You're assuming, though, that the cache flush happens really lazily, instead of the I/O board (raid card, or whatever) doing at top priority as soon as the underlying disk hardware is capable of committing the writes.
I also think the trend is to more cached writes, not fewer of them, and often in ways you can't control the latency of the cached writes (think SANs or other remote storage where not having cached writes would mean huge latency penalties and unusable storage).
The IOC is an organization committed to athletics in the US, Europe and a handful of Asian countries. Elsewhere, membership in the IOC is a perk that the junta/dictator hands out to someone's brother-in-law to take junkets and collect hard currency kickbacks from potential host countries. You expect them to bite the hand that feeds them?
Expecting the IOC as an organization to care about political issues is a waste of time, especially considering the grandiose gold-plated Disneyland that's expected to be built and barely affordable even to the predominantly wealthy host countries. They're just happy someone will host and pay for it.
What's the risk of cache loss, really? I mean, assuming something reasonable like a UPS? And what's the real risk of data loss vs. the vastly improved write performance of write back caching?
I can't remember the last time I chose "write through" as an option, even when there was no battery backing.
Isn't it amazing the crazy things people will do on the side of a mountain?
My wife and I were camping in Colorado and went on a non-technical day hike to an alpine lake @ ~12,000 ft. It was July, but there had been very heavy snows that year and many parts of the trail were still 6 ft or more covered in snow, and the weather was usual mountain variable -- kind of cold when the sun wasn't on you, warm when it was, and of course it changed every five minutes.
On our way up the trail we passed a family with two junior high aged kids. Dad was carrying a fishing pole and a tackle box, the kids had on the usual clothes you'd expect a lower-middle-class kids to be wearing at home -- baskeball-type shorts, tennis shoes, jeans jackets. I think mom might have even had flipflops or very flimsy tennis shoes on and was carrying a paper shopping bag. No half-sensible gear on any of them -- no coats, no backpacks, no sign of at least energy snacks, no water(!).
We made it up to the lake, but it was totally frozen over and when we got up there the weather was turning much darker and colder. We passed them again on the way down and told the ranger station about them. It was a very non-technical hike that should have been low risk other than the trail requiring numerous detours due to snow pack, but I was really worried that these people would at a minimum run the risk of exposure should it rain.
The problem with buying on Craigslist is that you have to be careful where you go and who you buy from and who you sell to.
I've had good experiences selling some items, but I'm always REAL wary of prospective buyers who email you one-line questions like "Where do you live?" It's too easy to have it become a burglars' shopping service, or even if they buy something not terribly expensive, they get a chance to case your house. Buying is a whole other risk category; wandering into a strange house/neighborhood for a deal with a few hundred dollars in your pocket can be risky. There have been several stories about people getting robbed in the local news media.
Personally, my stuff for sale I've kept in the garage and only let the buyers in there and not into the rest of my house. I also holster up my Glock in case something weird were to happen, and I would certainly do the same if I went to buy something.
I'm sure the robberies are more the exception than the rule and if you don't assume there's a great deal on expensive items in the ghetto you won't have problems, but it still gets risky.
Ha! I work for Kaspersky reseller, and while I find it to be much more effective than other products, it still has problems.
The default settings want to do CriticalArea and StartupItem scans when you boot your machine, and this makes the icky Windows-is-slow-at-startup even worse. We've also had a couple of problems with updates crippling the client, and worse, the Exchange product.
The first couple of client problems were with older 6.x clients not taking updates, we updated them to newer application versions and it fixed the updating problem. This summer there was an update that literally crippled the client; Kaspersky came out with a fix, but by that time I'd already just removed and reinstalled.
The Exchange AV product has had bad updates that cause it to shut down store.exe. This is a huge show stopper, naturally, and its happened more than once.
The AdminKit is a hot mess, too.
I'd like to see us do some NOD32 installs, I seem to hear good things about it.
It all makes sense. I would add the ability of someone who can prove theft AND has proof of purchase of their materials be able to TAKE anything missing that matches from a recycling center's inventory, whether they have paid out on it or not. Putting a little more burn on the recycling centers goes a long way towards forcing them to play honest.
I'm always amazed when recycling centers play "Gee, we didn't know it was stolen" when a pair of speed freaks show up in a 1995 Pontiac with 250 lbs of brand new, unused 4/0 wire and claim they want to "recycle" it.
No, I reject your analysis of Somali pirate psychology, just as I reject your obsolete choice in small arms.
These are people who have grown up in a totally lawless and stateless culture and many are likely experienced militiamen. They will not blanch or run when facing small arms fire. Many of them have been drawn on, shot at, and possibly even wounded throughout the course of their entire lives. These are Somalis, not risk-averse Europeans or Americans who make the "safe" choice when faced with danger. These people have chosen boarding large commercial shipping vessels by force of arms on the open seas as a way of life; a few stray rounds from a rifle is not going to alter their motivation one iota.
As for your specific analogy of the.22 pistol and the burglar armed with the Mac-10 -- most law-abiding people expect once you pull a gun on a bad guy, he's going to run. It's true *some* of the time, but many "bad guys" have lived their entire lives in dangerous situations and have had guns pointed at them if not fired at them countless times. Whitey thinking that brandishing his Glock impresses some thug needs to think again.
As for the mechanics of your Elmer Fudd meets Cutty Sark scenerio, who do you think is going to be shooting these rifles? Your typical merchant marine crew? Some peasant out of the Philippines who has done nothing but cook his entire life? A Greek diesel mechanic? They don't hire trigger men to run these ships.
The AK-74 round is even worse than the AK-47 round. The AK-47 round isn't too awful for smaller, thin-skinned game like deer; its ballistics are about on par with the 30-30 Winchester, which has probably taken more deer than any other rifle round. But that presumes you'd be using a longer-barreled rifle like the SKS vs. the AK and using something other than the standard issue ChiCom steel core ammo.
You miss that pirates actually board these vessels. By the time they're within docking range, a.300 Win Mag round is going to go straight through whatever makeshift plating they might have bolted on their little speedboats with no trouble whatsoever.
By the time they are within docking range, the pirates are capable of accurate RPG hits and their AKs are pretty deadly, even by African militia standards of marksmanship. Tactically you do not want them to be able to get within 500 yards of your vessel as it renders the usual small arms (AKs, RPGs, handguns) combat ineffective.
Even if you restrict yourself to docking range engagements, bolt action.300 win mag is still a loser from a cyclic rate (you're going up against a boat full of guys with full-auto AKs) and a dependency on precision aimed fire. At those ranges you would be much better off with semi-auto 7.62x54mm weapons with 4x red dots. Easier to operate, a higher cyclic rate and larger magazine capacities for what you're actually encouraging, a close quarters engagement.
The fact is that nobody fields bolt action rifles for anything other than parades and very specific sniping missions. They require too much precision aimed fire, have inadequate magazine capacity and cyclic rates that are just too low. This isn't to say that getting whacked with a 3000 ft/sec 180gr slug isn't going to do damage inside of 300 yards, but you'll get your hat handed to you even by Somali thugs with AKs.
As for what customs thinks, my guess is they'll either freak over *any* weapons or they're willing to give it a pass. But you may not be able to flag your ship with a Liberian flag or whatever the preferred flag of convenience is or necessarily staff your ship with whatever ethnic flotsam you can find.
The best plan is probably flagging the ship from a real country with actual diplomatic clout and hiring Blackwater or some other mercenary organization as trigger men on board to assuage local customs that you're acting above board and not gun running or whatever their paranoia is.
Deflect this, motherfucker. 300 grain, 3" 12 ga. sabot @ 2000 fps, 3000 ft lbs of muzzle energy.
It may take a couple of them to take the fight out of a Polar or Kodiak bear, but that's not bouncing off a bruin and just leaving him mad. That's knocking a hole the size if your fist into the torso and leaving a gaping wound cavity that will take the fight right out of most anything.
.300 Win Mag is a great sniper round from a scoped rifle, but that's a terrible platform for a maritime engagement. Aimed fire at ranges very likely to be 300m+ on moving targets from a moving platform on open water with a scoped weapon is a substantial challenge for the most gifted marksman, and that's just hitting the enemy vessel!.300 Win Mag would require a magic shot for that round to do any meaningful damage, and the magic is limited to killing a pirate or damaging the boat's propulsion. It's just not enough bullet for the distances involved.
The ideal option is a couple of twin.50 cal machine guns, but a compromise might be a half-dozen guys with Barrett 82s with low-power scopes (4x?) and tracer rounds and a fallback guy with a Javelin missile.
The.50 cal Barretts are semi-auto and with low-power optics and tracers, shooters could get on target and put enough rounds down to possible score hits under the maritime circumstances. And.50 cal hits would matter much more. If you assume a higher hit ratio, it could be expected that even larger fishing vessels might see cumulative damage to superstructures or other structural elements, not to mention engines and personnel.
The Javelin would be a nice option if the Barretts proved ineffective (bigger ship, suicide mission, whatever), since it would effectively stop anything the pirates have, including the larger mother ships the small speedboats depart from.
You're right, but I've had good luck using TivoDesktop and "Direct Show Dump Utility" to transfer programs from my S3 to a PC and get burnable DVDs. If you pay money to the partner DVD software company (Roxio?) you can do it without the hackery of DSDU (which was easy to download and use) and rolling your own DVDs.
Other that, though, you're dead-on. IMHO, Myth needs to be merged with or create their own bootable distribution and be done with it. The fscking around people seem to be willing to do to record the crap on TV boggles my mind; I have a hard time even watching the crap let alone investing hours making my own DVR. I'd much rather spend the $600 or whatever it is for a S3 and a lifetime subscription and be done with it for 5 years or so.
As a fellow subscriber to the NY Times, I agree with assessment about the cheer leading in the NY Times for Obama. I think they managed some positive McCain pieces but I generally felt that throughout the election they were biased in favor of Obama.
That being said, I don't think it stops with Obama -- I think there are a number of issues where the NY Times shows deep editorial bias towards the stereotypically "liberal" position on a number of issues. I've only been a daily reader for about 6 years (I live outside NYC and also read the local paper), so I don't know where/how this began. Part of me thinks its an incidental byproduct of a siege mentality after 8 years of press-hostile conservatism, part of me thinks that its a deliberate attempt to forge and maintain a position as the official liberal newspaper of the U.S., in the model of the generally acknowledged ideological stance of French newspapers (which makes kind of a perverse sense, considering how France is often the intellectual model for disaffected American liberals).
Regardless of the level of bias, I still read & subscribe to the NY Times because no other newspaper offers the level of detailed reporting and feature writing that the NY Times does and their ideological stance is generally easy to detect and doesn't become so obnoxious that it detracts from the factual reporting.
My long-term concern with Obama is that the fawning and desire to see him succeed will lead to weak reporting and failure to follow leads that generate exposes that may undermine his presidency. If this occurs, than we've entered the really ugly and anti-democratic realm of bias better known as propaganda.
In my state, MN, you can use deadly force to stop the commission of a felony in your home. Since burglary is a felony, this works. I think deadly force is a better option -- I'd rather be the only one telling a story via my attorney to the cops and let the crooks rap sheet speak for him.
I agree that if burglary was met with more physical force it might deter it, and I'd be totally in favor of making deadly force a more generous option for homeowners (ie, immunity from civil suits, mandatory restitution for damage to property, significant civil penalties for prosecutors who bring criminal prosecutions when reasonable proof of defense of dwelling exists, the right to use deadly force on your *property* not just in your dwelling, and the right to use deadly force to protect your property [shooting a car thief stealing your car from the driveway], and the OK to shoot a fleeing burglar).
I don't know what kind of a deterrent it would be though, considering how stupid many burglars are, and it may make some of the "career" ones more violent or more prepared to BE violent (again, though, this implies that there's thinking & future planning involved by crooks, as well as the idea that they aren't already prepared to BE violent).
What's worse is that the CNC carved pumpkin is only shown lit up from a distance -- no up close detail or anything. I'd also swear it looks like the lit up CNC carved pumpkin isn't actually a carving but is an image projected onto the pumpkin -- the lighting just doesn't look right, but this is just an impression I don't really have any proof.
Are they just catering to the small percentage of people who sit and tweak their desktops and widget layouts all day long and are constantly looking for something with more of "teh shiny!!1"?
I find it hard to believe that the best and brightest minds, with enough credentials to start their own University, sat around a room and decided "YES! The way to make it easier to use is to CHANGE IT ALL and NULLIFY WHAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS!"
Or is it not the experts in UI design or usability or the developers, but the usual suspect, the parasites from marketing -- who work at MS for the money but go home to a secret room with a wall-size photo of Steve Jobs and a bunch of products from B&O and Apple -- insisiting on newer, shinier, more trendier looks to "go along with" today's newest trends in art, design and fashion?
I just don't get how they decided that changing it all and making it work differently makes it better or easier to use.
Most TOS are so overly broad and restrictive that you almost can't use the site without violating it, and in general it didn't sound if the submitter's violation of the TOS was anything more than technical, and did not result in real harm.
IMHO what your boss wants is maybe not polite or nice but isn't really unethical. It is cheap, though.
I do share your disdain, though, as I have a boss who is equally cheap. Not for resale products we get on a discount for evaluation/testing purposes end up being used to support our internal production network, generally making them unavailable for what they were intended, getting us up to speed on the real thing.
I extract my revenge, though, by bugging the product reps for an additional unit on loan for testing by telling him (on the QT) that my boss is using ours for our internal production network. Sometimes I get the extra loaner in sympathy, sometimes I don't, a couple of times the product rep panicked the boss by telling him that the rep's loaner is in use and we needed to bring our own to a key sales demo (which was impossible without killing our network).
One guy mercilessly badgered the boss over the location of the NFR unit and it was hard not to laugh as the boss stammered and lied badly, since it was hard to explain why it wasn't available when the only people who should be using it were in the same room.
Maybe the story submitter needs to screw the bosses plan by emailing the site maintainers and explaining he doesn't like doing what he's doing and see if the site maintainers will submarine the bosses plan by canceling accounts.
The only thing to remember is that if you lose your job today, good luck finding another for a long, long time.
Have you ever had new windows put in? I only have 14 windows in my entire 2000 sq ft house, but it's like $4-5k every time I want to replace 4 of them. I used Pella which is a very good window, but I can't even fathom what it would cost to get a similar quality window with automation features. My guess is you probably couldn't get a good window (eg, with a 20 year lifetime) that automated without buying standard, and compromising it with automation controls and losing the warranty, and even then your per window costs would be sky-high, something like $2000+ each.
The better solution for what you want is an air-air heat exchanger (most have programmable controls) that would allow you to circulate outside air without necessarily running the A/C compressor. You'd still have to run the furnace blower and the dehumidifier on the heat exchanger, but at least you would cut your energy use by half.
The other option would be a whole-house exhaust fan setup; I would think you could have a thermostatically driven relay control both an intake damper and an exhaust fan with return ducts in all the rooms. Coupled with similar setpoints on the thermostat, you could have ventilation with a minimum of power use (maybe even none if you got into solar or wind-driven roof turbines).
Re-sale is the other thing. Automation is complex, ages poorly and most house buyers don't want it as all they see is an old, complex system that they don't understand and they think will cost them $$$$ to remove. Even automation freaks won't want it, since they'll want their own setup, not yours, or they will want something current.
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You're assuming, though, that the cache flush happens really lazily, instead of the I/O board (raid card, or whatever) doing at top priority as soon as the underlying disk hardware is capable of committing the writes.
I also think the trend is to more cached writes, not fewer of them, and often in ways you can't control the latency of the cached writes (think SANs or other remote storage where not having cached writes would mean huge latency penalties and unusable storage).
The IOC is an organization committed to athletics in the US, Europe and a handful of Asian countries. Elsewhere, membership in the IOC is a perk that the junta/dictator hands out to someone's brother-in-law to take junkets and collect hard currency kickbacks from potential host countries. You expect them to bite the hand that feeds them?
Expecting the IOC as an organization to care about political issues is a waste of time, especially considering the grandiose gold-plated Disneyland that's expected to be built and barely affordable even to the predominantly wealthy host countries. They're just happy someone will host and pay for it.
What's the risk of cache loss, really? I mean, assuming something reasonable like a UPS? And what's the real risk of data loss vs. the vastly improved write performance of write back caching?
I can't remember the last time I chose "write through" as an option, even when there was no battery backing.
Isn't it amazing the crazy things people will do on the side of a mountain?
My wife and I were camping in Colorado and went on a non-technical day hike to an alpine lake @ ~12,000 ft. It was July, but there had been very heavy snows that year and many parts of the trail were still 6 ft or more covered in snow, and the weather was usual mountain variable -- kind of cold when the sun wasn't on you, warm when it was, and of course it changed every five minutes.
On our way up the trail we passed a family with two junior high aged kids. Dad was carrying a fishing pole and a tackle box, the kids had on the usual clothes you'd expect a lower-middle-class kids to be wearing at home -- baskeball-type shorts, tennis shoes, jeans jackets. I think mom might have even had flipflops or very flimsy tennis shoes on and was carrying a paper shopping bag. No half-sensible gear on any of them -- no coats, no backpacks, no sign of at least energy snacks, no water(!).
We made it up to the lake, but it was totally frozen over and when we got up there the weather was turning much darker and colder. We passed them again on the way down and told the ranger station about them. It was a very non-technical hike that should have been low risk other than the trail requiring numerous detours due to snow pack, but I was really worried that these people would at a minimum run the risk of exposure should it rain.
Only if you didn't spend a couple of grand in hard currency and you gave material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sharm el-Sheikh is the Sun City of Egypt.
The problem with buying on Craigslist is that you have to be careful where you go and who you buy from and who you sell to.
I've had good experiences selling some items, but I'm always REAL wary of prospective buyers who email you one-line questions like "Where do you live?" It's too easy to have it become a burglars' shopping service, or even if they buy something not terribly expensive, they get a chance to case your house. Buying is a whole other risk category; wandering into a strange house/neighborhood for a deal with a few hundred dollars in your pocket can be risky. There have been several stories about people getting robbed in the local news media.
Personally, my stuff for sale I've kept in the garage and only let the buyers in there and not into the rest of my house. I also holster up my Glock in case something weird were to happen, and I would certainly do the same if I went to buy something.
I'm sure the robberies are more the exception than the rule and if you don't assume there's a great deal on expensive items in the ghetto you won't have problems, but it still gets risky.
Ha! I work for Kaspersky reseller, and while I find it to be much more effective than other products, it still has problems.
The default settings want to do CriticalArea and StartupItem scans when you boot your machine, and this makes the icky Windows-is-slow-at-startup even worse. We've also had a couple of problems with updates crippling the client, and worse, the Exchange product.
The first couple of client problems were with older 6.x clients not taking updates, we updated them to newer application versions and it fixed the updating problem. This summer there was an update that literally crippled the client; Kaspersky came out with a fix, but by that time I'd already just removed and reinstalled.
The Exchange AV product has had bad updates that cause it to shut down store.exe. This is a huge show stopper, naturally, and its happened more than once.
The AdminKit is a hot mess, too.
I'd like to see us do some NOD32 installs, I seem to hear good things about it.
It all makes sense. I would add the ability of someone who can prove theft AND has proof of purchase of their materials be able to TAKE anything missing that matches from a recycling center's inventory, whether they have paid out on it or not. Putting a little more burn on the recycling centers goes a long way towards forcing them to play honest.
I'm always amazed when recycling centers play "Gee, we didn't know it was stolen" when a pair of speed freaks show up in a 1995 Pontiac with 250 lbs of brand new, unused 4/0 wire and claim they want to "recycle" it.
How fucking obvious does it have to get?
What was considered acceptable, a PKM? I'll bet that 7.62x54R would do some damage.
No, I reject your analysis of Somali pirate psychology, just as I reject your obsolete choice in small arms.
These are people who have grown up in a totally lawless and stateless culture and many are likely experienced militiamen. They will not blanch or run when facing small arms fire. Many of them have been drawn on, shot at, and possibly even wounded throughout the course of their entire lives. These are Somalis, not risk-averse Europeans or Americans who make the "safe" choice when faced with danger. These people have chosen boarding large commercial shipping vessels by force of arms on the open seas as a way of life; a few stray rounds from a rifle is not going to alter their motivation one iota.
As for your specific analogy of the .22 pistol and the burglar armed with the Mac-10 -- most law-abiding people expect once you pull a gun on a bad guy, he's going to run. It's true *some* of the time, but many "bad guys" have lived their entire lives in dangerous situations and have had guns pointed at them if not fired at them countless times. Whitey thinking that brandishing his Glock impresses some thug needs to think again.
As for the mechanics of your Elmer Fudd meets Cutty Sark scenerio, who do you think is going to be shooting these rifles? Your typical merchant marine crew? Some peasant out of the Philippines who has done nothing but cook his entire life? A Greek diesel mechanic? They don't hire trigger men to run these ships.
The AK-74 round is even worse than the AK-47 round. The AK-47 round isn't too awful for smaller, thin-skinned game like deer; its ballistics are about on par with the 30-30 Winchester, which has probably taken more deer than any other rifle round. But that presumes you'd be using a longer-barreled rifle like the SKS vs. the AK and using something other than the standard issue ChiCom steel core ammo.
You miss that pirates actually board these vessels. By the time they're within docking range, a .300 Win Mag round is going to go straight through whatever makeshift plating they might have bolted on their little speedboats with no trouble whatsoever.
By the time they are within docking range, the pirates are capable of accurate RPG hits and their AKs are pretty deadly, even by African militia standards of marksmanship. Tactically you do not want them to be able to get within 500 yards of your vessel as it renders the usual small arms (AKs, RPGs, handguns) combat ineffective.
Even if you restrict yourself to docking range engagements, bolt action .300 win mag is still a loser from a cyclic rate (you're going up against a boat full of guys with full-auto AKs) and a dependency on precision aimed fire. At those ranges you would be much better off with semi-auto 7.62x54mm weapons with 4x red dots. Easier to operate, a higher cyclic rate and larger magazine capacities for what you're actually encouraging, a close quarters engagement.
The fact is that nobody fields bolt action rifles for anything other than parades and very specific sniping missions. They require too much precision aimed fire, have inadequate magazine capacity and cyclic rates that are just too low. This isn't to say that getting whacked with a 3000 ft/sec 180gr slug isn't going to do damage inside of 300 yards, but you'll get your hat handed to you even by Somali thugs with AKs.
As for what customs thinks, my guess is they'll either freak over *any* weapons or they're willing to give it a pass. But you may not be able to flag your ship with a Liberian flag or whatever the preferred flag of convenience is or necessarily staff your ship with whatever ethnic flotsam you can find.
The best plan is probably flagging the ship from a real country with actual diplomatic clout and hiring Blackwater or some other mercenary organization as trigger men on board to assuage local customs that you're acting above board and not gun running or whatever their paranoia is.
Deflect this, motherfucker. 300 grain, 3" 12 ga. sabot @ 2000 fps, 3000 ft lbs of muzzle energy. It may take a couple of them to take the fight out of a Polar or Kodiak bear, but that's not bouncing off a bruin and just leaving him mad. That's knocking a hole the size if your fist into the torso and leaving a gaping wound cavity that will take the fight right out of most anything.
.300 Win Mag is a great sniper round from a scoped rifle, but that's a terrible platform for a maritime engagement. Aimed fire at ranges very likely to be 300m+ on moving targets from a moving platform on open water with a scoped weapon is a substantial challenge for the most gifted marksman, and that's just hitting the enemy vessel! .300 Win Mag would require a magic shot for that round to do any meaningful damage, and the magic is limited to killing a pirate or damaging the boat's propulsion. It's just not enough bullet for the distances involved.
The ideal option is a couple of twin .50 cal machine guns, but a compromise might be a half-dozen guys with Barrett 82s with low-power scopes (4x?) and tracer rounds and a fallback guy with a Javelin missile.
The .50 cal Barretts are semi-auto and with low-power optics and tracers, shooters could get on target and put enough rounds down to possible score hits under the maritime circumstances. And .50 cal hits would matter much more. If you assume a higher hit ratio, it could be expected that even larger fishing vessels might see cumulative damage to superstructures or other structural elements, not to mention engines and personnel.
The Javelin would be a nice option if the Barretts proved ineffective (bigger ship, suicide mission, whatever), since it would effectively stop anything the pirates have, including the larger mother ships the small speedboats depart from.
You're right, but I've had good luck using TivoDesktop and "Direct Show Dump Utility" to transfer programs from my S3 to a PC and get burnable DVDs. If you pay money to the partner DVD software company (Roxio?) you can do it without the hackery of DSDU (which was easy to download and use) and rolling your own DVDs.
Other that, though, you're dead-on. IMHO, Myth needs to be merged with or create their own bootable distribution and be done with it. The fscking around people seem to be willing to do to record the crap on TV boggles my mind; I have a hard time even watching the crap let alone investing hours making my own DVR. I'd much rather spend the $600 or whatever it is for a S3 and a lifetime subscription and be done with it for 5 years or so.
As a fellow subscriber to the NY Times, I agree with assessment about the cheer leading in the NY Times for Obama. I think they managed some positive McCain pieces but I generally felt that throughout the election they were biased in favor of Obama.
That being said, I don't think it stops with Obama -- I think there are a number of issues where the NY Times shows deep editorial bias towards the stereotypically "liberal" position on a number of issues. I've only been a daily reader for about 6 years (I live outside NYC and also read the local paper), so I don't know where/how this began. Part of me thinks its an incidental byproduct of a siege mentality after 8 years of press-hostile conservatism, part of me thinks that its a deliberate attempt to forge and maintain a position as the official liberal newspaper of the U.S., in the model of the generally acknowledged ideological stance of French newspapers (which makes kind of a perverse sense, considering how France is often the intellectual model for disaffected American liberals).
Regardless of the level of bias, I still read & subscribe to the NY Times because no other newspaper offers the level of detailed reporting and feature writing that the NY Times does and their ideological stance is generally easy to detect and doesn't become so obnoxious that it detracts from the factual reporting.
My long-term concern with Obama is that the fawning and desire to see him succeed will lead to weak reporting and failure to follow leads that generate exposes that may undermine his presidency. If this occurs, than we've entered the really ugly and anti-democratic realm of bias better known as propaganda.
You mean he did worse than cheat on his wife and plagiarize his thesis?
This animal only had to touch an electric fence once to realize he didn't want to do it again!
In my state, MN, you can use deadly force to stop the commission of a felony in your home. Since burglary is a felony, this works. I think deadly force is a better option -- I'd rather be the only one telling a story via my attorney to the cops and let the crooks rap sheet speak for him.
I agree that if burglary was met with more physical force it might deter it, and I'd be totally in favor of making deadly force a more generous option for homeowners (ie, immunity from civil suits, mandatory restitution for damage to property, significant civil penalties for prosecutors who bring criminal prosecutions when reasonable proof of defense of dwelling exists, the right to use deadly force on your *property* not just in your dwelling, and the right to use deadly force to protect your property [shooting a car thief stealing your car from the driveway], and the OK to shoot a fleeing burglar).
I don't know what kind of a deterrent it would be though, considering how stupid many burglars are, and it may make some of the "career" ones more violent or more prepared to BE violent (again, though, this implies that there's thinking & future planning involved by crooks, as well as the idea that they aren't already prepared to BE violent).
What's worse is that the CNC carved pumpkin is only shown lit up from a distance -- no up close detail or anything. I'd also swear it looks like the lit up CNC carved pumpkin isn't actually a carving but is an image projected onto the pumpkin -- the lighting just doesn't look right, but this is just an impression I don't really have any proof.
Are they just catering to the small percentage of people who sit and tweak their desktops and widget layouts all day long and are constantly looking for something with more of "teh shiny!!1"?
I find it hard to believe that the best and brightest minds, with enough credentials to start their own University, sat around a room and decided "YES! The way to make it easier to use is to CHANGE IT ALL and NULLIFY WHAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS!"
Or is it not the experts in UI design or usability or the developers, but the usual suspect, the parasites from marketing -- who work at MS for the money but go home to a secret room with a wall-size photo of Steve Jobs and a bunch of products from B&O and Apple -- insisiting on newer, shinier, more trendier looks to "go along with" today's newest trends in art, design and fashion?
I just don't get how they decided that changing it all and making it work differently makes it better or easier to use.
Most TOS are so overly broad and restrictive that you almost can't use the site without violating it, and in general it didn't sound if the submitter's violation of the TOS was anything more than technical, and did not result in real harm.
IMHO what your boss wants is maybe not polite or nice but isn't really unethical. It is cheap, though.
I do share your disdain, though, as I have a boss who is equally cheap. Not for resale products we get on a discount for evaluation/testing purposes end up being used to support our internal production network, generally making them unavailable for what they were intended, getting us up to speed on the real thing.
I extract my revenge, though, by bugging the product reps for an additional unit on loan for testing by telling him (on the QT) that my boss is using ours for our internal production network. Sometimes I get the extra loaner in sympathy, sometimes I don't, a couple of times the product rep panicked the boss by telling him that the rep's loaner is in use and we needed to bring our own to a key sales demo (which was impossible without killing our network).
One guy mercilessly badgered the boss over the location of the NFR unit and it was hard not to laugh as the boss stammered and lied badly, since it was hard to explain why it wasn't available when the only people who should be using it were in the same room.
Maybe the story submitter needs to screw the bosses plan by emailing the site maintainers and explaining he doesn't like doing what he's doing and see if the site maintainers will submarine the bosses plan by canceling accounts.
The only thing to remember is that if you lose your job today, good luck finding another for a long, long time.
Because nobody would give a shit if it was called blackspace.
Have you ever had new windows put in? I only have 14 windows in my entire 2000 sq ft house, but it's like $4-5k every time I want to replace 4 of them. I used Pella which is a very good window, but I can't even fathom what it would cost to get a similar quality window with automation features. My guess is you probably couldn't get a good window (eg, with a 20 year lifetime) that automated without buying standard, and compromising it with automation controls and losing the warranty, and even then your per window costs would be sky-high, something like $2000+ each.
The better solution for what you want is an air-air heat exchanger (most have programmable controls) that would allow you to circulate outside air without necessarily running the A/C compressor. You'd still have to run the furnace blower and the dehumidifier on the heat exchanger, but at least you would cut your energy use by half.
The other option would be a whole-house exhaust fan setup; I would think you could have a thermostatically driven relay control both an intake damper and an exhaust fan with return ducts in all the rooms. Coupled with similar setpoints on the thermostat, you could have ventilation with a minimum of power use (maybe even none if you got into solar or wind-driven roof turbines).
Re-sale is the other thing. Automation is complex, ages poorly and most house buyers don't want it as all they see is an old, complex system that they don't understand and they think will cost them $$$$ to remove. Even automation freaks won't want it, since they'll want their own setup, not yours, or they will want something current.