Funny, but in the real world - at least the one I live in - that sort of a response will get mentioned in your annual review, and possibly a "discussion" with your boss sooner, because the 40-something you just refused to help knows your senior director.
There are a lot of people who give happily to causes whose work they like and want to support.
I personally give money to political causes, to arts organizations, and to other charities like RMHC (Ronald McDonald House.) There is no tax deduction for some of these, and for the others the donation is not predicated on it.
Some of the more massive donations that people have made probably are partially motivated by tax breaks.
But many are not, and historically have not been.
See, for example, the Carnegie Libraries. I'm no expert on the history of them, but it doesn't sound like it was a matter of anything except philanthropy.
I doubt Bill Gates is especially after the tax breaks with his foundation; more likely he wants to leave a more positive legacy than having sold software of uneven quality to millions (billions?) of people and companies.
Just because I like doing all the laundry at once doesn't make it 'archaic' - it's how I choose to live my life. If you want to "pop a load in when you've got enough" you go ahead; I like laundry day.
I'm usually home on Saturday morning anyway, so getting it all done at once is fine, and I'd rather that than be doing laundry all week or unpredictably.
But I want it done in 5 hours, not in 8, because I want to be able to go out Saturday afternoon and not leave things in the machine.
I do sort-of babysit the machine; I want my clothes out of the dryer and folded or on hangers as soon as they're dry so they don't get wrinkled.
Maybe your clothes can take being left in a ball for hours and still look decent, or you actually iron your clothes (talk about archaic!)
I'm not sure the iron even works - my clothes look fine if I get them out of the dryer quickly enough.
I'm pretty confident that "light truck" as used for these purposes means, basically, pickup trucks, vans and SUVs of any ilk. It's certainly what it means when it says it on the front of an auto parts catalog.
I believe, but am not sure, that a 1-ton dually is considered a "light truck."
It does not, as you apparently believe, mean "compact trucks."
Or on company equipment. I work for a multi-billion dollar company and know of people who have been fired for doing questionable things with their company-issued laptops.
We have a Unix VM at work that runs a large portion of our business. All sales, merchandise ordering, inventory and payroll flows through these VMs (one runs in each retail location.)
The VM's entire memory footprint is less than 100M, or, as I like to say at work, less than what IE uses just sitting there on the local HTML home page.
The thing is, you have to be careful of statistics like this.
Take infant mortality, for example. This is from memory of something I read in the last year or so...
The US counts every baby that pops out with any vital signs whatsoever as a "live birth", even if it died 2 hours later. That then goes into "infant mortality" counts.
Another country might (and some do, as I recall) count that same birth as a non-live birth. If it wasn't born alive, it doesn't count toward "infant mortality."
How do those two countries factor those two children into the life expectancy calculations? I sure don't know, do you?
Unless you're using POTS and modems for authorization, you're going to have some down time due to connectivity outages, due to the cheapo DSL your locations will probably have.
During that time, it probably won't be acceptable to not accept credit cards, so what you do is accept it, save the card info, and hope it gets approved when connectivity returns. There's some risk to that method, but really, the vast majority of transactions get approved, so there isn't that much risk. And it's better than pissing off your customers. I know merchants who are willing to accept credit cards even when they absolutely know they will never see the money rather than piss off their customers.
Now, if the connectivity is down due to the backhoe coming through, things get more interesting, because you're down for days or weeks. The cards you stored start expiring - about 1/36 of them - at the end of the month. So then your loss rate goes up.
But, on the flip side, if you "tell" your acquirer/processor that it's a stored transaction, they can tell your customer's issuing bank that it's a stored transaction, and more of those will get approved - the issuing banks will be more lenient in their approvals. (I don't know the right term for this, I just know the AP "pushes harder.")
And until connectivity comes back, all of that cardholder data is stored on a not-very-secure PC at the restaurant.
And some here will no doubt remember when those carbon forms went from having a single piece of carbon paper to a piece that was perforated half-way through where the card number would hit. Half the carbon would go in the garbage, the other half stayed with the merchant copy if I remember correctly.
There are in fact Federal laws about that - look here: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/alerts/alt007.shtm - but even if there weren't, there are many state laws, and there are network rules about it too, which you clearly know.
A merchant cannot show more than the last 5 digits of the card number or the expiration date on the receipt.
If you encounter a merchant in violation you can complain to the FTC.
I made a bunch of changes to a POS system 7 to 8 years ago to start accepting credit cards. Our data structure only even has room for the last 4 characters of the card. (It also has room for the expiration date, which it does retain, but it was later changed to not ever print it on the customer copy. I think we may print it on the (rare) merchant copy to be in compliance with one of the network's requirements.)
I would hope that a C coder who needs to sort various things would write two routines, one for COMPARING integers, another for COMPARING pointers, use qsort() and get on with their day.
I don't know what a C++ coder would do, perhaps some sort of thing with templates and sorted collections. I assume that a template also needs to be told how to compare objects at some point - even if it's just the implementation of operator() and operator==().
A person who would write his (or her) own sort function should, in most cases, be ridiculed, beaten and fired.
(Yes, I know, there are exceptions to this rule. Rules always have exceptions.)
Another poster said roughly 1/6 of US cars sold are manuals. That sounds high to me.
Yet another said "but what about the Miata?" To that, I say, all Mazda cars were under 3% of the US market 2009-2010.
My guess is 1/6 is correct if you include in light and medium duty trucks.
I worked in auto repair in the late 90's. Most everything domestic was automatic except the cheapest of the cheap cars. The imports had a higher percentage (especially Honda) but still far from a majority.
Just to pick up on your "straight boring" in America idea, I grew up in central Illinois.
When the country roads were laid out there, they literally just made a one-mile grid with roads running north-south and east-west. Damn hard to get lost.
Open source software has a general idea of "contribute what you can to make this a better product." Dad couldn't contribute coding skills, but he could contribute analysis and design suggestions.
If the OP's dad had put out a sign that said "give me photo suggestions" I would expect him to happily accept and evaluate said suggestions.
If he expected them to jump right on it, well, that's an incorrect expectation.
But he probably expected his week of design/requirements work (and that's really what it was) to at least be accepted politely and briefly reviewed. And that seems reasonable to me. It doesn't really take long to read a few pages.
In the US, it's comparatively rare to see a car (except the very very cheap or the very exotic) that isn't an automatic transmission.
People who don't know how to drive a manual transmission are, for the most part, smart enough to know that they don' t know how. I don't really think we need a law, thanks.
Personally, I haven't driven a manual transmission since 1997 or so (and it was a customer's car while I worked at an auto repair place.) I could probably still do it but it wouldn't be pretty.
My current car is a VW with DSG, which is a computer controlled "manual" transmission, more or less. (No, it isn't a fluid automatic, it has gears and clutches.) I can tell it when to shift if I want but my 10-mile, 30-minute commute is very tiring if I do so.
I don't know about where you are, but I work in a Chicago suburb, and every once in a while I look out my window and see a guy sitting on what looks like a playground swing washing the windows.
I work on the 6th floor of an 8 story building.
There's also a big scaffolding rig that they can drop down the side, but I assume it's a lot more work to get that setup and move it around the building, so for window washing, they get the guy sitting on the board.
(He is wearing some sort of harness with another cable going up to the roof, so I guess it's comparatively safe.)
The GP said "a row of vertical studs" when referring to firebreaks, which are short pieces of stud-material that run parallel to the floor, halfway up, inside the wall. The intent is to stop/slow fire from spreading quickly up inside the wall.
Those are clearly not vertical. They are horizontal. Hence my post.
Joists are horizontal boards that support floors (and perhaps roofs, I'm not sure about that.)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, but in the real world - at least the one I live in - that sort of a response will get mentioned in your annual review, and possibly a "discussion" with your boss sooner, because the 40-something you just refused to help knows your senior director.
I disagree.
There are a lot of people who give happily to causes whose work they like and want to support.
I personally give money to political causes, to arts organizations, and to other charities like RMHC (Ronald McDonald House.) There is no tax deduction for some of these, and for the others the donation is not predicated on it.
Some of the more massive donations that people have made probably are partially motivated by tax breaks.
But many are not, and historically have not been.
See, for example, the Carnegie Libraries. I'm no expert on the history of them, but it doesn't sound like it was a matter of anything except philanthropy.
I doubt Bill Gates is especially after the tax breaks with his foundation; more likely he wants to leave a more positive legacy than having sold software of uneven quality to millions (billions?) of people and companies.
Just because I like doing all the laundry at once doesn't make it 'archaic' - it's how I choose to live my life. If you want to "pop a load in when you've got enough" you go ahead; I like laundry day.
I'm usually home on Saturday morning anyway, so getting it all done at once is fine, and I'd rather that than be doing laundry all week or unpredictably.
But I want it done in 5 hours, not in 8, because I want to be able to go out Saturday afternoon and not leave things in the machine.
I do sort-of babysit the machine; I want my clothes out of the dryer and folded or on hangers as soon as they're dry so they don't get wrinkled.
Maybe your clothes can take being left in a ball for hours and still look decent, or you actually iron your clothes (talk about archaic!)
I'm not sure the iron even works - my clothes look fine if I get them out of the dryer quickly enough.
This isn't a bad idea if the company is willing to be reasonable - but you want to have permission to do it first.
Well, there is one point.
Saturday is "Laundry Day" at our house.
I start doing laundry around 7 AM, and by noon it's all done.
The washer takes about an hour, and the dryer takes about an hour. With separate appliances, that takes 5 hours for 4 loads.
With a single washer/dryer appliance, assuming the cycle times stay the same, 4 loads takes 8 hours.
Those three hours are valuable to me.
It isn't the dropouts, it's the idiots who managed to pass 12th grade but none of it really "stuck."
Or those who haven't used a lot of it and have therefore forgotten it. I'm 42 and there's a lot of stuff I remember knowing but don't know any more.
I'm pretty confident that "light truck" as used for these purposes means, basically, pickup trucks, vans and SUVs of any ilk. It's certainly what it means when it says it on the front of an auto parts catalog.
I believe, but am not sure, that a 1-ton dually is considered a "light truck."
It does not, as you apparently believe, mean "compact trucks."
Or on company equipment. I work for a multi-billion dollar company and know of people who have been fired for doing questionable things with their company-issued laptops.
We have a Unix VM at work that runs a large portion of our business. All sales, merchandise ordering, inventory and payroll flows through these VMs (one runs in each retail location.)
The VM's entire memory footprint is less than 100M, or, as I like to say at work, less than what IE uses just sitting there on the local HTML home page.
The thing is, you have to be careful of statistics like this.
Take infant mortality, for example. This is from memory of something I read in the last year or so...
The US counts every baby that pops out with any vital signs whatsoever as a "live birth", even if it died 2 hours later. That then goes into "infant mortality" counts.
Another country might (and some do, as I recall) count that same birth as a non-live birth. If it wasn't born alive, it doesn't count toward "infant mortality."
How do those two countries factor those two children into the life expectancy calculations? I sure don't know, do you?
Unless you're using POTS and modems for authorization, you're going to have some down time due to connectivity outages, due to the cheapo DSL your locations will probably have.
During that time, it probably won't be acceptable to not accept credit cards, so what you do is accept it, save the card info, and hope it gets approved when connectivity returns. There's some risk to that method, but really, the vast majority of transactions get approved, so there isn't that much risk. And it's better than pissing off your customers. I know merchants who are willing to accept credit cards even when they absolutely know they will never see the money rather than piss off their customers.
Now, if the connectivity is down due to the backhoe coming through, things get more interesting, because you're down for days or weeks. The cards you stored start expiring - about 1/36 of them - at the end of the month. So then your loss rate goes up.
But, on the flip side, if you "tell" your acquirer/processor that it's a stored transaction, they can tell your customer's issuing bank that it's a stored transaction, and more of those will get approved - the issuing banks will be more lenient in their approvals. (I don't know the right term for this, I just know the AP "pushes harder.")
And until connectivity comes back, all of that cardholder data is stored on a not-very-secure PC at the restaurant.
Fun!
And some here will no doubt remember when those carbon forms went from having a single piece of carbon paper to a piece that was perforated half-way through where the card number would hit. Half the carbon would go in the garbage, the other half stayed with the merchant copy if I remember correctly.
There are in fact Federal laws about that - look here: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/alerts/alt007.shtm - but even if there weren't, there are many state laws, and there are network rules about it too, which you clearly know.
A merchant cannot show more than the last 5 digits of the card number or the expiration date on the receipt.
If you encounter a merchant in violation you can complain to the FTC.
I made a bunch of changes to a POS system 7 to 8 years ago to start accepting credit cards. Our data structure only even has room for the last 4 characters of the card. (It also has room for the expiration date, which it does retain, but it was later changed to not ever print it on the customer copy. I think we may print it on the (rare) merchant copy to be in compliance with one of the network's requirements.)
That was operator-less-than, not operator(). Slashdot ate my less-than!
I would hope that a C coder who needs to sort various things would write two routines, one for COMPARING integers, another for COMPARING pointers, use qsort() and get on with their day.
I don't know what a C++ coder would do, perhaps some sort of thing with templates and sorted collections. I assume that a template also needs to be told how to compare objects at some point - even if it's just the implementation of operator() and operator==().
A person who would write his (or her) own sort function should, in most cases, be ridiculed, beaten and fired.
(Yes, I know, there are exceptions to this rule. Rules always have exceptions.)
Another poster said roughly 1/6 of US cars sold are manuals. That sounds high to me.
Yet another said "but what about the Miata?" To that, I say, all Mazda cars were under 3% of the US market 2009-2010.
My guess is 1/6 is correct if you include in light and medium duty trucks.
I worked in auto repair in the late 90's. Most everything domestic was automatic except the cheapest of the cheap cars. The imports had a higher percentage (especially Honda) but still far from a majority.
Just to pick up on your "straight boring" in America idea, I grew up in central Illinois.
When the country roads were laid out there, they literally just made a one-mile grid with roads running north-south and east-west. Damn hard to get lost.
Motorcycles aren't cars.
Perhaps we should also include bicycles, mopeds, and those plastic battery-operated "cars" sold at WalMart for 3-year-old children.
I think that's a fundamentally flawed analogy.
Open source software has a general idea of "contribute what you can to make this a better product." Dad couldn't contribute coding skills, but he could contribute analysis and design suggestions.
If the OP's dad had put out a sign that said "give me photo suggestions" I would expect him to happily accept and evaluate said suggestions.
If he expected them to jump right on it, well, that's an incorrect expectation.
But he probably expected his week of design/requirements work (and that's really what it was) to at least be accepted politely and briefly reviewed. And that seems reasonable to me. It doesn't really take long to read a few pages.
In the US, it's comparatively rare to see a car (except the very very cheap or the very exotic) that isn't an automatic transmission.
People who don't know how to drive a manual transmission are, for the most part, smart enough to know that they don' t know how. I don't really think we need a law, thanks.
Personally, I haven't driven a manual transmission since 1997 or so (and it was a customer's car while I worked at an auto repair place.) I could probably still do it but it wouldn't be pretty.
My current car is a VW with DSG, which is a computer controlled "manual" transmission, more or less. (No, it isn't a fluid automatic, it has gears and clutches.) I can tell it when to shift if I want but my 10-mile, 30-minute commute is very tiring if I do so.
I don't know about where you are, but I work in a Chicago suburb, and every once in a while I look out my window and see a guy sitting on what looks like a playground swing washing the windows.
I work on the 6th floor of an 8 story building.
There's also a big scaffolding rig that they can drop down the side, but I assume it's a lot more work to get that setup and move it around the building, so for window washing, they get the guy sitting on the board.
(He is wearing some sort of harness with another cable going up to the roof, so I guess it's comparatively safe.)
RFC 2119 addresses that.
I think all BAs should be required to read and sign RFC 2119
By the way, "SHALL" is equivalent to "MUST."
No, I do not.
The GP said "a row of vertical studs" when referring to firebreaks, which are short pieces of stud-material that run parallel to the floor, halfway up, inside the wall. The intent is to stop/slow fire from spreading quickly up inside the wall.
Those are clearly not vertical. They are horizontal. Hence my post.
Joists are horizontal boards that support floors (and perhaps roofs, I'm not sure about that.)
Do you perhaps mean a row of horizontal studs?