Adrian Smith @ 59: Yes, unions are the traditional answer. They work well when workers are easily interchangeable, and less well when the workers are highly specialized from one to another. Union busting is still a popular pass-time, sadly.
Jon Baker @ 3: of course there's a lot of variables. But moving 5k of cost around will lead to a couple of percentage points of difference. I suspect that given the methodology of this straw poll, that will fall in the noise. It's still informative to see where the gaps lie.
One of the greatest assets (some) governments and (some) employers have in their battle to keep workers oppressed is the taboo against discussing compensation. They know the compensations of every employee, and use this knowledge in negotiations, while employees are encouraged to not even fully understand their *own* compensation, let alone have information about the compensation of their peers.
Ah, a fun game to play while waiting for a compile. I live in Canada, and I have the good fortune to earn a sizable chunk of my income in the highest tax bracket (taxed at 41.5%). Even so:
1. 29.5%
2. 29.5% (which was up a few years ago to 31% or so, as I was paying for some expensive eye drugs that weren't yet covered)
I work 40-60 hours a week, and travel a lot. That 's the downside of my good fortune.
I don't begrudge the tax I pay - I can afford to, without affecting my standard of living. I know those taxes help provide not only our national and provincial infrastructure, but also universal healthcare - I value living in a community where my ability to pay allows those less able to have many of the same benefits I have.
Jim Kiley @ 6: Sirloin tips are one of my favorite "cheap" cuts. They are an accident of butchering technique. When cutting up an animal with a bandsaw you cut near the point of the hip because it's least wasteful of the various rump roast parts, and makes a big animal manageable. But the loin continues from the back a little further, and so its tip gets left in the leg part. Typically you can get 1-2 decent steaks or pork chops out the tip, but it's not generally worth the labor to separate it and bundle it down the line to the guy doing up the loin, so it gets packaged out separately, or ground.
If you care about this sort of thing, look up Merle Ellis' _Cutting up in the Kitchen_ (out of print, but widely available used), which gives a great overview of meat cuts and marketing names. Enough that you can save a lot on your meat budget but wind up eating higher on the hog than you would have otherwise. He even explains that "higher on the hog" thing ;-)
I always considered that "hard" science fiction was about exploring the effects of relaxing a law of nature. For example, the author could postulate that FTL travel is possible via a particular space warping technology after which the author would be free to explore what that means through their story, but without any further "magic".
"Soft" SF, to me, isn't the opposite of hard SF, but rather an indication of a character oriented focus rather than world-oriented.
I'm certain that 127 being the largest integer representable in a signed (two's complement) byte has nothing to do with it being a Mersenne prime. Nit.
Lori Coulson @ 5 - Don't worry, according to the memos you'd be fine; they used *insects*, not spiders.
See? No problem.
I loved the film. My non-comics-background colleague liked it less. The only real downside for me was the girls in the row behind me on continuous chatter: "Ooh, what's with all the nakedness?" "Oh, why do we have to see his penis?" "Ooh, yuck".
Now I have to go see it again without the commentary.
Congratulations^3!
And what fortunate timing. I'll be in Sweden on business the week before, and traveling back from there, likely via Amsterdam, just about then. Let's see what the airlines can do :-)
Off topic, and wandering further.
Charlie Stross @86, j h woodyatt, and sundry: I was pretty surprised when the TM came out working at file granularity. There is a mid-90's technology out of Bell Labs that nails this space and is freely available, except for the OS you have to run (Plan9). Venti is a content-addressable block-storage device. Every chunk of data is stored, indexed by a cryptographic hash of that data - if two blocks (which might be in separate files) contain the same data, they hash to the same address, and are not stored twice. On Plan9 you use a file system called Fossil as the "front end" which sends snapshots of your file system to Venti on demand. Venti *never* deletes any blocks, so you can access your file system as it was on any snapshot.
When the pre-release press of TM came out I was convinced Apple engineers had seized on this technology and put a proper front end on it.
I was sad to discover it was just overlaying a traditional file-based sile system.
[cardinal sin]
That said, I'd love to use the TM, but until it handles FileVault, it's no more useful to me than the NAS already on my network.
[/cardinal sin]
For me the most important part of GTD was the triage step -- learning to dispatch the 2 minute replies from the same stream of work in which I delete the junk.
Then, for good measure, I let people know when I'm in backlog mode. My triage then goes from "that might be interesting, I'll keep it around" to "that might not be interesting, I'll delete it".
I'm convinced these two changes have saved my career, particularly as I've moved into positions of more responsibility, and thus more email grief.
Kevin Riggle at 23: East vs West
David Goldfarb @ 33: The give-away against the "general case" is that he's giving you actual angle sizes. This particular setup has a bunch of nice properties to exploit: BDC is isosceles, and a simple construction gives you an isosceles triangle based on AC as well. Which makes for a bunch of interesting observations on how special certain intersections are in this diagram.
Congratulations from a northern neighbor!Although I regret that I'll have a much harder time recruiting talent from the US to move to Canada now ;-)
Theresa,
Get well, stay well.
Don't fear the lifestyle changes your physician will doubtless recommend. I had a chest pain scare this February; I was lucky and it wasn't an MI or anything so serious, but it did lead me to believe in the need for the changes my physician had been advocating. At first the new regimen was discouraging, slow, and painful, but six months later, I'm starting to see real changes in my health.
I wish you a full recovery and the steadfastness this hard road requires.
Andrew @ 56: Yes, they make ATMs, but when the ATM malfunctions, the bank is on the hook, not you. And you know the machine has malfunctioned and can do something about it.
When a voting machine "malfunctions" the electorate gets shafted: the voter isn't aware, and no-one is on the hook.
Earl @ 24: People forget that the requirement of a good election process is not just to count accurately, but also to count transparently. The appearance of vote fraud is as bad a result as actual vote fraud, weakening the validity of the result. The process should be understandable to every voter, not just those skilled enough in the technical arts to make a judgement on the validity of a software audit.
Earl Cooley III @ 20: It's even worse. I won't believe *any* electronic vote collection is accurate, no matter how audited and examined the machine is.
The argument for these machines is that they make tabulation faster and so can provide results in a more timely manner. Given that counting paper ballots scales very well with number of ballots I fail to see the need.
Paper voting is well understood, but frequently mis-applied. The basics are simple: count each ballot box, publicly, at the place of voting, immediately at the close of voting.
Making it practical works like this:
1. Limit the number of votes per ballot box to 500-1000 (depending on the complexity of the ballots) by distributing voters to many boxes at a polling station.
2. Let each person named on the ballot be allowed a representative present at the counting; if the party can't spare a counter for each ballot box they are unlikely to be elected, but their votes are still counted. Any representative can challenge a ballot and that ballot is put aside (sealed in an envelope) for later consideration.
This system has the advantage that any of the ballot-box counting committees has a strictly limited scope of fraudulent behavior: only the 500-1000 ballots per box is at risk for any set of corrupt counters. That means that even in tightly contested elections it's difficult to systematically drift the result: too many people have to be aware of the fraud to have a significant effect.
A typical error made in implementing ballot counting is the transporting ballot boxes, which not only allows substitutions to occur, but also typically centralizes the counting, which leads to fewer people needing to be corrupted to dramatically alter votes.
Really - there is nothing, except perhaps marking the ballot, that a machine can do better than humans in enforcing an accurate ballot count.
And a quick note about "the virus checker did it": I've yet to see a case where that answer was true. It's an easy cop-out, but frankly, if the virus checker caused a short read on the file, the code reading it should have trapped the error. Many error conditions can occur in production systems and *if* (and it's a big if) the virus checker caused the problem, Diebold was still negligent for not writing code robust to simple I/O errors.
I suspect them of either the worst sort of cop-out, or of being voodoo computing practitioners instead of engineers. I don't know which is the most charitable.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 12 |
| 2008 | 16 |
| 2007 | 11 |
| 2006 | 28 |
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