As a point of order, merely requiring overtime pay for people who work more than 40 hours a week is no guarantee that employers will try not to force people to work excessive hours.
Here in the UK, there's an anomalous overtime regulation which is exploited by various hospitals. Y'see, doctors are paid overtime for being "on call", i.e. present in the hospital and available to be called in event of an emergency.
"On call" was originally intended to be just that -- an emergency capability. But you tend to get junior doctors working 70-110 hour weeks in British hospitals, of which 40 hours are salaried and the rest are paid the on-call overtime rate. Why?
Because "on call" wages are paid at half the standard hourly rate. Not time-plus-half, but half. So it is in the hospital administration's financial interests to work their junior doctors until they drop (regardless of the likelihood of accidents occuring, due to the peculiar insurance situation in the UK). And there's a lot of inertia in the medical establishment (from older GPs and consultants, who should know better than to think that "on call" duty today is the same as it was thirty or forty years ago).
I saw this at first hand some years ago, when working in a variety of NHS hospitals. (The NHS is the biggest culprit -- tight budgets and no insurance whatsoever because it's so huge it can settle up in cash for just about any legal action.) Junior doctors who are zombies, falling asleep over patients and making mistakes because they've had 4 hours sleep in the past 96 hours.
Seems to me that the Californian legislation simply doesn't address the problem unless it explicitly mandates that overtime rates of pay must be higher than standard rates of pay, to give the employers a financial incentive to avoid this kind of slave-driving.
The TV license fee is legally based on the fiction that it is illegal to monitor any part of the EM spectrum without a license (except for designated parts, like visible light:). You also need a license if you want to broadcast.
But that's beside the point...
Free local phone calls do exist in the UK if you use an operator other than BT; apparently some years ago OFTEL refused to let BT zero-rate local calls for fear it would destroy BT's then-small competitors. The problem is that BT was privatised as a monolithic company in 1982, not split up into "Baby BT's" like AT&T. The result was that it took quite a while, and lots of regulation, before rival telcos became really viable.
Today, however, Things Are Different. We have cellphone companies trying to undercut BT's long-distance call charges. We have cablecos undercutting BT on local and long-distance phone service. We have long-haul telcos. And now we have an unbundled local loop coming. It is beginning to look as if it's finally time to begin deregulating the telephone industry, now that a competitive market has arrived.
Nice theory, and I'd agree with it completely, except...
Why would M$ want to hijack Perl? I mean hijack as in destroy, not hijack as in use productively. Their reason for destroying Java is to prevent "write once, run everywhere" as a Windows alternative, and to piss off a competitor (Sun). Guess what? Perl isn't a similar threat, and there is *no* competitor to damage.
Unfortunately, Perl runs on more platforms than Java.
So it is a potential "write once, run anywhere" threat.
Not at the user application level (unless Tk starts spreading rapidly)... but at the server software level.
The best keyboards are original IBM PC AT keyboards.
Back in the dawn of history (1984-86 or so:), IBM's keyboards were made by the Selectric typewriter division. Cost $200 or so to replace, had a big iron plate in their base to hold 'em on the desk, proper switches under every key. Depress the keys and they go 'click' with a lovely positive feel -- you don't need to hammer them and you always know when you've mistyped something because you can feel it in your fingertips.
It's just a standard layout keyboard, but in tactile terms it's like the difference between a concert grand piano and a cheap consumer-market midi keyboard.
Those keyboards are built like brick outhouses; most of 'em are still soldiering on. The later keyboards are flimsy and plasticky, but in my experience there is nothing quite like an original PC-AT keyboard.
NB: They began cutting corners in 1987, around the time the PS/2 models began coming out. Later models look the same, but have cheap membrane switches underneath instead of being properly spring; basically a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. I am talking about original PC-AT keyboards made between the introduction of the PC-AT in 1984 and the arrival of the PS/2 range in 1987, with the positive clicking action and the genuine electric typewriter feel. I picked this one up about two weeks ago for two pounds (UK currency -- about US $3) and it's great.
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Here in the UK, there's an anomalous overtime regulation which is exploited by various hospitals. Y'see, doctors are paid overtime for being "on call", i.e. present in the hospital and available to be called in event of an emergency.
"On call" was originally intended to be just that -- an emergency capability. But you tend to get junior doctors working 70-110 hour weeks in British hospitals, of which 40 hours are salaried and the rest are paid the on-call overtime rate. Why?
Because "on call" wages are paid at half the standard hourly rate. Not time-plus-half, but half. So it is in the hospital administration's financial interests to work their junior doctors until they drop (regardless of the likelihood of accidents occuring, due to the peculiar insurance situation in the UK). And there's a lot of inertia in the medical establishment (from older GPs and consultants, who should know better than to think that "on call" duty today is the same as it was thirty or forty years ago).
I saw this at first hand some years ago, when working in a variety of NHS hospitals. (The NHS is the biggest culprit -- tight budgets and no insurance whatsoever because it's so huge it can settle up in cash for just about any legal action.) Junior doctors who are zombies, falling asleep over patients and making mistakes because they've had 4 hours sleep in the past 96 hours.
Seems to me that the Californian legislation simply doesn't address the problem unless it explicitly mandates that overtime rates of pay must be higher than standard rates of pay, to give the employers a financial incentive to avoid this kind of slave-driving.
But that's beside the point ...
Free local phone calls do exist in the UK if you use an operator other than BT; apparently some years ago OFTEL refused to let BT zero-rate local calls for fear it would destroy BT's then-small competitors. The problem is that BT was privatised as a monolithic company in 1982, not split up into "Baby BT's" like AT&T. The result was that it took quite a while, and lots of regulation, before rival telcos became really viable.
Today, however, Things Are Different. We have cellphone companies trying to undercut BT's long-distance call charges. We have cablecos undercutting BT on local and long-distance phone service. We have long-haul telcos. And now we have an unbundled local loop coming. It is beginning to look as if it's finally time to begin deregulating the telephone industry, now that a competitive market has arrived.
Unfortunately, Perl runs on more platforms than Java.
So it is a potential "write once, run anywhere" threat.
Not at the user application level (unless Tk starts spreading rapidly) ... but at the server software level.
Back in the dawn of history (1984-86 or so :), IBM's keyboards were made by the Selectric typewriter division. Cost $200 or so to replace, had a big iron plate in their base to hold 'em on the desk, proper switches under every key. Depress the keys and they go 'click' with a lovely positive feel -- you don't need to hammer them and you always know when you've mistyped something because you can feel it in your fingertips.
It's just a standard layout keyboard, but in tactile terms it's like the difference between a concert grand piano and a cheap consumer-market midi keyboard.
Those keyboards are built like brick outhouses; most of 'em are still soldiering on. The later keyboards are flimsy and plasticky, but in my experience there is nothing quite like an original PC-AT keyboard.
NB: They began cutting corners in 1987, around the time the PS/2 models began coming out. Later models look the same, but have cheap membrane switches underneath instead of being properly spring; basically a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. I am talking about original PC-AT keyboards made between the introduction of the PC-AT in 1984 and the arrival of the PS/2 range in 1987, with the positive clicking action and the genuine electric typewriter feel. I picked this one up about two weeks ago for two pounds (UK currency -- about US $3) and it's great.