Most people caught speeding in the UK are speeding.
If you can't control your vehicle well enough to avoid gaining excessive speed (i.e. going over the limit) while going downhill then you're not safe to drive.
And most people know the limit on the road they're driving down. They just don't want to stick to it.
That said, yeah, speed cameras on downhill stretches are cynical revenue generators.
disclaimer: I have been caught speeding. I did know the limit. I was quite flagrantly breaking it. I still don't believe I was driving unsafely.
90mph isn't fast. That's a pretty standard speed on motorways here in the UK, where the official limit is 70mph.
90mph down country lanes, where there's barely room for two cars to pass each other, people are riding bikes and horses, and old grannies are out for a sunday stroll, that's fast.
I find a lot of Gartner output to be utter tripe, but I'm going to have to come out and defend them on this one.
Most IT people work in an IT department in a large business, or for one of the big consultancy/service companies that pander to big businesses.
In those environments there are no tricky programming problems left. (Ok, that's a grotesque generalisation; I'm talking about 99.5% of the programming that takes place.) People don't get paid to devise new algorithms, to develop new technologies, to find new ways of storing data.
People get paid to hook up an off-the-shelf inventory system with a supply chain, with selling systems (web / retail) and with off-the-shelf fulfilment systems. They use known technologies, they put their data in Oracle or SQL Server, they host on Sun or HP hardware.
In such an environment, someone willing to spend three weeks debugging a complex thread deadlock just isn't needed. People that understand the business, can suggest and rapidly implement solutions that help the business, and that can work with the business are needed.
If you demand a requirements doc and hide in a dark room for two months before delivering your masterpiece, you've failed the business - in the last two months, their objectives have changed, the market has changed, and you've delivered something they don't quite need. If you're continually talking to them throughout that time then you can adapt, and you're more likely to meet their actual needs.
Unfortunately most business people don't understand IT. They have no concept of project delivery, and they don't realise just how much skill goes into making some things we do look easy. To talk to them you have to use their language, express things in terms they understand, and demonstrate that you do understand their needs and aren't actually working to thwart their entire business model.
This takes communication skills. It really needs people that are capable of understanding business concepts. Ideally it needs people that understand the industry itself.
So when the term "Deep Coding" is used, it's describing the programmer of lore, the genius sat at a terminal cranking out code all the time. And that's just not needed by most of the employers out there.
This doesn't mean you need a business major - but you do need to demonstrate you can interact with the business.
Incidentally, don't think I'm downplaying the need for technical skills too - there's a tremendous shortage of people that know how to design complex systems (and make them look simple), that can do proper application architecture, that can think abstractly and hone in on correct solutions. Those people will always find work, and Indian outsourcers are very definitely not filling that gap. And if you get that bit right, the programming is a very simple piece that comes after.
I'm very curious that you link to a site with the URL 'notapathetic' (which I haven't checked, as I'm at work) yet you couldn't be bothered to formally record the fact that none of the candidates adequately represented you.
To me that is apathy.
Writing "Intentionally Spoiled" across multiple boxes would not suggest illiteracy or inability to follow instruction.
While in principle it would be possible to have the mistake repealed, there's no guarantee that a parliament will be elected that wishes to repeal it, or indeed, that even considers it a mistake. So I stand by my initial observation: You're a month too late.
>> No. A&E treatment has always been unrestricted.
For how long after all of us that can't see a GP because we refuse to carry a card start turning up there because it's the only way we can gain access to the healthcare our taxes are funding?
My father was in the RAF and I too grew up carrying an ID card.
For restricting access to a secure location (i.e. an air force base) they're useful.
I still hate the current legislation being proposed. I refuse to provide biometrics to the Government, I don't trust them to use them safely, to guard them, to act in my best interests.
I don't see a need to provide ID to seek medical care - I'm paying excessively for that already in taxes. ID cards wont prevent terrorism, crime, identity theft, they'll have minimal impact on fraud (and indeed, greatly increase certain types of it).
Even if ID cards make certain aspects of life easier, they also make population control easier. I've seen and read about too many examples of population control to like it - I'm amazed that having been to East Germany you think otherwise.
I know who I am. I don't need a card to prove it. ~Cederic
We've outsourced to three different companies, two of which are Indian and the third of which is using their Indian division to handle our account (with our agreement).
I wont name the individual companies involved, but two of them will be familiar to anybody that's looked at outsourcing to India, and the third isn't entirely unknown.
Call centre? This is IT outsourcing. The call centre is with a different Indian company, and their spoken English is a little better.
The IT company to which we outsource is a well-known one, with a lot of American and European business. And in terms of cost, it's costing us more to employ them than it did to do the work in-house.
>> Most educated Indians speak very good english, i.e. perfect grammar.
In that case our outsourcers must have been very selective in their hiring process.
Verbal communication contains considerable mis-use of the English language. Written communications are every bit as bad.
"Object call database for the storing of the data" might be interpretable, but it's unfortunately a better example than many we're having to deal with.
Which isn't to say the level of English is unworkable. There are other far more serious issues we're encountering.
Being unable to drive would add 5 hours to my daily commute (return journey). I'd realistically have to move house, for at least part of the week, or get a new job. And if jobs were so plentiful I'd have picked one nearer home.
I even live in the UK, where we pretend to have public transport networks.
Heard of taxis? Have friends? There are plenty of ways to go out for the night, have a drink, and avoid driving home.
There's also nothing stopping you staying in and having a drink.
Maybe the idiots that think they can drive when they've "only had a couple" should get a life and stop trying to ruin others.
A.05% margin is sensible. It means people taking cold medicine (many brands here in the UK contain alcohol) wont be over the limit, it means people that ate a sherry trifle for pudding wont be over the limit, and it means that people that just slammed a triple tequila know they'd better not be on the road.
There's no normal excuse for drinking and driving - it's a proven and easily avoidable cause of a lot of accidents and deaths.
To get back on topic, would I want one of these steering wheels? To be honest, no - I don't ever touch my steering wheel unless I'm sober and I can't be bothered with the thing breaking, or failing to realise that it's not alcohol in my bloodstream, it's windscreen washer antifreeze that spilled while I was filling the car.
Perhaps I should remind you the US has specific battle plans for an invasion of Holland.
Perhaps you underestimate the global benefit of the UK siding with the US in Iraq.
Perhaps the use of space-borne weapons of mass destruction in a future conflict will scare the shit out of the rest of the world. They place full trade sanctions on the US - including oil. The US invade Saudi Arabia. Europe stands together and says, "No.", the Commonwealth join in with the UK pulling India on board, and China are issued with a 'for us or against us' ultimatum by one side or the other.
It's more likely than global nuclear holocaust, and lets face it, plenty of people worried about that for a few decades..
Someone rapes your sister. You see it happening, run over, and as they're running away you shoot them.
That's murder. You will go to prison.
Do you really deserve to lose 'human rights'? Are you really acting against the interests of society?
A jury may actually let you off (in America - in the UK you're in deep trouble). However, while you're awaiting trial, you're in the LA County Jail, and you're wearing one of these bracelets.
What if it was your brother that did the shooting - you were merely providing medical assistance to your sister, but the police arrested the pair of you. Now you're completely innocent, you're still in jail. And you're still wearing a bracelet.
This is not good. Personally I hope inmates develop a habit of disabling the bracelet (through good old tinfoil, by lifting it away from the skin, by sticking their hand in a sink of water) to force continual alarms - disobedience in the face of unreasonableness is to be cherished.
Just because someone is in prison doesn't mean treating them badly is acceptable.
Actually, for 3 million, you're likely to get close. Raw per-unit production costs are going to be in the tens of dollars at most - the bulk of the fee is premium pricing, and the rest is covering the R&D spend. Three million units scales up to a lot of margin.
Don't forget there'd be no t-shirts or case fans thrown in;)
>> A recurve bow is not any more powerful than a medieaval crossbow. It's big advantage is a higher rate of fire. But it takes a bit more training to use effectively. A true long bow (where it is probably taller than most men) is whole orders of magnitude harder to aim and fire
A true longbow is the same as a sightless recurve bow to aim and shoot. The draw-release motion tends to be abbreviated, to avoid holding the bow at full draw, and that can impact accuracy, and the efficiency of the bow is lower, so the arrow gains less of the power put in by the archer, but it's certainly not an order of magnitude harder (let alone several).
There is no doubt that picking up an unstrung longbow and shooting it is tricky - but it's still easier than picking up an unstrung crossbow and shooting it.
Starting both stringed and ready, yes, the crossbow is perhaps more point and click - but the bow is still very simple to use, and easy to teach the basics to someone in minutes.
I do appreciate that modern bows are far more efficient than yew longbows. I shoot a modern recurve bow, with metal handle and carbon limbs (so I do take the full weight of the bow, but it does transmit far more of its energy to the arrow).
However, I've shot yew longbows; a large number of club members at my (Nottingham, England) archery club shoot longbows regularly/exclusively.
They do add considerably to arrow power. They are also very difficult to properly draw for the inexperienced. And that's why regular practice was legally mandated for a few centuries. (Although, back then everybody was a manual labourer and had muscles like Arnie, so the physical effort of drawing the bow was less of an issue - also meant they had far higher strength bows than modern longbows).
Nonetheless, even at my current inept archery ability I could function effectively in a battle situation - draw, release, draw, release, draw, release, get hacked down by bloke on horse..
Erm. I learned how to shoot a bow in a day. Sure, took me a while longer to start hitting things more than ten yards away, and I still can't promise a hit at 100 yards on my first arrow.
But put me with 800 mates and give us a 2000 strong army to shoot at, I think I'll do just fine.
Bows are incredibly easy to use. Crossbows were never a major part of British warfare; the bows were better. The French used crossbows a lot, but they didn't know how to make a good longbow.
Shrug. They post a 60MB file for the public, they should expect the public to come and download it.
It's up to them to restrict access, to throttle bandwidth or to deal with a server outage.
I have no sympathy, and even though it may be irresponsible to post an article suggesting readers download a 60MB movie, it's even more irresponsible to violate copyright by mirroring or providing a torrent for the file.
Slashdot Mirror
'publisity' and 'genorous' weren't bad either.
Most people caught speeding in the UK are speeding.
If you can't control your vehicle well enough to avoid gaining excessive speed (i.e. going over the limit) while going downhill then you're not safe to drive.
And most people know the limit on the road they're driving down. They just don't want to stick to it.
That said, yeah, speed cameras on downhill stretches are cynical revenue generators.
disclaimer: I have been caught speeding. I did know the limit. I was quite flagrantly breaking it. I still don't believe I was driving unsafely.
90mph isn't fast. That's a pretty standard speed on motorways here in the UK, where the official limit is 70mph.
90mph down country lanes, where there's barely room for two cars to pass each other, people are riding bikes and horses, and old grannies are out for a sunday stroll, that's fast.
Damn good fun though
most likely noone will
Nope, never happens
I find a lot of Gartner output to be utter tripe, but I'm going to have to come out and defend them on this one.
Most IT people work in an IT department in a large business, or for one of the big consultancy/service companies that pander to big businesses.
In those environments there are no tricky programming problems left. (Ok, that's a grotesque generalisation; I'm talking about 99.5% of the programming that takes place.) People don't get paid to devise new algorithms, to develop new technologies, to find new ways of storing data.
People get paid to hook up an off-the-shelf inventory system with a supply chain, with selling systems (web / retail) and with off-the-shelf fulfilment systems. They use known technologies, they put their data in Oracle or SQL Server, they host on Sun or HP hardware.
In such an environment, someone willing to spend three weeks debugging a complex thread deadlock just isn't needed. People that understand the business, can suggest and rapidly implement solutions that help the business, and that can work with the business are needed.
If you demand a requirements doc and hide in a dark room for two months before delivering your masterpiece, you've failed the business - in the last two months, their objectives have changed, the market has changed, and you've delivered something they don't quite need. If you're continually talking to them throughout that time then you can adapt, and you're more likely to meet their actual needs.
Unfortunately most business people don't understand IT. They have no concept of project delivery, and they don't realise just how much skill goes into making some things we do look easy. To talk to them you have to use their language, express things in terms they understand, and demonstrate that you do understand their needs and aren't actually working to thwart their entire business model.
This takes communication skills. It really needs people that are capable of understanding business concepts. Ideally it needs people that understand the industry itself.
So when the term "Deep Coding" is used, it's describing the programmer of lore, the genius sat at a terminal cranking out code all the time. And that's just not needed by most of the employers out there.
This doesn't mean you need a business major - but you do need to demonstrate you can interact with the business.
Incidentally, don't think I'm downplaying the need for technical skills too - there's a tremendous shortage of people that know how to design complex systems (and make them look simple), that can do proper application architecture, that can think abstractly and hone in on correct solutions. Those people will always find work, and Indian outsourcers are very definitely not filling that gap. And if you get that bit right, the programming is a very simple piece that comes after.
~Cederic
I'm very curious that you link to a site with the URL 'notapathetic' (which I haven't checked, as I'm at work) yet you couldn't be bothered to formally record the fact that none of the candidates adequately represented you.
To me that is apathy.
Writing "Intentionally Spoiled" across multiple boxes would not suggest illiteracy or inability to follow instruction.
While in principle it would be possible to have the mistake repealed, there's no guarantee that a parliament will be elected that wishes to repeal it, or indeed, that even considers it a mistake. So I stand by my initial observation: You're a month too late.
~Cederic
How often does parliament vote to reduce its powers?
This legislation is being pushed now. It might not impact you for five years, but you're too late to vote against it.
Tell me, did you spoil your ballot paper?
>> No. A&E treatment has always been unrestricted.
For how long after all of us that can't see a GP because we refuse to carry a card start turning up there because it's the only way we can gain access to the healthcare our taxes are funding?
>> I would now seriously consider voting for a candidate who demonstrably opposes these malicious proposals.
Well done, you're just over a month late.
However, feel free to contact your current MP via writetothem.com and share your views.
I did (and his reply is why I didn't vote for him in May).
~Cederic
My father was in the RAF and I too grew up carrying an ID card.
For restricting access to a secure location (i.e. an air force base) they're useful.
I still hate the current legislation being proposed. I refuse to provide biometrics to the Government, I don't trust them to use them safely, to guard them, to act in my best interests.
I don't see a need to provide ID to seek medical care - I'm paying excessively for that already in taxes. ID cards wont prevent terrorism, crime, identity theft, they'll have minimal impact on fraud (and indeed, greatly increase certain types of it).
Even if ID cards make certain aspects of life easier, they also make population control easier. I've seen and read about too many examples of population control to like it - I'm amazed that having been to East Germany you think otherwise.
I know who I am. I don't need a card to prove it.
~Cederic
More people turn up to watch the footy on a Saturday afternoon than make it to church on a sunday.
Football IS religion. To misquote Shankly (a God amongst men) football is more important than life or death.
Anybody that thinks otherwise is welcome to live their life another way.
~cederic
We've outsourced to three different companies, two of which are Indian and the third of which is using their Indian division to handle our account (with our agreement).
I wont name the individual companies involved, but two of them will be familiar to anybody that's looked at outsourcing to India, and the third isn't entirely unknown.
So it is very mixed.
Call centre? This is IT outsourcing. The call centre is with a different Indian company, and their spoken English is a little better.
The IT company to which we outsource is a well-known one, with a lot of American and European business. And in terms of cost, it's costing us more to employ them than it did to do the work in-house.
I do indeed find that bitterly ironic.
>> Most educated Indians speak very good english, i.e. perfect grammar.
In that case our outsourcers must have been very selective in their hiring process.
Verbal communication contains considerable mis-use of the English language. Written communications are every bit as bad.
"Object call database for the storing of the data" might be interpretable, but it's unfortunately a better example than many we're having to deal with.
Which isn't to say the level of English is unworkable. There are other far more serious issues we're encountering.
~Cederic
Being unable to drive would add 5 hours to my daily commute (return journey). I'd realistically have to move house, for at least part of the week, or get a new job. And if jobs were so plentiful I'd have picked one nearer home.
I even live in the UK, where we pretend to have public transport networks.
~Cederic
Or how about you just don't drink and drive?
Heard of taxis? Have friends? There are plenty of ways to go out for the night, have a drink, and avoid driving home.
There's also nothing stopping you staying in and having a drink.
Maybe the idiots that think they can drive when they've "only had a couple" should get a life and stop trying to ruin others.
A
There's no normal excuse for drinking and driving - it's a proven and easily avoidable cause of a lot of accidents and deaths.
To get back on topic, would I want one of these steering wheels? To be honest, no - I don't ever touch my steering wheel unless I'm sober and I can't be bothered with the thing breaking, or failing to realise that it's not alcohol in my bloodstream, it's windscreen washer antifreeze that spilled while I was filling the car.
~Cederic
Perhaps I should remind you the US has specific battle plans for an invasion of Holland.
Perhaps you underestimate the global benefit of the UK siding with the US in Iraq.
Perhaps the use of space-borne weapons of mass destruction in a future conflict will scare the shit out of the rest of the world. They place full trade sanctions on the US - including oil. The US invade Saudi Arabia. Europe stands together and says, "No.", the Commonwealth join in with the UK pulling India on board, and China are issued with a 'for us or against us' ultimatum by one side or the other.
It's more likely than global nuclear holocaust, and lets face it, plenty of people worried about that for a few decades..
Don't get too full of yourself.
Just takes China + Europe + India to decide to gang up and basically, it's all over for you.
Not because your military isn't stronger - but because it would be so rapidly overstretched.
You may well be able to hold onto the US mainland. But you would lose military influence over much of the rest of the world.
If the US starts deploying space born weapons operationally, expect large numbers of nations to start going very very anti-US.
Someone rapes your sister. You see it happening, run over, and as they're running away you shoot them.
That's murder. You will go to prison.
Do you really deserve to lose 'human rights'? Are you really acting against the interests of society?
A jury may actually let you off (in America - in the UK you're in deep trouble). However, while you're awaiting trial, you're in the LA County Jail, and you're wearing one of these bracelets.
What if it was your brother that did the shooting - you were merely providing medical assistance to your sister, but the police arrested the pair of you. Now you're completely innocent, you're still in jail. And you're still wearing a bracelet.
This is not good. Personally I hope inmates develop a habit of disabling the bracelet (through good old tinfoil, by lifting it away from the skin, by sticking their hand in a sink of water) to force continual alarms - disobedience in the face of unreasonableness is to be cherished.
Just because someone is in prison doesn't mean treating them badly is acceptable.
~Cederic
Actually, for 3 million, you're likely to get close. Raw per-unit production costs are going to be in the tens of dollars at most - the bulk of the fee is premium pricing, and the rest is covering the R&D spend. Three million units scales up to a lot of margin.
Don't forget there'd be no t-shirts or case fans thrown in
Approach nvidia with a credible request for 3 million of these, and I promise they'll be willing to discuss rather better terms than $1000 each.
>> A recurve bow is not any more powerful than a medieaval crossbow. It's big advantage is a higher rate of fire. But it takes a bit more training to use effectively. A true long bow (where it is probably taller than most men) is whole orders of magnitude harder to aim and fire
A true longbow is the same as a sightless recurve bow to aim and shoot. The draw-release motion tends to be abbreviated, to avoid holding the bow at full draw, and that can impact accuracy, and the efficiency of the bow is lower, so the arrow gains less of the power put in by the archer, but it's certainly not an order of magnitude harder (let alone several).
There is no doubt that picking up an unstrung longbow and shooting it is tricky - but it's still easier than picking up an unstrung crossbow and shooting it.
Starting both stringed and ready, yes, the crossbow is perhaps more point and click - but the bow is still very simple to use, and easy to teach the basics to someone in minutes.
~cederic
I do appreciate that modern bows are far more efficient than yew longbows. I shoot a modern recurve bow, with metal handle and carbon limbs (so I do take the full weight of the bow, but it does transmit far more of its energy to the arrow).
However, I've shot yew longbows; a large number of club members at my (Nottingham, England) archery club shoot longbows regularly/exclusively.
They do add considerably to arrow power. They are also very difficult to properly draw for the inexperienced. And that's why regular practice was legally mandated for a few centuries. (Although, back then everybody was a manual labourer and had muscles like Arnie, so the physical effort of drawing the bow was less of an issue - also meant they had far higher strength bows than modern longbows).
Nonetheless, even at my current inept archery ability I could function effectively in a battle situation - draw, release, draw, release, draw, release, get hacked down by bloke on horse..
Erm. I learned how to shoot a bow in a day. Sure, took me a while longer to start hitting things more than ten yards away, and I still can't promise a hit at 100 yards on my first arrow.
But put me with 800 mates and give us a 2000 strong army to shoot at, I think I'll do just fine.
Bows are incredibly easy to use. Crossbows were never a major part of British warfare; the bows were better. The French used crossbows a lot, but they didn't know how to make a good longbow.
~cederic
Shrug. They post a 60MB file for the public, they should expect the public to come and download it.
It's up to them to restrict access, to throttle bandwidth or to deal with a server outage.
I have no sympathy, and even though it may be irresponsible to post an article suggesting readers download a 60MB movie, it's even more irresponsible to violate copyright by mirroring or providing a torrent for the file.
~cederic