There are very few times when you can go over the head of someone above you. Either it is urgent and your boss isn't around (vacation or offsite), or you want your boss fired.
The latter should only be done in major cases, and everyone should have their resume ready. Read that again: everyone should be in agreement (or nearly everyone). You need to be going in a position of informing the higher ups that everyone is so unsatisfied that they are activly shopping their resume around, and you need to be willing to be laid off. Because everyone is shopping their resume, you are best off if you select someone who already has a new job. You (or whoever is first) presents it, not just in the exit interview but corner the bosses boss in his office and inform him that you are leaving and want him to know everyone else is trying to. Then everyone else when asked can stay just one step short of admitting to looking for a job. (I'm very concerned, I like company X, but I don't know how much longer I can take Y)
Hopefully you are better with words.
In no other case does something go above your bosses head. So because this session is not going over your bosses head, you should ask him (or her) what to say, when, and how. Your bosses job is to know the politics, so you should be backing up 100% what your boss says (or say nothing at all if you disagree)
The example was minneapolis-Chicago, a much shorter trip than NY-LA. Northwest used to (up til 9/11, maybe still do but I don't hear it advertised) gaurentee that that a plane doing the Minneapolis-Chicago would take off every 15 minutes, and if you showed up at the airport, the next flight it was physically possibal for you to get to the gate in time for would be the one you were on. (that is there would be a seat for you, one flat rate, buy your ticket at the counter) It was physically possibal to be in the air 15 minutes after parking your car!
There is a parfect canidate for high speed rail. Enough passangers to make it worth while, a short enough trip that it can be done faster than air (except they made sure this particular flight had priority), and if the terminals are closer to where people want to be (ie downtown to downtown instead of airport to airport) I could see it making a money.
This could easially be good for you. As other customers start using more bandwidth, your useage becomes less and less extreem. It could easially happen that you get a much larger bandwidth cap because the average user is using so much.
Exactly. That is what makes conventional high speed designs good: they can run on regular track while you upgrade it. So you upgrade a 10 mile section that needs replacement anyway, and go a little faster there, then the next section. It may take years, but you slowly gain the benifits.
With a non-conventional track you have to have it all at once. The 300 mile (whatever it is) round trip that makes the high speed train worth building needs to entirely be operational before you bother running anything because it doesn't make sense to run until you can do that.
When you give a gift, the thought counts. If you give a gift certificate you show that you didn't give the gift much thought. If you cared enough to think you could get a gift, might not be as useful as the certificate, but you put some thought into it.
Face it, children with no money will take all the gifts they can get. Adults that want or need something will buy it if they can afford it. If they can't afford it, it means they value their time away from work (sometimes a different stressful, but high paying job) too much to do what it takes to get it.
But what can't you do? Can you dig up iron ore and smelt it into steel? Can you inspect a bridge and declare is safe with confidence? Can you... Perhaps you can do some of that, good for you. I can build a house, and I have in fact done so (not by myself, some things require help, and others are cheaper to hire out), but I've never sailed a boat. I can do a lot of little things that are not particularly common. It happens there are so many different skills a human can learn that there is no time to learn them all. I happened to major in CS with a math minor, but I can't speel to save my life.
I don't care what you can do. I don't care at all for your atitude that you are somehow better than the average person because of what you can do. The average person can do a lot of things. I know people who can run a buisness with several employees, but can't run a hammer. They are better than me at the skills needed to run a buisness, I'm better at construction. In the end you cannot compare our abilities except in a situation where something is needed. (Even then, is it really better to be the plumber or the person who hires the plumber?)
There is one advantage of email though: it is easy to send a form letter. Simple scripts can then extract the for or against (the politition only reads one copy of the email, everyone else who sent exactly the same thing is a number, so he knows how many agree with whatever it sends)
Nobody has time to read all the mail a polition gets, so form letters can be in your favor if enough people send it that he gets a card "here is a letter we have recived 10,000 different copies of".
It takes 10 seconds to load a gun, aim, and pull the trigger. Bullets cost about $.25. How long does it take the tie a noose, then untie someone afterwards? Don't forget that the bullet can be fired against the prision wall, while the noose requires a tree, and someone to get the prisoner up there. In short there is a lot more cost in a hanging than in a shooting. I don't know how electric chair, gas chamber, or injection compare. In general though labor is expensive.
With a shooting you can have a gaurd take is service rifle so that is essentially free (as in you would have to buy it anyway), and take a target shot (something he should do anyway, so the cost of the bullet is free).
There is a downside though. Few people can just shoot someone without psycological problems. Thats why it is a firing squad, 4 blanks that don't kill, and one real bullet that does. Anytime there is a problem you can assure the shooters that "their" gun just has a blank. I don't know if there is a similear problem with other mythods of execution.
All news sources are biased. Ny Times and AP have a democrate leaning, Fox has a republican one. Degrees are there over course, I won't argue that. However you are presenting things as if you don't question AP and NyTimes, and that is dangerious. Everyone has an agenda, and it is impossibal to avoid it. There is no way to be unbiased, not presenting a fringe side is biased, while presenting it may give it far too much credit.
If the above are biases you can live with, that is just fine, but always remember your thinking is influenced by them. Keep your mind open that.
Potatoe was a very common spelling. If you went to the grocery store prior to that incident there is a good change that all the "potatoes" you bought would be spelled with that e. I'm given to understand that in England they spell the word color with a u (colour). Don't ask why, I don't know that. I'd argue that either answer is correct given that both spellings are common.
Then again I can't spell very well myself, so I'm not allowed in this arguement.
If it was the right spiecies. Trout are good, so I'll try a glowing one. I don't like northen pike, so I wouldn't try a glowing on.
Now for the fine print: it would be raised on a diet where attention was paid to preventing things like heavy metal and other toxin build up. I'd look a lot closer at what made it glow, and make sure chemicallly it wasn't going to be harmful. I'd make sure I'd cook it right.
I'm not against eating glowing fish. However I'm not going eat one without understanding the risks. Right now I know of no risks, just some luddites scared of them. IF there is hard science one way or the other about how harmful glowing fish are it will make my mind up about eating them. If there is not hard science (which is what I suspect, after all they are not making these for people to eat) then no I will not eat one.
For about 100 years the US was open to anyone who could manage to come, and would even give you 100+ acres to farm if you did. A successful mars colony would need population for many years before it became a problem. They need at least enough people to ensure genetic deivsersity, nobody wants inbred grandkids.
Even after genetic diversity, there is a limit to how much land anyone can deal with on their own. So you have your 3000 acre ranch on mars, that still leaves a lot of room for colonization, let them come so long as they stay off of your land. Most people tend to enjoy city life with people nearby, so even less land per person is really needed, though who knows how their culture will turn out.
Byond all that, new people mean more workers. It it expensive to ship things from earth, so if someone sets up a tractor plant on mars, everyone can afford a trator where shipping from earth means nobody can. Expand the above to big screen TVs, desks, stereos, video game consoles, cookware, beds, or pianos. (plenty more if you start to think) All things I could live without, but would like to have. Sure I'll take the navagation computer out of my one way spacecraft, but that is only a small fraction of the gadgets I'd like to have.
Bandwidth would be poor only if you choose beforehand not to make it good. Remember humans need a lot of support, the mass of high bandwidth antennas isn't nearly the problem when you have a spacecraft large enough for humans, as opposed to a smaller one for robots. (I suspect size is more a problem than mass)
Mind you with the time delay I wouldn't want try a web browser, so I'd expect a lot of technology would be spend on proxies to cache data we are likely to want to look at.
Bahh, people would forget about it, food supplies would not be sent. Then at the last mintue they would be remembered again, but too late to get a food shipment there.
Worse yet, imange the food shipment would be just in time, but it explodes on launch (challanger style).
These problems can be solved, but I'd want to be sure polititions were not involed in creating them. Much easier to propose big fines for a private company that decided not to launch needed supplies, and gain publicity for at least doing something to make sure "big evil corporation" won't strike again, then to cover your own trail as you cut funding yourself. Either way people die though, and that is unfortunate. Which is why I'd never agree to a trip like this unless food and supplies have arrived in advance. (or with me)
But the average joe does need all his power. He just needs it for short impulses, not all the time. When I open a new window I want it open now, not in one second. It takes a powerful CPU to take all the eye candy I have and put it in a window that still pops up fast enough that it happens appearently instantly. Even when I was use a 1.6Mhz Atari 8bit most of the time I wasn't using all the CPU, but that CPU wasn't powerful enough for the times I did use it all. (though most of the time things were programed around the CPU limitations so it seemed like it was powerful enough).
When the CPU can deal with the instant demands without appearent delay it is fast enough. It needs to cover all problems cases though.
I keep thinking death row. Find some with an okay education on death row and all appeals exhausted. Die in the chair today, or spend 5 years on mars before dieing, your choice. (I'd also give them sucicide pills so once air does run out they die quick)
If I had a family on earth I wouldn't offer, because any family I cared about enough to want to be sure they got my check is also family I care about enough to not want to leave.
I could see some stereotypical poor person going for that deal, knowing this his sacrafice left the rest of the family in good shape. A normal middle class person with a good education though? Those with a good education can get plenty of money here on earth. Educated people is who we want to send because they will advance science the most. (they might want some servants, but the cost of sending people makes it unlikely that any would be sent)
Mind you I'd seriously consider it. However I'm single, and don't have good prospects for changing that anytime soon. My parents and siblings would miss me, but it isn't the same as wife and children. (or it doesn't seem the same to me or anyone else I've talked to) I'm still not sure I'd go. It sounds good, but in truth it would be boring. I'd miss watching the cat attack the dog (the dog is only 10 times his size) I'd miss hunting and fishing. I'd miss well a lot of things about life on earth.
Nobody with any knowledge belived the world was flat. Columbus offered Protrigal first chance to finance his mission, and they said "your and idiot, the earth is 4 times as large as you have calculated and you will starve before you make it to asia." (or something to that effect.
Spain said much the same thing until the queen took a fancy to the effort so they gave Columbus the cheapest ships and sailers they could and let the idiot starve himself far enough from land that they didn't have to worry about him.
Columbus nearly did starve, but it turns out that there is land inbetween here and there, and he was able to get back safely. (without the gold and spices he was after)
Right now we don't really ahve the ability to keep men in space for long. By the time man in space means familys living their normal lives (not just science) that treaty will be obsolete.
Note that I said obsolete, not gone. I kinda hope it stays. Let those in space form their own countries, instead of being colonies of some earth bound country. Leave the treaty in place, by the time earth realizes they are lossing because of it, it will be too late to control space. And perhaps one of those new countries will find a reasonable government that manages to control crime and the like without interfiering on rights. (okay, it is a long shot, but we can dream)
But overhead powerlines are visible, meaning you know where there could be a problems, and you know nearly exactly. Close enough that if you are paying attention to your ladder you won't hit them. Even paying attention to your shovel won't help if they marked the lines wrong. For that matter, most of the lines I've seen are the same color as dirt (there is a marker of a different color over them) so I'm not sure you would nesecarly see it if your shovel was about to hit it.
In practice underground powerlines are less reliable than overhead. Sure wind brings down overhead lines, but moles don't eat them, ground water doesn't seep in, the insulation doesn't rot. My local utility has more outages per mile in the underground lines than overhead.
In addition to the above comments: that is what fork() is for. I know Mozilla runs on Windows which doesn't have fork (at least it didn't last I checked, I don't know what posix services provides windows though), but why should I suffer on unix which does.
I don't recall what it was. I do recall however skipping several songs I wanted because I could not be sure it was legal. Eventially I found demos from the artist's web page, and I downloaded those.
I prefer music from small artists, and I try to support them whenever I can. I suspect several of my CDs had a production run of under 10000, and I know for a fact that some it was much less. They aren't making much money, but I like to encourage them to make more real music and money always helps.
Kids today are whimps, back in my day rain, snow and really cold would keep us. But 5 degress? That wasn't really cold. When it was -10 (F, about -20C) we stayed inside, but other than that it was outside. Didn't happen often, 5F is common here.
I recall a teacher in alaska telling about a really hot day, where everyone was outside, the boys haveing a snowball fight. One teacher turned to the other and said "hot out today, ain't it", and the reaponse was "very". The tempature was appearently -10F.
Yeah, there is a really good idea. Take high voltage power lines and place them underground where any idiot with a shovel can hit them accidently. And don't suggest a locating service be used first because I know more than one person who did get the lines located, and still hit them because the paint wasn't over the line. Fortunatly for them it was just a gas pipe, which while dangerious enough isn't as deadly as a power line.
Saddly the US is moveing in that same direction, and most new power lines are going underground. At least it looks nicer.
Problem is you cannot creat a detailed design document first, and that is when requirements place it. I can't start implimentation until the design document is done. So I do a best guess design document, and start to impliment that. Eventially I find something the design didn't account for so I shoehorn it in, creatly ugly code.
What you really need is to write something that works for the common case(s). Then write a design document of how it should be, then start over from scratch and do it right. Even then you are lucky if you can see 5 years in advance how the code will need to be used.
Take the last task I had: writing CDs, easy enough, I wrote something that put data on disk, and then did a design, which worked great. Then the boss gave me a DVD burner and told me to support that too. Turns out DVDs are very different in some ways, and I hadn't accounted for that. Depending on if is +r,+rw,-r,-rw,-RAM you need to do different things as far as formatting, and tracks are handled differently if you even have tracks. Suddenly my nice design that was working great was getting uglier and uglier and I was faced with a deadline getting closer and close and I still hadn't solved enough of the main tracks to write a design document on how it should be, much less do the re-write. (I got laid off for reasons not related to the above so I don't know how this story would have turned out. I like to think I could have made it work though)
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There are very few times when you can go over the head of someone above you. Either it is urgent and your boss isn't around (vacation or offsite), or you want your boss fired.
The latter should only be done in major cases, and everyone should have their resume ready. Read that again: everyone should be in agreement (or nearly everyone). You need to be going in a position of informing the higher ups that everyone is so unsatisfied that they are activly shopping their resume around, and you need to be willing to be laid off. Because everyone is shopping their resume, you are best off if you select someone who already has a new job. You (or whoever is first) presents it, not just in the exit interview but corner the bosses boss in his office and inform him that you are leaving and want him to know everyone else is trying to. Then everyone else when asked can stay just one step short of admitting to looking for a job. (I'm very concerned, I like company X, but I don't know how much longer I can take Y)
Hopefully you are better with words.
In no other case does something go above your bosses head. So because this session is not going over your bosses head, you should ask him (or her) what to say, when, and how. Your bosses job is to know the politics, so you should be backing up 100% what your boss says (or say nothing at all if you disagree)
The example was minneapolis-Chicago, a much shorter trip than NY-LA. Northwest used to (up til 9/11, maybe still do but I don't hear it advertised) gaurentee that that a plane doing the Minneapolis-Chicago would take off every 15 minutes, and if you showed up at the airport, the next flight it was physically possibal for you to get to the gate in time for would be the one you were on. (that is there would be a seat for you, one flat rate, buy your ticket at the counter) It was physically possibal to be in the air 15 minutes after parking your car!
There is a parfect canidate for high speed rail. Enough passangers to make it worth while, a short enough trip that it can be done faster than air (except they made sure this particular flight had priority), and if the terminals are closer to where people want to be (ie downtown to downtown instead of airport to airport) I could see it making a money.
This could easially be good for you. As other customers start using more bandwidth, your useage becomes less and less extreem. It could easially happen that you get a much larger bandwidth cap because the average user is using so much.
Exactly. That is what makes conventional high speed designs good: they can run on regular track while you upgrade it. So you upgrade a 10 mile section that needs replacement anyway, and go a little faster there, then the next section. It may take years, but you slowly gain the benifits.
With a non-conventional track you have to have it all at once. The 300 mile (whatever it is) round trip that makes the high speed train worth building needs to entirely be operational before you bother running anything because it doesn't make sense to run until you can do that.
When you give a gift, the thought counts. If you give a gift certificate you show that you didn't give the gift much thought. If you cared enough to think you could get a gift, might not be as useful as the certificate, but you put some thought into it.
Face it, children with no money will take all the gifts they can get. Adults that want or need something will buy it if they can afford it. If they can't afford it, it means they value their time away from work (sometimes a different stressful, but high paying job) too much to do what it takes to get it.
Put some thoughts into your gifts.
But what can't you do? Can you dig up iron ore and smelt it into steel? Can you inspect a bridge and declare is safe with confidence? Can you ... Perhaps you can do some of that, good for you. I can build a house, and I have in fact done so (not by myself, some things require help, and others are cheaper to hire out), but I've never sailed a boat. I can do a lot of little things that are not particularly common. It happens there are so many different skills a human can learn that there is no time to learn them all. I happened to major in CS with a math minor, but I can't speel to save my life.
I don't care what you can do. I don't care at all for your atitude that you are somehow better than the average person because of what you can do. The average person can do a lot of things. I know people who can run a buisness with several employees, but can't run a hammer. They are better than me at the skills needed to run a buisness, I'm better at construction. In the end you cannot compare our abilities except in a situation where something is needed. (Even then, is it really better to be the plumber or the person who hires the plumber?)
There is one advantage of email though: it is easy to send a form letter. Simple scripts can then extract the for or against (the politition only reads one copy of the email, everyone else who sent exactly the same thing is a number, so he knows how many agree with whatever it sends)
Nobody has time to read all the mail a polition gets, so form letters can be in your favor if enough people send it that he gets a card "here is a letter we have recived 10,000 different copies of".
It takes 10 seconds to load a gun, aim, and pull the trigger. Bullets cost about $.25. How long does it take the tie a noose, then untie someone afterwards? Don't forget that the bullet can be fired against the prision wall, while the noose requires a tree, and someone to get the prisoner up there. In short there is a lot more cost in a hanging than in a shooting. I don't know how electric chair, gas chamber, or injection compare. In general though labor is expensive.
With a shooting you can have a gaurd take is service rifle so that is essentially free (as in you would have to buy it anyway), and take a target shot (something he should do anyway, so the cost of the bullet is free).
There is a downside though. Few people can just shoot someone without psycological problems. Thats why it is a firing squad, 4 blanks that don't kill, and one real bullet that does. Anytime there is a problem you can assure the shooters that "their" gun just has a blank. I don't know if there is a similear problem with other mythods of execution.
All news sources are biased. Ny Times and AP have a democrate leaning, Fox has a republican one. Degrees are there over course, I won't argue that. However you are presenting things as if you don't question AP and NyTimes, and that is dangerious. Everyone has an agenda, and it is impossibal to avoid it. There is no way to be unbiased, not presenting a fringe side is biased, while presenting it may give it far too much credit.
If the above are biases you can live with, that is just fine, but always remember your thinking is influenced by them. Keep your mind open that.
Potatoe was a very common spelling. If you went to the grocery store prior to that incident there is a good change that all the "potatoes" you bought would be spelled with that e. I'm given to understand that in England they spell the word color with a u (colour). Don't ask why, I don't know that. I'd argue that either answer is correct given that both spellings are common.
Then again I can't spell very well myself, so I'm not allowed in this arguement.
If it was the right spiecies. Trout are good, so I'll try a glowing one. I don't like northen pike, so I wouldn't try a glowing on.
Now for the fine print: it would be raised on a diet where attention was paid to preventing things like heavy metal and other toxin build up. I'd look a lot closer at what made it glow, and make sure chemicallly it wasn't going to be harmful. I'd make sure I'd cook it right.
I'm not against eating glowing fish. However I'm not going eat one without understanding the risks. Right now I know of no risks, just some luddites scared of them. IF there is hard science one way or the other about how harmful glowing fish are it will make my mind up about eating them. If there is not hard science (which is what I suspect, after all they are not making these for people to eat) then no I will not eat one.
For about 100 years the US was open to anyone who could manage to come, and would even give you 100+ acres to farm if you did. A successful mars colony would need population for many years before it became a problem. They need at least enough people to ensure genetic deivsersity, nobody wants inbred grandkids.
Even after genetic diversity, there is a limit to how much land anyone can deal with on their own. So you have your 3000 acre ranch on mars, that still leaves a lot of room for colonization, let them come so long as they stay off of your land. Most people tend to enjoy city life with people nearby, so even less land per person is really needed, though who knows how their culture will turn out.
Byond all that, new people mean more workers. It it expensive to ship things from earth, so if someone sets up a tractor plant on mars, everyone can afford a trator where shipping from earth means nobody can. Expand the above to big screen TVs, desks, stereos, video game consoles, cookware, beds, or pianos. (plenty more if you start to think) All things I could live without, but would like to have. Sure I'll take the navagation computer out of my one way spacecraft, but that is only a small fraction of the gadgets I'd like to have.
Bandwidth would be poor only if you choose beforehand not to make it good. Remember humans need a lot of support, the mass of high bandwidth antennas isn't nearly the problem when you have a spacecraft large enough for humans, as opposed to a smaller one for robots. (I suspect size is more a problem than mass)
Mind you with the time delay I wouldn't want try a web browser, so I'd expect a lot of technology would be spend on proxies to cache data we are likely to want to look at.
Bahh, people would forget about it, food supplies would not be sent. Then at the last mintue they would be remembered again, but too late to get a food shipment there.
Worse yet, imange the food shipment would be just in time, but it explodes on launch (challanger style).
These problems can be solved, but I'd want to be sure polititions were not involed in creating them. Much easier to propose big fines for a private company that decided not to launch needed supplies, and gain publicity for at least doing something to make sure "big evil corporation" won't strike again, then to cover your own trail as you cut funding yourself. Either way people die though, and that is unfortunate. Which is why I'd never agree to a trip like this unless food and supplies have arrived in advance. (or with me)
But the average joe does need all his power. He just needs it for short impulses, not all the time. When I open a new window I want it open now, not in one second. It takes a powerful CPU to take all the eye candy I have and put it in a window that still pops up fast enough that it happens appearently instantly. Even when I was use a 1.6Mhz Atari 8bit most of the time I wasn't using all the CPU, but that CPU wasn't powerful enough for the times I did use it all. (though most of the time things were programed around the CPU limitations so it seemed like it was powerful enough).
When the CPU can deal with the instant demands without appearent delay it is fast enough. It needs to cover all problems cases though.
I keep thinking death row. Find some with an okay education on death row and all appeals exhausted. Die in the chair today, or spend 5 years on mars before dieing, your choice. (I'd also give them sucicide pills so once air does run out they die quick)
If I had a family on earth I wouldn't offer, because any family I cared about enough to want to be sure they got my check is also family I care about enough to not want to leave.
I could see some stereotypical poor person going for that deal, knowing this his sacrafice left the rest of the family in good shape. A normal middle class person with a good education though? Those with a good education can get plenty of money here on earth. Educated people is who we want to send because they will advance science the most. (they might want some servants, but the cost of sending people makes it unlikely that any would be sent)
Mind you I'd seriously consider it. However I'm single, and don't have good prospects for changing that anytime soon. My parents and siblings would miss me, but it isn't the same as wife and children. (or it doesn't seem the same to me or anyone else I've talked to) I'm still not sure I'd go. It sounds good, but in truth it would be boring. I'd miss watching the cat attack the dog (the dog is only 10 times his size) I'd miss hunting and fishing. I'd miss well a lot of things about life on earth.
Nobody with any knowledge belived the world was flat. Columbus offered Protrigal first chance to finance his mission, and they said "your and idiot, the earth is 4 times as large as you have calculated and you will starve before you make it to asia." (or something to that effect.
Spain said much the same thing until the queen took a fancy to the effort so they gave Columbus the cheapest ships and sailers they could and let the idiot starve himself far enough from land that they didn't have to worry about him.
Columbus nearly did starve, but it turns out that there is land inbetween here and there, and he was able to get back safely. (without the gold and spices he was after)
Right now we don't really ahve the ability to keep men in space for long. By the time man in space means familys living their normal lives (not just science) that treaty will be obsolete.
Note that I said obsolete, not gone. I kinda hope it stays. Let those in space form their own countries, instead of being colonies of some earth bound country. Leave the treaty in place, by the time earth realizes they are lossing because of it, it will be too late to control space. And perhaps one of those new countries will find a reasonable government that manages to control crime and the like without interfiering on rights. (okay, it is a long shot, but we can dream)
But overhead powerlines are visible, meaning you know where there could be a problems, and you know nearly exactly. Close enough that if you are paying attention to your ladder you won't hit them. Even paying attention to your shovel won't help if they marked the lines wrong. For that matter, most of the lines I've seen are the same color as dirt (there is a marker of a different color over them) so I'm not sure you would nesecarly see it if your shovel was about to hit it.
In practice underground powerlines are less reliable than overhead. Sure wind brings down overhead lines, but moles don't eat them, ground water doesn't seep in, the insulation doesn't rot. My local utility has more outages per mile in the underground lines than overhead.
In addition to the above comments: that is what fork() is for. I know Mozilla runs on Windows which doesn't have fork (at least it didn't last I checked, I don't know what posix services provides windows though), but why should I suffer on unix which does.
I don't recall what it was. I do recall however skipping several songs I wanted because I could not be sure it was legal. Eventially I found demos from the artist's web page, and I downloaded those.
I prefer music from small artists, and I try to support them whenever I can. I suspect several of my CDs had a production run of under 10000, and I know for a fact that some it was much less. They aren't making much money, but I like to encourage them to make more real music and money always helps.
Kids today are whimps, back in my day rain, snow and really cold would keep us. But 5 degress? That wasn't really cold. When it was -10 (F, about -20C) we stayed inside, but other than that it was outside. Didn't happen often, 5F is common here.
I recall a teacher in alaska telling about a really hot day, where everyone was outside, the boys haveing a snowball fight. One teacher turned to the other and said "hot out today, ain't it", and the reaponse was "very". The tempature was appearently -10F.
Yeah, there is a really good idea. Take high voltage power lines and place them underground where any idiot with a shovel can hit them accidently. And don't suggest a locating service be used first because I know more than one person who did get the lines located, and still hit them because the paint wasn't over the line. Fortunatly for them it was just a gas pipe, which while dangerious enough isn't as deadly as a power line.
Saddly the US is moveing in that same direction, and most new power lines are going underground. At least it looks nicer.
Problem is you cannot creat a detailed design document first, and that is when requirements place it. I can't start implimentation until the design document is done. So I do a best guess design document, and start to impliment that. Eventially I find something the design didn't account for so I shoehorn it in, creatly ugly code.
What you really need is to write something that works for the common case(s). Then write a design document of how it should be, then start over from scratch and do it right. Even then you are lucky if you can see 5 years in advance how the code will need to be used.
Take the last task I had: writing CDs, easy enough, I wrote something that put data on disk, and then did a design, which worked great. Then the boss gave me a DVD burner and told me to support that too. Turns out DVDs are very different in some ways, and I hadn't accounted for that. Depending on if is +r,+rw,-r,-rw,-RAM you need to do different things as far as formatting, and tracks are handled differently if you even have tracks. Suddenly my nice design that was working great was getting uglier and uglier and I was faced with a deadline getting closer and close and I still hadn't solved enough of the main tracks to write a design document on how it should be, much less do the re-write. (I got laid off for reasons not related to the above so I don't know how this story would have turned out. I like to think I could have made it work though)