Got news for you - a.22LR *will* kill you. Don't believe me? Volunteer to take a couple in the chest and as you gasp for your last breath, tell us if I was right.
Remember when Reagan got shot? He was minutes from death thanks to a single.22LR round fired from a junk revolver.
I work for a company who maintains a number of large Nortel 81c / CS1000 enterprise phone systems hosting a phones that number in the thousands. The pros easily outnumber the cons. Conversely, as my company gears up for the 21st century - we've migrated our internal telephony system from the Nortel products to Microsoft Lync.
I can tell you that the Nortel phone systems run at 100% uptime. Not 99.999%. 100%. Sure, we'll lose a line card here and there - but that just affects a small number of phones or incoming trunks. The processing cores are redundant, and we have redundant T1 lines coming in for in/out bound calls - and from different carriers. The call quality of the Nortel systems is top-notch. Some of these systems - and the phones they're using - are 20 years old and still running without a hiccup. It has it's own wiring infrastructure - and if the LAN goes down (and you'd be surprised how often that does happen), the phone system stays up. Plus we have extensive DC battery plants to keep them running 8-12 hours - most sites have backup generators though. There's a reason why public safety agencies and utilities still use these systems - their reliability is unmatched and it is a very well engineered product. I've been able to resurrect Nortel products after sitting in flood waters for a few days by rinsing them off and letting them dry out for a couple of days and they *still* work. Plus yeah... I like having a desk phone with a number I give out for business people - and if I really need to be contacted away from work - I'll forward it to my cell phone.
Lync - it's a very neat product. I use it for our internal communications all the time - and it's the number I give out to customers as I can fork calls to both my Lync number and my cell phone (and turn that on or off at will). It has it's share of problems - your LAN goes down, so does Lync. Lync server throws a BSOD, no Lync for you til it reboots. If you have a USB handset, you gotta have a computer up and running. Got a bad internet connection? You'll be lucky if your call goes through. For starters - it's a Microsoft product... and it integrates nicely into your Active Director and Exchange infrastructure... but has it's share of problems inherent in MS products - and there are many interdependencies required to make it all work properly. Servers need to be patched and rebooted routinely (so does the Nortel stuff once in a while to address specific problems - but you do it one inactive core at a time off-hours and the service disruption lasts just a few seconds at most - and you're not doing tons of security patching either). So long as you build sufficient redundancy into a Lync system - these issues can be mitigated. Call quality can be as good as standing next to someone with higher voice bandwidth, or highly compressed incomprehensible garble when you run into bandwidth and latency issues). I get a number of calls that result in dead-air and I gotta call the person back.
Mobile - it comes nowhere near the quality or reliability of a PBX. Call quality ranges from good landline quality so long as you have a good signal and you're not using a shitty Bluetooth earpiece... to just abysmal if you have a poor signal and you're using a shitty Bluetooth earpiece. Good luck relying on it in rural areas, or in parts of an office building that are in effect a Faraday cage. I love my Droid, but it's essentially a handheld computer that you can make calls on - and placing/receiving calls can be a pain when your phone doesn't feel like cooperating because some poorly written app is hogging up all the system resources.
At home I have a regular landline (actually Verizon FiOS now)... the call quality is top-notch and I can use it to dial out with a 56k modem to the PBX's I maintain. Can't do that with "digital phone", or VoIP. Plus if I gotta dial 911 in a hurry, I know where my corded phones are - and I'm not concerned with finding my mobile device, dead batteries, or bad signal strength.
How's blocking ads in your browser any different than:
1. Getting up to take a shit during a commercial break on TV 2. Skipping commercials with a DVR or VCR? 3. Visually ignoring ads in the paper - or tossing aside the ad circulars that come with the paper 4. Turning down the radio in the car or changing stations during commercials 5. Using a SPAM filter for my e-mail client 6. Watching PBS
The biggest reason why I run Firefox with AdBlock Plus isn't so much the visual distraction - but it's the bandwidth and system resources that ads tie up and crashes the browser.
The websites will find ways around the ad blocks, and the ad blocks will find ways to block the ad block blocks... cat and mouse. No different than anti-virus software. Just a matter of staying one step ahead of the other guy.
Personally, I'd be fine with *some* ads... for example, if I'm always talking about guns on Facebook, then show me ads from gun and gun accessory manufacturers. Otherwise, I don't need to see any dick pill ads.
Sure - there's ways around it - encode the ad into the webpage so it's an integral part of the content - not just a pointer to an ad farm. Clever product placement. Co-branding. Etc... etc...
Keep necessities, valuables and irreplaceables. Sell everything else and buy new when you get there. Have copies of your data in two separate places during the move (one in your luggage, one with the stuff that's being moved). We had a gap of several months between selling our house and buying a new one when we moved 2 hours away. For a family of 3, we ended up filling two 10x20 storage units to the ceiling while we stayed with my in-laws for several months. I was surprised how much shit we've accumulated (wife's a bit of a pack rat).
"The things you own end up owning you." - Tyler Durden
So what if I died a thousand deaths You think I'm insane but I have no regrets One more time won't matter no question Suicide is self expression. - Type-O Negative
Our water supply comes from Lake Ontario (which gets it's water from the other 4 Great Lakes in addition to watershed that makes it into Lake Ontario. As a result, I water my lawn like a mother fucker - and it's green - GREEN I tells ya after a hot summer with little precipitation. But people are all into this "water conservation" thing where I live so I'm living on a block of brown lawns because all of the tree huggers and bunny fuckers brainwashed everyone into thinking that using too much water is a bad thing - and as such we're stuck with 1.6 gallon per flush toilets that clog every time I drop a deuce and shower heads that give us a mere trickle of what we should be getting every morning.
But whatever - more water for me. No one wants to live here in upstate NY because it's too cold and snowy in the winter... so they'd rather live in a dry parched desert suburb outside Vegas instead. Dummies.
If you're 22 yrs old and bringing home (and by that I mean your mom and dad's home since most college grads these days wouldn't know how to sign an apartment least if their live depended on it) $25,000 USD a year - and you can't make ends meet - then you're obviously a dumb fucking dummy who can't balance a checkbook and learn to live within your means.
With that - you can still rent a small apartment, pay insurance on the used Toyota mom and dad handed down to you, eat 3 decent meals a day and still take your girlfriend out to Applebees for dinner once a month on an Apple Store salary.
Most Apple Store customers know what they want, did their homework, and all they need is someone to swipe their credit card and hand them their new iWhatever. You can pay someone minimum wage to do that.
Suck it up... young 20-something's aren't cut out for a full-time white collar job making $60k a year.
Otherwise, quit your crummy Apple Store job, wear cheap makeup and women's clothes, and suck dick in an alley for $20 a pop.
What next? Local TV stations making their newscasts pay-per-view events? But even the newscasts have a good degree of suck to them... 5 minutes of news, 10 minutes of the weatherman blowing his load in his pants over the weather radar's accuracy, 5 minutes of sports and 10 minutes of ads.
Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc... is just infotainment with a bunch of bobblehead bitches arguing with each other... only Erin Burnett on CNN is worth watching -- but only because I'd love to fuck her. Hard.
Most local news is just regurgitated press-releases anyway. We only get the Sunday paper so the wife can clip her coupons... otherwise, it just gets tossed.
... not by much - but it's still down ~0.5%... putting Zuck down another $91 million.
But, Zuck did take a $2.1 billion hit (on paper) today at closing. I guess Priscilla won't be so horny tonight... no boom-boom for Zuck... his stock loss too beaucoup. I don't feel bad. Tomorrow will probably be even worse. Give it a few months... she'll pump and dump him... and he'll really be paying some Vietnamese hooker with tuberculosis to love him long time.
Advertising in general is a waste of money if the product you're selling just tumbled out of my rectum this morning. I haven't seen an exciting new GM product in years.
It's the scores of travelers who don't know how to travel. They:
* Overpack, including items they're not supposed to bring on board * Cannot navigate simple lines * Do not heed signs, placards and other warnings * Are inconsiderate of other travelers * Become argumentative for not following instructions or hearing what they don't want to hear
As for me, I dress light, pack light, make use of hotel supplied toiletries - although I feel that having to remove my laptop is too much hassle, have ID/boarding pass in hand, and usually the security checkpoint is nothing more than a minor inconvenience and I've never had secondary screening. The longest wait on line was 45 minutes at LAX.
I'll agree that yes, these checkpoints are largely theater, but as any ex-burglar will tell you, they don't like detection. The very risk of being detected is enough to make them look for softer targets. With that, we'll never know how many would-be terrorists have decided hijacking a plane ain't gonna work. Besides, a good number of airline pilots are now packing heat, and a classified number of armed Federal Air Marshals are sitting somewhere on a plane.
With that, the biggest risk to airline safety isn't the wannabe bomber... it's the two bozo's at the controls. The majority of fatal airline disasters are due to pilot error as Colgan Air 3047 in Buffalo and Air France 447 over the Atlantic have highlighted.
As a long-time USAA customer, no surprise it's a good place to work...
As for working in IT... yup, did it for 15 yrs, hated it. Not so much the work (I really liked the work) but the "techies with titles" that are your managers who don't know how to lead and have no people skills - they only know how to manage upward to keep kissing the hand the feeds them while treating their employees like shit. Fuck them.
Did the IT management thing... hated it. Long hours, pay really wasn't that great... lots of vacation time I was too busy to use only to lose it at the end of the year. Your employees hate you and at the same time they'll do whatever it takes to fuck you so they can get promoted into your job. Fuck them - let them have the shitty job.
These days I'm doing field service for Nortel PBX's (81C's, CS1000's, etc...) and leveraging my IT background as we move into unified communications (MS OCS 2007, etc...). LOVE IT. Work from home, have a company car, wear jeans, haven't seen my boss in over a month - and lucky if I talk to him for more than 5 minutes every few weeks. No office politics or bullshit, no backstabbers to watch out for - I just head out every morning and do my job. Company is well established - 50 yrs or so with a large geographical footprint up and down the eastern seaboard and about 300 employees spread across the footprint. Pay is about what I was making as an IT manager, but with 10% of the workload and headaches. Plus I'm hourly, so there's OT and prevailing wage premium when working at a public sector site. Nice thing is my work is a specialty - not many people know how to do it - so I'm no longer competing with 1,000's of unemployed people with MCSE's for a job that pays 30% less than it did 10 yrs ago.
And where I am - the benefits aren't great, but the work is satisfying, many days I'm home by 2:00 and done for the day (but I'm still on call til 5 and paid for the full day) and there's lots of freedom and autonomy.
There's a LORAN station between Rochester and Syracuse in upstate NY - try listening to AM broadcast radio within 10 miles of the facility. Granted, it's in the middle of nowhere on a decommissioned Army depot that once stored several thousand nuclear weapons, but interference is interference.
But really, if LORAN went offline tomorrow, 99.999% of you would never know. How many of you have a LORAN receiver that you use regularly and rely on? I didn't think so. Go on eBay - the smallest handheld unit out there is bigger than the first/\/\otorola "brick" handheld cell phone with a big telescopic antenna for reception... and the installed units require a good size antenna and the unit themselves are a bit bulky as well.
The argument to keep LORAN in operation is as ludicrous as the argument to keep Morse Code as a requirement for ham radio licensing. It's obsolete and has been replaced by more gooder technologies. I have no qualms about using GPS as a primary means of navigation. But on the other hand - I still keep old fashioned laminated dead tree maps in the car, along with navigational charts in the boat and a topo map in the back pack during hikes just in case... just like most pilots keep sectional charts in their planes too.
If you get lost and your GPS (or LORAN for you old-timey types) gets lost, dies, breaks, etc... and you don't have a map to find your way out - well that's your own tough shit I guess.
Dude - there's RoadRunner, Verizon FIOS and your choice of cellular carriers in the Syracuse area. What do you mean there's no broadband in Syracuse unless you're really out in the sticks in like Homer or something???
Need to look at it this way... TV/radio news is "free" so long as you don't mind enduring advertising. Newspapers you can skip over the ads, but with broadcast you can't (unless you time-shift using a DVR and fast forward) - and you're still getting the news, but without the paper. Radio and TV have been doing this for decades. Online is really no different.
I used to get the paper every day... then noticed it got thinner and thinner - with at least 75% of every column inch dedicated to advertising. The local reporting got smaller and smaller - and local newspaper layoffs became a regular event. So really I was paying around $4.00 a week to have what amounted to advertisements with a few AP/Reuters stories and some locally generated content - mostly regurgitated news releases put out by people looking for some press exposure. The AP/Reuters stuff can be found online, and the local press releases are all crap anyway (i.e., local VFW post's ladies auxiliary bake sale), or just more of the obvious ("East Bumfuck residents dig out of snow storm" - really? You mean the snow storm only happened there and no one else in the region knew about it? Well no shit.).
I used to bring the paper to work everyday so I can have something to read at lunch. Then I got a smartphone and lo and behold I could read the news on that instead. The 7-day subscription got shitcanned. Eventually, the Saturday/Sunday subscription eventually lapsed because the in-depth stuff was also available online too.
Yes - there is some local/regional/state stuff that isn't always online - but no matter your news source, you're always going to miss out on something - so you need to diversify your news portfolio so to speak. RSS feeds certainly help. Every city has their local paper and TV/cable news channels online now. PBS stations and the weekly alternative newspapers are also online.
It sounds like the sticker price of the newspaper covers printing and distribution. It's a lot of overhead. Online isn't cheap either (someone has to manage the website, pay for bandwidth, hosting, programming, etc...) but you're not sending an army of people out at 4:00 am each morning to deliver the paper either. I think when you compare dead-tree to online, you'll spend less money going online.
Once they start asking you computer questions, that's when you push them on the floor, fracture their hips, sweet talk them into giving you power of attorney, roll them into the nursing home and walk away forever.
In upstate NY they're transforming the part of the Seneca Army Depot that was once the largest storage site for tactical nuclear weapons into secure data centers. The weapon bunkers are 4 feet thick concrete surrounded by triple barbed wire electric fence. I got a tour of the place while shopping for a disaster recovery facility. Cool stuff...
I'll be home fucking my wife, and the overweight smelly "hamsexuals" will be out circle jerking in a park somewhere because that's all they have to look forward to in life, that and the "hamfest" selling overpriced crap from the backseat of their beat-up Dodge Caravan with 20 antennas on the roof to people riding around in motorized scooters.
Slashdot Mirror
Baby rapers do less time.
10 years for hacking? Oy...
Got news for you - a .22LR *will* kill you. Don't believe me? Volunteer to take a couple in the chest and as you gasp for your last breath, tell us if I was right.
Remember when Reagan got shot? He was minutes from death thanks to a single .22LR round fired from a junk revolver.
I work for a company who maintains a number of large Nortel 81c / CS1000 enterprise phone systems hosting a phones that number in the thousands. The pros easily outnumber the cons. Conversely, as my company gears up for the 21st century - we've migrated our internal telephony system from the Nortel products to Microsoft Lync.
I can tell you that the Nortel phone systems run at 100% uptime. Not 99.999%. 100%. Sure, we'll lose a line card here and there - but that just affects a small number of phones or incoming trunks. The processing cores are redundant, and we have redundant T1 lines coming in for in/out bound calls - and from different carriers. The call quality of the Nortel systems is top-notch. Some of these systems - and the phones they're using - are 20 years old and still running without a hiccup. It has it's own wiring infrastructure - and if the LAN goes down (and you'd be surprised how often that does happen), the phone system stays up. Plus we have extensive DC battery plants to keep them running 8-12 hours - most sites have backup generators though. There's a reason why public safety agencies and utilities still use these systems - their reliability is unmatched and it is a very well engineered product. I've been able to resurrect Nortel products after sitting in flood waters for a few days by rinsing them off and letting them dry out for a couple of days and they *still* work. Plus yeah... I like having a desk phone with a number I give out for business people - and if I really need to be contacted away from work - I'll forward it to my cell phone.
Lync - it's a very neat product. I use it for our internal communications all the time - and it's the number I give out to customers as I can fork calls to both my Lync number and my cell phone (and turn that on or off at will). It has it's share of problems - your LAN goes down, so does Lync. Lync server throws a BSOD, no Lync for you til it reboots. If you have a USB handset, you gotta have a computer up and running. Got a bad internet connection? You'll be lucky if your call goes through. For starters - it's a Microsoft product... and it integrates nicely into your Active Director and Exchange infrastructure... but has it's share of problems inherent in MS products - and there are many interdependencies required to make it all work properly. Servers need to be patched and rebooted routinely (so does the Nortel stuff once in a while to address specific problems - but you do it one inactive core at a time off-hours and the service disruption lasts just a few seconds at most - and you're not doing tons of security patching either). So long as you build sufficient redundancy into a Lync system - these issues can be mitigated. Call quality can be as good as standing next to someone with higher voice bandwidth, or highly compressed incomprehensible garble when you run into bandwidth and latency issues). I get a number of calls that result in dead-air and I gotta call the person back.
Mobile - it comes nowhere near the quality or reliability of a PBX. Call quality ranges from good landline quality so long as you have a good signal and you're not using a shitty Bluetooth earpiece... to just abysmal if you have a poor signal and you're using a shitty Bluetooth earpiece. Good luck relying on it in rural areas, or in parts of an office building that are in effect a Faraday cage. I love my Droid, but it's essentially a handheld computer that you can make calls on - and placing/receiving calls can be a pain when your phone doesn't feel like cooperating because some poorly written app is hogging up all the system resources.
At home I have a regular landline (actually Verizon FiOS now)... the call quality is top-notch and I can use it to dial out with a 56k modem to the PBX's I maintain. Can't do that with "digital phone", or VoIP. Plus if I gotta dial 911 in a hurry, I know where my corded phones are - and I'm not concerned with finding my mobile device, dead batteries, or bad signal strength.
Actually the US has been minting dollar coins since 1794.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_coin_(United_States)
Hang the treasonous little faggot... put the video on WikiLeaks.
How's blocking ads in your browser any different than:
1. Getting up to take a shit during a commercial break on TV
2. Skipping commercials with a DVR or VCR?
3. Visually ignoring ads in the paper - or tossing aside the ad circulars that come with the paper
4. Turning down the radio in the car or changing stations during commercials
5. Using a SPAM filter for my e-mail client
6. Watching PBS
The biggest reason why I run Firefox with AdBlock Plus isn't so much the visual distraction - but it's the bandwidth and system resources that ads tie up and crashes the browser.
The websites will find ways around the ad blocks, and the ad blocks will find ways to block the ad block blocks... cat and mouse. No different than anti-virus software. Just a matter of staying one step ahead of the other guy.
Personally, I'd be fine with *some* ads... for example, if I'm always talking about guns on Facebook, then show me ads from gun and gun accessory manufacturers. Otherwise, I don't need to see any dick pill ads.
Sure - there's ways around it - encode the ad into the webpage so it's an integral part of the content - not just a pointer to an ad farm. Clever product placement. Co-branding. Etc... etc...
They're not putting bullets in the heads of the people running these scams and dumping their corpses in the desert.
"Time to update the Miranda warning to include: 'Anything you Tweet or post can and will be held against you in a court of law'?'""
Um no... seeing how Trayvon Martin is already dead - and he's not the one on trial.
Find those responsible for making said robocalls and slaughter their children while they watch. That'll learn 'em.
Keep necessities, valuables and irreplaceables. Sell everything else and buy new when you get there. Have copies of your data in two separate places during the move (one in your luggage, one with the stuff that's being moved). We had a gap of several months between selling our house and buying a new one when we moved 2 hours away. For a family of 3, we ended up filling two 10x20 storage units to the ceiling while we stayed with my in-laws for several months. I was surprised how much shit we've accumulated (wife's a bit of a pack rat).
"The things you own end up owning you." - Tyler Durden
So what if I died a thousand deaths
You think I'm insane but I have no regrets
One more time won't matter no question
Suicide is self expression.
- Type-O Negative
Our water supply comes from Lake Ontario (which gets it's water from the other 4 Great Lakes in addition to watershed that makes it into Lake Ontario. As a result, I water my lawn like a mother fucker - and it's green - GREEN I tells ya after a hot summer with little precipitation. But people are all into this "water conservation" thing where I live so I'm living on a block of brown lawns because all of the tree huggers and bunny fuckers brainwashed everyone into thinking that using too much water is a bad thing - and as such we're stuck with 1.6 gallon per flush toilets that clog every time I drop a deuce and shower heads that give us a mere trickle of what we should be getting every morning.
But whatever - more water for me. No one wants to live here in upstate NY because it's too cold and snowy in the winter... so they'd rather live in a dry parched desert suburb outside Vegas instead. Dummies.
If you're 22 yrs old and bringing home (and by that I mean your mom and dad's home since most college grads these days wouldn't know how to sign an apartment least if their live depended on it) $25,000 USD a year - and you can't make ends meet - then you're obviously a dumb fucking dummy who can't balance a checkbook and learn to live within your means.
With that - you can still rent a small apartment, pay insurance on the used Toyota mom and dad handed down to you, eat 3 decent meals a day and still take your girlfriend out to Applebees for dinner once a month on an Apple Store salary.
Most Apple Store customers know what they want, did their homework, and all they need is someone to swipe their credit card and hand them their new iWhatever. You can pay someone minimum wage to do that.
Suck it up... young 20-something's aren't cut out for a full-time white collar job making $60k a year.
Otherwise, quit your crummy Apple Store job, wear cheap makeup and women's clothes, and suck dick in an alley for $20 a pop.
What next? Local TV stations making their newscasts pay-per-view events? But even the newscasts have a good degree of suck to them... 5 minutes of news, 10 minutes of the weatherman blowing his load in his pants over the weather radar's accuracy, 5 minutes of sports and 10 minutes of ads.
Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc... is just infotainment with a bunch of bobblehead bitches arguing with each other... only Erin Burnett on CNN is worth watching -- but only because I'd love to fuck her. Hard.
Most local news is just regurgitated press-releases anyway. We only get the Sunday paper so the wife can clip her coupons... otherwise, it just gets tossed.
... not by much - but it's still down ~0.5%... putting Zuck down another $91 million.
But, Zuck did take a $2.1 billion hit (on paper) today at closing. I guess Priscilla won't be so horny tonight... no boom-boom for Zuck... his stock loss too beaucoup. I don't feel bad. Tomorrow will probably be even worse. Give it a few months... she'll pump and dump him... and he'll really be paying some Vietnamese hooker with tuberculosis to love him long time.
Advertising in general is a waste of money if the product you're selling just tumbled out of my rectum this morning. I haven't seen an exciting new GM product in years.
It's the scores of travelers who don't know how to travel. They:
* Overpack, including items they're not supposed to bring on board
* Cannot navigate simple lines
* Do not heed signs, placards and other warnings
* Are inconsiderate of other travelers
* Become argumentative for not following instructions or hearing what they don't want to hear
As for me, I dress light, pack light, make use of hotel supplied toiletries - although I feel that having to remove my laptop is too much hassle, have ID/boarding pass in hand, and usually the security checkpoint is nothing more than a minor inconvenience and I've never had secondary screening. The longest wait on line was 45 minutes at LAX.
I'll agree that yes, these checkpoints are largely theater, but as any ex-burglar will tell you, they don't like detection. The very risk of being detected is enough to make them look for softer targets. With that, we'll never know how many would-be terrorists have decided hijacking a plane ain't gonna work. Besides, a good number of airline pilots are now packing heat, and a classified number of armed Federal Air Marshals are sitting somewhere on a plane.
With that, the biggest risk to airline safety isn't the wannabe bomber... it's the two bozo's at the controls. The majority of fatal airline disasters are due to pilot error as Colgan Air 3047 in Buffalo and Air France 447 over the Atlantic have highlighted.
If it makes you feel better, the Seneca LORAN site is no longer in operation.
As a long-time USAA customer, no surprise it's a good place to work...
As for working in IT... yup, did it for 15 yrs, hated it. Not so much the work (I really liked the work) but the "techies with titles" that are your managers who don't know how to lead and have no people skills - they only know how to manage upward to keep kissing the hand the feeds them while treating their employees like shit. Fuck them.
Did the IT management thing... hated it. Long hours, pay really wasn't that great... lots of vacation time I was too busy to use only to lose it at the end of the year. Your employees hate you and at the same time they'll do whatever it takes to fuck you so they can get promoted into your job. Fuck them - let them have the shitty job.
These days I'm doing field service for Nortel PBX's (81C's, CS1000's, etc...) and leveraging my IT background as we move into unified communications (MS OCS 2007, etc...). LOVE IT. Work from home, have a company car, wear jeans, haven't seen my boss in over a month - and lucky if I talk to him for more than 5 minutes every few weeks. No office politics or bullshit, no backstabbers to watch out for - I just head out every morning and do my job. Company is well established - 50 yrs or so with a large geographical footprint up and down the eastern seaboard and about 300 employees spread across the footprint. Pay is about what I was making as an IT manager, but with 10% of the workload and headaches. Plus I'm hourly, so there's OT and prevailing wage premium when working at a public sector site. Nice thing is my work is a specialty - not many people know how to do it - so I'm no longer competing with 1,000's of unemployed people with MCSE's for a job that pays 30% less than it did 10 yrs ago.
And where I am - the benefits aren't great, but the work is satisfying, many days I'm home by 2:00 and done for the day (but I'm still on call til 5 and paid for the full day) and there's lots of freedom and autonomy.
There's a LORAN station between Rochester and Syracuse in upstate NY - try listening to AM broadcast radio within 10 miles of the facility. Granted, it's in the middle of nowhere on a decommissioned Army depot that once stored several thousand nuclear weapons, but interference is interference.
But really, if LORAN went offline tomorrow, 99.999% of you would never know. How many of you have a LORAN receiver that you use regularly and rely on? I didn't think so. Go on eBay - the smallest handheld unit out there is bigger than the first /\/\otorola "brick" handheld cell phone with a big telescopic antenna for reception... and the installed units require a good size antenna and the unit themselves are a bit bulky as well.
The argument to keep LORAN in operation is as ludicrous as the argument to keep Morse Code as a requirement for ham radio licensing. It's obsolete and has been replaced by more gooder technologies. I have no qualms about using GPS as a primary means of navigation. But on the other hand - I still keep old fashioned laminated dead tree maps in the car, along with navigational charts in the boat and a topo map in the back pack during hikes just in case... just like most pilots keep sectional charts in their planes too.
If you get lost and your GPS (or LORAN for you old-timey types) gets lost, dies, breaks, etc... and you don't have a map to find your way out - well that's your own tough shit I guess.
Dude - there's RoadRunner, Verizon FIOS and your choice of cellular carriers in the Syracuse area. What do you mean there's no broadband in Syracuse unless you're really out in the sticks in like Homer or something???
Need to look at it this way... TV/radio news is "free" so long as you don't mind enduring advertising. Newspapers you can skip over the ads, but with broadcast you can't (unless you time-shift using a DVR and fast forward) - and you're still getting the news, but without the paper. Radio and TV have been doing this for decades. Online is really no different.
I used to get the paper every day... then noticed it got thinner and thinner - with at least 75% of every column inch dedicated to advertising. The local reporting got smaller and smaller - and local newspaper layoffs became a regular event. So really I was paying around $4.00 a week to have what amounted to advertisements with a few AP/Reuters stories and some locally generated content - mostly regurgitated news releases put out by people looking for some press exposure. The AP/Reuters stuff can be found online, and the local press releases are all crap anyway (i.e., local VFW post's ladies auxiliary bake sale), or just more of the obvious ("East Bumfuck residents dig out of snow storm" - really? You mean the snow storm only happened there and no one else in the region knew about it? Well no shit.).
I used to bring the paper to work everyday so I can have something to read at lunch. Then I got a smartphone and lo and behold I could read the news on that instead. The 7-day subscription got shitcanned. Eventually, the Saturday/Sunday subscription eventually lapsed because the in-depth stuff was also available online too.
Yes - there is some local/regional/state stuff that isn't always online - but no matter your news source, you're always going to miss out on something - so you need to diversify your news portfolio so to speak. RSS feeds certainly help. Every city has their local paper and TV/cable news channels online now. PBS stations and the weekly alternative newspapers are also online.
It sounds like the sticker price of the newspaper covers printing and distribution. It's a lot of overhead. Online isn't cheap either (someone has to manage the website, pay for bandwidth, hosting, programming, etc...) but you're not sending an army of people out at 4:00 am each morning to deliver the paper either. I think when you compare dead-tree to online, you'll spend less money going online.
Once they start asking you computer questions, that's when you push them on the floor, fracture their hips, sweet talk them into giving you power of attorney, roll them into the nursing home and walk away forever.
In upstate NY they're transforming the part of the Seneca Army Depot that was once the largest storage site for tactical nuclear weapons into secure data centers. The weapon bunkers are 4 feet thick concrete surrounded by triple barbed wire electric fence. I got a tour of the place while shopping for a disaster recovery facility. Cool stuff...
I'll be home fucking my wife, and the overweight smelly "hamsexuals" will be out circle jerking in a park somewhere because that's all they have to look forward to in life, that and the "hamfest" selling overpriced crap from the backseat of their beat-up Dodge Caravan with 20 antennas on the roof to people riding around in motorized scooters.