The other problem that constantly plagued me was that even if you did strange things w/ the items you were carrying, several times you ended up losing the item, which discouraged the very experimentation that was needed to complete the game.

Like using up one Cupid's arrows in Kings Quest IV, and then making it to the last scene in the game and not having an arrow left to use and having to replay the entire f'ing game.

ARGHHHHH...the frustration is still with me!

You're getting downmodded because you have no idea what you're talking about with credit cards. You don't have to pay a 7+% for ANY purchase at all as long as you pay your monthly statement in full. The ONLY time you end up owing ANY interest on your purchases is when you decide to (or have to) carry debt from month to month, and then the APR on that debt is generally in the 20% range - absolutely atrocious rates btw.

So yeah, I use a credit card for pretty much every single purchase I make because:
A) It's super convenient - especially for gas.
B) I get between 1% - 4% back on every purchase I make. Every year, I end up getting north of $150 back just for using a card over cash.
C) I hate carrying a wad of cash around and getting coins back.
D) I get detailed reports of all my spending at the end of each month from the card that can easily be imported into the finance program of my choice
E) I'm protected should I ever lose my wallet, I lose nothing as long as I report the cards lost fairly quickly. I'd lose whatever cash I had if I just used cash.

The only time I generally don't use a card is when I want to support local small stores - mostly restaurants. Since paying in cash generally puts 1-2% more of the purchase in their pockets.

As much as I don't like these cameras, when you get a ticket in Chicago, and most of the suburbs I know of around here, you're provided w/ the means to actually watch your car commit the violation. I got a ticket for a rolling right turn on red last summer. You key your license and the citation number into a city website (google it, you'll find it) and you can watch an mpeg4 stream of your car passing through the intersection or turning on red or whatever - with a little curl magic you can download it as a keepsake.

Armed with the video, you should be able to appeal the ticket if you truly didn't commit the offense or if the camera went bonkers and ticketed everyone going through the intersection.

If it's a borderline case, most people don't bother with the hassle of appealing and just pay the fine...miss a day of work and sit in a traffic court for hours (and possibly pay court costs) or pay $100.

My observation around the Chicago area is that people are mostly just butthurt because they're getting ticketed for infractions that were lightly enforced before due to labor / manhour constraints of the police forces.

That's because it's 8 hours to do the development work and 1992 management hours to plan when those 8 hours will transpire and who will transpire them.

My God man, there's Gantt charts to adjust, Statements of Work to write up, change requests to employ, personnel allocations to make, budget charts to adjust, approvals to attain, approvals of approvals to attain, test plans to write (and then later ignore), opportunity costs to calculate, and that's just the tip of the iceburg.

I'm shocked they could fit all of that into only (!) 1992 hours - after all that's about 50 weeks worth of time.

I stand corrected and offer apologies to GP.

You are right that we dealt with the big box chains, I figured we were also doing their online fulfillments since we did it for several other retailers and was very wrong.

As someone who has worked in the logistics industry now for about 10 years, currently pretty much everything about your post is factually incorrect.

iPhones are shipped via ocean cargoships, they are domestically warehoused, and domestically shipped primarily via truck. I know this because my previous employer handled the supply chain logistics and domestic warehousing/staffing for the iPhone.

Also, look to the trade consortiums and trade lobbies for why there are fewer customs inspectors - not electronic/mechanical efficiencies.

Until planes can carry hundreds of shipping containers worth of goods or the number of air routes is vastly increased ocean shipments are going to be vastly less expensive for all but niche markets - .ie seafood is one current market where a majority of product is air shipped.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/debit-credit-facts-fraud-liability/story?id=16090439

You have a maximum liability of $50 for fraudulant credit card purchases - no liability if the phsyical card wasn't used to make the purchase (.ie online purchases). That's hardly losing "100% of [your] stuff" if someone rips off your card number.

NOTE: Identity theft is WAY different than somoene using your CC#.

My son, who is 27 months now, has been using a tablet since about 8 months old. We started mostly with apps that consist of pressing a button to hear animal or machine sounds, he also liked the bubble pop games - especially ones with lots of colors. He caught on really quickly and was able to navigate around my parent's kindle better than them shortly after he turned one. He liked the kneebouncers apps when he was little too, which are just a series of simple cartoon characters that do repetitive things every time you press any button. I also think the book apps on the tablet really helped him to appreciate actual books more, we had problems getting him to listen to a book until we got him some book apps. After watching them with us for awhile he really started liking real books too. The Netflix app is also nice. Lets face it, there's times where having 15 minutes to make dinner, take care of bills, etc are needed and I'm glad my son can watch something to keep him entertained that doesn't have any commercials in it.

I realize that everyone thinks their child is above average, but my son has a great vocabulary, counts to 15 by himself, knows all his colors and shapes, and has an extremely active imagination. I definitely think the time he spends on the iPad helps contribute to that.

Don't listen to the self-righteous assholes telling you your a bad parent because you want to spend time doing something other than peekaboo with you child. Anything that creates a form of bond between you and your child and stimulates their motor and cognitive skills is a valuable tool. It's obvious that a tablet should be just one form of stimulation you provide for your kids, but since there's several hours in the day for play there's plenty of time to include games/tablet use amongst books, puzzles, play-dough, blocks, etc

As someone who spent some time several years ago developing a picking algorithm for plumbing / electrical warehouses, there's generally much more to it than just a simple scanning / shortest path equation. You'll generally want to make sure you're going through your older stock first so you don't end up with old, unsellable stock, sometimes you want to actually clear out bins that have only a few items in them to make room for more stock, and many more things. So, just because you may walk by a few bins that have your item in it already doesn't mean the algorithm is dumb (though it very well may mean that), it may mean that those who set up the system assigned higher value to other picking / service priorities than just pick speed.

That just gets back to the point of offering a competitive salary. If your people are jumping ship because they can earn more elsewhere, it means your company is offering crappy pay for the job - or, as is more often the case, not offering any raises commensurate with experience levels or acquired knowledge while on the job.

If I start as an entry level developer then after about 5 years I should expect to start being payed like a mid-senior level developer. Sadly, that's generally just not how it works with most companies. You get your 2-3% (if you're lucky) raise per year and that's it...so, you have the option of working 20 years at your company just to make it to the pay level that you could have been at in 5 if you'd jump ship and landed a senior development gig at the point you hit that mid-senior experience level.

That's just a no-brainer decision to leave for another company.

This is bang on. You really need a good 15-30 minutes to decompress after you finish work and let your brain wind down. I find the gym is great for this - a walk or run would likely work just as well. Definitely get some exercise, because you do so much less movement / walking working at home.

Google Voice is actually great for this. Especially since it allows you to set up rules to "turn off" your business line after hours and have calls go straight to voice mail (just like it would if you had an office line and were no longer there). There's nothing worse than having a customer get a hold of your personal number and call you during off hours or a weekend.

The problem is that if you have your Oracle DB's linked together in the fashion described in the article, having just a single little random Oracle DB owned can result in a DOS of literally every Oracle DB in your company that is linked together. It's not limited to just the DB connected to the front end that was compromised.

Furthermore, from what I understood from the article, the only real way to recover from the DOS is to restore EVERY database from a backup after rolling back the SCN number on EVERY database you run. If you miss rolling back and updating just a single one, you're hosed again.

This is a really insidious bug.

I thought that myself too and that was one of the reasons I held out to SD over HD content w/ DirecTV for so long. I bit the bullet in October and got the DirecTV HD DVR. There's only 2 things I've found that it can't do that the DirecTivo could do. Suggestions (which is something I think is patented by Tivo - and I didn't actually use) and undeleting shows from your recorded list you've deleted. There might be more, but they'd be things which I don't miss and the DirectTV DVR does quite a few more things that the aging stock Tivo one didn't.

I was expecting to miss the Tivo, but I don't at all.

This is EXACTLY what the protocol allows and the reference implementation does. At some point about 2/3rds of the way through the video when they're talking about federating wave servers together they show a wave that they've sent between 3 different organizations. They specifically show that members from one organization (in the example, Milton and Peter from Innitech) can branch a portion of the wave and speak specifically to one another and the Innitech branch is never broadcast outside of Innitech's own server. If Milton had not been a member of the original wave he'd also only see the wave branch that Peter specifically added him to.