And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Another post detailed it as well but heck, this is Slashdot and nothing is ever only said once in comments.
A carpool is generally defined as a group of people going to generally the same destination over a period of time. That's my general definition. Feel free to make up your own. Examples would be from a Park and Ride lot to an office complex, co-workers who travel a lot on the same schedule going to the airport, etc. It's a defined, regular event. Almost every carpool has the same members for most of the time.
By setting up a service where you could look for a ride from X to Y and pay for that specific ride isn't a carpool. It's a taxi service going under the heading of Carpool with the intention of skirting the regulations that they should be following.
I can see where shutting this down/restricting it heavily is actually a good idea. Not for taking away business from the municipal services but just for safety's sake. Taxi, shuttle and bus drivers are regulated for a reason.
Since municipalities seem to have their own carpool websites with the intention of encouraging 'real' carpools they know that carpools don't compete with bus service. It might be named here as part of municipal services just so the taxi companies aren't singled out as the people who are most affected.
Take a good look at the cars and drivers around you on the road some days. Do you really want them ferrying people around? Do you want to be in that car, with that driver? Doing this is actually a public service. Yes, that one was a bit on the flippant side.
I work for a bank but not anywhere near the money, thank goodness. During our annual compliance training there's a section on this kind of thing. We're supposed to try to dissuade the person but if they persist they need to physically sign a form that they're taking out the money against the advice of the bank.
So while we can't refuse to give a person their money (assuming they haven't been declared incompetent) we can cover our own butts from future lawsuits by showing that the person was warned.
Seems to me this person just didn't believe anyone. You can't reason with people like that. My money's on her falling for some other scam within the next five years. Especially since she thinks she can recoup her losses in under five years.
Anyone up for the 'Recover your money from Nigerian scammers' scam? Or has that been done?
Before I finally got fed up and opted out of any contact from them Classmates always said there were 24 people looking to reconnect with me or viewed my profile or some nonsense like that. In every message from them. So either they were lying or there were 24 people with nothing else to do but read my sparse and uninteresting profile.
I'm guessing Classmates was lying to me.
For a while it was a good thing. But now LinkedIn is my medium of choice since it is more relevant than people I haven't seen in 25 years and am glad for it.
I'll need to see if the class action suit is worthwhile or just another one where all the money goes to to the lawyers and the plantiffs get a year's worth of Gold membership.
It may not have been spelled exactly like that. You'll have to forgive me since I've had mine for over 30 years and the original boxes are long gone.
I've hauled around a five gallon bucket of these things for years. For quite a while they were just part of the stuff to move but now I'm using them as temporary framing for building miniatures. So I'm technically still playing with them!
The fit can be a bit loose on some of them but overall I had nothing but fun with them when I actively played with them. They even have a motor and gears to make moving stuff.
Lego will still have their licensing deals so while you might get basic sets the special ones (Star Wars, etc.) will probably still be theirs and theirs alone. I can see generic Galaxy Wars sets but kids want the things they see in the movies.
I'm the system admin for our technology problem ticket system. One of the things we still have going is a server with a couple of multimodems and paging software.
Almost every cell phone provider still supports the TAP (or TAPI) protocol but sometimes you really have to lean on them to get the information. Most of the phone jockeys on tech support don't even know what it is.
Since I refuse to wear the electronic leash I don't have paging on my cell phone. But I did for a while and the messages came through entirely differently than an e-mail or SMS. I believe that included the 'pay attention to me' features you're asking about.
I don't get asked about it much any more but occasionally senior management would ask why we still had this in place when cell phones now get e-mail. My answer was always "And how are you supposed to get an e-mail that the e-mail system is down?" A couple of blinks later and they understood why I keep it running.
Try your local multi-carrier store and see what they have. They're probably your best bet when it comes to finding a decent pager and plan.
Anecdote time, from a time not all that long ago (to me). An office building wanted to keep their various floors/departments aware of issues in a timely manner. The final solution was pagers set to beep and vibrate in acrylic holders on the walls, kind of like a thermostat. When there was a problem that area needed to know about they sent a page. Since it would make all kinds of noise someone always went to check the pager. It was also routine to change the batteries every month. Worked fantastic, very cheap. I could see this still working as a solution, which is why I keep it in the mental filing cabinet.
Cordless phones have to be some of the most insecure communication devices out there but people still think nothing of using them for 'secure' transactions.
When my mom got her first cordless phone she was concerned about giving out things like credit card info to companies using the cordless phone. She got a revelation with my answer of "Just use the corded phone for those."
We also had Cat5 run when we had some electrical work done. We use the corded connections for 99% of what we do. Wireless is there for the very rare time when we want to use one of the notebooks in an area without a network jack. And in no way do I consider the connection secure regardless of any encryption put in place.
Wireless isn't all that great. I'm not about to do my online banking at a Starbucks or any other place when I'm literally broadcasting my communication to anyone willing to sniff for it. That's just silly.
I won't discuss for whom I voted as that's my personal decision. However, I did fulfill my civic responsibility, duty and right by voting. By doing this I now have the right to complain all I want for the next four years because I participated in the process. No vote = shut your trap about the state of the nation since you couldn't be bothered to be involved when it mattered. At least, that's my opinion.
We voted before lunchtime. We live in a reasonably small district so we never have had much of a wait. Three volunteers helping us go to the right line (two wards vote in our location), one person in front of us in line, the same elderly ladies checking us off the list as having voted, fill in the circle paper ballots. The reader didn't spit them back out so we know that they were accepted. Overall it took less than ten minutes and that's including parking.
Political campaigns by their nature are not 'clean' and never have been. They can't be clean when the intent is to say "Vote for me and not those other guys". That sets it up to compare themselves to the other guys. So they need to make the other guys look bad, or at least worse than they do. It's a downward spiral.
Why did I vote the way I did? I looked at the candidates' qualifications, experience, stances, past votes, and all the other things that make up their consistent actions. What they say doesn't matter all that much since no candidate has every been held accountable in any real way for their campaign promises. So you could say I used their own public record to decide if they would be the candidate for whom I cast my vote.
Anyone who votes for a candidate solely on campaign promises gets what they deserve.
I occasionally take my work home with me. It's called a notebook with secure VPN access. At no time does any sensitive data reside locally.
It's not that difficult to be responsible. It just takes a little common sense. Oh wait, I forgot how lacking that is in general.
If you absolutely have to put sensitive data on media (memory stick, CD, whatever) then institute a chain of custody procedure so you get sign off on who has that data at any given time. Yes, it can be falsified but at least you have some idea of who did it. And the last step needs to be secure, accountable destruction of the data on the media.
If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities. Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp."
We had to change the e-mail address of one poor soul where I worked due to a very nasty divorce in progress. His wife used his work e-mail address to sign him up to a variety of very unsavory e-mail lists and sites. You can guess why she did it.
Many, many cases are 'tossed out' due to lack of proper warrants. This just clarifies that a search on a computer is considered the same as a search of a home and requires the same authorization. Substitute 'terrorist materials' for 'child pornography' and you'll have the same conclusion from the ruling, except that the government could then have invoked the Patriot Act and done all kinds of mischief without telling anyone about it.
OP was asking for options. This is one if he can't work there but doesn't have another job lined up immediately. 1/3 of an income (it's more in my state, btw) is better than 0 income.
This was more in response to the "Just quit dood" kind of answers that continually crop up when there's some kind of job dilemma. Having another job lined up immediately is nice but not necessarily possible. And staying there means working on the project.
So before the unemployment insurance compensation gets dismissed out of hand realize it's one of many options. And it was one he may not have considered since most people think you can only collect those benefits if you're fired.
Think back to your US history classes. The popular vote doesn't elect the president. The Electoral College does. And the Electoral College doesn't have to follow the popular vote.
Some states require their delegates to vote the way the state vote goes but not all of them. That's why there's the ever-popular 'Superdelegates'. Those are the ones from states without the requirement and can be courted to vote however they want.
So any controversy over how the popular vote comes in is a joke.
While researching unemployment benefits (unrelated to my job, thank goodness) I found that many states have a very small set of circumstances that let you quit your job yet collect unemployment. Being told to do something that is illegal/immoral/unethical is actually one of them in the state I was researching.
Since this is kind of a grey area here is how I would look into my options.
Research and find out if your state is one of the ones that allows this kind of thing. If so, proceed.
Get something in writing as to what you're being asked/told to do. There has to be some kind of requirements documentation for this.
Get the TOS from the site(s) you're being asked/told to scrape, showing that scraping is not allowed.
Contact your local unemployment office and find out if this is enough to let you quit and collect benefits.
With these things in hand you have a decent chance of being able to keep to your morals, not take a big financial hit while looking for new work with more ethical employers, and possibly flag this place as somewhere that doesn't play well with others. I suggest this course because simply saying "Quit and work for someone better" sounds great but is not very practical in reality where you like to sleep indoors and eat cooked food.
You'll find that we've all had to suck it up and do something we know isn't the correct course of action but generally that doesn't include something ethically wrong. Mostly it's a matter of knowing that what the company wants to do isn't going to work but also knowing there's nothing we can do about it.
Did you even think that perhaps, just perhaps, not every developer likes playing computer games? Personally I don't want to spend my extra or decompress time at the computer.
Add that to the fact you're trying to do this on the sly and circumvent corporate policies says that it falls into the Very Bad Idea bin.
Negotiate for extra vacation days, flex work hours, telecommuting, or other things that the individual developers might find helpful.
Of course, I didn't see anywhere in your brief comment that you asked your staff what could be done to make them feel more appreciated. To be honest I don't see why you feel your staff deserves to be 'happier' than the rest of the company? This just encourages the misguided belief that the techies should be coddled and held separate. Think through what's going to happen when (not if, when) other managers and employees find out that your people get extra perks. You're even asking this crowd how to handle the politics of doing it in the first place. I don't think you're in a position to handle the fallout from actually pulling it off.
Sorry if this seems overly harsh but all I'm seeing here is problems and more problems. I think a regular paycheck, training, and the ability to ply their craft are more than enough 'perks'.
I write code to do stuff. That's generic enough for me to continue.
When I write my code, I sit back and try to think of how people are going to try to get around the restrictions, do things they shouldn't do, etc. In other words, I think like a 'bad guy'.
I can't guess everything but if I can weed out the obvious stuff then I'm well on my way to making things that aren't going to have the security value of tissue paper, I hope.
It's kind of the equivalent of installing the best deadbolt made. On a hollow core door. You have to think it through or your dubious 'security measure' isn't all that secure.
...they'd spend their entire existence sucking fat salaries and occasionally managing to bust one or two half-wit script kiddies with barely enough knowledge to download the tools from a warez site and sneer at people who ask questions on Linux sites.
Back in the day when I was running a call center I would schedule my people for PIE (phone in ear) time for 80% of their day, max. The other 20% was spent training, updating, researching, whatever. But they had 20% of their day when they didn't have to answer the phones.
From what I hear now that's one of those distant memories. Maybe that's why I didn't have a very high turnover and most of that was promotions within the company.
If the company can't see the value in a collaborative environment then there's a deeper issue at hand. If they can't see the value in a collaborative environment just for their call center then it's time to move on to another company that does see the value. Not giving productivity tools means they don't value anything besides your call volume.
The old adage "You get what you measure" means just that. If they only care about number of calls and time on the phone then that's what their employees are going to do. Take calls and get them off the line quickly. Not a recipe for quality service or for keeping call center employees.
This grumpy rant is far too fun to let die. Elucidated and gramatically correct discourse? Not on your life!
I fully agree with the superlatives being done to the point of losing all meaning and I should have said that in my original response. 'Massive' has no meaning without an explanation. 'Massive in comparison to the surface area, covering fully 20%' would be far more in line with actually defining what they mean by using the word massive.
I long for the days when they taught actual science in schools so this kind of thing wouldn't be necessary. Your footnote about the multiple meanings of the measure 'volume' is just a sad fact these days.
I'm gonna stay on your lawn until you offer me a chilled beverage with salt on the rim of the glass and a chair. Honestly, what kind of hospitality do you call this??
My take on this is to give the common person some kind of reference that they can understand. If they just gave estimated wind speeds there's nothing there that normal daytime TV watching mouthbreathers can use to relate to what they know. Taking numbers out of thin air - if Hurricane Jerry Springer was 150 miles per hour then they can say that the Saturn Storms are 10 times more powerful. That gives a understandable frame of reference.
We all do it when we're talking to people outside of our field. Without a reference they can understand there's no comprehension. It's like saying the storm area is the size of [insert state here]. Sure, it may be considered dumbing down the science but if they can get people interested then that isn't such a bad thing.
Know your rights. In my state it is illegal to ask to see identification when voting. And you can register at the polls so there's a process for that. It's been a while but I think you need a driver's license or a utility bill and your license. Either way it was relatively painless.
And if anyone other than the poll workers ask me for any information then I'll tell 'em to go fuck themselves. They have no right to ask me anything. That's where the 'know your rights' comes in. At least I know my rights here. In other states there will be differences.
Sounds like a course in basic government is in order for those areas where this kind of thing is prone to happening. Or a lot of folks with digicams recording the whole thing. These kinds of tricks can't stand exposure.
I haven't personally experienced any of the dirty tricks noted here. My little corner of the world isn't important enough for them to bother with meddling, it seems.
The worst thing about robocalls is that they don't free up the line after you hang up. For whatever reason they keep your line tied up until the end of the recording. An annoyance certainly and not something to endear me to any candidate.
Honestly my first thought when I saw this story was 'Gee. A lot of teenagers are going to be grabbing Mom's keys instead of their own.'
So all this means is kids will learn to be creative in taking the full access key and doing whatever they want. Unless the keys are radically different and easily discernible at a distance all this is going to accomplish is a lot of key swapping.
Actually, this sounds like a dongle. And we all know how well those work out. I can see a kid shelling out $25 to get a new key made and actually reading the owner's manual to register it to the car. Then they walk out the door proudly showing their bright red key to mom and pop and reach for the full access key in their pocket.
Sony wants me to spend a whole lotta money on a new player and more money on each movie so they can pump new advertising content to me every time I watch it?
And they also want to dump a bunch of things I'll never use (screensavers, ringtones, etc.) on me at the same time?
In return I'll get a difference in picture quality I'll never see on my middle-of-the-road equipment and be at the mercy of their content download systems.
Um, I think I'm going to take a pass on this one. I won't put ANY movie into my computer except to make my mandatory back up copy. I might be missing out on 'all those cool extra features' but you know what? I only want to watch the movie! 98 times out of 100 I never even bother to see what else is on the disk. How many times do you really want to watch the 'making of' section, the trailers, or any of that other nonsense taking up space? To promote that as a reason to buy this overpriced crap just doesn't compute.
Then again I don't know that I'm the demographic they're going for here. If I had a couple of kids who were pestering me so they could get the [insert movie name here] ringtone and other goodies that only come with the BR copy then maybe I would have a different opinion. But I only want to watch the movie!
I wrote to and called all three of my representatives (two Senators and a Representative, for those not familiar with the setup) putting my vote in the No column.
When I wrote I put in my views on how the money should be spent, since it was going to pass regardless. Yeah, none of my stuff made it in.
One again only Russ Feingold stood up against it. He was also the sole vote against the 'Patriot Bill' so he's actually got some neurons firing.
Oddly enough my Representative wrote me a lovely form letter explaining why he voted for the bill. The Senators are fine with using plain text but he feels the need to use an image file with all the headers and images that I believe are on the official stationery of the House. Yeah, I'm talking about you Paul Ryan.
Of course I shall be writing them again, expressing my displeasure over the two who did vote for the bill and my pride in the one who did not. I've gotten into the habit of copying all three when I write and noting that at the bottom of the message. It makes it easier for me to cut-and-paste as well.
We're not going to see a dime of this money. From the analysis so far we're going to actually see more problems in less lending, higher prices, and general badness in the economy. And now we've got to pay for this thing too.
The bill is full of entitlements put in place to entice specific states to vote for the bill. That's quite obvious and was stated outright during this round of revisions. So now they can 'justify their vote because it is actually good for the state' to their constituents.
Everyone seems to forget that it is our money in the first place and they think they're doing us a favor by giving some back. That's just stupid.
There's some kind of myth that distilling cheap vodka will make it taste like the expensive stuff. Same thing here.
Mythbusters took on the vodka thing. Looks like they get to go highbrow and do the same thing with wine.
Making fine wine is an art and as many others have said vintages vary by year due to a myraid of conditions. Putting a bottle of wine in a jewelry cleaner won't fix anything. It might be shiny clean but it's still a cheap bottle of wine.
Calling to say 'vote no' is great and a nice checkpoint for the graph. By all means, do that!
But if you're going to take the time to write please try to have something positive in your message. Suggest an alternative, identify why this isn't something you agree with, anything besides 'That suxors'.
I've been starting to write both my Senators and my Representative about issues. Of course, I note at the bottom that I've sent copies to the others. I need to take some time and put up the interesting differences in responses on my blog. But the point is that the United States has a representative government and that only really works when you take the time to tell your representatives what you want.
As I said in my messages about how I think the bail out they all want should go - this is MY money you're spending and I have a say in how it should be done.
Put their Washington office numbers in your cell phone and bookmark their web pages where you can submit comments. Let 'em know!
Slashdot Mirror
And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Another post detailed it as well but heck, this is Slashdot and nothing is ever only said once in comments.
A carpool is generally defined as a group of people going to generally the same destination over a period of time. That's my general definition. Feel free to make up your own. Examples would be from a Park and Ride lot to an office complex, co-workers who travel a lot on the same schedule going to the airport, etc. It's a defined, regular event. Almost every carpool has the same members for most of the time.
By setting up a service where you could look for a ride from X to Y and pay for that specific ride isn't a carpool. It's a taxi service going under the heading of Carpool with the intention of skirting the regulations that they should be following.
I can see where shutting this down/restricting it heavily is actually a good idea. Not for taking away business from the municipal services but just for safety's sake. Taxi, shuttle and bus drivers are regulated for a reason.
Since municipalities seem to have their own carpool websites with the intention of encouraging 'real' carpools they know that carpools don't compete with bus service. It might be named here as part of municipal services just so the taxi companies aren't singled out as the people who are most affected.
Take a good look at the cars and drivers around you on the road some days. Do you really want them ferrying people around? Do you want to be in that car, with that driver? Doing this is actually a public service. Yes, that one was a bit on the flippant side.
I work for a bank but not anywhere near the money, thank goodness. During our annual compliance training there's a section on this kind of thing. We're supposed to try to dissuade the person but if they persist they need to physically sign a form that they're taking out the money against the advice of the bank.
So while we can't refuse to give a person their money (assuming they haven't been declared incompetent) we can cover our own butts from future lawsuits by showing that the person was warned.
Seems to me this person just didn't believe anyone. You can't reason with people like that. My money's on her falling for some other scam within the next five years. Especially since she thinks she can recoup her losses in under five years.
Anyone up for the 'Recover your money from Nigerian scammers' scam? Or has that been done?
Before I finally got fed up and opted out of any contact from them Classmates always said there were 24 people looking to reconnect with me or viewed my profile or some nonsense like that. In every message from them. So either they were lying or there were 24 people with nothing else to do but read my sparse and uninteresting profile.
I'm guessing Classmates was lying to me.
For a while it was a good thing. But now LinkedIn is my medium of choice since it is more relevant than people I haven't seen in 25 years and am glad for it.
I'll need to see if the class action suit is worthwhile or just another one where all the money goes to to the lawyers and the plantiffs get a year's worth of Gold membership.
It may not have been spelled exactly like that. You'll have to forgive me since I've had mine for over 30 years and the original boxes are long gone.
I've hauled around a five gallon bucket of these things for years. For quite a while they were just part of the stuff to move but now I'm using them as temporary framing for building miniatures. So I'm technically still playing with them!
The fit can be a bit loose on some of them but overall I had nothing but fun with them when I actively played with them. They even have a motor and gears to make moving stuff.
Lego will still have their licensing deals so while you might get basic sets the special ones (Star Wars, etc.) will probably still be theirs and theirs alone. I can see generic Galaxy Wars sets but kids want the things they see in the movies.
I'm the system admin for our technology problem ticket system. One of the things we still have going is a server with a couple of multimodems and paging software.
Almost every cell phone provider still supports the TAP (or TAPI) protocol but sometimes you really have to lean on them to get the information. Most of the phone jockeys on tech support don't even know what it is.
Since I refuse to wear the electronic leash I don't have paging on my cell phone. But I did for a while and the messages came through entirely differently than an e-mail or SMS. I believe that included the 'pay attention to me' features you're asking about.
I don't get asked about it much any more but occasionally senior management would ask why we still had this in place when cell phones now get e-mail. My answer was always "And how are you supposed to get an e-mail that the e-mail system is down?" A couple of blinks later and they understood why I keep it running.
Try your local multi-carrier store and see what they have. They're probably your best bet when it comes to finding a decent pager and plan.
Anecdote time, from a time not all that long ago (to me). An office building wanted to keep their various floors/departments aware of issues in a timely manner. The final solution was pagers set to beep and vibrate in acrylic holders on the walls, kind of like a thermostat. When there was a problem that area needed to know about they sent a page. Since it would make all kinds of noise someone always went to check the pager. It was also routine to change the batteries every month. Worked fantastic, very cheap. I could see this still working as a solution, which is why I keep it in the mental filing cabinet.
Cordless phones have to be some of the most insecure communication devices out there but people still think nothing of using them for 'secure' transactions.
When my mom got her first cordless phone she was concerned about giving out things like credit card info to companies using the cordless phone. She got a revelation with my answer of "Just use the corded phone for those."
We also had Cat5 run when we had some electrical work done. We use the corded connections for 99% of what we do. Wireless is there for the very rare time when we want to use one of the notebooks in an area without a network jack. And in no way do I consider the connection secure regardless of any encryption put in place.
Wireless isn't all that great. I'm not about to do my online banking at a Starbucks or any other place when I'm literally broadcasting my communication to anyone willing to sniff for it. That's just silly.
I won't discuss for whom I voted as that's my personal decision. However, I did fulfill my civic responsibility, duty and right by voting. By doing this I now have the right to complain all I want for the next four years because I participated in the process. No vote = shut your trap about the state of the nation since you couldn't be bothered to be involved when it mattered. At least, that's my opinion.
We voted before lunchtime. We live in a reasonably small district so we never have had much of a wait. Three volunteers helping us go to the right line (two wards vote in our location), one person in front of us in line, the same elderly ladies checking us off the list as having voted, fill in the circle paper ballots. The reader didn't spit them back out so we know that they were accepted. Overall it took less than ten minutes and that's including parking.
Political campaigns by their nature are not 'clean' and never have been. They can't be clean when the intent is to say "Vote for me and not those other guys". That sets it up to compare themselves to the other guys. So they need to make the other guys look bad, or at least worse than they do. It's a downward spiral.
Why did I vote the way I did? I looked at the candidates' qualifications, experience, stances, past votes, and all the other things that make up their consistent actions. What they say doesn't matter all that much since no candidate has every been held accountable in any real way for their campaign promises. So you could say I used their own public record to decide if they would be the candidate for whom I cast my vote.
Anyone who votes for a candidate solely on campaign promises gets what they deserve.
I occasionally take my work home with me. It's called a notebook with secure VPN access. At no time does any sensitive data reside locally.
It's not that difficult to be responsible. It just takes a little common sense. Oh wait, I forgot how lacking that is in general.
If you absolutely have to put sensitive data on media (memory stick, CD, whatever) then institute a chain of custody procedure so you get sign off on who has that data at any given time. Yes, it can be falsified but at least you have some idea of who did it. And the last step needs to be secure, accountable destruction of the data on the media.
This kind of thing is inexcusable.
We had to change the e-mail address of one poor soul where I worked due to a very nasty divorce in progress. His wife used his work e-mail address to sign him up to a variety of very unsavory e-mail lists and sites. You can guess why she did it.
Many, many cases are 'tossed out' due to lack of proper warrants. This just clarifies that a search on a computer is considered the same as a search of a home and requires the same authorization. Substitute 'terrorist materials' for 'child pornography' and you'll have the same conclusion from the ruling, except that the government could then have invoked the Patriot Act and done all kinds of mischief without telling anyone about it.
OP was asking for options. This is one if he can't work there but doesn't have another job lined up immediately. 1/3 of an income (it's more in my state, btw) is better than 0 income.
This was more in response to the "Just quit dood" kind of answers that continually crop up when there's some kind of job dilemma. Having another job lined up immediately is nice but not necessarily possible. And staying there means working on the project.
So before the unemployment insurance compensation gets dismissed out of hand realize it's one of many options. And it was one he may not have considered since most people think you can only collect those benefits if you're fired.
Think back to your US history classes. The popular vote doesn't elect the president. The Electoral College does. And the Electoral College doesn't have to follow the popular vote.
Some states require their delegates to vote the way the state vote goes but not all of them. That's why there's the ever-popular 'Superdelegates'. Those are the ones from states without the requirement and can be courted to vote however they want.
So any controversy over how the popular vote comes in is a joke.
While researching unemployment benefits (unrelated to my job, thank goodness) I found that many states have a very small set of circumstances that let you quit your job yet collect unemployment. Being told to do something that is illegal/immoral/unethical is actually one of them in the state I was researching.
Since this is kind of a grey area here is how I would look into my options.
With these things in hand you have a decent chance of being able to keep to your morals, not take a big financial hit while looking for new work with more ethical employers, and possibly flag this place as somewhere that doesn't play well with others. I suggest this course because simply saying "Quit and work for someone better" sounds great but is not very practical in reality where you like to sleep indoors and eat cooked food.
You'll find that we've all had to suck it up and do something we know isn't the correct course of action but generally that doesn't include something ethically wrong. Mostly it's a matter of knowing that what the company wants to do isn't going to work but also knowing there's nothing we can do about it.
Did you even think that perhaps, just perhaps, not every developer likes playing computer games? Personally I don't want to spend my extra or decompress time at the computer.
Add that to the fact you're trying to do this on the sly and circumvent corporate policies says that it falls into the Very Bad Idea bin.
Negotiate for extra vacation days, flex work hours, telecommuting, or other things that the individual developers might find helpful.
Of course, I didn't see anywhere in your brief comment that you asked your staff what could be done to make them feel more appreciated. To be honest I don't see why you feel your staff deserves to be 'happier' than the rest of the company? This just encourages the misguided belief that the techies should be coddled and held separate. Think through what's going to happen when (not if, when) other managers and employees find out that your people get extra perks. You're even asking this crowd how to handle the politics of doing it in the first place. I don't think you're in a position to handle the fallout from actually pulling it off.
Sorry if this seems overly harsh but all I'm seeing here is problems and more problems. I think a regular paycheck, training, and the ability to ply their craft are more than enough 'perks'.
Living in the corridor, I can pretty much say it's so tangled in politics I can't see it happening any time soon. Which is a darn shame.
One of the earlier proposed schedules had the commuter trains stopping so much it would have taken an impossible amount of time to get to Milwaukee.
Commuting by train is great. If you can get the schedules and station locations to work correctly.
I write code to do stuff. That's generic enough for me to continue.
When I write my code, I sit back and try to think of how people are going to try to get around the restrictions, do things they shouldn't do, etc. In other words, I think like a 'bad guy'.
I can't guess everything but if I can weed out the obvious stuff then I'm well on my way to making things that aren't going to have the security value of tissue paper, I hope.
It's kind of the equivalent of installing the best deadbolt made. On a hollow core door. You have to think it through or your dubious 'security measure' isn't all that secure.
...they'd spend their entire existence sucking fat salaries and occasionally managing to bust one or two half-wit script kiddies with barely enough knowledge to download the tools from a warez site and sneer at people who ask questions on Linux sites.
And just where do I apply?
Back in the day when I was running a call center I would schedule my people for PIE (phone in ear) time for 80% of their day, max. The other 20% was spent training, updating, researching, whatever. But they had 20% of their day when they didn't have to answer the phones.
From what I hear now that's one of those distant memories. Maybe that's why I didn't have a very high turnover and most of that was promotions within the company.
If the company can't see the value in a collaborative environment then there's a deeper issue at hand. If they can't see the value in a collaborative environment just for their call center then it's time to move on to another company that does see the value. Not giving productivity tools means they don't value anything besides your call volume.
The old adage "You get what you measure" means just that. If they only care about number of calls and time on the phone then that's what their employees are going to do. Take calls and get them off the line quickly. Not a recipe for quality service or for keeping call center employees.
This grumpy rant is far too fun to let die. Elucidated and gramatically correct discourse? Not on your life!
I fully agree with the superlatives being done to the point of losing all meaning and I should have said that in my original response. 'Massive' has no meaning without an explanation. 'Massive in comparison to the surface area, covering fully 20%' would be far more in line with actually defining what they mean by using the word massive.
I long for the days when they taught actual science in schools so this kind of thing wouldn't be necessary. Your footnote about the multiple meanings of the measure 'volume' is just a sad fact these days.
I'm gonna stay on your lawn until you offer me a chilled beverage with salt on the rim of the glass and a chair. Honestly, what kind of hospitality do you call this??
My take on this is to give the common person some kind of reference that they can understand. If they just gave estimated wind speeds there's nothing there that normal daytime TV watching mouthbreathers can use to relate to what they know. Taking numbers out of thin air - if Hurricane Jerry Springer was 150 miles per hour then they can say that the Saturn Storms are 10 times more powerful. That gives a understandable frame of reference.
We all do it when we're talking to people outside of our field. Without a reference they can understand there's no comprehension. It's like saying the storm area is the size of [insert state here]. Sure, it may be considered dumbing down the science but if they can get people interested then that isn't such a bad thing.
Get off my intarwebz you whippersnappers!
Know your rights. In my state it is illegal to ask to see identification when voting. And you can register at the polls so there's a process for that. It's been a while but I think you need a driver's license or a utility bill and your license. Either way it was relatively painless.
And if anyone other than the poll workers ask me for any information then I'll tell 'em to go fuck themselves. They have no right to ask me anything. That's where the 'know your rights' comes in. At least I know my rights here. In other states there will be differences.
Sounds like a course in basic government is in order for those areas where this kind of thing is prone to happening. Or a lot of folks with digicams recording the whole thing. These kinds of tricks can't stand exposure.
I haven't personally experienced any of the dirty tricks noted here. My little corner of the world isn't important enough for them to bother with meddling, it seems.
The worst thing about robocalls is that they don't free up the line after you hang up. For whatever reason they keep your line tied up until the end of the recording. An annoyance certainly and not something to endear me to any candidate.
Honestly my first thought when I saw this story was 'Gee. A lot of teenagers are going to be grabbing Mom's keys instead of their own.'
So all this means is kids will learn to be creative in taking the full access key and doing whatever they want. Unless the keys are radically different and easily discernible at a distance all this is going to accomplish is a lot of key swapping.
Actually, this sounds like a dongle. And we all know how well those work out. I can see a kid shelling out $25 to get a new key made and actually reading the owner's manual to register it to the car. Then they walk out the door proudly showing their bright red key to mom and pop and reach for the full access key in their pocket.
Sony wants me to spend a whole lotta money on a new player and more money on each movie so they can pump new advertising content to me every time I watch it?
And they also want to dump a bunch of things I'll never use (screensavers, ringtones, etc.) on me at the same time?
In return I'll get a difference in picture quality I'll never see on my middle-of-the-road equipment and be at the mercy of their content download systems.
Um, I think I'm going to take a pass on this one. I won't put ANY movie into my computer except to make my mandatory back up copy. I might be missing out on 'all those cool extra features' but you know what? I only want to watch the movie! 98 times out of 100 I never even bother to see what else is on the disk. How many times do you really want to watch the 'making of' section, the trailers, or any of that other nonsense taking up space? To promote that as a reason to buy this overpriced crap just doesn't compute.
Then again I don't know that I'm the demographic they're going for here. If I had a couple of kids who were pestering me so they could get the [insert movie name here] ringtone and other goodies that only come with the BR copy then maybe I would have a different opinion. But I only want to watch the movie!
I wrote to and called all three of my representatives (two Senators and a Representative, for those not familiar with the setup) putting my vote in the No column.
When I wrote I put in my views on how the money should be spent, since it was going to pass regardless. Yeah, none of my stuff made it in.
One again only Russ Feingold stood up against it. He was also the sole vote against the 'Patriot Bill' so he's actually got some neurons firing.
Oddly enough my Representative wrote me a lovely form letter explaining why he voted for the bill. The Senators are fine with using plain text but he feels the need to use an image file with all the headers and images that I believe are on the official stationery of the House. Yeah, I'm talking about you Paul Ryan.
Of course I shall be writing them again, expressing my displeasure over the two who did vote for the bill and my pride in the one who did not. I've gotten into the habit of copying all three when I write and noting that at the bottom of the message. It makes it easier for me to cut-and-paste as well.
We're not going to see a dime of this money. From the analysis so far we're going to actually see more problems in less lending, higher prices, and general badness in the economy. And now we've got to pay for this thing too.
The bill is full of entitlements put in place to entice specific states to vote for the bill. That's quite obvious and was stated outright during this round of revisions. So now they can 'justify their vote because it is actually good for the state' to their constituents.
Everyone seems to forget that it is our money in the first place and they think they're doing us a favor by giving some back. That's just stupid.
There's some kind of myth that distilling cheap vodka will make it taste like the expensive stuff. Same thing here.
Mythbusters took on the vodka thing. Looks like they get to go highbrow and do the same thing with wine.
Making fine wine is an art and as many others have said vintages vary by year due to a myraid of conditions. Putting a bottle of wine in a jewelry cleaner won't fix anything. It might be shiny clean but it's still a cheap bottle of wine.
Calling to say 'vote no' is great and a nice checkpoint for the graph. By all means, do that!
But if you're going to take the time to write please try to have something positive in your message. Suggest an alternative, identify why this isn't something you agree with, anything besides 'That suxors'.
I've been starting to write both my Senators and my Representative about issues. Of course, I note at the bottom that I've sent copies to the others. I need to take some time and put up the interesting differences in responses on my blog. But the point is that the United States has a representative government and that only really works when you take the time to tell your representatives what you want.
As I said in my messages about how I think the bail out they all want should go - this is MY money you're spending and I have a say in how it should be done.
Put their Washington office numbers in your cell phone and bookmark their web pages where you can submit comments. Let 'em know!