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Spectrum Auction Could Be A Game of Chicken
Ardvark writes "Google promised some time ago to bid at least the reserve price for the C block of 700Mhz spectrum if the FCC accepted its demand for an open access rule for devices using the band, which the FCC did over Verizon's objections. If the reserve price is not met the rule will be dropped and the block re-auctioned. It appears now that bidding has stalled just short of the reserve price. It's assumed that Google has no interest in becoming a cell phone company and with a recession looming the 700MHz spectrum now seems worth a whole lot less. If Google's strategy was to force the bidding above the reserve but still lose the auction, Verizon could be calling their bluff, threatening them to live up to their word and buy what to Google could be the equivalent of a $4.6 billion 'doohickey.'" Update: 01/31 16:01 GMT by Z : And just like that, the plot thickens: the C block has hit the reserve price during bidding.
More money than brains. Now we know why their stock is so high.
DUNT BEE TEH EVEL!!!11!1... unless a government asks us to.
what do you mean again?
Telecommuting generally means fast, stable Internet access, which many of those small communities don't have.
Not a typewriter
It also requires certain types of job. You can't weld or make sandwiches via the internet.. well without specialised equipment. Even as an IT worker who is primarily doing coding right now, I can't telecommute because I still have to do the odd IT support job occasionally (which I could just talk people through or do via Remote Assistance I guess, though I still think asking if I can telecommute is going too far, and I'd probably end up really lazy and just work from my bed :p ).
which is totally what she said
This is offtopic, I know, but I wanted to reply to your signature link at the appropriate page and replies are disabled there. So, here it goes, flagged as "Anonymous Coward" so it doesn't appear to those reading Slashdot filtered at +2 and I don't get modded down as "Offtopic". :-)
First, I'd like to point out that, although I'm currently an Ubuntu user at home, I also had my fair share of ugly results with Grub and, a little before it, Lilo. At the time I was a Linux newbie too, and it turned out I didn't understood how to use these boot loaders properly, also losing partitions and needing help to recover my data. But over time I came to know both softwares well enough to not have much problem.
What I want to tell, however, is that these kind of problems also happen on Windows, and even Windows alone. Earlier this month, my boss tasked me with reinstalling Windows XP Pro on his computer. This, you surely know, is very easy for anyone who have done it some times, although I also know for sure Windows newbies suffer a lot doing it, as the desperate calls I received from a friend who was trying it for the first prove. Anyway, reinstalling my boss' XP shouldn't have been a hard task, as he has two hard disks, a small one for the OS and applications and another, huge, for his data. In short: disconnect the data HD, wipe clean the OS HD, install XP, install drivers, patch XP up, install applications, reconnect the data HD, done.
Well, it turns out that everything worked fine until the "reconnect the data HD" step. I load Windows, and nothing. The disk was detected and installed, but no partitions where detected on it. I go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management (sorry if these terms aren't accurate, I'm translating to English from my Brazilian Portuguese XP), and there the hard disk is, without partitions. Strangely enough, however, the data HD is marked as being a "Dynamic Disk". With status "Online (errors)". I right-click it, select "Reactivate disk". Nothing happens. I go into the system even log, and there I find a scary red icon with a useless error message and a long hex code. I search the code on Google, it directs me to an even scarier Microsoft Knowledge Base article saying the solution is to convert the disk to "Basic", which will delete everything on it as there is "no way" to do a non-destructive conversion from dynamic to basic. Uh-oh...
Since reformatting my boss' data HD isn't a good idea by any stretch of imagination, I go around searching on Google, and all the solutions I find talk about purchasing some advanced recovery software with prices starting at $99, with which to copy on small steps the recoverable contents from the data disk to the OS disk, backing it up to DVDs one at a time, for then to reformat the disk and copy the data back. Yeah, sure! Or, rather, no thanks!
So, I search more, and more, and more, and more, and finally find an obscure solution that deals with editing the disk partition table by hand with an hex editor. Again, thanks again! But restarting my search from there, I finally discover someone who successfully did it using, guess what? An even more obscure Linux text-mode partition recovery utility which, luckily, had a Windows port (still text mode though): TestDisk. Fingers crossed, I try it. It scans the data HD, detects a lost dynamic NTFS partition there, and offers me options to recover it and convert it back to a basic NTFS partition. Sure, why not? If anything goes wrong I'll still be able to (purchase and) use a full-fledged data recovery tool. No need though: it worked. I reboot the machine, the data hard disk is fully detected. I run an extensive chkdsk on drive E: to repair any residual damage, and my boss' data is then fully available again.
As you can see, it's not only Linux that can cause trouble to Windows partitions. Windows itself also does nasty things to Windows partitions now and then, for no apparent reason.