Just Saying -- the soapbox thread

[Muadzin]

On a semi-related note, does anyone else find that, when you're waiting in line at the supermarket or wherever, no matter how much you scrutinize the various queues for potential timewasters before queuing up, you always wind up behind:

That old guy from the eighteen hundreds who uses a checkbook... if you're very, very lucky, the person at the till will know what to do with these archaic clay tablets, otherwise you're in for an even longer wait than that.

That person with a hundred different things, who wants them put through in five different lots, and pays for each lot separately

That person with three dozen different types of produce, all of which have to be separately weighed before they can be put into the computer

That person who wants to pay cash (and not the quick, hand over a fifty and get their change back, quick-like, but someone who slowly works out the exact notes and coins to hand over)

That person who wants a pack of fags which, naturally, are not in the unmarked cabinet the worker has in their little stand, which means that everything is put on hold while they go for walkies and look for that brand of fags in another till area

That person who, you think, only wants to buy a case of beer, but engages in a long, lengthy discussion about the different kind of rubbish collection stickers the shop carries, the benefits and drawbacks of each sticker, how much each one costs versus how much rubbish the rubbish truck is prepared to take for one of those stickers, etc

I'm sure that you all can add to this list.

Always avoid old people. Nothing but respect for our senior citizens who built up our country, but as a rule of thumb you're better off not behind one in the checkout line, they tend to be slower and not so technologically savvy. Thankfully, more and more supermarkets here have no cash PIN only lines, that old people and those who insist on using cash avoid like the plague. So their checkout lines are usually the shortest and fastest. Even better are the self checkout facilities so you avoid the lines altogether. But in case you still have to, avoid lines with elderly (for obvious reasons), mothers with children with lots of stuff in their cart (their attention gets divided between paying, packing their groceries and their kids), and always, always when the lines are long, keep an eye on which cash register is most likely to open next and chose that line. Nothing more disheartening then having to endure a long wait only to see a new register open which is too far away from you to beat the rest of the mob.

And beware of German owned supermarkets, and supermarkets in Germany in general. For some strange reason German grundlichkeit does not seem to apply to maintaining as many open registers for their customers as possible, but as few as they can get away with.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Mailing woes...again   

Bought online and had a package shipped from North Carolina. Quick shipping (seller was awesome!) and in 2 days the package arrived at my local distribution center (DC) this is where it went haywire....
Apparently, DC felt the need to send it to the Manassas VA distribution center. Then, they felt the need to send it to the Woodbridge VA distribution center. Then, they decided to send it back to the DC distribution center. So... a package that I ordered on Monday and should have had on Wednesday.... is now STILL in the system and I might get it a week later (if they decide NOT to re-route it ...AGAIN!!)

Ugggg.... 

[alanp]

I tend to consider myself a fairly worldly fellow, but I have no idea what this is referring to. You need to buy stickers for garbage collection?

In New Zealand, yeah. You either hire a wheelie bin and put that on the kerb once a week (or fortnightly, depending on the contract), or buy a rubbish sticker, put the sticker on your bag o' trash, and put that on the kerb for pickup.

[reddesert]

And beware of German owned supermarkets, and supermarkets in Germany in general. For some strange reason German grundlichkeit does not seem to apply to maintaining as many open registers for their customers as possible, but as few as they can get away with.

Don't get behind me in the self checkout line of a European supermarket!  I will have managed to screw up pre-weighing my produce at the separate weigh station, cause a nuisance because I'm trying to buy wine and need to be ID'ed or it's the wrong day or God only knows what, and generally fail to understand what is going on even though I nominally speak a little bit of the language. I'm better off taking my chances with the cashier and only half-understanding the conversation.

Also, after being conditioned (by Germany and maybe Italy) that shops, restaurants etc prefer cash and paying with a credit card is a big production that you only pull out at the department store, I was then a bit stunned to find out that it's not unusual for shops in the Netherlands to be cash-free. Is this really a major cultural difference between the countries or more a rapidly evolving generational thing?

[alanp]

New Zealand has the EFT-POS system, effectively debit cards. (Electronic Fund Transaction at Point Of Sale.) Each card has a four digit PIN number, making it a lot safer than the average credit card (which, AFAIK, you can just slide and done. It's one reason I don't want to get one of those PayWave cards, too easy for someone to abuse with no PIN needed.)

If a shop doesn't have EFT-POS, it's going to be because it's either a very, very small-timey business, or because they don't have a phone line for the EFT-POS machine. Even pizza delivery boys have it, these days.

People do pay in cash as well, but it's increasingly rare for people to carry cash. With EFT-POS, you're not carrying around tempting amounts of money for someone to take off you, and even if they do steal your card, they will still need your PIN. (Scammers can find out your pin through various nefarious means, but it means that there is another hoop for them to jump through.)

[Muadzin]

In New Zealand, yeah. You either hire a wheelie bin and put that on the kerb once a week (or fortnightly, depending on the contract), or buy a rubbish sticker, put the sticker on your bag o' trash, and put that on the kerb for pickup.

In the Netherlands its up to the local governments to decide. Here in Nijmegen you have to buy green garbage bags which cost like a Euro a piece, but you can put all your plastic and metal cans into free see through bags. And paper gets picked up once a month, so the green bags only get used for leftover rubbish. But my friend who lives in a neighboring town he has to use a wheelie bin and pays for each emptying. And has grown very adept at dumping his trash in public trash cans wherever he finds them. And some people just refuse to pay for anything and dump their trash alongside the road. Which I see a lot.

The idea that you can force people to separate their trash and make those who produce the most pay more in practice always collides with human stubbornness and creativity. Some people don't like being forced, nor to pay more.

Don't get behind me in the self checkout line of a European supermarket!  I will have managed to screw up pre-weighing my produce at the separate weigh station, cause a nuisance because I'm trying to buy wine and need to be ID'ed or it's the wrong day or God only knows what, and generally fail to understand what is going on even though I nominally speak a little bit of the language. I'm better off taking my chances with the cashier and only half-understanding the conversation.

Also, after being conditioned (by Germany and maybe Italy) that shops, restaurants etc prefer cash and paying with a credit card is a big production that you only pull out at the department store, I was then a bit stunned to find out that it's not unusual for shops in the Netherlands to be cash-free. Is this really a major cultural difference between the countries or more a rapidly evolving generational thing?

Nobody uses credit cards over here to do grocery shopping. Methinks that's the equivalent of the elderly person wanting to pay with a signed check. It's all regular bank PIN transactions here. Which is why many shops opt to go cash free. We're used to paying PIN early on, you can even do it nowadays by just holding the card close to the reader. I hardly ever use any cash any more. And for some stores it has the advantage of there no longer being any cash in the place that would attract criminals. As our city centers are full of cameras, shops, restaurants and gas stations outside of the city center have seen more and more attempts of armed robbery. Criminals will go where they can still get cash money. Which is why I think the elderly will the ones that will get targeted the most. Not only are they the most vulnerable, they're also the ones more likely to still have cash money in their possession.

As for the Netherlands differing from Germany in this regard, the Germans seem more traditional when it comes to money. Maybe its because of the hyper inflation thing they had after World War 1? They're only now thinking about getting rid of their 1 and 2 cents coins and rounding up or down on transactions. In the Netherlands we've been doing that for as long as I can remember. I can't remember ever having seen a 1 cent coin when we still had our own currency. We got them back when we switched to the Euro but they quickly disappeared again. If you still get one chances are you get one that was coined in Germany and that person did some shopping in Germany.

[somnif]

Here in my part of the US, we pay a monthly fee for weekly trash pick ups, one bin garbage, one bin mixed recyclables. The bins hold up to 75lbs (34kg), and what recycling can go in varies from pickup company to pickup company.

[davent]

The city i live in Canada we have three streams of trash pick-up. An organics "Green" bin for food wastes & garden waste which you can augment with other designated bins/cans or heavy duty paper bags, no limit on the amount you can put out. Blue bin for recyclables, again no limit,  finally a trash can/bag, limited per household to one unit per week and limited by weight to 23k/50lbs. You also get 12 tags per year to apply to an extra garbage can/bag(s) that may have accumulated on occasion.

City taxes pay for the pickup.
dave

[midwayfair]

FFS I should not have to police members of my project groups in their senior year about not just copying code off the internet without citing their sources.

Number of CS classes this semester that have even mentioned the word plagiarism in class: 0. Number this year (running total): 1.

On the other hand:
Number of teachers who have complained about students plagiarizing their homework: 3.

[somnif]

FFS I should not have to police members of my project groups in their senior year about not just copying code off the internet without citing their sources.

Number of CS classes this semester that have even mentioned the word plagiarism in class: 0. Number this year (running total): 1.

On the other hand:
Number of teachers who have complained about students plagiarizing their homework: 3.

I've gotten lucky, I didn't have to report any of my students for plagiarism this semester (I teach a second semester general bio lab). Worst I've had is someone nearly copying a methods section from a paper, bad enough for a "direct quotation" penalty, but not a deans visit.

Then again, I should say "not yet anyway", still 2 major assignments for them to turn in before the end. Some of the other lab teachers have had to bring the hammer down, and I really don't want to deal with that paperwork headache.

[midwayfair]

Three students in my prog lang class downloaded a previous semester's implementation of their first project.

It's 1000 lines of code. I just can't fathom what makes people think that won't look suspicious when the teacher sees three projects that look the same.

While that's inexcusable, it was (by far) the most difficult programming assignment I've ever had in a class, so if they had needed to look something up that would have been understandable.

[lars]

Mailing woes...again   

Bought online and had a package shipped from North Carolina. Quick shipping (seller was awesome!) and in 2 days the package arrived at my local distribution center (DC) this is where it went haywire....
Apparently, DC felt the need to send it to the Manassas VA distribution center. Then, they felt the need to send it to the Woodbridge VA distribution center. Then, they decided to send it back to the DC distribution center. So... a package that I ordered on Monday and should have had on Wednesday.... is now STILL in the system and I might get it a week later (if they decide NOT to re-route it ...AGAIN!!)

Ugggg.... 

They do a great job making sure that junk mail arrives on time and unscathed. I've never missed a single Xfinity ad or coupon to get my gutters cleaned!

[thesmokingman]

It has to be hard combating source code plagiarism with sites like stackoverflow out there, not to mention the "I'll do your homework for you" sites. Over the years, I've looked at other people's code for inspiration on a different approach or maybe an edge case I didn't consider(professional work or hobby, not school work), but to just hand in identical work? that would have to be a referral for academic misconduct. I once got the results of a python project back that had what they considered to be a less than 100% yet still acceptable level of originality and I was scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how original a student-level project is supposed to be? there's only so many ways you've been instructed on how to carry out the task.

[mjg]

If they go on to work in a programming job, a lot of their time will be just looking up how someone else has done it on Stack Overflow.  Or downloading someone else's GitHub example. 

Which makes it difficult - a lot of the teaching is based on making individuals do their own 'original' work, but in reality 90% of a lot of jobs in the industry is knowing where to copy/paste from. 

(I work as a software engineer, and have also worked in computer science dept at a Uni, so that's where my opinion is coming from)

[midwayfair]

If they go on to work in a programming job, a lot of their time will be just looking up how someone else has done it on Stack Overflow.  Or downloading someone else's GitHub example. 

Which makes it difficult - a lot of the teaching is based on making individuals do their own 'original' work, but in reality 90% of a lot of jobs in the industry is knowing where to copy/paste from. 

(I work as a software engineer, and have also worked in computer science dept at a Uni, so that's where my opinion is coming from)

The point of most school projects is to reinvent the wheel. You do this in every discipline.
"Write a sonnet."
"Calculate the area of a circle using an integral."
"Dissect this frog."

My problem with my group members was them not citing their code, though I was also disappointed that she didn't just write the code for something as simple as a stack, because this also means I am reluctant to trust her to do something more complicated on the project. I'm also not talking about copying a Function to Do The Thing or an algorithm.

If the industry tolerates using someone else's work without citation doesn't mean it's not plagiarism, but most people don't enjoy trying to figure out a difficult piece of code that was explained at some link that could have been put in a damn comment.

And you wouldn't wholesale download the source code for some software and try to pass it off as your own since that's a good way to get sued. Downloading a previous student's code off of git hub is the most blatant form of cheating.