Business casual at a call center where I worked meant polo shirt, khakis, and dress shoes (I chose Doc Martins as they're like dressy tennis shoes). Polo shirts and khakis are just one slight nudge away from the full monkey suit I had to wear working for banks. Do you really want to spend half of your life wearing uncomfortable clothing? Most of your waking life, actually.

Seriously, I worked in government offices and universities where I wore jeans and t-shirts every day. Professors even taught classes in Hawaiian shirts and shorts with flip flops. People were happy and productive. They didn't look like slobs, either.

Millions of students go to college every day in jeans and t-shirts. Heck, some go to class in their pajamas. They still work hard, make the grade, and many even discover new things - just like an R&D division. Grad students that publish important new discoveries are seldom seen wearing anything but jeans, t-shirts,and maybe a lab coat and goggles if needed. It's beyond stupid to expect R&D to perform better with a monkey suit or business casual than if they were allowed to wear whatever made them feel comfortable and relaxed so that they could focus on creative solutions and new experiments.

Psychology -- the theory being that putting on work clothes puts you into a different frame of mind which is conducive towards work.

Frankly, I think it's BS, but that's the real answer. The HR droids believe (and lots of psychological experiments show) that when people put on certain clothes - especially uniforms - they tend to change their behaviors and thought processes. People who wear their pajamas all day tend to be calmer and lazier. Those who wear suits and ties tend to be more active. Women especially change their emotional states and attitudes in response to what they're wearing.

The reason I call BS is because regardless of whatever lab experiments show, no one knows how specific individuals will respond to such changes - especially in a place where the work is a CREATIVE work. I would think creative minds should be allowed to wear whatever clothing makes them most comfortable so that their minds are free to relax and imagine creative solutions.

Having worked at a business casual call center with casual day Fridays (and even casual weeks at times), I can say that the jeans actually improved the workplace. We were on phones all day talking to irate customers. Anything that helped us relax was helpful to everyone.

I hate business attire. I'd wear t-shirts, jean shorts, and sandals every day of my life if I could... heck, maybe gym shorts if they didn't look horrendous.

Companies that don't have customer-facing personal contact should drop the BS. Clothing rules should reflect workplace safety and avoid offensive content -- and maybe also reduce distractions for other workers.... but, I say some distractions at work are healthy.

Depends on what you mean by "faster." If you mean clock frequency, then perhaps. Also perhaps if you mean an individual core of a CPU vs a core of a GPU.

In this sense, it's the time to perform massively parallel instructions. GPUs are generally hundreds of times faster than CPUs for such calculations. Part of this is because a CPU can have a few cores, but a GPU generally has thousands of floating point units. The other part is that CPUs are general purpose central processors while GPUs are very specialized to optimize them for specific kinds of tasks.

Think of it like a CPU is 4 guys with Swiss Army Knives while a GPU is a team of 1,600 guys each with a battery powered, professional screwdriver. Guess which one's faster at screwing 1,600 wood screws into 400 posts for a building. Now guess which is faster at cutting a traced outline on a single piece of paper.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/w...

Obamacare did originate in the House as HR 3590. (HR meaning House of Representatives.) It was a "shell bill" that was gutted and stuffed with Obamacare to get around the rule. It's not a novel approach either, and the courts took no issue with it.

HR 3590 passed the House first as required, went to the Senate which altered it into Obamacare and then congress "resolved the differences" between the House and Senate versions passed before sending it to the president.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/...

The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.

1400 years is indeed a long time, but if there is a civilization broadcasting, who knows what we might be able to learn from those broadcasts?!?

ET could be beaming out their PBS documentaries with the answers to nearly all our questions for them.

Even if there's no advanced life there, we now have a great target for sending a probe to detect life -- the fact that the humans that send the probe won't live to get the reply isn't important. Someone, someday will know if we send a probe now and it is successful in its mission.

My guess (and I admit, it's pure speculation) is that only a select few who created the OS have access to such sources -- that and perhaps NK sponsored hackers. Everyone else is restricted to the national intranet. Well, everyone else that is lucky enough to even see, much less use a computer in NK. The country has enough trouble providing food, much less electronics for its citizens.

You make a fair point. However, if the only difference is whether a TAXI diver is actively scouting for service or waiting for a service to assign a job, then it's a really grey area. After all, Uber does its best to advertise itself. Wouldn't an Uber driver parked at an airport waiting for the App to signal the fare be the same as a TAXI driver waiting for a pedestrian to signal for a fare? Why would TAXIs need to advertise their service if the app can advertise for them? - especially if UBER buys advertising or even a sign at the Airport to entice pedestrians to use the app to hail a cab?

I've almost always called cabs from phones -- why would calling a cab using an app on my phone be any different?

Not sure where you got the definition that taxis are not also personal vehicles. Where I live in South Carolina, there is a limited number of taxi licenses by law -- and those licenses are owned by only a few families. The vehicles are most certainly owned by the drivers and are random makes and models with a simple TAXI light on the top. They also use those cars as their personal vehicles around town. I know because I've ridden in many of them and I've spoken with the drivers.

I don't think the distinction is meaningless.

If I use a phone to call, text, or use an app in order to have someone provide me with personal transportation to another location for a fee, I'm calling a taxi. I have expectations of being picked up in a reasonable amount of time and to get to my destination in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable fee.

Uber drivers ARE Taxi drivers. They aren't casual drivers picking up hitchhikers and asking for voluntary, optional donations.

  The only question is whether or not those Taxi drivers are independent contractors or employees of Uber. Either way, they likely need Taxi licenses. It's reasonable that if their income derives from Uber and Uber has significant expectations about their hours, appearance, work, and/or performance; they could indeed be considered employees of Uber - or at least contractors working as agents on behalf of Uber (like temp workers at a call center for a bank).

It follows that if the drivers are employees of Uber, then Uber is operating a taxi service. Uber's only chance is to say that those independent contractors and users are simply using their software service as a communication/scheduling app. I sincerely doubt that explanation is going to work.

The irony is that BeOS was designed specifically to take advantage of modern computer hardware of the day and cared nothing for binary compatibility with other OSes, and today Haiku is clinging to an ancient compiler and a dead x86 architecture... in the name of compatibility with BeOS apps, no less. BeOS itself moved from Hobbit to PowerPC to Intel x86 with little care for compatibility.

What made BeOS exciting 20 years ago was it promised to give users better multimedia support and responsiveness. Other OSes have caught up with the innovations and surpassed them. (Multithreading, multiprocessing, multitasking, journaling file systems, etc.) Some users liked the GUI and lauded it as a clean and a great interface. I hated the yellow tabs. Still, that's just personal preference -- Mac OS X has a clean and polished interface that suits that purpose today. In fact, the death knell of BeOS was when Apple declined to purchase BeOS and bought NeXTSTEP instead... because it was superior and led to today's OS X.

Point being that BeOS offered new, cutting edge features and better functionality on the same hardware than other OSes at the time. It seems that Haiku is the last of the BeOS clones and it's not progressing at a rate that will ever offer users significant benefits over modern OSes today.

What does Haiku have to offer? I mean - when it's finally released in a few decades or centuries at this rate and our ancestors get to enjoy it on their x86 or even AMD64 emulators?

There's a nice bit of fluff at : https://www.haiku-os.org/about , but that doesn't really answer the question. The key strength compared to Linux seems to be that a single team is developing and integrating everything with a common goal. Why couldn't that same team (or one as dedicated) simply fork a Linux distribution and all software it uses to customize and integrate towards the same common goal?

Seems a waste to re-invent the wheel creating new drivers and struggling to build on the Haiku platform for backwards compatibility without any clear, solid, user-recognizable benefit.

I get that it's interesting as a project and great practice for coders, and I truly wish Haiku well in its continued development... I just don't see the point if the development will never release outside of Beta with support for modern hardware. If Linux still struggles to get decent drivers, I can't imagine Haiku ever getting proper support.

Haiku seems like another stagnant AmigaOS, Syllable Desktop, or other relic. ReactOS at least has some benefit to Linux and potentially former Windows users by furthering WINE development even if it never makes it out of alpha (going on 17 years now btw.)