up booze for a couple of years". I agree with this because the job is just too dangerous to have someone in the yard who is even a bit impaired.
I'm not naive. There are still going to be impaired people on the job but I don't blame them for applying this filter at the hiring point. When they made the statement during the hiring session, about half the guys started looking extremely uncomfortable and a bunch left at the break.
Personally, I'm OK with it when they are upfront with the issue and have a legitimate reason for the hard line. Like: it might be my ass that is burnt by the impaired idiot I'm working with.
Obviously there are issues and limitations with the strips but they work well, have a high capacity, and provide excellent informational view of flights. They don't crash, slow down or freeze. And the flight strip does not disappear en route to another controller. And they work in all sorts of complex situations. It may be hard for some folk to comprehend that a manual paper system sets a high bar for a replacement digital system.
I am surprised at the comment from the vendor in TFA to the effect that nothing new has happened in control since the introduction of radar. Seems to me that computer driven displays, flight management, and information displays were introduced in the 1970's.
Ans: Noooooooo! It was the first thought in my head as well.
"X-Class Solar Flare", at last something to replace the Victoria line of CPUs and do away with those bloated, overpriced, power hungry SPARCs (is my prejudice showing?).
How disappointing that we are talking about a celestial object that is the prime enabler of our life on Earth and an event which will create spectacular results to be viewed by millions around the world.
Except that most steam engines didn't refill by "scoop". They refilled from the TOP via a water tower.
Although you are correct that most did not use a "scoop", replenishing water by this method was well known and not uncommon on main lines where there was a competitive desire to reduce transit times. Look up "track pans" for US references.
Slashdot Mirror
er... this is just fun, so don't rain on it.
And... no, WE can't think of anything better to do with our time!
Cheers
I could not fail to disagree with you less.
3 cubic acres of money is trans-dimensional, that is beyond our normal 3 physical dimensions. Even if it were all pennies, SMcD's fortune would easily eclipse the $29 billion mark. I believe that the Tardis was based on the money bin design.
And we are talking about 1951 dollars.
Saying Uncle Sam's resources are infinite is a cop-out. Scrooge McDuck has accumulated wealth where not even the Ferengi have been able to go.
The article is clearly biased against ducks who have manged to acquire wealth and power.
On their personal towel rack, of course.
Say the company cut the sq ft per employee in half by going to non-dedicated workspace for when employees are in the office, and say we are talking about IT workers in central office tower space that is Class A or B. I used the following reference:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=lJmBYCED_nMC&pg=PA92&dq=office+space+cost+per+employee&hl=en&ei=LY6bTZrONcnPgAeAuZCdBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=office%20space%20cost%20per%20employee&f=false
On page 92, for the city of Ottawa and an urban location, the savings per employee are significant. They give a figure of about 18,000 per employee but I would think that figure is high (the calculation includes costs of setting up space as well as operational costs, and also estimates zero on-site time for the telecommuter).
Still, using much more conservative numbers, a business with an existing employee base and location could easily look to save 5,000 per employee per year in space rental costs, hvac savings, and reduced power/lighting costs. Insurance rates could be affected as well.
I don't see why the employee would opt for a pay cut to save the employer money.
FSF wants Windows, Office, Photoshop, and everything else to be free. That's their job. People need to be able to make money on software, or large corporations won't invest in it. That's why FOSS-friendly companies like Sun are going under and being snapped up by profit-hungry pricks like Larry Ellison. Film at 11.
Sun was never a big FOSS-friendly company. They picked and chose certain things to put into the open source domain but for the most part, they didn't "get it". Look at all the fits and starts with Solaris on the x86. Besides, they were a hardware/os company and not a software vendor at the core. They went down not because of their support for FOSS but because of their poor performance with one of their two business pillars: servers and CPUs. OpenOffice was a distraction to them.
Their foray into FOSS was born more of desperation than as a value of their business model.
It remains to be seen what Larry can do with Solaris and the Sun h/w products. They have lost a huge amount of business to IBM.
I wish Industry Canada would take a similar interest in broadband deployment in Canada.
Lots of comments about waste of money, etc., but it depends on what and how it works.
First off: without some independent metrics, how is the FCC to gain an understanding of the status of broadband quality? Sure they can infer somethings from stats provided by ISPs but I am sure there are all kinds of issues with using secondhand data from parties with vested interests.
Given that the FCC should have an independent understanding of broadband deployment and quality in the US, then sticking 10,000 data collectors out there is not a bad idea. I would guess that the routers have custom firmware and call home to a server on a regular basis. Putting the metric collector on the router instead of a program on a local PC is obviously the way to go: always on, known behaviour, and relatively free from user fiddling.
It seems like a damn good idea to me.
I hear you. I was the only guy in the financial office of a large industrial firm. About $50 million / week of transactions. Customized Oracle Financials. Plus they had several projects on the go: automated invoice intake and they were big into real-time financial analysis. Not to mention generating database reports for the accountants. Oh and EDI (don't complain about XML until you deal with EDI).
I complained to my boss that it was just too much work... so he advanced the implementation date for the next project instead of spreading things out or hiring someone else.
I quit and they brought in a pair of expen$ive consultants to fill in while they spent two months hiring another fool.
Sigh.
Contrary to your opinion, gasoline is extremely dangerous. You obviously have never had to deal with a fire caused by a static discharge by someone filling a plastic gas can. It is true that as a liquid without vapours and oxygen, gasoline is not a problem. We can drive down the road and as long as the car's tank maintains its integrity, we are ok. Of course, things can happen. It still took us (people) a long time to remove gas tanks from pick up truck cabs, and to place them inside the frame instead of outside. Not to mention flaming Pintos (the car). And don't be reaching into your vehicle for your ringing cell phone while fuelling. Another good way to create a static discharge and fire.
Simplistically, the potential explosive danger in a situation is proportional to the amount of stored energy of the device/product in question.
The risk is the likelihood of a bad thing happening.
Standing near the base of the Hoover dam would put myself in the path of a more powerful potential energy dump than any battery or car gas tank but I would feel pretty comfortable about the risk of the dam collapsing.
OTOH, both gas tanks and powerful batteries are fairly risky. However, we tend to ignore the risks because we like the convenience and we have mitigated the risk sufficiently to maintain the veneer of comfort.
The iPad is an optimized consumption experience.
So is a Papa Burger
I can type while standing on an iPad.
... and I can hear in the dark! ;->
Absolutely, they keep records and detailed logs. But having done the systems architecture for such a system I can say without reservation that although most of the information is accurate, there are erroneous records. And it is almost impossible to tell which records are correct and which are false without a lot of work.
So... if the law came to us and we gave them an IP record, and they asked about my confidence in it then I would say my confidence is high. If a defence attorney asked me if the records were ever wrong (ie: the subscriber to IP match is wrong) I would have to say yes. Then I could name at least a dozen issues that we have experienced that resulted in some erroneous records.
Also, I would have to attest that it is possible for someone to corrupt a lease record or even hijack a lease under certain conditions and within some limits.
That is all that the discussion is about. Not whether or not the ISP could trace back to you but whether the dynamic IP to subscriber record is certain and whether courts should take the IP to subscriber match at face value. Having worked with these systems I would say emphatically no, not without supporting evidence that the record is correct.
Usually it doesn't matter from an ISP point of view since most customers are on monthly billing plans and 98% of them never exceed their plan limits (what a change from dial-up!). So if no money is involved, what do we or the customer care if a few records are wrong? After all, we generate millions of DHCP log lines per day so what's misplaced IP, reverse lookup, or time event here or there? Point is, although in our system the records are very very accurate, they are not perfect.
Our original IP provisioning system was very bad. Sigh. Our records were terrible.
What's the lesson: the court should not assume that the records are accurate. Just because ISP xx has good records and systems doesn't mean ISP yy does. The ISP should have to show that the records are correct and also indicate how they could be wrong and what the likelyhood is. They should also have to show some kind of track record for the accuracy of the system. All of this is doable and is no more than you would expect from, say, a speed trap camera system in court. Police departments have to show that the device is calibrated, the operator is trained, the device has an accurate history, etc.
ROTFL Thanks for that! You're bringing back painful memories of an ISP our company absorbed. Their servers were all compromised by their star sysadmin who had rooted and compromised all of the servers and firewalls for his own admin (and other) convenience. The bad ol' days.
Best defence against that kind of thing is promotion and maintenance of a high standard of professionalism. You can put in all of the monitoring systems you want but the shop culture often determines how vulnerable you are to an inside job. My 2 cents anyways.
I meant that you can clone MAC addresses (a common feature on home routers) or you can set them to whatever you want. You can't assume that a MAC address will be unique outside of a LAN segment. IP collisions are easy to create by setting a static IP on your machine, but so are MAC collisions. Some people like to try to get other people's service features by copying MACs. Doesn't usually work because of other issues but you still get people trying it.
It just goes back to the original point that identifying someone definitively by their IP and information from the ISP has lots of room for error. Even if the ISP has excellent record keeping and systems, other people can throw a monkey wrench into things. It should take a fair amount of effort to prove without a doubt that a given IP was actually provisioned to a given location at a given time. Even more to prove that a specific person was using that IP.
I was referring to big iron routers re: ACLs and so forth. Not your little DLINK home WAP.
Even MACs are dynamic. There are very few hard coded MAC addresses in devices anymore. Probably he wanted to make sure that he was looking at the same thing that you were.
The stuff I mentioned above are just on the ISP side. Unbelievably (tongue in cheek here), subscribers do all kinds of odd and unauthorized things. Neighbours and friends will swap, trade, loan and sell their set top boxes and modems. The curious sort will install custom firmware on the ISPs device, or they'll stick a transparent BSD box on the wire to see what fun they can have.
The IP allocation system will include a lot of devices that the end user may be surprised about. Of course there are the DHCP servers and the systems that mange them (set and query), but configuration of routers is often involved even to the provisioning of a single subscriber for access control, QoS, virtual circuits, etc etc. It is one big state machine and if someone monkeys with it (er... sets an illegal or unforseen state) then all bets are off as to how it operates.
This stuff is only simple on a small scale or from a distance.
It also depends on the accuracy of the ISP dynamic IP records.
The IP records, if they keep them, are subject to a number of accuracy issues. So much of the ability to trace the given IP at a given time back to a particular subscriber line or dataset depends on accurate configuration of many devices and databases... and on the people that manage all of it.
eg1: Allocation of routable IP address ranges to DHCP servers changes more often than you might think, primarily due to the scarcity of IPV4 addresses. Depending on how the ISP handles these changes, you could easily have a situation where a subscriber endpoint is returned that is no longer correct.
eg2: Say we're talking about DSL. In all of the millions of pairs of wires that have been connected by hand, there are bound to be errors, either in the actual jumpering or in the record keeping about the jumpers and the end points. Believe me, this happens and it can go undetected for a long time.
eg3: Systemic errors in the provisioning software that manages the DHCP servers. As long as the billing records don't come into question and the subscribers get their service, it is unlikely that anyone is going to notice that there is a problem with the generation of the reverse lookup name. If the dynamic IP to dynamic name relationship is not always correct, who is going to notice? This one in particular can be a real bugger to find.
eg4: You would think that everything is kept straight by monolithic, standardized allocation software and methods that are tried and true, but all you need is one manual step in a process to throw everything into question. Excel spreadsheets crop up in the most unexpected places.
Basically, IP tracking by an ISP is an inventory management issue and even with relatively static warehouses it is nigh on impossible to get two counts to agree. The larger the inventory and the more dynamic the flow, the more likely there will be problems.
hee.. hee... Canada has a statutory minimum campaign length of 36 days.
So... a max of 11 elections per year, but more likely about 5 given other procedural issues. Could we afford $1.5 billion per year on federal elections if it kept Ottawa busy and out of our hair?
Damn straight we could! We'll just take it out of the Quebec / Ottawa split from the "Old Harry" oilfield in the St. Lawrence.
Yes, true enough. There are various kinds of dynamics that can develop depending on sizes and numbers of factions. Some times less desirable than others. Still, a small swing party has to be careful as well: if they force something too unpopular they may just find themselves locked out completely.
The only downside is the cost of each election. That is an issue...
You're the same kind of person who would give up sovereign currency because "the cost of currency conversion is too high".
Don't be saying I'm that "kind of person". I never said the cost was too high; I just said the cost was a downside... and it is. Elections aren't cheap and when you have a bunch in a few years the question has to come up about value. That is all part of the democratic dialogue.
I thought I was pretty clear that I support elections and I don't mind greatly if the minority government in power has to go back to the electorate to check to see if they still have confidence in them. I think its a great way to put a check on the excesses that are inevitable with anyone who stays in power for too long.
OTOH, a federal election in Canada costs the public about $250 to $300 million apiece. This will be our fifth election in eleven years. It is valid to question the expenditure and talk about it.
Take this election for example: both the conservatives and the opposition parties have acted in a manner that the non-confidence vote was almost a sure thing. It is like they were all playing political chicken. There are no burning public issues driving this election (May 2, BTW... so a 36 or 37 day campaign depending on how you count the days). I'm happy that the DMCA died on the table but there is a bunch of other legislation which is important that died as well. Some of it seems to have been deliberately delayed knowing it would die so that fingers could be pointed during the election campaign. Politically astute but not good management of our country.
It would be nice if they would all work at co-operating a bit more and put that money to better use. Pie-in-the-sky but a valid wish. After all, we (Canadians) are constitutionally entitled to POGG (peace, order, and good government), with my emphasis on GG. ;->
The upside to minority governments is that they get so busy fighting and posturing that they have little left to go about interfering with their countrymen. Anything that gets passed has to be done with some consensus from the other parties. Eh, can't get along well with others then down you come.
We get a regular chance to vote the b*stards out, which of course is the main purpose of any election: vote out the incumbent before they get too ensconced in their positions of power. Even if they get back in as a minority, they still have to mind themselves or they have to go back and roll the dice again.
The only downside is the cost of each election. That is an issue... but a lot of out of work folks make some money working temp for Elections Canada. Better than other money hand-out programs.
Canadian campaigns tend to be limited in length, from min 36 days to the record of 74 days. Usually about six or seven weeks. No year long brain damaging onslaught of political party dogma and drivel.
And we mark paper ballots with pencil. No voting machines. Close results have meaningful and accurate recounts.
Here's hoping for another minority government! Cheers!
While I agree that in many jobs there is no need for the employer to do drug tests because the private time activities don't infringe on work time, I believe you are being disingenuous. You sound like you've been around the block so you know that effects do linger and that many people learn to cope in a sober manner when they are at work, even though they are impaired. I've seen this and it has made the workplace unsafe.
So a store clerk can be hung over or moderately impaired from the night before and it doesn't matter. Other jobs it does. The local railroad is hiring and they make it extremely clear in the hiring conditions that for the first two years or so while the employee is effectively on call 7/24, there is to be no drug or alcohol consumption. They basically said "go away we don't want you if you can't give up booze for a couple of years". I agree with this because the job is just too dangerous to have someone in the yard who is even a bit impaired.
I'm not naive. There are still going to be impaired people on the job but I don't blame them for applying this filter at the hiring point. When they made the statement during the hiring session, about half the guys started looking extremely uncomfortable and a bunch left at the break.
Personally, I'm OK with it when they are upfront with the issue and have a legitimate reason for the hard line. Like: it might be my ass that is burnt by the impaired idiot I'm working with.
I LIKE to feed the trolls!
Thanks for posting. Ticker tape indeed!
Obviously there are issues and limitations with the strips but they work well, have a high capacity, and provide excellent informational view of flights. They don't crash, slow down or freeze. And the flight strip does not disappear en route to another controller. And they work in all sorts of complex situations. It may be hard for some folk to comprehend that a manual paper system sets a high bar for a replacement digital system.
I am surprised at the comment from the vendor in TFA to the effect that nothing new has happened in control since the introduction of radar. Seems to me that computer driven displays, flight management, and information displays were introduced in the 1970's.
Ans: Noooooooo! It was the first thought in my head as well.
"X-Class Solar Flare", at last something to replace the Victoria line of CPUs and do away with those bloated, overpriced, power hungry SPARCs (is my prejudice showing?).
How disappointing that we are talking about a celestial object that is the prime enabler of our life on Earth and an event which will create spectacular results to be viewed by millions around the world.
Sigh.
Except that most steam engines didn't refill by "scoop". They refilled from the TOP via a water tower.
Although you are correct that most did not use a "scoop", replenishing water by this method was well known and not uncommon on main lines where there was a competitive desire to reduce transit times. Look up "track pans" for US references.
For an absolutely smashing discussion of scoops see http://jimquest.com/writ/trains/pans/scoop2.htm.
"Scoop" accidents could be deadly; imagine a steamer running full tilt and the scoop drops out or catches on something it shouldn't. Nasty.