Listen Slashdotters: there is no reason why we humans cannot have a safe, viable nuclear power program. Yes, nuclear energy is dangerous, but we have the science and the engineering know-how to build and manage safe, reliable power plants using nuclear energy.
Well, when I say, “we”, I mean some people. Okay, a very few, highly educated people, and yes, people who might require salaries higher than an electricity utility would pay. And even if they did get the salaries they deserve, these people might find the day-to-day management of a power plant to become supremely boring in the long run, and yearn for something more challenging than what’s available in the outskirts of the country where most nuclear power plants reside.
So, does that leave us with a very big reason why people cannot have a safe, viable nuclear power program? Because there are not that many people talented enough to design and safely operate nuclear power plants, because these same rare and talented people would rather get paid to do something else, and because utility companies would rather pay less educated people less money to operate the machinery they don’t completely understand? (picture: the taxi driver with the check-engine light on: “yeah, it’s been like that”)
This could be sad. Really sad. Realizing the limits of society’s capabilities as being the limits of most people rather than the limits of the few mutants among us who qualify as nuclear engineers. Scott Adams notes in The Dilbert Principle that we are nearly all the idiot beneficiaries of a few mutant smart people who make gadgets that are easy for the rest of us to use. But nuclear power plants can’t be made as safe and disposable as a car, an iPad, or even a table-saw. In a nuclear power plant, little things like a lit check-engine light really matter and have devastating consequences.
In the short term, the problems of safe nuclear power can certainly be solved. The right people with the right talents can be hired and put to work. That’s not the problem. The problem is, can the right people be maintained months and years after routines get boring, cost-cutters start cutting, and discipline erodes as the most talented move on to newer and more exciting things?
Put short, is it inevitable that nuclear power plants will have accidents because it simply isn’t practical to maintain sufficient interest (including money and talent) in them to keep them running safely?
A one seat majority is not a majority so long as there's a filibuster rule. There are still presidential appointees awaiting confirmation because of Republican filibusters. At best, the Senate is more gridlocked than before.
Unless, that is, the politicians start crossing the aisle and working with each other (why start now?)
You're resting on the assumption that all groupings of people are created equal.
Far from it. That is why I did not say one word about voluntary collaborations of people formed for specifically political purposes.
Unions are, for the most part, involuntary groupings formed based on employment or occupation, having no political purpose behind them. No, "collective bargaining" is not a political purpose, it is a commercial one.
Collective bargaining is inherently political. Commerce is regulated by politics, and politics is influenced by commerce. And the power of the state is involved in any dispute between union and labor, e.g., the rights of labor to petition, contract matters, even the matter of obtaining a permit to picket. Before unions had political influence, the government would often come to the aid of companies in conflict with their workers. Think Department of Labor. Think Labor Day. Collective bargaining is nothing if not an exercise of political power.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."
A corporation is not the same as "your money". A corporation is an artificial, legal entity created by a state that has its own assets and its own liability. Most particularly, it can sue, be sued, own property, even go bankrupt, but the assets of the owners of the corporation are protected. Normally, only knowing commissions of fraud or crime are grounds to "break the corporate veil" and give plaintiffs access to an owners personal assets.
This is an extraordinary protection. And has absolutely no constitutional basis (but you're welcome to look for it yourself). Thus, the rights of a corporation are completely arbitrary, created by government and therefore changeable and may be regulated by government for any reason. States like Delaware and South Dakota, for example, are comparably lenient on corporations, thereby to be more attractive as a registration site.
In other words, a person, e.g., you, have the right to express yourself in any way you choose. But if you incorporate, and your corporation makes money, you do NOT inherently have the right to spend your corporate assets in any way you choose. You could, of course, pay yourself a big bonus and then do what you want with it, but there are rules regarding liabilities and your obligations to your co-owners. Throwing a $million birthday bash for your wife with corporate funds is not a good idea.
The abuse comes because one can incorporate anything. Most taxis in New York are owned by a hand-full of corporations. But if a taxi hits you and you sue, you will find yourself suing a tiny nothing-corporation with no assets other than that individual taxi; the assets of the parent corporation will be out of your reach. The same chicanery is applied to politics.
The point is, the rights of a corporation have no constitutional basis. Really. Go and look for some. There is no language in the constitution pertinent to corporations (notice how many times the Constitution expressly says "person"), nor is there any evidence that the Founders considered corporations when framing the document. On the contrary, the matter of corporations was left entirely to the states until late in the 18th Century at the earliest.
No constitutional rights means free to regulate... speech, commerce, anything. And whocan argue that corporate speech isn't targeted, at least ultimately, to making a bigger buck? Hence, Kennedy and the Ro
Oh... it's ending. I agree with the FA that the personal computer (PCs running Windows, Linux, MacOS) are gonna die out.
Slashdotters are bound to disagree with this for the same reason real geeks like me resisted mice back in the 80's. The command-line was the only way, because it was powerful and we had climbed the learning curve. X10 or X11 only had one purpose... more xterms on a bigger screen. We called Macs "MacinToys" because of their substandard hardware, no multi-tasking, and no command-line to get done what you really wanted it to do.
But all the time during early Windows and Macs, there was a feeling that faster hardware would make the GUI more palatable. And our art-school friends used Windows and Macs regardless, in spite of all the drawbacks we command-line geeks were so well aware of.
Fast-forward to today. Just about every Linux distro boots straight to a mouse-based desktop, and all the admin tools have a GUI. The GUI has won. We are happy to spin 90% of our CPU cycles just to paint the screen, because CPU cycles (and RAM! and storage!) are so damned abundant. Macs, Linux, now even Windows comes with a command-line shell, but how often do we actually use it? Really?
But all the other stuff we invested our time learning and mastering, like partitioning, directory structure, networking, defragging, anti-malware, plug-ins, superior 3d-party apps, maintenance, maintenance, all the other stuff we have to do for our grandma to keep her PC working ok are still around. Let's face it ladies, we spend (waste) a lot of time keeping our computers healthy and up-to-date. And we're smug about it.
The future is a computing platform free of all that shit, where all the skills we are so smug about are as obsolete as the command line. That's where Jobs and the iPad are going, and the market for problem-free, geek-free computing is hungry enough to pay a premium for it, even as PC hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, even as we complain about handing control over to Some Corporation. This market is sick and tired of always running to (or paying) people like us for help.
And that's the last frontier, the last bit of value-added left to the computer industry. Intel and the market flourished because MacOS and Windows never ran quite good enough with the CPU and memory available. Now, 3GHz 8-core CPU's with 4 GB RAM are really quite good enough (compare that to your... VAX). But to people who just want to get online or do word processing, there's still a lot of cruft to deal with.
Let's face it... we LIKE that cruft. We LOVE it. But it's also time-consuming, time spent downloading this and configuring that or installing just the right liquid-cooled heat exchanger and on and on until our dream PC is "just right". Jobs and Apple are out to hand out a machine that's "just right" out of the box. And they damn-well don't want third-party plug-ins like Flash i) requiring an extra step before you fully use the Internet, and ii) putting the platform at risk in case Adobe screws something up.
Perfect the turn-key computing device, and Jobs has good reason to believe people will hand over their money for years and years to come.
Because it's the maintenance-free, worry-free, geek-free, turn-the-key experience that Jobs thinks is where the money is. And he's right, just like he was right about the GUI. Geeks like us may want (and pay for) premium hardware, but we'll buy it from Newegg at the cheapest margins possible, and even still, our girlfriends will look up from their iPads with THAT look in their eyes and ask how much longer we're going to need getting our little do-it-urself project to the level Apple is selling out-of-the-box.
"But mine will be better, once I'm done...", we start to explain, thinking how "closed" and "restricted" that iPad is.
Talk to the hand. While she's Facebooking how immature we are to all her iPad friends, we're all hell-bound to end up like that grumpy old COBOL developer: "In my day, we wrote code in ed, one line at a time, 'cause we only had 1024K in the whole damned mainframe for 85 VT-100's across the whole campus... and we LOVED IT!"
All FIVE of them?
If it were just one coax, I would suspect it's stapled. But the OP says he has five coax cables spilling out of his walls... which sounds like a hack-job to me. I think there's hope that at least some of his cables are just flopping around loose in there. Wire-pull!
This article supposes that the merger is principally a business bet against the future of the industry.
That is, Comcast is sitting on wads of cash, and buying NBC/Universal will protect it from...
* Further extortionist increases in cable content carriage fees
* The gradual conversion of cable into dumb pipes that just deliver Internet access and IP-video
FTFA:
Brian Roberts is thinking that he's sick to death of that bastard Bob Iger at Disney holding him up for higher carriage fees on ESPN, et al, every few years. And, before he bought NBC, Brian was sick to death of that bastard Jeff Zucker holding him up for higher fees on CNBC, et al. Etc.
Now, in the future, if anyone does any holding up, Brian Roberts is:
1) going to cash in, too (because now he owns a lot of cable programming), and
2) going to have more leverage in telling Bob Iger, et al, to take a hike.
Here's where it gets really interesting:
Eventually, the current cable TV business is toast. There is NO WAY today's teenagers are going to be shelling out $150 a month to get 500 channels they don't watch when what they do watch is available for free over the Internet. Eventually, therefore, this whole "carriage fee" game is done--or at least radically changed.
But it's going to take a while. At least 10 years.
And all those future adults who are going to be watching TV for free over the Internet in 10 years are still going to need Internet access (or else how are they going to watch?). And Comcast is in a great position to keep providing it.
So there you have it. What could possibly go wrong with that?
There's a really cool article at ArsTechnica describing what can happen when a monopoly controls the information pipeline from source to delivery... in this case, the pipeline was the telegraph network, aka the Victorian Internet.
"Western Union secretly siphoned to AP's [Associated Press] general agent Henry Nash Smith the telegraph correspondence of key Democrats during the struggle. Smith, in turn, relayed this intelligence to the Hayes camp with instructions on how to proceed. On top of that, AP constantly published propaganda supporting the Republican side of the story. Meanwhile, Western Union insisted that it kept "all messages whatsoever . . . strictly private and confidential." Tilden supporters weren't fooled. By the end of the debacle -- [Rutherford] Hayes having won the White House -- they called AP "Hayessociated Press."
Anyway, I would feel better if beleaguered NBC was being bought by a company a little less awful. A typical Comcast "service" center looks like the visitor's lounge at a prison, bullet-proof glass and everything. This is the company that will have editorial control over NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Obviously, those HUNDREDS of homes are promptly paying their protection money.
Chalk it up to a young Queens extortionist who hasn't learned the ropes. Always do it in private, and always make sure the victim knows it will get worse if he goes to the cops.
Nice of Verizon to give him a second chance, though. They must see a great future in him.
IExplorer has one add-in that's worth noting: IE Pro. Includes many features including an ad-blocker, a flash blocker, tab crash recovery, and in-line search borrowed from the Firefox world. And it's free.
Just noting that running IE (like, for that IE-only site you just must use) doesn't leave you completely out of luck.
I'm guessing from the "Ultimate" legend on many of the screenshots, the pricing structure hasn't changed. We can expect to wade through at least 3 differing releases with various capabilities turned on and off, while "Ultimate" is dangled over our heads for over $300.
Windows also can't seem to shake the Windows 2000/95 desktop style. The style in XP seems like a thin skin painted over this 13-year-old design (read: hack). But I thought Vista offered a complete redesign of the display infrastructure. Instead, Vista surprised me that if you don't like Aero's color choices and over-sized widgets, you're only choice is to downgrade to the old Windows 2000 look, which is apparently still around for the ride. My guess is Windows 7 is the same?
It's a little more than luck, though. What Apple did was create confidence: confidence in a new market for a skeptical consumer, a consumer all too often burned by half-baked products that take too much work or patience or tech-savvy to work with. I'm not so much praising Apple as I am dissing the rest of the consumer electronics industry.
Apple made a significant investment in what is typically a very low-profit market. With the iPod, they figured out that there's room out there for something better than just a box with a cable, a CD with an outdated version of Rhapsody on it and a manual that says "good luck".
Most consumer electronics out there have the life span of a fruit fly. Check out the MP3 section of your typical Circuit City or Best Buy, MP3 players hanging in plastic clam-shells, too many models from any one manufacturer to count and who knows whether there will be support for them in 3 mos. This super-low-margin business model has led to very low prices, sure, but it's also done much to suck the life out of fun techie gadgets, certainly for the mass market which doesn't have the patience to nurse these gadgets through their bugs and shortcomings.
If Apple's stuff costs more to support a better infrastructure to support a smaller line of products, so that their products don't feel as disposable as other consumer electronics do, maybe it's worth it. There was a day when a Sony product was rock-solid and could be expected to run really well for years. I'd pay a little more to have that confidence back.
The U.S. Patent Office provides a way to submit an invention where the applicant does not want patent rights, but does want the subject matter published and used as prior art by the PTO just as an actual patent would to prevent future applications from getting patent protection on it.
It's called a Statutory Invention Registration. It's not free. It costs much the same as filing a regular Patent application. But I would think that it carries the greatest weight against any future patent applicants trying to get a patent on your idea.
Be fair... a nuke in a trailer juicing that portable Google supercluster is cause for caution. Anywhere there are neutrons flying around free, there is just cause for concern.
But I agree that way too many thinking people have bought into the Jack Bauer terrorist thing, and way too few thinking people have stood up and called it for the bullsh*t that it is. Maybe because there's a lot of money to be made in playing the "they're out there, and waiting to get us" game.
C'mon, people. The Bushies have had us on Code Orange for 6 years. That's like Def-Con 2, but people can still sneak weapons onto airplanes. The only thing all this terrorist hype has accomplished is make people fight among themselves and elect bad politicians who have nothing better to sell.
The real thing here is why we care. Why we keep going back to these movies, stopping our channel surfing when we see those great visuals, hungry for what they just don't deliver. The Star Wars movies, especially the first one in 1977, did a lot of things right, creating an appetite for more. Great visuals, great orchestral soundtrack, simple story that carries you from one really cool place to another.
This broke down as the films went forward. It became all about a few characters, which weren't very developed anyway, and a plot that just got more hokie and convoluted with each episode. This meant the writing became so much more important. And whoever was behind the script, well, they stink at writing - at first it was just dialog; later it was story, too.
But it wasn't until Jar Jar that even the visuals couldn't save the movie. Half-way through Phantom, when the movie was reduced to nothing but talking (talking about virgin birth and mita-con-whatevers), I realized I didn't care anymore and walked out.
And in the end, even the Force was a disappointment. Vader once said that the Death Star's power to destroy an entire planet was insignificant compared to the power of the Force. Yet Yoda lost every fight he got into... can't even lift himself over that thing he was hanging from in his fight with Palpatine. The rest of the Jedi went out with a whimper.
Lucas made a lot of excuses over the years of the second trilogy, many of them involving kids. I see a colossal movie-making opportunity, when all the resources were put in place to do something incredible, only to fizzle.
Therefore, the only reason I think most people keep watching these movies (and ranting about them) is they use their own imaginations to make up for what could have been.
Anyways, the Comcast posse promptly blew off... It took me.... Everything was like that... they wanted the college to PROVE they were incompetent. They ignored... and insisted that the problem was due to illegal file sharing.... they insisted the college's wiring was faulty... Then they insisted... Finally they admitted... after the college administration threatened to end the contract... When I brought up students having technicians pull a no show, I was told that my peers were exaggerating or lying.
Where do Comcast business-types go to school to learn how to stonewall like this?
This is mad skills! You think they'd put it on their resume? Does it contribute to their family life?
Well, let's get real. This lady was mistreated and ignored. Faced with this kind of obstruction and utterly dismissive disrespect, some kind of escalation is not only understandable, but probably inevitable.
Or else you just give up and do nothing. Because Comcast, or whoever it is, doesn't have to pay attention to you.
If you're going to be sanctimonious, save it for someone who does real harm for no good reason, and not a little old lady, with an impeccable standing in her community BTW, who did nothing more than damage some completely obsolete office equipment to make a point about being, well, unconscionably rude.
I'm glad someone pointed the bullet-proof glass thing. There are plenty of banks that put no glass between tellers and their customers. But I have known 3 cable outfits, in Pittsburgh, NJ, and D.C., all of whom bullet-proof their offices like they expect all the terrorists in Iraq to storm the gates.
For what? A coupla cable boxes?
Seriously, this kind of armor costs money. The only reason they'd spend it is because they EXPECT customers to be furious at them. I mean, there are people at Comcast who discussed this, concluding they need to protect themselves from... well... their customers.
Uhh, they don't see a problem with this? I gotta hint for you cable companies... if you gotta hide from your subscribers behind bullet-proof glass and steel drawers, the problem is YOU.
Of course, maybe Fort Knox security is cheaper than friendly customer service...
Slashdot Mirror
Listen Slashdotters: there is no reason why we humans cannot have a safe, viable nuclear power program. Yes, nuclear energy is dangerous, but we have the science and the engineering know-how to build and manage safe, reliable power plants using nuclear energy.
Well, when I say, “we”, I mean some people. Okay, a very few, highly educated people, and yes, people who might require salaries higher than an electricity utility would pay. And even if they did get the salaries they deserve, these people might find the day-to-day management of a power plant to become supremely boring in the long run, and yearn for something more challenging than what’s available in the outskirts of the country where most nuclear power plants reside.
So, does that leave us with a very big reason why people cannot have a safe, viable nuclear power program? Because there are not that many people talented enough to design and safely operate nuclear power plants, because these same rare and talented people would rather get paid to do something else, and because utility companies would rather pay less educated people less money to operate the machinery they don’t completely understand? (picture: the taxi driver with the check-engine light on: “yeah, it’s been like that”)
This could be sad. Really sad. Realizing the limits of society’s capabilities as being the limits of most people rather than the limits of the few mutants among us who qualify as nuclear engineers. Scott Adams notes in The Dilbert Principle that we are nearly all the idiot beneficiaries of a few mutant smart people who make gadgets that are easy for the rest of us to use. But nuclear power plants can’t be made as safe and disposable as a car, an iPad, or even a table-saw. In a nuclear power plant, little things like a lit check-engine light really matter and have devastating consequences.
In the short term, the problems of safe nuclear power can certainly be solved. The right people with the right talents can be hired and put to work. That’s not the problem. The problem is, can the right people be maintained months and years after routines get boring, cost-cutters start cutting, and discipline erodes as the most talented move on to newer and more exciting things?
Put short, is it inevitable that nuclear power plants will have accidents because it simply isn’t practical to maintain sufficient interest (including money and talent) in them to keep them running safely?
A one seat majority is not a majority so long as there's a filibuster rule. There are still presidential appointees awaiting confirmation because of Republican filibusters. At best, the Senate is more gridlocked than before. Unless, that is, the politicians start crossing the aisle and working with each other (why start now?)
You're resting on the assumption that all groupings of people are created equal.
Far from it. That is why I did not say one word about voluntary collaborations of people formed for specifically political purposes.
Unions are, for the most part, involuntary groupings formed based on employment or occupation, having no political purpose behind them. No, "collective bargaining" is not a political purpose, it is a commercial one.
Collective bargaining is inherently political. Commerce is regulated by politics, and politics is influenced by commerce. And the power of the state is involved in any dispute between union and labor, e.g., the rights of labor to petition, contract matters, even the matter of obtaining a permit to picket. Before unions had political influence, the government would often come to the aid of companies in conflict with their workers. Think Department of Labor. Think Labor Day. Collective bargaining is nothing if not an exercise of political power.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."
A corporation is not the same as "your money". A corporation is an artificial, legal entity created by a state that has its own assets and its own liability. Most particularly, it can sue, be sued, own property, even go bankrupt, but the assets of the owners of the corporation are protected. Normally, only knowing commissions of fraud or crime are grounds to "break the corporate veil" and give plaintiffs access to an owners personal assets.
This is an extraordinary protection. And has absolutely no constitutional basis (but you're welcome to look for it yourself). Thus, the rights of a corporation are completely arbitrary, created by government and therefore changeable and may be regulated by government for any reason. States like Delaware and South Dakota, for example, are comparably lenient on corporations, thereby to be more attractive as a registration site.
In other words, a person, e.g., you, have the right to express yourself in any way you choose. But if you incorporate, and your corporation makes money, you do NOT inherently have the right to spend your corporate assets in any way you choose. You could, of course, pay yourself a big bonus and then do what you want with it, but there are rules regarding liabilities and your obligations to your co-owners. Throwing a $million birthday bash for your wife with corporate funds is not a good idea.
The abuse comes because one can incorporate anything. Most taxis in New York are owned by a hand-full of corporations. But if a taxi hits you and you sue, you will find yourself suing a tiny nothing-corporation with no assets other than that individual taxi; the assets of the parent corporation will be out of your reach. The same chicanery is applied to politics.
The point is, the rights of a corporation have no constitutional basis. Really. Go and look for some. There is no language in the constitution pertinent to corporations (notice how many times the Constitution expressly says "person"), nor is there any evidence that the Founders considered corporations when framing the document. On the contrary, the matter of corporations was left entirely to the states until late in the 18th Century at the earliest.
No constitutional rights means free to regulate... speech, commerce, anything. And whocan argue that corporate speech isn't targeted, at least ultimately, to making a bigger buck? Hence, Kennedy and the Ro
Oh... it's ending. I agree with the FA that the personal computer (PCs running Windows, Linux, MacOS) are gonna die out.
Slashdotters are bound to disagree with this for the same reason real geeks like me resisted mice back in the 80's. The command-line was the only way, because it was powerful and we had climbed the learning curve. X10 or X11 only had one purpose... more xterms on a bigger screen. We called Macs "MacinToys" because of their substandard hardware, no multi-tasking, and no command-line to get done what you really wanted it to do.
But all the time during early Windows and Macs, there was a feeling that faster hardware would make the GUI more palatable. And our art-school friends used Windows and Macs regardless, in spite of all the drawbacks we command-line geeks were so well aware of.
Fast-forward to today. Just about every Linux distro boots straight to a mouse-based desktop, and all the admin tools have a GUI. The GUI has won. We are happy to spin 90% of our CPU cycles just to paint the screen, because CPU cycles (and RAM! and storage!) are so damned abundant. Macs, Linux, now even Windows comes with a command-line shell, but how often do we actually use it? Really?
But all the other stuff we invested our time learning and mastering, like partitioning, directory structure, networking, defragging, anti-malware, plug-ins, superior 3d-party apps, maintenance, maintenance, all the other stuff we have to do for our grandma to keep her PC working ok are still around. Let's face it ladies, we spend (waste) a lot of time keeping our computers healthy and up-to-date. And we're smug about it.
The future is a computing platform free of all that shit, where all the skills we are so smug about are as obsolete as the command line. That's where Jobs and the iPad are going, and the market for problem-free, geek-free computing is hungry enough to pay a premium for it, even as PC hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, even as we complain about handing control over to Some Corporation. This market is sick and tired of always running to (or paying) people like us for help.
And that's the last frontier, the last bit of value-added left to the computer industry. Intel and the market flourished because MacOS and Windows never ran quite good enough with the CPU and memory available. Now, 3GHz 8-core CPU's with 4 GB RAM are really quite good enough (compare that to your... VAX). But to people who just want to get online or do word processing, there's still a lot of cruft to deal with.
Let's face it... we LIKE that cruft. We LOVE it. But it's also time-consuming, time spent downloading this and configuring that or installing just the right liquid-cooled heat exchanger and on and on until our dream PC is "just right". Jobs and Apple are out to hand out a machine that's "just right" out of the box. And they damn-well don't want third-party plug-ins like Flash i) requiring an extra step before you fully use the Internet, and ii) putting the platform at risk in case Adobe screws something up.
Perfect the turn-key computing device, and Jobs has good reason to believe people will hand over their money for years and years to come.
Because it's the maintenance-free, worry-free, geek-free, turn-the-key experience that Jobs thinks is where the money is. And he's right, just like he was right about the GUI. Geeks like us may want (and pay for) premium hardware, but we'll buy it from Newegg at the cheapest margins possible, and even still, our girlfriends will look up from their iPads with THAT look in their eyes and ask how much longer we're going to need getting our little do-it-urself project to the level Apple is selling out-of-the-box.
"But mine will be better, once I'm done...", we start to explain, thinking how "closed" and "restricted" that iPad is.
Talk to the hand. While she's Facebooking how immature we are to all her iPad friends, we're all hell-bound to end up like that grumpy old COBOL developer: "In my day, we wrote code in ed, one line at a time, 'cause we only had 1024K in the whole damned mainframe for 85 VT-100's across the whole campus... and we LOVED IT!"
All FIVE of them?
If it were just one coax, I would suspect it's stapled. But the OP says he has five coax cables spilling out of his walls... which sounds like a hack-job to me. I think there's hope that at least some of his cables are just flopping around loose in there. Wire-pull!
That is, Comcast is sitting on wads of cash, and buying NBC/Universal will protect it from...
FTFA:
Here's where it gets really interesting:
So there you have it. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Anyway, I would feel better if beleaguered NBC was being bought by a company a little less awful. A typical Comcast "service" center looks like the visitor's lounge at a prison, bullet-proof glass and everything. This is the company that will have editorial control over NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Obviously, those HUNDREDS of homes are promptly paying their protection money.
Chalk it up to a young Queens extortionist who hasn't learned the ropes. Always do it in private, and always make sure the victim knows it will get worse if he goes to the cops.
Nice of Verizon to give him a second chance, though. They must see a great future in him.
IExplorer has one add-in that's worth noting: IE Pro. Includes many features including an ad-blocker, a flash blocker, tab crash recovery, and in-line search borrowed from the Firefox world. And it's free.
Just noting that running IE (like, for that IE-only site you just must use) doesn't leave you completely out of luck.
I'm guessing from the "Ultimate" legend on many of the screenshots, the pricing structure hasn't changed. We can expect to wade through at least 3 differing releases with various capabilities turned on and off, while "Ultimate" is dangled over our heads for over $300.
Windows also can't seem to shake the Windows 2000/95 desktop style. The style in XP seems like a thin skin painted over this 13-year-old design (read: hack). But I thought Vista offered a complete redesign of the display infrastructure. Instead, Vista surprised me that if you don't like Aero's color choices and over-sized widgets, you're only choice is to downgrade to the old Windows 2000 look, which is apparently still around for the ride. My guess is Windows 7 is the same?
It's a little more than luck, though. What Apple did was create confidence: confidence in a new market for a skeptical consumer, a consumer all too often burned by half-baked products that take too much work or patience or tech-savvy to work with. I'm not so much praising Apple as I am dissing the rest of the consumer electronics industry.
Apple made a significant investment in what is typically a very low-profit market. With the iPod, they figured out that there's room out there for something better than just a box with a cable, a CD with an outdated version of Rhapsody on it and a manual that says "good luck".
Most consumer electronics out there have the life span of a fruit fly. Check out the MP3 section of your typical Circuit City or Best Buy, MP3 players hanging in plastic clam-shells, too many models from any one manufacturer to count and who knows whether there will be support for them in 3 mos. This super-low-margin business model has led to very low prices, sure, but it's also done much to suck the life out of fun techie gadgets, certainly for the mass market which doesn't have the patience to nurse these gadgets through their bugs and shortcomings.
If Apple's stuff costs more to support a better infrastructure to support a smaller line of products, so that their products don't feel as disposable as other consumer electronics do, maybe it's worth it. There was a day when a Sony product was rock-solid and could be expected to run really well for years. I'd pay a little more to have that confidence back.
Sorry if this comes a little late :|
The U.S. Patent Office provides a way to submit an invention where the applicant does not want patent rights, but does want the subject matter published and used as prior art by the PTO just as an actual patent would to prevent future applications from getting patent protection on it.
It's called a Statutory Invention Registration. It's not free. It costs much the same as filing a regular Patent application. But I would think that it carries the greatest weight against any future patent applicants trying to get a patent on your idea.
Read more about it here, and the fees are here.
Be fair... a nuke in a trailer juicing that portable Google supercluster is cause for caution. Anywhere there are neutrons flying around free, there is just cause for concern.
But I agree that way too many thinking people have bought into the Jack Bauer terrorist thing, and way too few thinking people have stood up and called it for the bullsh*t that it is. Maybe because there's a lot of money to be made in playing the "they're out there, and waiting to get us" game.
C'mon, people. The Bushies have had us on Code Orange for 6 years. That's like Def-Con 2, but people can still sneak weapons onto airplanes. The only thing all this terrorist hype has accomplished is make people fight among themselves and elect bad politicians who have nothing better to sell.
The real thing here is why we care. Why we keep going back to these movies, stopping our channel surfing when we see those great visuals, hungry for what they just don't deliver. The Star Wars movies, especially the first one in 1977, did a lot of things right, creating an appetite for more. Great visuals, great orchestral soundtrack, simple story that carries you from one really cool place to another.
This broke down as the films went forward. It became all about a few characters, which weren't very developed anyway, and a plot that just got more hokie and convoluted with each episode. This meant the writing became so much more important. And whoever was behind the script, well, they stink at writing - at first it was just dialog; later it was story, too.
But it wasn't until Jar Jar that even the visuals couldn't save the movie. Half-way through Phantom, when the movie was reduced to nothing but talking (talking about virgin birth and mita-con-whatevers), I realized I didn't care anymore and walked out.
And in the end, even the Force was a disappointment. Vader once said that the Death Star's power to destroy an entire planet was insignificant compared to the power of the Force. Yet Yoda lost every fight he got into... can't even lift himself over that thing he was hanging from in his fight with Palpatine. The rest of the Jedi went out with a whimper.
Lucas made a lot of excuses over the years of the second trilogy, many of them involving kids. I see a colossal movie-making opportunity, when all the resources were put in place to do something incredible, only to fizzle.
Therefore, the only reason I think most people keep watching these movies (and ranting about them) is they use their own imaginations to make up for what could have been.
Anyways, the Comcast posse promptly blew off... It took me.... Everything was like that... they wanted the college to PROVE they were incompetent. They ignored... and insisted that the problem was due to illegal file sharing.... they insisted the college's wiring was faulty... Then they insisted... Finally they admitted... after the college administration threatened to end the contract...
When I brought up students having technicians pull a no show, I was told that my peers were exaggerating or lying.
Where do Comcast business-types go to school to learn how to stonewall like this?
This is mad skills! You think they'd put it on their resume? Does it contribute to their family life?
Brave Mrs. Shaw and her hammer of justice could be the poster-lady for a new movement of assertive consumers.
Proceeds go to her legal fees, and whatever else her kind heart desires. Shux! I'd buy two (XL, please) and wear 'em with pride!
Well, let's get real. This lady was mistreated and ignored. Faced with this kind of obstruction and utterly dismissive disrespect, some kind of escalation is not only understandable, but probably inevitable.
Or else you just give up and do nothing. Because Comcast, or whoever it is, doesn't have to pay attention to you.
If you're going to be sanctimonious, save it for someone who does real harm for no good reason, and not a little old lady, with an impeccable standing in her community BTW, who did nothing more than damage some completely obsolete office equipment to make a point about being, well, unconscionably rude.
I'm glad someone pointed the bullet-proof glass thing. There are plenty of banks that put no glass between tellers and their customers. But I have known 3 cable outfits, in Pittsburgh, NJ, and D.C., all of whom bullet-proof their offices like they expect all the terrorists in Iraq to storm the gates. For what? A coupla cable boxes? Seriously, this kind of armor costs money. The only reason they'd spend it is because they EXPECT customers to be furious at them. I mean, there are people at Comcast who discussed this, concluding they need to protect themselves from... well... their customers. Uhh, they don't see a problem with this? I gotta hint for you cable companies... if you gotta hide from your subscribers behind bullet-proof glass and steel drawers, the problem is YOU. Of course, maybe Fort Knox security is cheaper than friendly customer service...