Think about it, how much does it really cost to register a domain? Since there's no materials or other supplies involved, its basically an overhead-cost-only function, which makes it easy to see how they could give away registrations to shadow entities without it affecting the bottom line or even being traceable.
In fact, it would not even surprise me if many squatters weren't actually owned and controlled by registrars as external or even internal entities operating from maildrops but having access to internal data.
This is another example of American business simply deciding that cheating is easier than working.
I was thrilled when they rolled out IMAP for gmail, but less thrilled when it would not work properly with Windows Mobile handhelds (which worked with my ancient UW-IMAP on FreeBSD..) -- messages with HTML bodies showed up as blank.
Meanwhile, a month or more later, its still not fixed even though Google acknowledges its broken. This leads me to two questions/conclusions -- did they even TEST it with anything, including the wildly popular (if not market leading) WM5 & 6 handhelds? IIRC the forums are also full of gripes from Apple Mail and iPhone users. And what can possibly be taking the "smartest company in the world" so long to fix it?
If non-responsive fixes and broken-out-the-door software is what we can expect for "free", I hate to say it, but I'd almost rather pay. MS stuff can suck pretty hard, but it generally works for some core set of features.
Any transition to more energy efficient lighting will take far longer than the congressionally mandated transition, so the mercury "reduction" from power plants is likely to be just a slowing of the growth of mercury from power plants, not a reduction which balances all the improper disposal of CFLs; in fact it may still result in a net increase in mercury.
CFLs still have a long way to go. I have been using CFLs aggressively for a decade now, and they have a very mixed record in terms of reliability. The recessed can versions don't last anywhere near as long as they are supposed to and the notion of returning them for a refund/exchange sounds like a level of record-keeping more onerous than burning white gas or kerosene in a lantern, unless congress mandates CFLs be born-on date stamped and returnable to any merchant selling CFLs for an exchange inside of some defined warranty period.
They don't dim for shit. I recently re-lamped my kitchen to get better lighting, but found that dimmable CFLs were a JOKE. Mine (a pricey GE model, not some house brand) had maybe 4 dim levels and anything but full on sucked. I ended up using Philips Halogena (45W vs. 65W) which looked good and at least shaved a third of the energy costs.
For me they have worked well in situations where I could take advantage of their relatively cooler operating temps and up-lamp fixtures designed only for 60W bulbs with 75W or 100W CFL equivalents, but its been at a ridiculous financial cost.
As for buying them other than at Home Depot or Wallmart or other mass chains, you've got to be kidding! I'm supposed to mail-order them from some specialty online retailer? C'mon.
My big concern is that with a congressional mandate to not sell incandescents, CFLs or other alternative technologies will lose the incentive to compete and we'll be stuck with really crappy CFLs loaded with mercury because makers won't have any reason to make better. I have seen a general improvement in CFLs over the past 10 years -- better fixture fit, better life, more form factors, but its not happening because the government says so, its happening because they have to compete with incandescents and there is market demand for an alternative thats got competitive advantages.
I bought a refurbished 3500N two years ago for $350. I've replaced the black cartridge once and the magenta is about to go empty, which does trigger annoying non-printing due to missing toner.
The black cartridge was expensive, but it looks like prices have come down a little. Even so, I'm half-toying with unloading the printer missing a magenta cartridge on craigslist for $50 and just buying a brand-new comparable model. This one does work really well, and the color quality is great -- my wife prints and frames pictures and they look as good as 35mm prints from Walgreens.
I don't know why people still buy ink jets at all. I tell customers I don't even want to look at their printers -- its 1/4 of the cost of a new color laser that will both work and provide cheaper output.
I agree that this whole thing depends on the budget given to the agency......and I think the chances of it getting enough budget to be effective is pretty small.
No, see the seizure program BECOMES the budget. That's what's really so pernicious about these programs, the seizing agency gets to keep some or all of the seized assets and/or their proceeds from sale, thus making seizure self-perpetuating and a critical aspect of operations as it provides significant funding without significant tax demands ("We help protect people and it costs taxpayers nothing.")
Many of the drug seizures became something akin to a protection racket, where if, say they found a few flakes of pot in your car (ground into the carpet...) they seized it but let you buy it back for $500 or something on the spot. I mean, why not just take bribes?
There was (and maybe still is..) a Federal law (and probably copycat state laws) allowing law enforcement to seize assets that they believed were tied in to (either bought with proceeds from or used in) drug trafficking. No conviction required. They seize your assets and then you have to go to court and prove to the government that they weren't a product of drug trafficking. Nice, of course you can't pay an attorney since they have seized all your assets...
I don't remember, but the Supreme Court may have ultimately overturned this as a violation of search and seizure or of due process of law, but it stood for a long time and IMHO is a much grosser civil rights violation than any CIA torture or rendition of non-citizens.
Seems like an unusual situation -- relative to the number of people who sign non-competes, almost none go on to start $100 million startups because very few people start them to begin with, and those that do fall into the "key scientist" group I mentioned in my OP.
Furthermore, most states have restrictions on non-competes that generally exclude self-employment as being covered by the non-compete and in at least my state, a non-compete can't prevent you from working in your professional field entirely.
I still think that non-competes are generally BS for mere mortals, since trying to actually litigate the agreement probably costs $20k just to determine if you even can think about litigating it.
The only time I can see them being successful is if the agreement held some bonus compensation in escrow for the duration of the non-compete or pending proof of non-competitive employment.
...unless you're some key scientist at a major corporation.
For "average" techies who have to sign them, how do they know where you go to work when you quit and how much effort will they put forth to actually enforce it?
I work for a small consulting company (20 people) and they made new guys sign non-competes and tried to get existing employees to sign them (I said sure, for $10k consideration and a full salary and benefits guarantee during my non-compete period, they said not to worry about it then).
But if I quit my job, I just go into my boss' office, hand him a resignation letter that says "Thanks for the opportunity. My last day is Month XX, 20xx. Please have any final checks available on this date as I am relocating and do not have a forwarding address." I don't tell them where I'm going, I don't tell them who I'm working for (if really pressed, "looking into several opportunities I do not wish to discuss").
I just find it hard to believe that a company my size, or even 10 times my size, is going to go through the hassle of hiring an investigator, an attorney and spending possibly a year of my salary to keep me from working. I mean, they have to FIND me, FIND where I'm working and be able to prove it in court. That's not trivial.
Now, if you're a really key exec or scientist or something at a company with real, real deep pockets or you do some real obvious, high profile job change that even the tabloids can track, I can see where they could spend the money (or not need to) to enforce them. But for everyone else it just seems like a BS corporate bluff.
They need to follow the money behind some of these spammers and start RICO prosecutions against anyone who even had a tangental relationship with these people.
If the legitimate world was worried about $100k fines and 20 years in a Federal-run-by-the-Aryan-Brotherhood-pound-me-in-the-ass prison for dealing with spammers and their ilk, it'd get a lot colder out there for spammers.
How often do ocean going ships come close to having accidents on the open oceans?
I'm sure its probably more often than I would otherwise think given the ideal routes from high-traffic origins to high-traffic destinations, but you'd think they would have some kind of rules about operating it only XX miles from ports and have some kind of radar tie-in that would cause the kite to not deploy or undeploy should shipping traffic come within some danger zone.
Its easy and obvious to make some kind of political message out of the first Curious George book. We've had parents who said they were "nervous" about it because of the smoking and what can best be termed colonialism of the Man in the Yellow Hat.
I would argue that the "colonialism" is key to the appeal that the books have to children. Kids identify with George -- he's small, curious and misunderstood and the adventure and trouble he gets into is much like their own, plus, there's something intrinsically "captive" about BEING a child that mimics George's existence.
I found a web site with detailed photos of changes done to Richard Scary illustrated children's books. It was fairly minor, but I consider it political correctness run amok in most instances (changes to gender roles, elimination of smoking, etc).
I've made an effort to find used children's books where I can, particularly pre-1970s, as these are unlikely to have been edited and also tend to show a wider range of behaviors and experiences (such as shooting & hunting and other "dangerous" behavior).
One of the few bright spots have been the original Curious George books; we've bought them new and they still show George and/or the Man in The Yellow Hat smoking a pipe. We've bought some of the new ones illustrated in the style of curious George and the only thing that seems to be altered are more non-white characters, which occasionally seem out of place in an apparently 1940s America.
Although in "Curious George at the Baseball Game" there's what I presume is an unintentionally ironic bit of multiculturalism -- George wreaks havoc at a ballgame and gets in trouble with a TV camera woman. She chases him and he hides, and then finds a lost little black boy. The TV camera woman catches them and then realizes the boy is lost and puts their images on the Jumbotron.
The irony is in the caption on the Jumbotron reads "IS THIS YOU BOY OR YOUR MONKEY?", with both George and the boy on the screen. A racist wouldn't have written it better on purpose.
I'm sure they have by now. Just a couple of years ago (I think even post-9/11) the local nuclear power plant was having one of their once-in-a-lifetime tours. I was out of town, but wished I could have gone.
When I toured the plant in 1996, the tour guide (a maintenance employee that day) said that when the plant was first built, it transmitted DC power and still had a DC customer in Northern Missouri, a metal smelter.
It was a cool tour, and since I was the only one on it, I got to go all kinds of places they didnt normally take tours, include INSIDE a generating turbine.
He also showed me how they can HAND START the entire plant -- they had a gizmo that looked something like a bicycle that could be hand-cranked to generate enough power to get a single turbine running, and that turbine could then power the rest of the plant (I don't remember, but I assume it was to power the electromagnets used in the turbines). He said it hadn't been used for a long time as they had power from the grid, although during the flooding in the early 90s I seem to remember him saying they at least tested it in case the flood had damaged their grid power.
Well worth the stop in Keokuk, plus its a very interesting architectural presence on the river.
Your problem is you didn't check the MAC address to make sure you were connected to and reconfiguring the right AP. Wireless config is necessary, especially for APs mounted in funky places that are hard to get at with a cable.
But the bigger problem are APs that use the same SSIDs by default. A better option would be to have them tag the name with the last 4 digits of the MAC so they were unique and more easily identifiable. They could easily do this as part of the cold-start code.
Does this kind of thing, sort of. For calls that are "UNAVAILABLE" or "ANONYMOUS", callers get a voice prompt telling them that I don't accept telemarketing calls and then has them enter their 10 digit phone number.
It'd be much, much cooler if there was a web page I could go to to whitelist some numbers and have the others all get the captcha you mention, with added language that I don't accept telemarketing calls and I want to be taken off their list.
I've taken a bunch of Netflix recommendations. Some were brilliant and some were stupid, but I'm not afraid to list a movie as 1 or 2 stars, and I seldom rate a movie at 5 stars unless it was really, really good. I figure this helps the recommendation process.
I'd like to see 3 improvements, though:
1) Half-star ratings. I'm given recommendations in fractional star increments, and there are times where I think half-stars make sense -- there's been movies that haven't totally sucked, and 2.5 stars seems appropriate, and some that have been better than 4 star but not quite 5.
2) A secondary list of characteristics for movies that were 4+ or 2- stars: "I rated this movie the way I did PRIMARILY because of the: (1) acting/cast, (2) director/direction, (3) plot/story, (4) effects/action." I think something like this would catch a lot of anomalous ratings that otherwise break suggestion algorithms as well as provide more dimensions.
3) The ability to rate actors and directors. I'd also say screenwriters, but I don't think enough people have enough knowledge of screenwriters for them to be able to build a reasonable algorithm.
You can buy heat exchangers for homes, in fact they are being required or close to being required for Minnesota due to the very serious problems you mention, all caused by too-tight houses, which we have due to our insulation & energy codes. In fact, we have friends that have one -- it brings in fresh air from outside and processes it, although I think the air volume is more on the slow exchange side and it couldn't be used for cooling.
I'd personally settle for being able to just bring in the outside air when it was below my set point, even if it did bring in humidity; my house will get humidity in it if I open the windows anyway, and any fresh-air system that cycled reasonably frequently would keep it from building up excessively. In the true cooling seasons, it would be eliminated pretty quickly by A/C operation.
I don't know if it would save a ton of money, but right now the alternative is either open all the windows at night and run fans or set the setpoint for A/C too a lower temp to keep the A/C cycling more often. I can't imagine that moving air from the outside would be more energy intensive than running the compressor.
You've specified? From your post, it's obvious you aren't an HVAC engineer, so what are your qualifications? Did you do an analysis to see what the real ROI is? Or is it just so obvious to you why years of HVAC design are totally wrong?
Years of a lot of designs in many fields have been total bullshit, often until someone who was an outsider to the field showed up and said "Why don't we try something different"? Groupthink and reliance on inherited wisdom often causes reasonable ideas to be rejected without serious consideration.
And I can't say I blame the OP for his idea -- I've often thought of it for my own home; if the outside temp sinks more than 2-3 degrees below the AC setpoint, the AC doesn't cycle and it gets stuffy in the house, so why not have a baffle that would intake outside air when the outside temp is below the setpoint, thus maintaining the setpoint without requiring running the compressor.
Obviously humidity is an issue, but it strikes me that dehumidification only shouldn't necessarily require running a coil with the 20-30 degree temperature gap that the AC coil requires, thus saving some energy. Even if intake air wasn't perfectly dehumidified on intake, the blower could cycle for a longer period allowing further dehumidification.
The OP's idea for cooling a data center makes even more sense for very cold climates, as it would require little or no dehumidification -- relative humidity in winter months is often 20% around here.
All the major application vendors recognize that VMs are valuable and they also recognize that by refusing support for 3rd-part VMs *AND* offering a VM (even if it is someone else's with a new paint scheme), they can both make more money and squeeze competitors. Microsoft is already doing this with Exchange 2007 (note coming hypervisor/VM tech in 2008 server), and I expect other major application vendors might try the same thing.
This is clearly a monopolistic practice, but I don't expect our corporate overlords in the FTC to ever do anything about it.
Just ask for more money before signing it. Its actually quite routine for businesses to change/update non-competes and its generally understood that compensation for this new consideration will be asked & given, since I don't think you can be forced to agree to a change in terms of employment when you are already employed.
Secondly (and more importantly), who cares? If you're seriously concerned with your pending invention/IP, then see a lawyer, otherwise don't worry about it.
Whenever you quit ANY job, you politely tell your employer you have found another opportunity and thank them for the opportunity they gave you and walk away. You don't tell them where you're working, if you're working, who you're working for, etc. Yes, this means alienating all your work friends to some degree (at least temporarily), but you can either tell them individually when the times is right or based on your personal trust levels, but you don't and shouldn't tell your boss.
Of course, they can find out if they really want to, but how many white collar employees in the US are SO important and posses such critical information that your former employer will hire private investigators or use other time-consuming and costly methods to track down where you're working and then go to the trouble and expense of initiating legal action? That has to be such a SMALL number, that most everyone doesn't have to get worried about if the big bad corporation is going to come after them.
So take the money, look like a team player and quit worrying about them taking the rights to your flux capacitor or time machine.
Minneapolis is rolling theirs out right now and I just don't get it.
Ours is rolled in with a new (separate technology) wireless setup for municipal vehicles and police cars, also by the same company rolling out the internet service (the projects are tied together).
My best guess is that the city wanted to replace the cellular-based data service in the cop cars and get something more flexible, but nobody would pay for a huge project like that on its own merits, so it gets tied to citywide Wifi, which gets all the coffee-swilling urbanites hot and sweaty imagining downloading iTunes or blogging from any of the few square meters of this town not covered by SOME kind of free wifi already, making it easy for the dreamy-eyed liberals on the council to vote for.
I suspect that the dirty secret is that the city has promised to pay better-than-they-should for the municipal data network in order to pay for the money losing wifi system, which nobody will use (we have a "good" DSL rollout (eg, you can choose ISPs and the speed is decent) and cable, anybody who wants high speed HAS IT already).
I called my council person (ditsy Betsy Hodges) and bitched about the project and asked her who was going to use it. I was told that it was inexpensive for inner-city residents who couldn't afford cable or DSL, of course she had no answer how these poor people could afford modern PCs but not some kind of internet access. Maybe that's the next socialist giveaway.
I do worry, though, that the company running it will turn around and say "its a money loser" and threaten to close it down and the city will bend over backwards to give them more money before they lose their precious "community asset."
The only hope is that the equipment they are deploying is all software-radio based and that with little physical upgrading, the base stations can be reprogrammed for new wireless standards and make the network actually useful.
I'm not against municipal data projects, either, but I think that they have to provide something actually USEFUL (eg, fiber to the curb), not some 10-15 year old tech.
Do you ever stop overthinking everything? If you think a G-phone on even an existing EVDO cell network can get cable, let alone, DS-3 speeds, you need to drop your "Wired" subscription for something you can understand, like "People".
And if you think that Google would even bother with speeds slower than even low-end DSL, you should probably stop by the hospital and have them check your meds, since you're obviously in need of desperate measures.
And so you actually understand, everyone assumes that "PC speeds" refers to the kind of generic experience one gets from 512k+ DSL or Cable. OC-3 and up speeds are meaningless, since much of what users do doesn't really benefit from speeds above about 1-2Mbps.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it, how much does it really cost to register a domain? Since there's no materials or other supplies involved, its basically an overhead-cost-only function, which makes it easy to see how they could give away registrations to shadow entities without it affecting the bottom line or even being traceable.
In fact, it would not even surprise me if many squatters weren't actually owned and controlled by registrars as external or even internal entities operating from maildrops but having access to internal data.
This is another example of American business simply deciding that cheating is easier than working.
I was thrilled when they rolled out IMAP for gmail, but less thrilled when it would not work properly with Windows Mobile handhelds (which worked with my ancient UW-IMAP on FreeBSD..) -- messages with HTML bodies showed up as blank.
Meanwhile, a month or more later, its still not fixed even though Google acknowledges its broken. This leads me to two questions/conclusions -- did they even TEST it with anything, including the wildly popular (if not market leading) WM5 & 6 handhelds? IIRC the forums are also full of gripes from Apple Mail and iPhone users. And what can possibly be taking the "smartest company in the world" so long to fix it?
If non-responsive fixes and broken-out-the-door software is what we can expect for "free", I hate to say it, but I'd almost rather pay. MS stuff can suck pretty hard, but it generally works for some core set of features.
Any transition to more energy efficient lighting will take far longer than the congressionally mandated transition, so the mercury "reduction" from power plants is likely to be just a slowing of the growth of mercury from power plants, not a reduction which balances all the improper disposal of CFLs; in fact it may still result in a net increase in mercury.
CFLs still have a long way to go. I have been using CFLs aggressively for a decade now, and they have a very mixed record in terms of reliability. The recessed can versions don't last anywhere near as long as they are supposed to and the notion of returning them for a refund/exchange sounds like a level of record-keeping more onerous than burning white gas or kerosene in a lantern, unless congress mandates CFLs be born-on date stamped and returnable to any merchant selling CFLs for an exchange inside of some defined warranty period.
They don't dim for shit. I recently re-lamped my kitchen to get better lighting, but found that dimmable CFLs were a JOKE. Mine (a pricey GE model, not some house brand) had maybe 4 dim levels and anything but full on sucked. I ended up using Philips Halogena (45W vs. 65W) which looked good and at least shaved a third of the energy costs.
For me they have worked well in situations where I could take advantage of their relatively cooler operating temps and up-lamp fixtures designed only for 60W bulbs with 75W or 100W CFL equivalents, but its been at a ridiculous financial cost.
As for buying them other than at Home Depot or Wallmart or other mass chains, you've got to be kidding! I'm supposed to mail-order them from some specialty online retailer? C'mon.
My big concern is that with a congressional mandate to not sell incandescents, CFLs or other alternative technologies will lose the incentive to compete and we'll be stuck with really crappy CFLs loaded with mercury because makers won't have any reason to make better. I have seen a general improvement in CFLs over the past 10 years -- better fixture fit, better life, more form factors, but its not happening because the government says so, its happening because they have to compete with incandescents and there is market demand for an alternative thats got competitive advantages.
I bought a refurbished 3500N two years ago for $350. I've replaced the black cartridge once and the magenta is about to go empty, which does trigger annoying non-printing due to missing toner.
The black cartridge was expensive, but it looks like prices have come down a little. Even so, I'm half-toying with unloading the printer missing a magenta cartridge on craigslist for $50 and just buying a brand-new comparable model. This one does work really well, and the color quality is great -- my wife prints and frames pictures and they look as good as 35mm prints from Walgreens.
I don't know why people still buy ink jets at all. I tell customers I don't even want to look at their printers -- its 1/4 of the cost of a new color laser that will both work and provide cheaper output.
I agree that this whole thing depends on the budget given to the agency......and I think the chances of it getting enough budget to be effective is pretty small.
No, see the seizure program BECOMES the budget. That's what's really so pernicious about these programs, the seizing agency gets to keep some or all of the seized assets and/or their proceeds from sale, thus making seizure self-perpetuating and a critical aspect of operations as it provides significant funding without significant tax demands ("We help protect people and it costs taxpayers nothing.")
Many of the drug seizures became something akin to a protection racket, where if, say they found a few flakes of pot in your car (ground into the carpet...) they seized it but let you buy it back for $500 or something on the spot. I mean, why not just take bribes?
There was (and maybe still is..) a Federal law (and probably copycat state laws) allowing law enforcement to seize assets that they believed were tied in to (either bought with proceeds from or used in) drug trafficking. No conviction required. They seize your assets and then you have to go to court and prove to the government that they weren't a product of drug trafficking. Nice, of course you can't pay an attorney since they have seized all your assets...
I don't remember, but the Supreme Court may have ultimately overturned this as a violation of search and seizure or of due process of law, but it stood for a long time and IMHO is a much grosser civil rights violation than any CIA torture or rendition of non-citizens.
Seems like an unusual situation -- relative to the number of people who sign non-competes, almost none go on to start $100 million startups because very few people start them to begin with, and those that do fall into the "key scientist" group I mentioned in my OP.
Furthermore, most states have restrictions on non-competes that generally exclude self-employment as being covered by the non-compete and in at least my state, a non-compete can't prevent you from working in your professional field entirely.
I still think that non-competes are generally BS for mere mortals, since trying to actually litigate the agreement probably costs $20k just to determine if you even can think about litigating it.
The only time I can see them being successful is if the agreement held some bonus compensation in escrow for the duration of the non-compete or pending proof of non-competitive employment.
...unless you're some key scientist at a major corporation.
For "average" techies who have to sign them, how do they know where you go to work when you quit and how much effort will they put forth to actually enforce it?
I work for a small consulting company (20 people) and they made new guys sign non-competes and tried to get existing employees to sign them (I said sure, for $10k consideration and a full salary and benefits guarantee during my non-compete period, they said not to worry about it then).
But if I quit my job, I just go into my boss' office, hand him a resignation letter that says "Thanks for the opportunity. My last day is Month XX, 20xx. Please have any final checks available on this date as I am relocating and do not have a forwarding address." I don't tell them where I'm going, I don't tell them who I'm working for (if really pressed, "looking into several opportunities I do not wish to discuss").
I just find it hard to believe that a company my size, or even 10 times my size, is going to go through the hassle of hiring an investigator, an attorney and spending possibly a year of my salary to keep me from working. I mean, they have to FIND me, FIND where I'm working and be able to prove it in court. That's not trivial.
Now, if you're a really key exec or scientist or something at a company with real, real deep pockets or you do some real obvious, high profile job change that even the tabloids can track, I can see where they could spend the money (or not need to) to enforce them. But for everyone else it just seems like a BS corporate bluff.
They need to follow the money behind some of these spammers and start RICO prosecutions against anyone who even had a tangental relationship with these people.
If the legitimate world was worried about $100k fines and 20 years in a Federal-run-by-the-Aryan-Brotherhood-pound-me-in-the-ass prison for dealing with spammers and their ilk, it'd get a lot colder out there for spammers.
But he's such a raging socialist, he'd invariably make a grab for my private property rights and they are as important as privacy.
How often do ocean going ships come close to having accidents on the open oceans?
I'm sure its probably more often than I would otherwise think given the ideal routes from high-traffic origins to high-traffic destinations, but you'd think they would have some kind of rules about operating it only XX miles from ports and have some kind of radar tie-in that would cause the kite to not deploy or undeploy should shipping traffic come within some danger zone.
Its easy and obvious to make some kind of political message out of the first Curious George book. We've had parents who said they were "nervous" about it because of the smoking and what can best be termed colonialism of the Man in the Yellow Hat.
I would argue that the "colonialism" is key to the appeal that the books have to children. Kids identify with George -- he's small, curious and misunderstood and the adventure and trouble he gets into is much like their own, plus, there's something intrinsically "captive" about BEING a child that mimics George's existence.
I found a web site with detailed photos of changes done to Richard Scary illustrated children's books. It was fairly minor, but I consider it political correctness run amok in most instances (changes to gender roles, elimination of smoking, etc).
I've made an effort to find used children's books where I can, particularly pre-1970s, as these are unlikely to have been edited and also tend to show a wider range of behaviors and experiences (such as shooting & hunting and other "dangerous" behavior).
One of the few bright spots have been the original Curious George books; we've bought them new and they still show George and/or the Man in The Yellow Hat smoking a pipe. We've bought some of the new ones illustrated in the style of curious George and the only thing that seems to be altered are more non-white characters, which occasionally seem out of place in an apparently 1940s America.
Although in "Curious George at the Baseball Game" there's what I presume is an unintentionally ironic bit of multiculturalism -- George wreaks havoc at a ballgame and gets in trouble with a TV camera woman. She chases him and he hides, and then finds a lost little black boy. The TV camera woman catches them and then realizes the boy is lost and puts their images on the Jumbotron.
The irony is in the caption on the Jumbotron reads "IS THIS YOU BOY OR YOUR MONKEY?", with both George and the boy on the screen. A racist wouldn't have written it better on purpose.
I'm sure they have by now. Just a couple of years ago (I think even post-9/11) the local nuclear power plant was having one of their once-in-a-lifetime tours. I was out of town, but wished I could have gone.
When I toured the plant in 1996, the tour guide (a maintenance employee that day) said that when the plant was first built, it transmitted DC power and still had a DC customer in Northern Missouri, a metal smelter.
It was a cool tour, and since I was the only one on it, I got to go all kinds of places they didnt normally take tours, include INSIDE a generating turbine.
He also showed me how they can HAND START the entire plant -- they had a gizmo that looked something like a bicycle that could be hand-cranked to generate enough power to get a single turbine running, and that turbine could then power the rest of the plant (I don't remember, but I assume it was to power the electromagnets used in the turbines). He said it hadn't been used for a long time as they had power from the grid, although during the flooding in the early 90s I seem to remember him saying they at least tested it in case the flood had damaged their grid power.
Well worth the stop in Keokuk, plus its a very interesting architectural presence on the river.
Your problem is you didn't check the MAC address to make sure you were connected to and reconfiguring the right AP. Wireless config is necessary, especially for APs mounted in funky places that are hard to get at with a cable.
But the bigger problem are APs that use the same SSIDs by default. A better option would be to have them tag the name with the last 4 digits of the MAC so they were unique and more easily identifiable. They could easily do this as part of the cold-start code.
Does this kind of thing, sort of. For calls that are "UNAVAILABLE" or "ANONYMOUS", callers get a voice prompt telling them that I don't accept telemarketing calls and then has them enter their 10 digit phone number.
It'd be much, much cooler if there was a web page I could go to to whitelist some numbers and have the others all get the captcha you mention, with added language that I don't accept telemarketing calls and I want to be taken off their list.
I've taken a bunch of Netflix recommendations. Some were brilliant and some were stupid, but I'm not afraid to list a movie as 1 or 2 stars, and I seldom rate a movie at 5 stars unless it was really, really good. I figure this helps the recommendation process.
I'd like to see 3 improvements, though:
1) Half-star ratings. I'm given recommendations in fractional star increments, and there are times where I think half-stars make sense -- there's been movies that haven't totally sucked, and 2.5 stars seems appropriate, and some that have been better than 4 star but not quite 5.
2) A secondary list of characteristics for movies that were 4+ or 2- stars: "I rated this movie the way I did PRIMARILY because of the: (1) acting/cast, (2) director/direction, (3) plot/story, (4) effects/action." I think something like this would catch a lot of anomalous ratings that otherwise break suggestion algorithms as well as provide more dimensions.
3) The ability to rate actors and directors. I'd also say screenwriters, but I don't think enough people have enough knowledge of screenwriters for them to be able to build a reasonable algorithm.
You can buy heat exchangers for homes, in fact they are being required or close to being required for Minnesota due to the very serious problems you mention, all caused by too-tight houses, which we have due to our insulation & energy codes. In fact, we have friends that have one -- it brings in fresh air from outside and processes it, although I think the air volume is more on the slow exchange side and it couldn't be used for cooling.
I'd personally settle for being able to just bring in the outside air when it was below my set point, even if it did bring in humidity; my house will get humidity in it if I open the windows anyway, and any fresh-air system that cycled reasonably frequently would keep it from building up excessively. In the true cooling seasons, it would be eliminated pretty quickly by A/C operation.
I don't know if it would save a ton of money, but right now the alternative is either open all the windows at night and run fans or set the setpoint for A/C too a lower temp to keep the A/C cycling more often. I can't imagine that moving air from the outside would be more energy intensive than running the compressor.
You've specified? From your post, it's obvious you aren't an HVAC engineer, so what are your qualifications? Did you do an analysis to see what the real ROI is? Or is it just so obvious to you why years of HVAC design are totally wrong?
Years of a lot of designs in many fields have been total bullshit, often until someone who was an outsider to the field showed up and said "Why don't we try something different"? Groupthink and reliance on inherited wisdom often causes reasonable ideas to be rejected without serious consideration.
And I can't say I blame the OP for his idea -- I've often thought of it for my own home; if the outside temp sinks more than 2-3 degrees below the AC setpoint, the AC doesn't cycle and it gets stuffy in the house, so why not have a baffle that would intake outside air when the outside temp is below the setpoint, thus maintaining the setpoint without requiring running the compressor.
Obviously humidity is an issue, but it strikes me that dehumidification only shouldn't necessarily require running a coil with the 20-30 degree temperature gap that the AC coil requires, thus saving some energy. Even if intake air wasn't perfectly dehumidified on intake, the blower could cycle for a longer period allowing further dehumidification.
The OP's idea for cooling a data center makes even more sense for very cold climates, as it would require little or no dehumidification -- relative humidity in winter months is often 20% around here.
All the major application vendors recognize that VMs are valuable and they also recognize that by refusing support for 3rd-part VMs *AND* offering a VM (even if it is someone else's with a new paint scheme), they can both make more money and squeeze competitors. Microsoft is already doing this with Exchange 2007 (note coming hypervisor/VM tech in 2008 server), and I expect other major application vendors might try the same thing.
This is clearly a monopolistic practice, but I don't expect our corporate overlords in the FTC to ever do anything about it.
Just ask for more money before signing it. Its actually quite routine for businesses to change/update non-competes and its generally understood that compensation for this new consideration will be asked & given, since I don't think you can be forced to agree to a change in terms of employment when you are already employed.
Secondly (and more importantly), who cares? If you're seriously concerned with your pending invention/IP, then see a lawyer, otherwise don't worry about it.
Whenever you quit ANY job, you politely tell your employer you have found another opportunity and thank them for the opportunity they gave you and walk away. You don't tell them where you're working, if you're working, who you're working for, etc. Yes, this means alienating all your work friends to some degree (at least temporarily), but you can either tell them individually when the times is right or based on your personal trust levels, but you don't and shouldn't tell your boss.
Of course, they can find out if they really want to, but how many white collar employees in the US are SO important and posses such critical information that your former employer will hire private investigators or use other time-consuming and costly methods to track down where you're working and then go to the trouble and expense of initiating legal action? That has to be such a SMALL number, that most everyone doesn't have to get worried about if the big bad corporation is going to come after them.
So take the money, look like a team player and quit worrying about them taking the rights to your flux capacitor or time machine.
Minneapolis is rolling theirs out right now and I just don't get it.
Ours is rolled in with a new (separate technology) wireless setup for municipal vehicles and police cars, also by the same company rolling out the internet service (the projects are tied together).
My best guess is that the city wanted to replace the cellular-based data service in the cop cars and get something more flexible, but nobody would pay for a huge project like that on its own merits, so it gets tied to citywide Wifi, which gets all the coffee-swilling urbanites hot and sweaty imagining downloading iTunes or blogging from any of the few square meters of this town not covered by SOME kind of free wifi already, making it easy for the dreamy-eyed liberals on the council to vote for.
I suspect that the dirty secret is that the city has promised to pay better-than-they-should for the municipal data network in order to pay for the money losing wifi system, which nobody will use (we have a "good" DSL rollout (eg, you can choose ISPs and the speed is decent) and cable, anybody who wants high speed HAS IT already).
I called my council person (ditsy Betsy Hodges) and bitched about the project and asked her who was going to use it. I was told that it was inexpensive for inner-city residents who couldn't afford cable or DSL, of course she had no answer how these poor people could afford modern PCs but not some kind of internet access. Maybe that's the next socialist giveaway.
I do worry, though, that the company running it will turn around and say "its a money loser" and threaten to close it down and the city will bend over backwards to give them more money before they lose their precious "community asset."
The only hope is that the equipment they are deploying is all software-radio based and that with little physical upgrading, the base stations can be reprogrammed for new wireless standards and make the network actually useful.
I'm not against municipal data projects, either, but I think that they have to provide something actually USEFUL (eg, fiber to the curb), not some 10-15 year old tech.
Do you ever stop overthinking everything? If you think a G-phone on even an existing EVDO cell network can get cable, let alone, DS-3 speeds, you need to drop your "Wired" subscription for something you can understand, like "People".
And if you think that Google would even bother with speeds slower than even low-end DSL, you should probably stop by the hospital and have them check your meds, since you're obviously in need of desperate measures.
And so you actually understand, everyone assumes that "PC speeds" refers to the kind of generic experience one gets from 512k+ DSL or Cable. OC-3 and up speeds are meaningless, since much of what users do doesn't really benefit from speeds above about 1-2Mbps.
It makes me wonder why the FBI doesn't have a permanent 1000 man team monitoring ebay for stolen merchandise.