Mahone

I got a pound, but the next morning I cried that I wanted my tooth back and made such a fuss that my mum made me place the pound under my pillow the next night and I got my tooth back in its place the following morning. Strangely, the tooth fairly never visited again...

Slightly different but related topic: would you define knowledge as included in the definition of intelligence? Does your intelligence level increase with each class you go to because you've gained knowledge? With your example, I'd personally say that said more about the quality of the degree she graduated with than her intelligence - I mean, she apparently graduated after all.

Hence where I mentioned manual take over without needing software based authentication to do so. I work in IT, and have seen my fair share of instances where software won't allow me to take a specific action because it thinks it knows better than I do. The vast majority of the time it's actually a bug in the application - I wouldn't be particularly happy if this happened in a potentially life threatening situation.

It was an airbus, not boeing.

Anyone remember Air France flight 447? It crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, killing all ~230 people on board. This was an Airbus A330-203 - a modern, largely computerised and automated plane. The root cause of the incident was established to be frozen pitot tubes on the underside of the plane. These tiny devices measure the speed of the plane, and even though there are several of them for redundancy, they all failed simultaneously on this plane due to weather conditions. As all the automated systems on the plane rely entirely upon the readings given by the pitot tubes, when they stopped working, everything failed over to manual mode, along with throwing up dozens of errors and alarms. The three pilots on board panicked, they hadn't been given the appropriate training or had any experience in dealing with such a situation, and their manual actions after this occurred were the mirror opposite of what should have been done, ultimately causing their demise. I'm not averse to computers largely taking over the manual actions of drivers, just as long as we are always able to regain manual control when we need to, within the time that we need to, without having to have software based authorisation to do so, and we remember how to manually drive when it comes to it!

Not strictly true, especially with passwords and online banking. No bank in the world will allow you to visit their online banking website without first encrypting the traffic with HTTPS. And if yours does... you need to find a new bank. The same goes with any website that requires you to enter a password for anything important. Most of the time, that password is encrypted. Anyone intercepting your traffic will just see gibberish. Not sure I agree. If you left the front door open to your house, are you 100% to blame if some random kids use your house for a party during your absence? Those kids also know entering private property under those circumstances, whether properly secured or not, is illegal. 2. Taking in outside food and drink (that you've hidden or the usher said nothing) into a movie theatre that prohibits it. Cinemas are notoriously expensive here. You don't know how good you've got it in the states . So yes, I take food in discreetly. 3. Wearing perfectly good clothing and returning it afterwards because you can and they don't ask questions if you've got a receipt or kept tags on. Never even thought about it. 4. Using a handicapped stall in the restroom when you do not have any physical or mental disabilities. I will if the others are dirty or engaged. 5. Saving places in line while waiting to be called in a first-come-first-serve setup. Generally I wouldn't do it, and would be self conscious if I did. 7. Turning on and using your phone before the aeroplane has taxied and come to a complete stop. After an 8 hour flight, checking your phone can be pretty crucial, depending on circumstances. So yeah, I've been known to do this. 8. When leaving, taking extra food out of a buffet restaurant for later. I would never do this. That said, I have been known to order only one drink instead of two, when eating out with my wife and the restaurant does free refills. 9. Allowing your children to use first names for authority figures or elders, such as: teachers, parents or grandparents. Over here, it isn't considered rude to do this in most cases (the exception being teachers with young students) 10. Not spaying or neutering your family pet because puppies/kittens might be fun or you foresee making a quick buck by breeding. I'm not sure why this would be an issue?

I didn't say it wasn't your place to judge. That would be silly. What I did say is that customers shouldn't judge the service of the waiter independently to that of the restaurant. In other words, the waiter and the restaurant are linked. To what degree is a variable, and will be different depending on the circumstances. For starters, we know the restaurant employed the waiter, chosen specifically after going through CVs and interview processes. We know they should be monitoring his performance regularly, probably with a manager spot checking with customers. If a bad service is largely down to waiter failings, the restaurant also failed in at least both of these procedures, to whatever degree. The only person that can truly establish where the failings of the restaurant in general end and the waiter begins is the manager. Customers should bear this in mind when forming their own opinions of the service.

Maybe. My point still stands. You can independently think what you like about the server, it doesn't make it true. The level of service given by the server can easily tie into the way management run things in so many ways. I gave an example of this above. Please explain why you think this example is silly. Your point holds as long as your initial assumption, that the waiters bad service is entirely their own fault, is true. Otherwise, it falls over. And when your initial assumption isn't true, my point doesn't seem so "silly". Customers are entitled to their own opinions. But these opinions shouldn't affect staff wage levels unless proven. And unfortunately bad service in and of itself doesn't prove fault of the waiter. That's for management to decide when they have looked at all of the facts (not possible for the customer to do in most cases).

In your experience, why do you think this is?

You're entirely missing the point I'm trying to make. Perhaps I should have appended my statement with "per se". If you'd read further down, you'd see that I then said this: The word general means overall, and this also includes the level of service the waiters or waitresses give. The point I was trying to make is that I don't believe the customers opinion of the level of service of the waiter should be independent to that of the restaurant overall, and therefore I don't believe that customer should then have the ability to affect that single employees income as a result of their opinion of the service given. There are an entire multitude of reasons as to why bad service is being given by a waiter, and not all of them are the waiters fault. Many of them could be simply down to bad management. A basic example is that a specific waiter is being worked harder and is being requested by management to serve 50% of the tables, but the other 2 employees only have to serve 25% each. That one employee won't be able to spend as much time at each table as the other two. This will affect the level of service he is able to give - but the customers don't know that. My view of this is that the customer should judge the overall service given by the restaurant as a whole, and the managers job is to narrow down specific issues and resolve them, either by improving processes, training staff or firing people. In my line of work, I regularly receive complaints about my staff. Many times, I know these complaints are either unfounded, or there is a good reason behind the scenes as to why that occurred, and it wasn't down to that specific employee. I'd be annoyed if the people that made these complaints were able to affect the wages of my staff, for this very reason.

I did not realise that servers in the US don't get minimum wage, with tips expected to fill the bulk of their wages. In the UK, everyone gets at least minimum wage by law (around $10 per hour when converted against current exchange rates), including servers. So, we don't tend to tip as generously here. My wife had to teach me the protocols over there (which I spent ages and a considerable amount of energy arguing with her about in the car on the way home. I don't feel bad - she spends her entire time here complaining about the British weather ). I still don't agree with the entire concept of tipping. It'd be better if tipping was based solely on level of service, but a pretty 21 year old girl, is far more likely to get higher tips than a balding overweight 50 year old male, even with the same level of service. That's unfair. Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that customers -should- be the ones to judge the level of service of the servers, but I disagree. That should be the job of the manager, and if someone doesn't do their job, they get fired. Customers should judge the restaurant in general, and if they don't like it, choose to stop giving it their custom.

I don't believe this information is recorded anywhere, unless in your personal records.

Doubt it. There is quite a large collection of adapters you need to ensure full compatibility (I have a small pile on my desk and I keep losing them).

I'm very surprised that it was empty for 6 years. It's not normally the style of the church to have assets of such worth like that lying unused, and essentially wasted for that long. Does anyone in the area know any history about it and why it remained empty like it did?

There is also a lot of evidence to suggest that he didn't actually commit suicide, but that his death was an accident. The original investigation was performed so badly, even for the standards back then, that we'll probably never know what really happened. There was a general assumption on the part of the investigators that he was a broken man, and therefore suicide was a logical conclusion. There is actually a lot of evidence to suggest he was intellectually amused by his treatment with oestrogen and the physical side effects that resulted (breast enlargement etc.), and had no known negative effects on his mental state. Suffice to say that, if the same incident had occurred today, the evidence used to conclude that he had committed suicide would not be sufficient, and much further investigation would have had to take place.

It was likely that the mac display output was something like mini DVI/displayport and the projector input was only analogue VGA (and possibly a couple of digital options but not mini DVI or display port). A lot of PCs on the other hand still come with VGA output, especially laptops. An adapter would have resolved this issue, but they probably didn't have one.

Welcome to our humble abode!

Your husband and I do similar jobs i.e. I'm an IT systems manager for a large educational establishment, and I have an ever growing number of macs encroaching on my network, but have opinions about macs that are on entirely different ends of the spectrum - I spent many a late evening night after night (11PM onwards when I was supposed to finish at 5) a couple of years ago trying to fix the many issues presented to us with our macs when we first integrated them onto our network, only to discover that the root cause was yet again another bug in that particular version of OSX, and an upgrade fixes it, only for that upgrade to break something else. The only analogy I can use to describe what it was like was trying to use the first version of apple maps (which started off as a complete failure), but with less well known features so only myself and a few other network engineers out there in the world were suffering with the bugs contained in them for months at a time. Apple were claiming everything was fine, and their documentation said it was fine right up until they released the next update, at which point they discretely acknowledged issues had existed. Of course for a home user macs are all fine and dandy - they won't use 50% of the features that OSX actually has, as they will never need them. But in a corporate environment, the setup becomes more complex, more of the features are needed and that's when the bugs really become apparent. I detest them, I loathe them. They don't work well with anything that wasn't made by apple, regardless of the fact that apple say such a setup is supported. And lets not get started on apple documentation... which is worse than what I'd expect to see on an elementary school IT network in the middle of Afghanistan.

I've had my fair share of "run-ins" with the TSA, although not anything related to being LDS. I've been taken into an interview room and questioned for up to an hour three times in the last two years, each on different trips to the USA. The first and second time were because when asked for the purpose of my trip, I didn't answer with the standard "holiday" or "business" responses, which seems to automatically warrant an interview, and the third time was because I'd already flown into the states only four or five months prior. The TSA agent told me off, insisting that my activity wasn't normal for a tourist, regardless of the fact that I had already told her I wasn't there for tourism, and I was there to see my wife and her family (my wife hadn't been given permission to live in the UK at the time, so we were living apart). Ironically, on each trip I've been on to the states, they have specifically asked me whether I intended to get married whilst there, except for the one time that I did actually intend to get married - for some reason he forgot to ask then. Oh well lol.

A headstone is a very different purchase to a holiday. I don't think this is at all tacky.

For those that mention the US "retaliating" in some shape or form: what makes you so sure it's a retaliation? We know the US Government have been on the offensive with this in the past, and we know they are now too. There is little to no evidence to suggest they weren't on the offensive to begin with - with an awful lot of technology giants based in the states and having to answer to the US government, they have many more opportunities to break into an opposing governments systems than vice versa. It could well be countries like China that have since been retaliating.

As an aside, I was in an IT security conference a few weeks back, and I was quite surprised to see that while China was top of the list for the source of cyber attacks (government and non-government), the USA was second, with Russia in third place. Between the three of them, they are responsible for 50% of the attack traffic on the internet.

As the article states, the US have been doing this for some time already, in conjuction with Israel. The stuxnet virus is probably the most well known, along with its (far more superior and complex) successor, flame. Both of these were primarily targeted at Iran. Stuxnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Flame (malware) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nervous about what? That it will happen again, or that you'll be punished for it? If it happened as you described, there is no chance at all of the latter happening. Your actions in closing it down immediately are more than suitable, and that's really the end of it. You're better off pushing the whole incident out of your mind. If it's the former, I suggest you install an ad blocker, and it might be worth using malware bytes (free) to check your PC for malware, just in case it was that causing popup.

Shannon (my wife) and I took a trip to the beach a couple of weekends back. It's a small place down the south of the country that I've been using as a "getaway" for a number of years now. The sea in this location is actually a channel, so during high tide, it can entirely immerse the beach, and during low tide it can be up to a mile or two away, providing a false sense of security in leaving the car on the beach. Despite large signs everywhere warning holiday makers to check tide times, at least once a month someone either forgets about them or ignores them, and results in this, much to the horror of the person/family that owned the car when they finally return: The owner of this car returned at the last minute, and managed to drive about 200 metres down the beach (dragging a whole bunch of fishing lines belonging to the local fishermen with him in his panic) , before the sea became too deep and his engine cut out, leaving him literally seconds to get out and rescue anything he could from the car. The car is of course a write off, and is usually dragged out by the beach warden once the tide subsides. Occasionally though, the car becomes so intrenched in the sand that it's impossible to remove it without bringing in very expensive equipment, so it ends up getting left there, as per this picture I took back in 2005: It was visible for about two years after that before finally disappearing beneath the sand. A couple of years back, a horse got stuck in the mud left behind after the tide had subsided. The authorities only just managed to get it out before it drowned, as the tide had already come back in at that point. When will people learn to pay attention to warning signs *sigh*.