Seriously am I the only one that's noticed that having 5 bars doesn't mean that my call is any more likely to get through?
Oh. A Verizon customer.:-D
But seriously, the bars tells you the strength of the tower signal as seen by your phone. Your phone's transmitter is much weaker, however, and depends on high gain at the tower to detect the signal. It isn't at all unusual in areas with high reflection (e.g. mountains) to find spots where you can see a slight signal from the tower because of constructive interference from multiple reflections but the tower can't detect your signal. That said, if you're seeing five bars and can't dial out, it likely means the tower doesn't have any free frequency/time slots and the cell company needs to deploy additional towers because of too many users in too small an area. Maybe you could gently encourage them to set up a picocell near some major apartment complex or university or junior high school or whatever to reduce the load on the main tower.
A DMCA takedown notice can't legally be used to go after trademark infringement anyway. The DMCA is about copyrights, not trademarks. Legally speaking, YouTube opens themselves up to civil liability for honoring a takedown notice that does not represent a copyright claim. Now maybe their terms of use protect against that liability, but if I were them, I'd be looking over those terms of use right now....
Personally, I think it would be strangely appropriate to use Arnaud's Bugler's Dream (ideally, John Williams's variant thereof since it is somewhat more bombastic) in a parody fashion superimposed over the massacre. That would warrant a DMCA claim.... If you're going to get a DMCA claim, you might as well go for the big one.
You don't need wireless in train stations anyway. Every train system I've seen uses card readers that are in turnstiles mounted to the floor of the station, and thus there's no reason not to use a wired connection there. Worst case is wire up a BPL/PLC setup if they don't already have some sort of data connection to the turnstiles. Or you could always deploy Wi-Fi since you could presumably get a landline data connection to the station somewhere. There's certainly no reason to use cellular connections there.
That theory is comedically easy to disprove. The distance from San Jose, CA to DFW airport is 1,685 miles. At five hours or so for the flight, that comes to on the order of 300 MPH. A bus traveling that speed on land would not make it. The tires would blow out after a few thousand feet at such a speed. Even if you could get around this problem with a new tire design, you'd still have the problem of hitting people and vehicles on the way. And, of course, if there were some elaborate theatrical production outside a plane traveling at such a rate, the people would fly away themselves. Oh, and I would add that with the number of people in and around these two airports, surely someone would have seen these 300 MPH busses if such a story were true.
What if the data links drops for some reason? What if it takes longer than usual to connect? Transit systems have schedules to keep (ideally!).
Then you fall back to reading the potentially incorrect value off the card, store the transaction, and submit it once the network is back up. If you only do that in cases where the network is unreachable, though, the benefit to hacking the card is at best a single fare once in a while, and at worst, the computer detecting that the value is substantially higher than expected, followed by three police officers waiting to arrest you at the next subway stop.
Furthermore, it's easy to say "get the cell company to add a picocell at the bus stops", but it's not as if a transit system can simply mandate that it be done. Who's going to pay for it? And at what point does the expense of ensuring reliable network connectivity become greater than simply expecting a certain percentage of fraud? After all, this is a transit system we're talking about, not a bank.
Well, chances are if there's a bus route, the phone company will be better off having coverage there anyway. The idea of a picocell is that the phone company can put it up cheaply and will usually agree to do so in exchange for somebody providing a place for them to do so. Most of the cost of cell towers is the land, not the equipment. Getting a picocell tower put up should be easy if you already have a bus stop roof. At least that's the impression I've gotten from various folks who have been involved with getting towers set up. Whether that is really true in practice or not, I couldn't say. In a metro area, though, the number of places where you would have no cell coverage outdoors is likely to be very small.
I know. That's why I talked about copying. Plus, given that with things like gift cards, the identifier is often written on the card itself, sometimes you don't even need to have a card reader to get the information. Or, you have security leaks. When I was an undergrad, the University of Maryland inadvertently exposed the ID numbers of the entire university population through its LDAP entries. Those same IDs were used as identifiers on the magstripe cards that gave building access, and dining hall access.
Chances are, the transit company accidentally publishing the information is not too likely. I hope. Having the number printed on the card is probably a good idea in case the stripe gets wiped, but actually reading a barcode or the numbers below it on the back of a card isn't going to be easy without physical access to the card, at which point the person might as well just rip off the card. Copying it seems more like psycho stalker behavior to make somebody think he/she is going nuts....:-) That's the rare edge case for which defense is probably not worth the effort you'd spend on it.
About the only easy theft case it doesn't protect against is some unscrupulous worker reading the number off a card as he/she loads it into the hopper of a vending machine. If you want to protect against that, though, all you need is a rub-off strip over the numbers like most modern gift cards have.
The bombing of Dresden may have been primarily an action of the RAF, but there are plenty of sources that say that the USAAF was an active participant and used far less surgical weapons than they normally would, largely in response to poor weather and an unwillingness to miss the target regardless of the collateral damage and casualties that resulted from it.
In addition to that attack and the others I mentioned, don't forget the USAAF firebombing of Tokyo (which killed 100,000) or the bombing of Kobe (which killed approx. 8,841).... Would you like me to continue pointing out cases where the U.S. went fairly blatantly after non-military targets? I suspect with a little research, the list could get damningly long.
What you are talking about was the US not using the same rules and tactics that British soldiers used. For instance use of Privateering, used by the US and most other countries not used by the British or the most common example the use of three ranks of soliders, since England quickly changed that I guess it not a "rule of war" as you defined and it wasn't it was a tactic.
By that definition, attacking civilian targets is also a tactic. Are you sure you want to argue that point? It would seem to substantially weaken your argument that military forces and terrorists are dramatically different....
To throw more water on this tactics equaling "rules of war" go read some British books on the reason they lost and they say it was because they would not change thier tactics to handle the situation, while Americans were acting separately and when the commanding officers were killed kept on firing when that happened on the British side they kept waiting for further orders.
I never said anything about that being the reason the U.S. won against the British. My point was that it was a radically different style of warfare than they were used to, and many would likely have used words like "terrorist" to describe it had the word existed. It was guerilla warfare, which is precisely the same sort of battle tactics that modern terrorist and insurgent groups tend to use. Fortunately for the U.S., the word "terrorist" was not coined for another couple of decades (source: Delaware Criminal Justice Council Terrorism Research).
I think you hit the nail on the head with this. I don't know about the Charlie card system, but the issue with many transit cards is that it's difficult or impossible for moving vehicles to always be able to check in with the network database to determine the value of an account. So the account value has to be stored on the card.
That's a pretty weak argument. All you need is a laptop with a cellular data connection. If you really have places where you can't get a cell signal, get the cell company to add a picocell at the bus stops or add a Wi-Fi hot spot. Odds are you won't have to add too many of them in any major metro area.
Of course, even just storing an account number or identifier on a card doesn't make it fraud-proof. Magstripe cards are trivially easy to re-encode with only a few dollars worth of equipment. Copying these can mean defeating physical access systems, being able to use someone else's gift card balance, or worse.
If you have access to somebody else's card, yes. Otherwise, if you are able to steal access, your number space is too small. Use a 256-bit number (or 1024-bit if you're really paranoid) and ensure that new numbers are assigned randomly within that space so that your odds of picking a valid number are remarkably close to zero.
But to say that things in Afghanistan were *better* under the Taliban is either a pathetic F'ing joke, or proof you've jumped the shark.
Agreed. That would be a pretty silly assertion to make about Afghanistan. Iraq, on the other hand, probably was better off. Granted, the ruler was somewhat despotic, but for the most part, this only served to keep the people in line and prevent the violence we're seeing now that the power structure has collapsed. The power structure's ability to do massive harm had effectively been neutered by previous actions (no-fly zones, weapons inspections, destruction of nerve gas stores, etc.) to such a degree that the true atrocities seemed to have stopped happening, which meant that the nation was rapidly evolving with a stable economy, etc. Had the U.S. left it alone, there's every reason to believe the country would have ended up in something resembling democratic rule after Saddam Hussein's death... without lots of bloodshed, destroyed infrastructure, civilian casualties, etc.
The Afgan Weddings, while tragic were not intentional, the pilot did not wake up that morning and prepare himself to kill a bunch of civi's. The suicide bomber meticulously goes though ceremony preparing himself, selects the busiest bus, the most crowded market, or the most painful target thats a huge difference than the soldier.
That's certainly true that the soldier did not intend to kill civilians. Thus, from the perspective of someone in the military who sees civilians and combatants as distinct groups, you are correct. From the perspective of someone who sees Americans as the enemy rather than American troops or the American government, however, the soldier and the suicide bomber have identical goals: to do as much harm to the enemy as possible.
For that matter, the U.S. has not always been that concerned about the number of civilian casualties. In WWII, the U.S. obliterated two cities by atomic bomb. You can't do much more to cause civilian deaths than that. And then, there were the fuel-air explosives in the bombing of Dresden. Between the three bombings, the U.S. killed on the order of 150,000 civilians in that war, not even counting any inadvertent deaths from countless surgical strikes that might reasonably be termed collateral damage.
Let's not pull punches here. This is a war, and whether you consider the terrorists' tactics to be legitimate or not, the differences between a terrorist and a soldier are solely a question of whether they act in service to a recognized government body (based on whatever arbitrary rules cause this recognition to take place) and whether they follow whatever arbitrary rules you define as legitimate military behavior---rules that change pretty rapidly and seem to be largely defined by the winner of the war. The British thought the U.S. soldiers were terrorists during the American Revolution because they ignored the traditional rules of war that had been honored up until that point. In the end, either way, soldier or terrorist, good people die in the process, so the only truly good choice is to avoid the war in the first place if at all possible.
Do I think terrorists are evil for targeting civilians? You bet your ass, I do. Do I think they are evil for deliberately attempting to provoke war by attacking a country that has never declared war on them? Doubly so. That doesn't mean I dont see the U.S. military calling them terrorists a case of the pot calling the kettle black, though. Ultimately, both sides are trying to harm their perceived enemy. In the end, the only real difference is that the terrorists have a very warped perception of who their enemy is.
Agreed, but at least the ruling makes it clear that the term is automatically void and the employee need neither sue to have the term declared void nor insist on striking the clause from the contract prior to signing. That should actually have employers more concerned, as it basically means that informed employees will likely ignore large swaths of their employment contracts as they will no longer have the perceived force of law behind them, including some passages that are legal, and the burden of proof will suddenly be on the employer to convince the employee that those parts of the contract are legal in order for the contract to get the respect it deserves....
I bought a Toyota Rav4. The warranty was cheap enough that it paled in comparison with the number of repairs my previous vehicle needed in that range of mileage. Part of that was probably my choice of vehicles, though. Apparently vans and minivans are designed to last about 30,000 miles. Well, the Ford dealer here said I should think about buying a new vehicle at 80,000 miles or at least having the engine rebuilt. Translation: we're too clueless to ifind and repair a simple coolant leak. Took them five days to find the split metal tube inside the intake manifold. I'll walk before I ever let that dealer touch any vehicle I own again, but that's a long story.
Basically, I had a horrible experience with a Ford Windstar in which a design defect in the engine caused me to spend an entire day tearing down the intake manifold and replacing all the seals, replacing one valve cover, flushing out the EGR hose, and cleaning pounds of oily gunk from the inside of the intake manifold.... I've also split a metal high pressure water line just below the intake manifold, had clogged vacuum lines just above 30,000 miles (which, BTW, was actually the first symptom of the design defect that I fixed at 60k which the ultra-sleazy Ford dealer KNEW ABOUT at the time and neither bothered to fix nor inform me about. Had I taken it to a competent Ford dealer, I'm told Ford actually would have eaten the parts cost that close to the end of the warranty period because the design flaw was well known and well documented at the time....
There have also been dozens of other problems with the vehicle (flaky rear air conditioner switch causes the rear air to randomly come on when it is switched off, left turn signal becomes a right signal instead of resetting when you turn the wheel, key switch randomly turns interior lights on, low grinding sound when I turn the wheels at low speed caused by some rubber hood rubbing under there), each of which the dealer seems to want $1500 just to look at, most of which I simply lived with because the vehicle was out of warranty before it started falling apart. It has paint peeling on the door. I've had the transmission rebuilt, the starter plate replaced (they noticed it was pretty much shattered when they dropped the transmission), and experienced... two or maybe three blowouts, and I'm still not up to 100,000 miles.
Before that, I drove a Chevy van whose fuel line clogged up once, which had constant problems with water in the fuel (at least once a year) due to an improperly designed fuel filler, that had some sort of ignition module failure, and whose paint fell off in sheets. Oh, and the rear air conditioner freon line ruptured. Was there anything else? I can't remember. Seems like it had some weird electrical quirks, but it has been too long for me to remember what they were.
Given how breathtakingly unlucky I've been with new or barely-used vehicles falling apart in the past, getting an extended warranty on the Rav4 seemed like a good idea.:-)
I saw a recent Diebold ATM machine in a semi-crashed state once. IIRC, it was running Windows 2000, but I wouldn't be surprised if the older ones still ran OS/2. Newer ones reportedly run XP. No idea if any of them run Vista yet.
Apple is the only company I've bought an extended warranty from because of this issue.
Likewise. Well, no, I think I extended the warranty on my automobile for pretty much the same reason. Most other stuff is getting cheaper and better with such rapidity that the cost of the extended warranty plus interest is enough to buy you a new one by the time the product fails.:-)
Indeed, something doesn't sit well with me about that explanation....
One might reasonably ask why one would need to run anti-virus software on what should be a completely isolated network of computers that should never be in any way connected to anything resembling a public network. One might reasonably ask why an antivirus program would interfere with a network connection. One might reasonably ask how the authors of a piece of software could be so inept that they would fail to report such a failure to the operators in an understandable fashion, particularly on something so fundamentally critical to the operation of a democracy.
As much as I believe the adage that one shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence would suffice, the more reports of fundamental flaws in their software I hear, the harder it is for me to conceive of a team of actual software engineers who could be that inept.
Going from digital 480i to digital 480p has relatively little merit. Going from analog TV broadcast resolution of approximately 330x480i to a full 720x480 had merit. The horizontal resolution more than doubled from something entirely subpar to something usable for reasonably large screens.
Just to be fair, the whole "monopoly provider of parts" is true for pretty much any portable product from any company, and really for any consumer product as well. The only place where it isn't true is for things like motherboards on desktop machines where the form factor is standardized and you can substitute off-the-shelf parts. I remember trying to do a repair on a Sony mini-DV camcorder. The power switch was flaky. It still is, though not as badly. Anyway, they wanted IIRC $250 for a small piece of plastic with a power switch and a pushbutton on it. I told them "No thanks. I can buy a new JVC mini-DV camcorder for that," and I did just that. Well, I think it was actually $300, but....:-)
It's basically like car parts. If you can find a third-party part manufacturer that you can get the parts from and/or a company that strips down dead cars for parts, you can get the part for a minimal expense. If you can only buy the factory part, you end up spending... IIRC $15 apiece for a bolt with a rubber sleeve from Ford. Pure comedy.
BTW, for your laptop repair parts, there are companies that strip the things down and sell them for parts. That will usually net you a much lower price than trying to find a part from the manufacturer. If you don't have an extended warranty, shopping around can really save you some bucks. This, of course, assumes that the failure was a fluke and not due to any frequent cause of failures. As always, with "working pull" parts, YMMV.
You're very lucky. Teacher's unions, by contrast, seem to barely boost income by enough to cover the union dues. I've watched as they made very minimal progress on health insurance, which for part time people is nonexistent, so those folks don't get any real benefit from the union at all.
All unions buy you is collective bargaining. If the employer can be bargained with, it's a win. If they can't, then it isn't a win. If they can be bargained with, then generally you would better off negotiating with your boss for a raise or extra time off or whatever, at least from what I've witnessed.
By the time a union becomes so ingrained in the corporate culture that they've made things as seemingly utopian as the long list of things your union provides, they've also usually turned it into a work environment where nobody wants to work out of fear of union grievances for trying something new and attempting to advance in their careers, where there is no real potential for learning new skills, and where lots of dead weight employees are kept around because the union won't let the company cut their jobs, resulting in a poorly run company that barely gets by and eventually lays off a third of its workforce.
Unfortunately, that's pretty typical of union shops. That and people with no potential sitting around doing nothing because the union won't let the employer fire them. The unions have basically shaped the companies operate, setting things up in the least efficient way possible, with specific people dedicated to doing specific tasks and risking getting canned if a person dares step outside the limited bounds of his/her job duties.
One side effect few people notice is that union policies make it nearly impossible for companies to innovate. The best ideas at most companies come from employees thinking outside the box and trying things outside the scope of their duties. Somebody builds some skunkworks project and shows it to somebody and suddenly you have a new product or whatever. In a union shop, as soon as he/she shows it to somebody, he/she is jobless, so nobody takes the risk and those technologies never get built until someone else at some other company thinks of the same ideas.
Agreed. These rules completely defeat the purpose of a laptop bag---to protect the laptop. At best, this makes things slightly better for people who have a laptop sleeve within an outer bag in that they only have to pull out the inner pouch (which usually is fastened with Velco® or similar) rather than pull out the inner pouch, open it, and pull the laptop out of that. It does nothing for any real laptop bags. You aren't going to see me trusting a laptop bag whose strap is held on with those flimsy plastic hooks, held together with flimsy plastic zippers, etc. No way.
As a total dollar amount, sure, the U.S. seems to give a lot. I used to think that was pretty good until I saw the cold, hard math. Total dollars is just not a very interesting metric when you consider how wealthy the U.S. is as a nation. Per capita, the U.S. provides much less disaster relief money than any of the other major world powers, and as a percentage of our GNP, it's even more laughable.
Remember the parable of the widow who gave her two coins in the synagogue. People perceive that we a nation give of our excess while so many others give in spite of their need. It's like a billionaire giving $500 at a charity auction. Even if it is more than all the other people combined, if that was his only donation to any charity, people will still call him stingy. The poor woman who gives the two pennies that would have helped help feed her family... she is the one we should aspire to imitate as a nation.
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Oh. A Verizon customer. :-D
But seriously, the bars tells you the strength of the tower signal as seen by your phone. Your phone's transmitter is much weaker, however, and depends on high gain at the tower to detect the signal. It isn't at all unusual in areas with high reflection (e.g. mountains) to find spots where you can see a slight signal from the tower because of constructive interference from multiple reflections but the tower can't detect your signal. That said, if you're seeing five bars and can't dial out, it likely means the tower doesn't have any free frequency/time slots and the cell company needs to deploy additional towers because of too many users in too small an area. Maybe you could gently encourage them to set up a picocell near some major apartment complex or university or junior high school or whatever to reduce the load on the main tower.
Man, would I be pissed if I ran into that.... :-D
A DMCA takedown notice can't legally be used to go after trademark infringement anyway. The DMCA is about copyrights, not trademarks. Legally speaking, YouTube opens themselves up to civil liability for honoring a takedown notice that does not represent a copyright claim. Now maybe their terms of use protect against that liability, but if I were them, I'd be looking over those terms of use right now....
Personally, I think it would be strangely appropriate to use Arnaud's Bugler's Dream (ideally, John Williams's variant thereof since it is somewhat more bombastic) in a parody fashion superimposed over the massacre. That would warrant a DMCA claim.... If you're going to get a DMCA claim, you might as well go for the big one.
It has been misattributed to both, but was actually by Rita Mae Brown. (Source: wikiquote.)
You don't need wireless in train stations anyway. Every train system I've seen uses card readers that are in turnstiles mounted to the floor of the station, and thus there's no reason not to use a wired connection there. Worst case is wire up a BPL/PLC setup if they don't already have some sort of data connection to the turnstiles. Or you could always deploy Wi-Fi since you could presumably get a landline data connection to the station somewhere. There's certainly no reason to use cellular connections there.
That theory is comedically easy to disprove. The distance from San Jose, CA to DFW airport is 1,685 miles. At five hours or so for the flight, that comes to on the order of 300 MPH. A bus traveling that speed on land would not make it. The tires would blow out after a few thousand feet at such a speed. Even if you could get around this problem with a new tire design, you'd still have the problem of hitting people and vehicles on the way. And, of course, if there were some elaborate theatrical production outside a plane traveling at such a rate, the people would fly away themselves. Oh, and I would add that with the number of people in and around these two airports, surely someone would have seen these 300 MPH busses if such a story were true.
Then you fall back to reading the potentially incorrect value off the card, store the transaction, and submit it once the network is back up. If you only do that in cases where the network is unreachable, though, the benefit to hacking the card is at best a single fare once in a while, and at worst, the computer detecting that the value is substantially higher than expected, followed by three police officers waiting to arrest you at the next subway stop.
Well, chances are if there's a bus route, the phone company will be better off having coverage there anyway. The idea of a picocell is that the phone company can put it up cheaply and will usually agree to do so in exchange for somebody providing a place for them to do so. Most of the cost of cell towers is the land, not the equipment. Getting a picocell tower put up should be easy if you already have a bus stop roof. At least that's the impression I've gotten from various folks who have been involved with getting towers set up. Whether that is really true in practice or not, I couldn't say. In a metro area, though, the number of places where you would have no cell coverage outdoors is likely to be very small.
Chances are, the transit company accidentally publishing the information is not too likely. I hope. Having the number printed on the card is probably a good idea in case the stripe gets wiped, but actually reading a barcode or the numbers below it on the back of a card isn't going to be easy without physical access to the card, at which point the person might as well just rip off the card. Copying it seems more like psycho stalker behavior to make somebody think he/she is going nuts.... :-) That's the rare edge case for which defense is probably not worth the effort you'd spend on it.
About the only easy theft case it doesn't protect against is some unscrupulous worker reading the number off a card as he/she loads it into the hopper of a vending machine. If you want to protect against that, though, all you need is a rub-off strip over the numbers like most modern gift cards have.
The bombing of Dresden may have been primarily an action of the RAF, but there are plenty of sources that say that the USAAF was an active participant and used far less surgical weapons than they normally would, largely in response to poor weather and an unwillingness to miss the target regardless of the collateral damage and casualties that resulted from it.
In addition to that attack and the others I mentioned, don't forget the USAAF firebombing of Tokyo (which killed 100,000) or the bombing of Kobe (which killed approx. 8,841).... Would you like me to continue pointing out cases where the U.S. went fairly blatantly after non-military targets? I suspect with a little research, the list could get damningly long.
By that definition, attacking civilian targets is also a tactic. Are you sure you want to argue that point? It would seem to substantially weaken your argument that military forces and terrorists are dramatically different....
I never said anything about that being the reason the U.S. won against the British. My point was that it was a radically different style of warfare than they were used to, and many would likely have used words like "terrorist" to describe it had the word existed. It was guerilla warfare, which is precisely the same sort of battle tactics that modern terrorist and insurgent groups tend to use. Fortunately for the U.S., the word "terrorist" was not coined for another couple of decades (source: Delaware Criminal Justice Council Terrorism Research).
That's a pretty weak argument. All you need is a laptop with a cellular data connection. If you really have places where you can't get a cell signal, get the cell company to add a picocell at the bus stops or add a Wi-Fi hot spot. Odds are you won't have to add too many of them in any major metro area.
If you have access to somebody else's card, yes. Otherwise, if you are able to steal access, your number space is too small. Use a 256-bit number (or 1024-bit if you're really paranoid) and ensure that new numbers are assigned randomly within that space so that your odds of picking a valid number are remarkably close to zero.
Agreed. That would be a pretty silly assertion to make about Afghanistan. Iraq, on the other hand, probably was better off. Granted, the ruler was somewhat despotic, but for the most part, this only served to keep the people in line and prevent the violence we're seeing now that the power structure has collapsed. The power structure's ability to do massive harm had effectively been neutered by previous actions (no-fly zones, weapons inspections, destruction of nerve gas stores, etc.) to such a degree that the true atrocities seemed to have stopped happening, which meant that the nation was rapidly evolving with a stable economy, etc. Had the U.S. left it alone, there's every reason to believe the country would have ended up in something resembling democratic rule after Saddam Hussein's death... without lots of bloodshed, destroyed infrastructure, civilian casualties, etc.
That's certainly true that the soldier did not intend to kill civilians. Thus, from the perspective of someone in the military who sees civilians and combatants as distinct groups, you are correct. From the perspective of someone who sees Americans as the enemy rather than American troops or the American government, however, the soldier and the suicide bomber have identical goals: to do as much harm to the enemy as possible.
For that matter, the U.S. has not always been that concerned about the number of civilian casualties. In WWII, the U.S. obliterated two cities by atomic bomb. You can't do much more to cause civilian deaths than that. And then, there were the fuel-air explosives in the bombing of Dresden. Between the three bombings, the U.S. killed on the order of 150,000 civilians in that war, not even counting any inadvertent deaths from countless surgical strikes that might reasonably be termed collateral damage.
Let's not pull punches here. This is a war, and whether you consider the terrorists' tactics to be legitimate or not, the differences between a terrorist and a soldier are solely a question of whether they act in service to a recognized government body (based on whatever arbitrary rules cause this recognition to take place) and whether they follow whatever arbitrary rules you define as legitimate military behavior---rules that change pretty rapidly and seem to be largely defined by the winner of the war. The British thought the U.S. soldiers were terrorists during the American Revolution because they ignored the traditional rules of war that had been honored up until that point. In the end, either way, soldier or terrorist, good people die in the process, so the only truly good choice is to avoid the war in the first place if at all possible.
Do I think terrorists are evil for targeting civilians? You bet your ass, I do. Do I think they are evil for deliberately attempting to provoke war by attacking a country that has never declared war on them? Doubly so. That doesn't mean I dont see the U.S. military calling them terrorists a case of the pot calling the kettle black, though. Ultimately, both sides are trying to harm their perceived enemy. In the end, the only real difference is that the terrorists have a very warped perception of who their enemy is.
Agreed, but at least the ruling makes it clear that the term is automatically void and the employee need neither sue to have the term declared void nor insist on striking the clause from the contract prior to signing. That should actually have employers more concerned, as it basically means that informed employees will likely ignore large swaths of their employment contracts as they will no longer have the perceived force of law behind them, including some passages that are legal, and the burden of proof will suddenly be on the employer to convince the employee that those parts of the contract are legal in order for the contract to get the respect it deserves....
I bought a Toyota Rav4. The warranty was cheap enough that it paled in comparison with the number of repairs my previous vehicle needed in that range of mileage. Part of that was probably my choice of vehicles, though. Apparently vans and minivans are designed to last about 30,000 miles. Well, the Ford dealer here said I should think about buying a new vehicle at 80,000 miles or at least having the engine rebuilt. Translation: we're too clueless to ifind and repair a simple coolant leak. Took them five days to find the split metal tube inside the intake manifold. I'll walk before I ever let that dealer touch any vehicle I own again, but that's a long story.
Basically, I had a horrible experience with a Ford Windstar in which a design defect in the engine caused me to spend an entire day tearing down the intake manifold and replacing all the seals, replacing one valve cover, flushing out the EGR hose, and cleaning pounds of oily gunk from the inside of the intake manifold.... I've also split a metal high pressure water line just below the intake manifold, had clogged vacuum lines just above 30,000 miles (which, BTW, was actually the first symptom of the design defect that I fixed at 60k which the ultra-sleazy Ford dealer KNEW ABOUT at the time and neither bothered to fix nor inform me about. Had I taken it to a competent Ford dealer, I'm told Ford actually would have eaten the parts cost that close to the end of the warranty period because the design flaw was well known and well documented at the time....
There have also been dozens of other problems with the vehicle (flaky rear air conditioner switch causes the rear air to randomly come on when it is switched off, left turn signal becomes a right signal instead of resetting when you turn the wheel, key switch randomly turns interior lights on, low grinding sound when I turn the wheels at low speed caused by some rubber hood rubbing under there), each of which the dealer seems to want $1500 just to look at, most of which I simply lived with because the vehicle was out of warranty before it started falling apart. It has paint peeling on the door. I've had the transmission rebuilt, the starter plate replaced (they noticed it was pretty much shattered when they dropped the transmission), and experienced... two or maybe three blowouts, and I'm still not up to 100,000 miles.
Before that, I drove a Chevy van whose fuel line clogged up once, which had constant problems with water in the fuel (at least once a year) due to an improperly designed fuel filler, that had some sort of ignition module failure, and whose paint fell off in sheets. Oh, and the rear air conditioner freon line ruptured. Was there anything else? I can't remember. Seems like it had some weird electrical quirks, but it has been too long for me to remember what they were.
Given how breathtakingly unlucky I've been with new or barely-used vehicles falling apart in the past, getting an extended warranty on the Rav4 seemed like a good idea. :-)
I saw a recent Diebold ATM machine in a semi-crashed state once. IIRC, it was running Windows 2000, but I wouldn't be surprised if the older ones still ran OS/2. Newer ones reportedly run XP. No idea if any of them run Vista yet.
Likewise. Well, no, I think I extended the warranty on my automobile for pretty much the same reason. Most other stuff is getting cheaper and better with such rapidity that the cost of the extended warranty plus interest is enough to buy you a new one by the time the product fails. :-)
Indeed, something doesn't sit well with me about that explanation....
One might reasonably ask why one would need to run anti-virus software on what should be a completely isolated network of computers that should never be in any way connected to anything resembling a public network. One might reasonably ask why an antivirus program would interfere with a network connection. One might reasonably ask how the authors of a piece of software could be so inept that they would fail to report such a failure to the operators in an understandable fashion, particularly on something so fundamentally critical to the operation of a democracy.
As much as I believe the adage that one shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence would suffice, the more reports of fundamental flaws in their software I hear, the harder it is for me to conceive of a team of actual software engineers who could be that inept.
If it disrupts time itself, perhaps it will have already happened by now. :-D
Going from digital 480i to digital 480p has relatively little merit. Going from analog TV broadcast resolution of approximately 330x480i to a full 720x480 had merit. The horizontal resolution more than doubled from something entirely subpar to something usable for reasonably large screens.
Just to be fair, the whole "monopoly provider of parts" is true for pretty much any portable product from any company, and really for any consumer product as well. The only place where it isn't true is for things like motherboards on desktop machines where the form factor is standardized and you can substitute off-the-shelf parts. I remember trying to do a repair on a Sony mini-DV camcorder. The power switch was flaky. It still is, though not as badly. Anyway, they wanted IIRC $250 for a small piece of plastic with a power switch and a pushbutton on it. I told them "No thanks. I can buy a new JVC mini-DV camcorder for that," and I did just that. Well, I think it was actually $300, but.... :-)
It's basically like car parts. If you can find a third-party part manufacturer that you can get the parts from and/or a company that strips down dead cars for parts, you can get the part for a minimal expense. If you can only buy the factory part, you end up spending... IIRC $15 apiece for a bolt with a rubber sleeve from Ford. Pure comedy.
BTW, for your laptop repair parts, there are companies that strip the things down and sell them for parts. That will usually net you a much lower price than trying to find a part from the manufacturer. If you don't have an extended warranty, shopping around can really save you some bucks. This, of course, assumes that the failure was a fluke and not due to any frequent cause of failures. As always, with "working pull" parts, YMMV.
You're very lucky. Teacher's unions, by contrast, seem to barely boost income by enough to cover the union dues. I've watched as they made very minimal progress on health insurance, which for part time people is nonexistent, so those folks don't get any real benefit from the union at all.
All unions buy you is collective bargaining. If the employer can be bargained with, it's a win. If they can't, then it isn't a win. If they can be bargained with, then generally you would better off negotiating with your boss for a raise or extra time off or whatever, at least from what I've witnessed.
By the time a union becomes so ingrained in the corporate culture that they've made things as seemingly utopian as the long list of things your union provides, they've also usually turned it into a work environment where nobody wants to work out of fear of union grievances for trying something new and attempting to advance in their careers, where there is no real potential for learning new skills, and where lots of dead weight employees are kept around because the union won't let the company cut their jobs, resulting in a poorly run company that barely gets by and eventually lays off a third of its workforce.
Unfortunately, that's pretty typical of union shops. That and people with no potential sitting around doing nothing because the union won't let the employer fire them. The unions have basically shaped the companies operate, setting things up in the least efficient way possible, with specific people dedicated to doing specific tasks and risking getting canned if a person dares step outside the limited bounds of his/her job duties.
One side effect few people notice is that union policies make it nearly impossible for companies to innovate. The best ideas at most companies come from employees thinking outside the box and trying things outside the scope of their duties. Somebody builds some skunkworks project and shows it to somebody and suddenly you have a new product or whatever. In a union shop, as soon as he/she shows it to somebody, he/she is jobless, so nobody takes the risk and those technologies never get built until someone else at some other company thinks of the same ideas.
Aha! The foot is on the other shoe now!
Wait... what?
:-D
Since that directly contradicts every article I've ever read on the subject, I'm going to have to say [citation needed].
Add an "I" in there and you could make it a complete sentence. Harder to crack that way. :-D
Agreed. These rules completely defeat the purpose of a laptop bag---to protect the laptop. At best, this makes things slightly better for people who have a laptop sleeve within an outer bag in that they only have to pull out the inner pouch (which usually is fastened with Velco® or similar) rather than pull out the inner pouch, open it, and pull the laptop out of that. It does nothing for any real laptop bags. You aren't going to see me trusting a laptop bag whose strap is held on with those flimsy plastic hooks, held together with flimsy plastic zippers, etc. No way.
As a total dollar amount, sure, the U.S. seems to give a lot. I used to think that was pretty good until I saw the cold, hard math. Total dollars is just not a very interesting metric when you consider how wealthy the U.S. is as a nation. Per capita, the U.S. provides much less disaster relief money than any of the other major world powers, and as a percentage of our GNP, it's even more laughable.
Remember the parable of the widow who gave her two coins in the synagogue. People perceive that we a nation give of our excess while so many others give in spite of their need. It's like a billionaire giving $500 at a charity auction. Even if it is more than all the other people combined, if that was his only donation to any charity, people will still call him stingy. The poor woman who gives the two pennies that would have helped help feed her family... she is the one we should aspire to imitate as a nation.