You're leaving out the hour plus in the cab line at McCarran, plus whatever it takes to get to a strip hotel if there's any insanity on the strip. A cab ride from MGM to Caesar's once took 35 minutes because the cops had somebody pulled over at 9 pm.
Depending on the length of stay, I prefer to drive for longer stays up to about 500 miles. The hassle of the drive is greatly offset by the ability to bring more stuff to make my stay more pleasant and the lack of any air travel headaches.
I had to go to Springfield, IL from Minnesota last March. Flights direct to Springfield weren't viable schedule-wise so I flew to St Louis. After the flight cancellation, re-route via Chicago and drive from St. Louis, it was about 45 minutes LONGER than had I just driven from Minneapolis, leaving at the same time I left my house for the airport.
As it happened when I booked the ticket, first class was only $75 more expensive than coach and this gave me the two checked bags I needed free ($100 value), so I took first class. Had I not been in first class, I may have not even been rebooked automatically or as easily.
And it would be of zero use for leftovers, unless you think they're going to put programmable RFID tags in ziploc bags and reusable containers.
Even using another device to manually track them sounds like more work than the reward. It reminds me of recipe database apps -- it's easier to do like my wife does, cut out the recipe from a newspaper or magazine and put it into a sheet protector in a three ring binder.
Even if you had an application that made it easy to enter the data, now you have an app to maintain and the odds are good that its not very cross-platform, either, meaning you may not be able to easily manage the data on a PC if its tablet based or other hassles.
Even with an app, would you bother for just a dollar?
It sounds like meeting up with someone on the train every day to swap tickets sounds like one more thing to deal with in a world of too many one more things to deal with.
There have been stories about the US airline price structure where people find that a plane trip from A to B costs more than a ticket from A to C with a layover in B, and people have bought the ticket from A to B and just not made the leg from B to C.
The airlines were unhappy and I think were threatening or actually refusing to honor the round trip portion of the ticket, regardless of the fact that the capacity from B to A was spoken for and that they saved fuel costs between B and C on both legs of the flight.
I'm sure they had some complex rationale, like maybe competition made the A to C route by itself break even and without making a profit on A to B the entire route lost money, something like that.
But airline fare pricing has always seemed screwball to me.
I kind of wonder if there's a business opportunity in all this.
Create a national chain of airplane rentals and subsidize the cost of obtaining a pilot's license. Encourage the use of rented planes for regional travel. Build a common air fleet of simple to fly, fuel efficient planes with modern materials and avionics.
There's probably a group of wannabe owners and former owners who like to fly and would fly more often and for more utility but can't afford their own planes. Plus existing rentals aren't setup like car rentals and don't promote them for travel. Discounts or credits could be offered for pilots who would fly a "one way" plane back or to its next destination, since some would fly for free because they could.
I would think there would be an unmet aviation need out there.
He just understands the nature of income distribution.
Until he can achieve significant improvements across the board in batteries in terms of capacity, cost and manufacturing efficiency, a Tesla car will be on the wrong side of affordability for the middle class. His cars will not sell and he will lose money.
However, if he targets the upper end of the spectrum, people who are able to spend $50-80,000, he has to offer them an SUV choice in order to not lose sales to people who don't want a sedan.
It's like that with anything anymore. Marginally expensive durable goods that used to be targeted at the middle class no longer find a strong market there because there's not enough income.
It's a generalization. Some ski towns are at about a mile elevation, some more like 3000 feet, at least in the mountains. The base at Arapahoe Basin is 10,780 feet, peak is over 13,000 feet.
New England is a different beast and probably relies even more on snow making than mountain resorts.
It's almost believable depending on sales volume and what's considered a non-slave wage and how many get the extra money.
A cursory Google search showed that Samsung sold 40 million Galaxy S4s. The phone was introduced in March 2013, so if you figure 50 million units in a year, that's $200 million dollars in annual salary to disburse. If the number of affected workers is 10,000, that's $20,000 in supplemental pay.
That doesn't seem totally unbelievable, especially considering $20,000 per year in salary is probably a very livable wage in third world countries.
But you need the sales volume to make it work at $4. If you only sold a million units you'd need to raise the price much higher which might not be sustainable.
In my experience this is true of most ski areas in the US, too.
The "town" the ski area is located in is much lower than the ski area base. By the time you get to the top of the ski area you're 5000 or more feet above the town and the weather is much different.
In town, it can be high 30s/low 40s (deg. F) and at the top of the ski area it's 15F.
I think the snowmaking observation is a little overblown. I think before the widespread adoption of snowmaking, skiing was always weather dependent. You simply didn't do much downhill skiing until mid-late January until the snow depths were enough to cover the mountain hazards and if it was a year with less snowfall, the season didn't go as long because there wasn't a man-made base.
Once skiing became a big business, snowmaking became a much bigger deal because resorts wanted to start the season in late November (American Thanksgiving holiday) and go until early April (common American 'spring break'). These goals, especially early opening, are hard to achieve without snow making.
Even in Minnesota our biggest ski area, Lutsen, was only about half open when I was there at Christmas and this is a place that's often just too cold to ski comfortably (it was -12 F at 6 AM the day we skied, high was maybe 5 that day).
It sounds very much like Stalin-style mass industrialism where massive resources are thrown at something to accomplish it. Usually it's done regardless of cost and almost seems to be done to demonstrate ability and capability more than the intrinsic value of what's being done.
One big problem with many 401ks are the crummy investment options. I worked for a small company whose 401k investment options were those offered by the company that managed the fund. Crap returns, high overhead.
The more flexible idea is to have the complete system you'd normally image simply be read only under normal circumstances and only writable permanently under special circumstances.
Somebody posted a link to "Deep Freeze" which does this, but there are probably a lot of ways to do this on a desktop PC or through virtual desktops.
My only concern with CIWS is how far out it can track a ground-hugging hypersonic missile. You don't have a lot of time to engage it when you can't see it over the horizon. Even at 60 ft elevation on a ship, the horizon is only 8-9 miles away.
That gives you, what, maybe 5-6 seconds from detection at the horizon to impact. You'd have to have your Vulcan firing 2 seconds after detection to hit it.
I hate the annual kabuki theater of the performance review, with it's empty and meaningless self-assessments and the usual empty criticism ladled on top to make sure the review is 'balanced' (and mostly to be just intimidating enough to dampen any expectation of a salary increase).
The once a year part is annoying as well, since anything good you've done that wasn't last week has been pushed off the stack. It'd be much better to have more often candid discussions, whether they were regular or based around projects or project milestones where some good could come of them.
So many devices phone home when you try to set them up or flash them to verify the device or software that the lack of an IMEI number doesn't seem like a problem. It would take vendor desire to opt in for wifi only devices, and maybe they just wouldn't bother if the device was from a family that had no cellular option at all.
But AFAIK, Apple phones home before you can flash a wifi-only iPad or iPodTouch. I was setting up an old iPhone 4 as an iPod only (no cell service) and I had to have a SIM inserted, too, even though the SIM I used was deactivated and invalid. But these devices all have cellular models in their product families, so it's not hard to see a vendor S/N match block list in addition to an IMEI block list, too.
Didn't the State Department issue some kind of data security warning, too?
Given the shadowy nexus of Russian organized crime and the intelligence services coupled with the security applied against the "terrorist" threat and the the opportunity to eavesdrop on a large amount of visiting dignitaries, it doesn't seem at all surprising that there would be a high threat environment.
I would think that you would expect your data connections to be sniffed at a minimum and probably attempts to intercept SSL which would be largely effective against most ordinary users. Even HTTP proxying and malware injection doesn't seem unlikely.
I'd be less inclined to think that every machine would be subject to full-scale port scans and intrusion attempts, just from a resource perspective.
I've been told by a police officer who I know personally that much of the value behind speeding stops isn't speed enforcement or even impacting speeding generally, it's the chance to "interview" the motorist, look around at what's visible in their car, run their ID through the computer. Basically look to see if there's anything they can possibly use against you for an arrest of any kind.
It's kind of like running a roadblock.
If speed traps were about safety, the locations of speed traps would be places statistically correlated with high levels of accidents, especially those related to speeding. Instead, speed traps end up in places where it's easy to speed, such as at the end of long downhill sections or wide-open areas with good road conditions.
I'm growing more of the opinion that UI design isn't really about any kind of improvement in usability.
I think it serves two purposes. The first is simply fashion-oriented -- showing that they "look" up to date and modern.
The second is really to disorient people enough that users no longer drive their own interest or usage out of the site but instead but instead through obfuscation, feature changes, etc, the people who control the site basically manipulate you into using the site they want, which basically means seeing more ads in most cases.
As for a Slashdot redesign? In a full web browser its not bad, but I've never understood why a tech site could be so awful for so long on mobile. On a tablet its manageable, on a phone it's not and I just don't get that, unless it's one of those political things, like the people who make code decisions are just angry FOSS users who refuse to accommodate anything that doesn't pass some litmus test.
The real answer may just be a horrific tangle of Perl dating from the 1990s that just can't accommodate mobile.
It's kind of funny that VMware seems to be pushing for less dependence on Windows, yet I think you need flash in your browser even if you want to use the web client that's part of the linux-based appliance.
Or really just like desktops. Most server workloads in most places haven't grown fast enough to make 3 year old hardware unusable and this has been true for a while, which is why you have seen virtualization grow so much. Now not only can you put multiple VMs on a box, the CPU is 'good enough' for past the old 3 year benchmark, too.
The other (and often more urgent) need to replace systems was outstripping internal storage. Now that storage is externalized onto SANs in even smaller organizations, mostly thanks to virtualization, that reason is gone too -- you expand your SAN storage instead of the whole server.
I can see why from a money standpoint HP wants to do this, but I wonder how much they will really benefit. I don't see a ton of BIOS issues with VMware on 3-5 year old HP servers.
I suspect it would take some kind of omnibus bill which repealed all the various laws which criminalize marijuana in different ways.
For some reason, I don't think congress was smart enough to define a macro in drug legislation that just says "controlled substances" and once you remove marijuana from the list of controlled substances, it's no longer illegal. I'm sure there are plenty of laws referring to controlled substances, too, but plenty of specific legislation.
The gist is that management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and if they know of a better way to make money for the shareholders, their obligation is to do just that.
Withholding that from shareholders and using that information to enrich themselves violates this duty.
I don't understand what role 'taking the company private' plays in their restructuring plans or why it couldn't be accomplished as a public company.
Slashdot Mirror
You're leaving out the hour plus in the cab line at McCarran, plus whatever it takes to get to a strip hotel if there's any insanity on the strip. A cab ride from MGM to Caesar's once took 35 minutes because the cops had somebody pulled over at 9 pm.
The best aphorism I've ever heard for this was that "Some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
Depending on the length of stay, I prefer to drive for longer stays up to about 500 miles. The hassle of the drive is greatly offset by the ability to bring more stuff to make my stay more pleasant and the lack of any air travel headaches.
I had to go to Springfield, IL from Minnesota last March. Flights direct to Springfield weren't viable schedule-wise so I flew to St Louis. After the flight cancellation, re-route via Chicago and drive from St. Louis, it was about 45 minutes LONGER than had I just driven from Minneapolis, leaving at the same time I left my house for the airport.
As it happened when I booked the ticket, first class was only $75 more expensive than coach and this gave me the two checked bags I needed free ($100 value), so I took first class. Had I not been in first class, I may have not even been rebooked automatically or as easily.
And it would be of zero use for leftovers, unless you think they're going to put programmable RFID tags in ziploc bags and reusable containers.
Even using another device to manually track them sounds like more work than the reward. It reminds me of recipe database apps -- it's easier to do like my wife does, cut out the recipe from a newspaper or magazine and put it into a sheet protector in a three ring binder.
Even if you had an application that made it easy to enter the data, now you have an app to maintain and the odds are good that its not very cross-platform, either, meaning you may not be able to easily manage the data on a PC if its tablet based or other hassles.
Even with an app, would you bother for just a dollar?
It sounds like meeting up with someone on the train every day to swap tickets sounds like one more thing to deal with in a world of too many one more things to deal with.
There have been stories about the US airline price structure where people find that a plane trip from A to B costs more than a ticket from A to C with a layover in B, and people have bought the ticket from A to B and just not made the leg from B to C.
The airlines were unhappy and I think were threatening or actually refusing to honor the round trip portion of the ticket, regardless of the fact that the capacity from B to A was spoken for and that they saved fuel costs between B and C on both legs of the flight.
I'm sure they had some complex rationale, like maybe competition made the A to C route by itself break even and without making a profit on A to B the entire route lost money, something like that.
But airline fare pricing has always seemed screwball to me.
I kind of wonder if there's a business opportunity in all this.
Create a national chain of airplane rentals and subsidize the cost of obtaining a pilot's license. Encourage the use of rented planes for regional travel. Build a common air fleet of simple to fly, fuel efficient planes with modern materials and avionics.
There's probably a group of wannabe owners and former owners who like to fly and would fly more often and for more utility but can't afford their own planes. Plus existing rentals aren't setup like car rentals and don't promote them for travel. Discounts or credits could be offered for pilots who would fly a "one way" plane back or to its next destination, since some would fly for free because they could.
I would think there would be an unmet aviation need out there.
He just understands the nature of income distribution.
Until he can achieve significant improvements across the board in batteries in terms of capacity, cost and manufacturing efficiency, a Tesla car will be on the wrong side of affordability for the middle class. His cars will not sell and he will lose money.
However, if he targets the upper end of the spectrum, people who are able to spend $50-80,000, he has to offer them an SUV choice in order to not lose sales to people who don't want a sedan.
It's like that with anything anymore. Marginally expensive durable goods that used to be targeted at the middle class no longer find a strong market there because there's not enough income.
It's a generalization. Some ski towns are at about a mile elevation, some more like 3000 feet, at least in the mountains. The base at Arapahoe Basin is 10,780 feet, peak is over 13,000 feet.
New England is a different beast and probably relies even more on snow making than mountain resorts.
It's almost believable depending on sales volume and what's considered a non-slave wage and how many get the extra money.
A cursory Google search showed that Samsung sold 40 million Galaxy S4s. The phone was introduced in March 2013, so if you figure 50 million units in a year, that's $200 million dollars in annual salary to disburse. If the number of affected workers is 10,000, that's $20,000 in supplemental pay.
That doesn't seem totally unbelievable, especially considering $20,000 per year in salary is probably a very livable wage in third world countries.
But you need the sales volume to make it work at $4. If you only sold a million units you'd need to raise the price much higher which might not be sustainable.
Similar to "Repo Men".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10...
In my experience this is true of most ski areas in the US, too.
The "town" the ski area is located in is much lower than the ski area base. By the time you get to the top of the ski area you're 5000 or more feet above the town and the weather is much different.
In town, it can be high 30s/low 40s (deg. F) and at the top of the ski area it's 15F.
I think the snowmaking observation is a little overblown. I think before the widespread adoption of snowmaking, skiing was always weather dependent. You simply didn't do much downhill skiing until mid-late January until the snow depths were enough to cover the mountain hazards and if it was a year with less snowfall, the season didn't go as long because there wasn't a man-made base.
Once skiing became a big business, snowmaking became a much bigger deal because resorts wanted to start the season in late November (American Thanksgiving holiday) and go until early April (common American 'spring break'). These goals, especially early opening, are hard to achieve without snow making.
Even in Minnesota our biggest ski area, Lutsen, was only about half open when I was there at Christmas and this is a place that's often just too cold to ski comfortably (it was -12 F at 6 AM the day we skied, high was maybe 5 that day).
It sounds very much like Stalin-style mass industrialism where massive resources are thrown at something to accomplish it. Usually it's done regardless of cost and almost seems to be done to demonstrate ability and capability more than the intrinsic value of what's being done.
One big problem with many 401ks are the crummy investment options. I worked for a small company whose 401k investment options were those offered by the company that managed the fund. Crap returns, high overhead.
The more flexible idea is to have the complete system you'd normally image simply be read only under normal circumstances and only writable permanently under special circumstances.
Somebody posted a link to "Deep Freeze" which does this, but there are probably a lot of ways to do this on a desktop PC or through virtual desktops.
What's the tracking distance of Phalanx?
My only concern with CIWS is how far out it can track a ground-hugging hypersonic missile. You don't have a lot of time to engage it when you can't see it over the horizon. Even at 60 ft elevation on a ship, the horizon is only 8-9 miles away.
That gives you, what, maybe 5-6 seconds from detection at the horizon to impact. You'd have to have your Vulcan firing 2 seconds after detection to hit it.
This.
I hate the annual kabuki theater of the performance review, with it's empty and meaningless self-assessments and the usual empty criticism ladled on top to make sure the review is 'balanced' (and mostly to be just intimidating enough to dampen any expectation of a salary increase).
The once a year part is annoying as well, since anything good you've done that wasn't last week has been pushed off the stack. It'd be much better to have more often candid discussions, whether they were regular or based around projects or project milestones where some good could come of them.
So many devices phone home when you try to set them up or flash them to verify the device or software that the lack of an IMEI number doesn't seem like a problem. It would take vendor desire to opt in for wifi only devices, and maybe they just wouldn't bother if the device was from a family that had no cellular option at all.
But AFAIK, Apple phones home before you can flash a wifi-only iPad or iPodTouch. I was setting up an old iPhone 4 as an iPod only (no cell service) and I had to have a SIM inserted, too, even though the SIM I used was deactivated and invalid. But these devices all have cellular models in their product families, so it's not hard to see a vendor S/N match block list in addition to an IMEI block list, too.
Didn't the State Department issue some kind of data security warning, too?
Given the shadowy nexus of Russian organized crime and the intelligence services coupled with the security applied against the "terrorist" threat and the the opportunity to eavesdrop on a large amount of visiting dignitaries, it doesn't seem at all surprising that there would be a high threat environment.
I would think that you would expect your data connections to be sniffed at a minimum and probably attempts to intercept SSL which would be largely effective against most ordinary users. Even HTTP proxying and malware injection doesn't seem unlikely.
I'd be less inclined to think that every machine would be subject to full-scale port scans and intrusion attempts, just from a resource perspective.
I've been told by a police officer who I know personally that much of the value behind speeding stops isn't speed enforcement or even impacting speeding generally, it's the chance to "interview" the motorist, look around at what's visible in their car, run their ID through the computer. Basically look to see if there's anything they can possibly use against you for an arrest of any kind.
It's kind of like running a roadblock.
If speed traps were about safety, the locations of speed traps would be places statistically correlated with high levels of accidents, especially those related to speeding. Instead, speed traps end up in places where it's easy to speed, such as at the end of long downhill sections or wide-open areas with good road conditions.
I'm growing more of the opinion that UI design isn't really about any kind of improvement in usability.
I think it serves two purposes. The first is simply fashion-oriented -- showing that they "look" up to date and modern.
The second is really to disorient people enough that users no longer drive their own interest or usage out of the site but instead but instead through obfuscation, feature changes, etc, the people who control the site basically manipulate you into using the site they want, which basically means seeing more ads in most cases.
As for a Slashdot redesign? In a full web browser its not bad, but I've never understood why a tech site could be so awful for so long on mobile. On a tablet its manageable, on a phone it's not and I just don't get that, unless it's one of those political things, like the people who make code decisions are just angry FOSS users who refuse to accommodate anything that doesn't pass some litmus test.
The real answer may just be a horrific tangle of Perl dating from the 1990s that just can't accommodate mobile.
It's kind of funny that VMware seems to be pushing for less dependence on Windows, yet I think you need flash in your browser even if you want to use the web client that's part of the linux-based appliance.
Or really just like desktops. Most server workloads in most places haven't grown fast enough to make 3 year old hardware unusable and this has been true for a while, which is why you have seen virtualization grow so much. Now not only can you put multiple VMs on a box, the CPU is 'good enough' for past the old 3 year benchmark, too.
The other (and often more urgent) need to replace systems was outstripping internal storage. Now that storage is externalized onto SANs in even smaller organizations, mostly thanks to virtualization, that reason is gone too -- you expand your SAN storage instead of the whole server.
I can see why from a money standpoint HP wants to do this, but I wonder how much they will really benefit. I don't see a ton of BIOS issues with VMware on 3-5 year old HP servers.
I suspect it would take some kind of omnibus bill which repealed all the various laws which criminalize marijuana in different ways.
For some reason, I don't think congress was smart enough to define a macro in drug legislation that just says "controlled substances" and once you remove marijuana from the list of controlled substances, it's no longer illegal. I'm sure there are plenty of laws referring to controlled substances, too, but plenty of specific legislation.
Ben Stein had an interesting column objecting to these buyouts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09...
The gist is that management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and if they know of a better way to make money for the shareholders, their obligation is to do just that.
Withholding that from shareholders and using that information to enrich themselves violates this duty.
I don't understand what role 'taking the company private' plays in their restructuring plans or why it couldn't be accomplished as a public company.