I'm fairly certain that the connector on my iphone will crap out way before the phone itself does, I wish there was a magsafe power port either as a usable subset of the connector or a seperate charging port.
As often as an iPhone needs to be charged, I don't see the edged connector lasting very long.
What law requires you to have one? It's probably impossible to get a 'normal' job without one, but what law compells a person to have a SSN?
I remember getting mine when I was 14 to get a part-time job and needed one, not because some law said I had to have one. We got one for our son right after he was born, but I seem to remember the logic of that having something to do with social security benefits depending on when your number was issued, not because he HAD to have one.
The colonies are only annual (at least here in Minnesota where hard freezes prevent perennial colonies), and the overwintered fertilized queens do fly about in the late spring/early summer looking for nesting sites.
So there is (an admittedly small) chance of killing a queen and stopping an entire colony.
The trap I use is passive, the yellow jackets climb in but they can't climb out (dunno how this part works, it looks like they should be able to climb right back out -- but they don't). They then die of dehydration in the trap.
The lure of the trap is a synthetic pheromone that only attracts yellow jackets. You don't get bald-faced (paper) wasps or any type of a honey making bee.
I put the trap up in the spring and bait it with the idea that I might catch a queen and preempt and nuke an entire colony; even if I don't, I figure killing off a few in the spring may limit member colony growth. The bait is kind of expensive so usually after a couple of baitings in the spring I lay off until "yellow jacket season" when catch yields increase and they are more of a pest.
Yellow jackets are protein eaters (other bugs, roadkill). They don't make honey. In the late summer / early fall they lose their normal food sources and they start going after carbohydrates -- sugary soda and pretty much anything on the picnic table.
They're also super aggressive at that time of year and can sting repeatedly. Which is why I hang a yellow jacket trap to kill as many as possible. 10 in the last day!
Is there a practical application for this? Does mechanically peeling tape require less power than producing the same radiation through more conventional means or with simpler materials?
I can appreciate the gee-whiz nature of it but I can't quite figure out what value it has outside of the sciencey aspect of it.
I'm convinced Linux is about the process of Getting It To Work, not about Working With It. I really think that its a hobby unto itself to say you "made it work" without actually getting any substantial use out of it or looking at the dozens and dozens of hours that went into getting even that far.
What they need to develop is some kind of a test (perhaps like a infant's busybox toy) that would provide some quantitative measure of *impairment* -- measuring reaction time, fine & gross motor skills, etc. This way you're not tied to a test for any specific drug, especially when drugs like marijuana can be tested for weeks after consumption without any proof of impairment.
Is a bomb like this actually more effective than precision targeting an underground bunker's entrances/exits, exposed infrastructure intakes, and carpet bombing the surrounding area, including aerial delivery of mines (to inhibit continued egress/ingress, repair, rescue, etc)?
I also wonder if you couldn't deliver some kind of acid or other caustic solution that would eat into a bunker, but I suppose that might not be practical.
That's like saying putting a new coat of paint on the Titanic is making an improvement to passenger shipping. It helps when buying a new, boxed CPU, but how often do you buy a new boxed CPU?
I build all my own desktop PCs, but we're talking maybe 6 or 7 new boxed CPU purchases in the last 10 years. I've easily bought 5x as many accessories (video cards, mice, ad nauseum) and generally speaking unless I really need/want it NOW, I have to skip Microcenter because it will cost me 30% or more, and usually with inferior selection.
Of course none of this is to knock Microcenter as a bad place to shop -- I'm there at least once a week, usually for some item I need for a business client at the last minute and they almost never fail me, even on obscure items like fiber optic patch cables or bigger networking gear you'd never find at Worst Buy.
The Ethernet jack on my 1st gen Intel Macbook went south after 9 months.
The connector was bad because any cable would work as long as it was held with upward tension, but without the tension on the jack would fail.
The Apple store told me they would need the computer for a few days for testing and that if they found something wrong they would fix it, but it would probably be gone for a week or maybe even two.
After a year and a half, my Dell Vostro had power button problem (machine would only turn on without the battery plugged in and ignoring some weird self-test error). I called Dell and had a technician with all the replacement parts AT MY HOUSE at 6:30 PM the next day.
Please don't tell me about how great Apple's service is. I personally would love a MacBook for consulting as I run into Mac stuff often enough that it would help a great deal. But at their prices and with their service, I can't afford to have two Macs so one can go away to the alchemy repair shop for a couple of weeks.
Now if we could only do something about Microcenter's pricing to get it close enough to Newegg's that the tax/shipping is a wash. A little less sloppy merchandising would help, too, but in general without it I'd be lost.
Sherman is better but the enforcement standard is too high.
In this proposed remedy it seems impossible that 4 companies would have identical margins for anything. They may all have HIGH margins, but they couldn't have identical ones, and they would be required to submit detailed costs for explaining their margins, preventing or limiting the ability to somehow have identcal margins.
With the actual margin values non-identical, forcing all the carriers into a single same margin would result in a different end price, thus exposing the consumer to varying price levels.
I don't know what regulator would do it (DOJ Anti-Trust or Commerce), but if the cell phone market is supposed to be competitive, regulators should jump all over the cell carriers when they all engage in the same practice billed at the same rate.
The carriers should be required to provide documentation supporting their pricing and if they all have a similar high margin for a given service (eg, over 20% or something) the regulator should find them "non-competitive" and order them all to cut their price to whatever is considered the minimum baseline margin.
Since a price cut to a specific margin from presumably 4 different cost structures would result 4 different and competitive prices, the market would once more be competitive, and those carriers with higher prices would be forced to cut their actual price to match the carrier whose price was lowest; raising prices would not be allowed for six months or something to prevent raising prices back their old rates right away.
For example, if all the carriers charged $0.20 a minute for SMS, and they submitted documentation showing 100-200% margins on them they would then be forced to cut their prices back to a 5% margin. But since each would have a different cost structure, the price they would be required to charge would be different (since one carrier's 5% margin price might be 2 cents versus anothers 4 cents). NOW you have competition again, as the higher priced carriers would scramble to match the lowest price.
There's no way you can call competitive a market that ends up pricing a good or service at the same price with a massive markup for all of them.
They charge that because idiots like you are willing to pay for it. Evidently you regard SMS as important enough to pay $5 for 100 messages. The fact that it doesn't cost them that much is irrelevant. They are charging what the market will bear. If you think it's overpriced then stop paying for it.
The problem is that we've reached the (unfortunate?) state of affairs where not having SMS can be a significant social and even business limitation.
Saying "Don't buy X" is easy, but in the case where "X" has some unique qualities or enables other secondary benefits (ie, sending SMS in and of itself isn't important, you do it for the social/business relationships it enables) it's not enough to suggest "Don't buy X" you have to also suggest ways in which the alternatives to X can be obtained which provide equivalent benefits.
The problem with SMS is that there really aren't perfect replacements. Email almost works, but only if the recipient has email on their phone (and you do as well). Furthermore, boycotting SMS won't really change carriers SMS policies -- only regulations can do this.
This kind of already happens -- many gun makers claim that their warranties are voided by the use of handloaded ammunition.
They of course have no way of proving this, even if the gun blows up, since its not unheard of for commercial ammunition to be misloaded -- I've had boxes of ammo with half the bullets setback too deep; a half-box you notice, one maybe not and significant deviations from overall length can lead to very dangerous pressure spikes, especially in guns whose chambers are designed for low pressure rounds.
This is the less common way to do it, though -- a friend set off a 10mm Auto round in my.45 with no ill effects. The most common way to nuke a gun is firing a good cartridge after a squib cartridge (one without sufficient power to propel the bullet out barrel, leaving it somewhere in the middle of the barrel) -- this will bulge and even blow barrels, blow out magazines and damage frames as easily as a double charge will (which is often difficult to do without overflowing the case).
Aside from the music syncing issue, has anyone actually used a Pre? I deeply resisted an iPhone for mostly emotional reasons, the on-screen keyboard, and fear of the AT&T network, for a long time but finally broke down three months ago when my Motorola Q became too frustrating to use and my wife also needed a new, non-work related phone.
I had my iPhone 3G for about 2 months when the Pre came out and I must say I wasn't totally impressed. The screen seemed smaller and navigation less intuitive than the iPhone. The other thing that got me was not being able to connect the mail app to Exchange with a self-signed cert (or no cert).
I was a little hesitant when I first handled it, thinking I might have iPhone remorse, but I found the Pre to be far from an iPhone killer.
There needs to be a much more powerful punishment that goes beyond civil punishment (aka fines), because fines just get built into the pricing model and don't hurt.
Like other kinds of white collar crime, there needs to be 100x multipliers for fines plus 20 year mandatory prison sentences. Once a few of these guys get fines that essentially wipe them out forever and send them away for a couple of decades, the urge to cheat will disappear.
In my experience, DBAs and their fellow travelers in the application group like to point their finger at SANs and virtualization and scream about performance, not because the performance isn't adequate but because SANs (and virtualization) threaten their little app/db server empire. When they no longer "need" the direct attached storage, their dedicated boxes get folded into the ESX clusters and they have to slink back into their cubicles and quit being server & networking dilettantes.
During operation, the SSD data is mirrored onto the HDD in the background, or, better yet, the HDD is larger and the most frequently used data is kept on the SSD but you get the whole capacity of the HDD.
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I'm fairly certain that the connector on my iphone will crap out way before the phone itself does, I wish there was a magsafe power port either as a usable subset of the connector or a seperate charging port.
As often as an iPhone needs to be charged, I don't see the edged connector lasting very long.
Even then, why didn't my I need one? I guarantee you he didn't wait until I was 14 to take me as a tax deduction.
What law requires you to have one? It's probably impossible to get a 'normal' job without one, but what law compells a person to have a SSN?
I remember getting mine when I was 14 to get a part-time job and needed one, not because some law said I had to have one. We got one for our son right after he was born, but I seem to remember the logic of that having something to do with social security benefits depending on when your number was issued, not because he HAD to have one.
The colonies are only annual (at least here in Minnesota where hard freezes prevent perennial colonies), and the overwintered fertilized queens do fly about in the late spring/early summer looking for nesting sites.
So there is (an admittedly small) chance of killing a queen and stopping an entire colony.
The trap I use is passive, the yellow jackets climb in but they can't climb out (dunno how this part works, it looks like they should be able to climb right back out -- but they don't). They then die of dehydration in the trap.
The lure of the trap is a synthetic pheromone that only attracts yellow jackets. You don't get bald-faced (paper) wasps or any type of a honey making bee.
I put the trap up in the spring and bait it with the idea that I might catch a queen and preempt and nuke an entire colony; even if I don't, I figure killing off a few in the spring may limit member colony growth. The bait is kind of expensive so usually after a couple of baitings in the spring I lay off until "yellow jacket season" when catch yields increase and they are more of a pest.
Yellow jackets are protein eaters (other bugs, roadkill). They don't make honey. In the late summer / early fall they lose their normal food sources and they start going after carbohydrates -- sugary soda and pretty much anything on the picnic table.
They're also super aggressive at that time of year and can sting repeatedly. Which is why I hang a yellow jacket trap to kill as many as possible. 10 in the last day!
Is there a practical application for this? Does mechanically peeling tape require less power than producing the same radiation through more conventional means or with simpler materials?
I can appreciate the gee-whiz nature of it but I can't quite figure out what value it has outside of the sciencey aspect of it.
I'm convinced Linux is about the process of Getting It To Work, not about Working With It. I really think that its a hobby unto itself to say you "made it work" without actually getting any substantial use out of it or looking at the dozens and dozens of hours that went into getting even that far.
Except that this doesn't test for intoxication.
What they need to develop is some kind of a test (perhaps like a infant's busybox toy) that would provide some quantitative measure of *impairment* -- measuring reaction time, fine & gross motor skills, etc. This way you're not tied to a test for any specific drug, especially when drugs like marijuana can be tested for weeks after consumption without any proof of impairment.
Is a bomb like this actually more effective than precision targeting an underground bunker's entrances/exits, exposed infrastructure intakes, and carpet bombing the surrounding area, including aerial delivery of mines (to inhibit continued egress/ingress, repair, rescue, etc)?
I also wonder if you couldn't deliver some kind of acid or other caustic solution that would eat into a bunker, but I suppose that might not be practical.
That's like saying putting a new coat of paint on the Titanic is making an improvement to passenger shipping. It helps when buying a new, boxed CPU, but how often do you buy a new boxed CPU?
I build all my own desktop PCs, but we're talking maybe 6 or 7 new boxed CPU purchases in the last 10 years. I've easily bought 5x as many accessories (video cards, mice, ad nauseum) and generally speaking unless I really need/want it NOW, I have to skip Microcenter because it will cost me 30% or more, and usually with inferior selection.
Of course none of this is to knock Microcenter as a bad place to shop -- I'm there at least once a week, usually for some item I need for a business client at the last minute and they almost never fail me, even on obscure items like fiber optic patch cables or bigger networking gear you'd never find at Worst Buy.
The Ethernet jack on my 1st gen Intel Macbook went south after 9 months.
The connector was bad because any cable would work as long as it was held with upward tension, but without the tension on the jack would fail.
The Apple store told me they would need the computer for a few days for testing and that if they found something wrong they would fix it, but it would probably be gone for a week or maybe even two.
After a year and a half, my Dell Vostro had power button problem (machine would only turn on without the battery plugged in and ignoring some weird self-test error). I called Dell and had a technician with all the replacement parts AT MY HOUSE at 6:30 PM the next day.
Please don't tell me about how great Apple's service is. I personally would love a MacBook for consulting as I run into Mac stuff often enough that it would help a great deal. But at their prices and with their service, I can't afford to have two Macs so one can go away to the alchemy repair shop for a couple of weeks.
Now if we could only do something about Microcenter's pricing to get it close enough to Newegg's that the tax/shipping is a wash. A little less sloppy merchandising would help, too, but in general without it I'd be lost.
Sherman is better but the enforcement standard is too high.
In this proposed remedy it seems impossible that 4 companies would have identical margins for anything. They may all have HIGH margins, but they couldn't have identical ones, and they would be required to submit detailed costs for explaining their margins, preventing or limiting the ability to somehow have identcal margins.
With the actual margin values non-identical, forcing all the carriers into a single same margin would result in a different end price, thus exposing the consumer to varying price levels.
I don't know what regulator would do it (DOJ Anti-Trust or Commerce), but if the cell phone market is supposed to be competitive, regulators should jump all over the cell carriers when they all engage in the same practice billed at the same rate.
The carriers should be required to provide documentation supporting their pricing and if they all have a similar high margin for a given service (eg, over 20% or something) the regulator should find them "non-competitive" and order them all to cut their price to whatever is considered the minimum baseline margin.
Since a price cut to a specific margin from presumably 4 different cost structures would result 4 different and competitive prices, the market would once more be competitive, and those carriers with higher prices would be forced to cut their actual price to match the carrier whose price was lowest; raising prices would not be allowed for six months or something to prevent raising prices back their old rates right away.
For example, if all the carriers charged $0.20 a minute for SMS, and they submitted documentation showing 100-200% margins on them they would then be forced to cut their prices back to a 5% margin. But since each would have a different cost structure, the price they would be required to charge would be different (since one carrier's 5% margin price might be 2 cents versus anothers 4 cents). NOW you have competition again, as the higher priced carriers would scramble to match the lowest price.
There's no way you can call competitive a market that ends up pricing a good or service at the same price with a massive markup for all of them.
They charge that because idiots like you are willing to pay for it. Evidently you regard SMS as important enough to pay $5 for 100 messages. The fact that it doesn't cost them that much is irrelevant. They are charging what the market will bear. If you think it's overpriced then stop paying for it.
The problem is that we've reached the (unfortunate?) state of affairs where not having SMS can be a significant social and even business limitation.
Saying "Don't buy X" is easy, but in the case where "X" has some unique qualities or enables other secondary benefits (ie, sending SMS in and of itself isn't important, you do it for the social/business relationships it enables) it's not enough to suggest "Don't buy X" you have to also suggest ways in which the alternatives to X can be obtained which provide equivalent benefits.
The problem with SMS is that there really aren't perfect replacements. Email almost works, but only if the recipient has email on their phone (and you do as well). Furthermore, boycotting SMS won't really change carriers SMS policies -- only regulations can do this.
But at least its free to see a doctor, so maybe it's a wash.
And the "bad guys" long ago figured out how to use Tracfones and other prepaid systems to evade surveillance.
HBO even made a whole TV series out of it called "The Wire".
This kind of already happens -- many gun makers claim that their warranties are voided by the use of handloaded ammunition.
They of course have no way of proving this, even if the gun blows up, since its not unheard of for commercial ammunition to be misloaded -- I've had boxes of ammo with half the bullets setback too deep; a half-box you notice, one maybe not and significant deviations from overall length can lead to very dangerous pressure spikes, especially in guns whose chambers are designed for low pressure rounds.
This is the less common way to do it, though -- a friend set off a 10mm Auto round in my .45 with no ill effects. The most common way to nuke a gun is firing a good cartridge after a squib cartridge (one without sufficient power to propel the bullet out barrel, leaving it somewhere in the middle of the barrel) -- this will bulge and even blow barrels, blow out magazines and damage frames as easily as a double charge will (which is often difficult to do without overflowing the case).
You'd get away with it more easily if you'd quit arguing with her parents from a roadside motel in the next state..
Aside from the music syncing issue, has anyone actually used a Pre? I deeply resisted an iPhone for mostly emotional reasons, the on-screen keyboard, and fear of the AT&T network, for a long time but finally broke down three months ago when my Motorola Q became too frustrating to use and my wife also needed a new, non-work related phone.
I had my iPhone 3G for about 2 months when the Pre came out and I must say I wasn't totally impressed. The screen seemed smaller and navigation less intuitive than the iPhone. The other thing that got me was not being able to connect the mail app to Exchange with a self-signed cert (or no cert).
I was a little hesitant when I first handled it, thinking I might have iPhone remorse, but I found the Pre to be far from an iPhone killer.
There needs to be a much more powerful punishment that goes beyond civil punishment (aka fines), because fines just get built into the pricing model and don't hurt.
Like other kinds of white collar crime, there needs to be 100x multipliers for fines plus 20 year mandatory prison sentences. Once a few of these guys get fines that essentially wipe them out forever and send them away for a couple of decades, the urge to cheat will disappear.
In my experience, DBAs and their fellow travelers in the application group like to point their finger at SANs and virtualization and scream about performance, not because the performance isn't adequate but because SANs (and virtualization) threaten their little app/db server empire. When they no longer "need" the direct attached storage, their dedicated boxes get folded into the ESX clusters and they have to slink back into their cubicles and quit being server & networking dilettantes.
Part HDD, part SSD?
During operation, the SSD data is mirrored onto the HDD in the background, or, better yet, the HDD is larger and the most frequently used data is kept on the SSD but you get the whole capacity of the HDD.
The problem there is that the hardware vendors walk away from their products so fast and stop releasing updates of any kind for them after six months.