What kind of losses did you incur as a result of the plaintiff's refusal to complete the purchase?
If the answer is "none" then you probably didn't have much of a case, at least in terms of fairness, since you didn't actually "lose" anything. I would imagine that even within one state, the laws on punitive contract clauses vary widely and there are probably a ton of consumer protection laws that drastically limit them as well.
Can you imagine putting down a down payment on some item and when you go to pick it up they've either substituted a less expensive or more expensive item and won't release the item without completing the purchase, perhaps at a higher price AND they can keep your down payment?
I'm generally a conservative -- very pro-gun, willing to try the "surge" in Iraq, generally favor Republican policies over Democratic ones -- but I'm to the point now where I think the Bush administration (which I've never really felt comfortable with) has demonstrated that it is entirely corrupt -- lying to get into Iraq, lying about Plame, and now the total fix/lie-fest of the US Attorney mess.
Bush needs to hang Rove out to dry -- let a special prosecutor send that guy to a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, can Gonzalez and seal the door to Cheney's office.
A friend taking flying lessons said that FAA regulations required the chopper used at the flight school to have its engine completely rebuilt every 1000 flight hours. I'm sure that's probably not entirely accurate (my memory or her quote), but I'm sure they do require significant rebuild/replacement of major components really frequently.
My client sells this and most of the sales stuff he has around the office makes it look more like just plastic braces nobody can see.
What looks cooler (and uses many of the same 3D modeling techniques) is a system that uses special wires; the tooth movements are modeled on screen and the wires are bent by robots with a precision that they can't get with hand tools. The upshot is supposedly 50% faster treatments due to the wires (stronger?) and the precision bending.
There was an urban legend in our building about being able to press and hold some button when entering the elevator that would cause it to "express" back down to the lobby, skipping any calls to other floors on the way down.
Our building had the lobby on 2, but the full bank of elevators would go to the 1st floor, exiting in a dimly lit elevator lobby that was exit-only and presumably only for emergencies. "Normal" traffic had to walk across the first floor, ride the escalator to 2, and then walk around the security desk to get to the elevators and vice-versa to exit.
The elevators all had a blank button that presumably went to 1 if it was only button pressed; pressing any other floor (like 2) would cause it to be ignored. Whenever you got on the elevator with a courier as the only occupant, the blank button was lit and the couriers would all groan when you hit any other floor button since they then had to walk an extra 100 yards or so and ride the escalator to get out of the building.
Neither trick worked for me when I tried them. Occasionally the elevator would go to 1 on its own (it must have been a fail-safe exit floor in the event of a mechanical problem that put the elevator out of service), and it was kind of weird when you were the only one on the elevator and not paying attention -- the doors would open and you'd be presented with this weird, empty space that was rather dark.
While I occasionally enjoy Krugman's columns, it's only window dressing that Krugman and the Cato institute are on opposite sides. They really represent a duopoly of opinion that relies on "the other side" to give "their side" some sort of validity.
Periodic ideological alignment is necessary to demonstrate that both "sides" are willing to engage in creative problem solving and aren't just part of an ideological game.
1) Industry experts 2) Business experts from outside the industry 3) Good rank-and-file employee sampling (proportionate represenation; ie, not all lunchboxes or suits)
You need input from all three to run the company well. All the genius industry expertise means crap of rank-and-file says it isn't working, and business experts from outside the industry can bring P&L/governance/etc expertise that might not be well represented within the industry, as well as provide market guidance (ie, HP sells PCs to the tech industry, but most go OUTSIDE the tech industry -- having non-tech experts on the board could provide really helpful advice).
> But it raises a question, which I've been on about at length in this thread: how do you verify? You do the research, but if it's not your area of expertise, you ask experts. If they tell you what you want to hear, how do you know?
It's a worthy problem, and I think it highlights a couple of problems:
1) Over-reliance on expert opinion. I think this is due to both lack of knowledge on the part of the decision makers and excessive scope of decision making. A decision maker perhaps should be smarter and/or better educated so that they can review some primary material and make a more informed decision *or* they should reduce the scope about which they make decisions.
2) Politicization. Advisory positions used to be above or outside of politics; experts relied on for specialized knowledge should be rank-and-file types judged and valued for their knowledge and analysis skills, not their political allegiances. We reached that point because decision makers have placed yes-men in advisory roles, and I also think a certain portion of the expert community has also allowed itself to bias the information they provide in the hope of decisions they favor -- something of a feedback loop.
I took the New Yorker article with a bit of a grain of salt. I think it went a little too far in accepting Patty's image of herself as a non-nonsense board member interested corporate governance buffeted between Carly haters and narcissistic venture capitalists.
I'm also skeptical of the usual "but they told me it was OK" finger-pointing merry-go-round that seems to indicate that merely asking someone else's opinion of the ethics of an action clears you of responsibility. We get that from every corporate scandal, when in reality its always a situation of them getting the answer they were looking for in the first place or yet another culture of don't-ask-don't-tell where results matter only slightly less than not getting caught.
No, I mean any of your post-colonial shitholes with no constitutional protections of free speech, run by enlightened leaders with no history of censorship or thuggishness towards even their domestic press, like Sudan, Zimbabwe, hey, even Russia (how many dead journalists in the last year?) and China.
Since the U.S. has a constitutional guarantee of free speech, a strong judiciary with no interest in prior restraint, as well as a vibrant free press, I don't think we qualify.
Your PKI doesn't do shit when some third-world government thug runs a few dozen 7.62x39 rounds through your camera. They generally don't want to steal your video, they don't want anyone to SEE your video AT ALL, and AK rounds accomplish this nicely.
Google Browser Sync seems to do a good job on passwords and cookies, but it does a *weird* job on bookmarks.
I organizized my bookmarks shortly after installing it and made the mistake of doing a full refresh, thinking it would somehow sync up my bookmarks the way I had just organized them on my home PC. Instead, it totally *trashed* my bookmarks. But strangely they kind of half-recovered about a month or so later.
What GBS needs is a way to to config sync for each item it syncs. I'd like to have multiple RW, RO relationships, conflict resolution rules (perhaps with some browser considered the winner always), and a way to specify what a refresh should do -- push out changes or pull down changes.
Since my bookmarks have stabilized it seems better, though.
That's actually not that hard.. add some data to the TCP header to give the final destination (machine number) - a couple of bytes would would do fine. You'd just need a stack at both ends that was capable of handling that.
Could probably hack it up in linux in 20 minutes... getting anyone else to use it of course would take longer. We're probably going to have to wait to see if a big player like MS does it first. I think the implementation trick is making the "protocol" extensible, secure and easy to use. MS takeup would help, too.
It seems like not a dumb idea -- if you think about it, port numbers enable 65k additional virtual IPs in a sense.
I always liked IPX numbering better than IP, if only because it integrated so easily with Ethernet and had such a larger pool of addresses.
The company I worked for was affiliated with a larger entity that had TWO/16s. One was very sparsely used as their public IP space and the other/16 was used internally. Yes, they NAT'd from one public 16 to another public 16.
My guess is that we'll very nearly never run out of IPv4 addresses -- as they become scarcer, ISPs will quit giving them away or come up with more effecient ways of giving them out so they don't need to hand out/30s or/29s but can hand out single IP addresses.
I wouldn't also be surprised to see more work done on automagic NAT mapping protocols that can allow for dynamic inbound mappings, further eliminating the need for multiple public IPs just to satisfy port number conflicts.
And shouldn't we expect faster and smarter routers less dependent on CIDR block-type allocations so that a recovered/29 or even a single IP can be reused anywhere without the 1990s style whining about routing table sizes?
Clearly this is an "organized" crime, why not a RICO prosecution which would enable much larger fines and many of the executives involved an opportunity to get to know some of the finer Federal institutions?
These cash-only fines do NOTHING except encourge everyone involved to up the ante to cover future fines (if they even need to -- $12.5 is probably a quarter-days advertising PROFIT for all the entities involved).
These arrogant corporate pricks need to get the kind of life-alterting punishment the rest of us get from the government; even if it is a fine, it needs to be substantial and PERSONALLY payable by the executives involved -- to the extent that the agency collecting it both collects it from the exec's assets (confiscating and/or selling assets as required) as well as monitoring the exec's income for 10 years to insure that they are not compensated by the corporation (making the corporation and its officers criminally liable for any compensatory payments would help, too).
Rarely do people in IT talk about how they often don't even know what the business problems are for the company, divisions, units and work groups they are providing services for. When I worked in an IT department, I used to *beg* to have employees explain to me what their specific business problems were, only to be told I wouldn't understand, lacked the niche experience or some other bullshit answer that had more to do with maintaining exclusivity and power bases among middle management. So you guessed as best you could in keeping with the IT policies and procedures you *knew* existed and were enforced, but then got chided for not understanding the business problems. OK, great, you don't like my cooking and you won't share the recipe. I guess that works.
Even in situations where the basic business problem is being solved (ie, replacing desperately old machines first on a companywide basis), I've had departmental managers tell me "I don't care what the company needs, I want my people taken care of first." What business problem is THAT solving?
Even for those problems that they are aware of, frequently problem solving takes a back-seat to the problems of structure within IT itself (well, the desktop team has to approve it after they get the purchase order for the technology liasion and then it needs to go to the network team for approval before I can do anything), silly procedural rules designed for no-trust situations which ironically create zero trust because of their application (any time we do a change you need to send me two emails the first saying "I've checked the code in pre-production and it should be promoted...blah blah blah), IT arrogance (we do not provide that service and you can't go elsewhere for it), etc. At the end of the day/week/month/year, IT has its own internal accountability which determines pay, raises, bonuses, promotions, and so on, typically following a company wide model. I got tired of being taken to the woodshed when I violated obviously stupid IT policy for the benefit of users; I have to respect what side of the bread gets buttered. And then there's the *financial* accountability -- often wanting to support users in the way they'd like involves spending money in ways that finance won't approve (often for reasons cavalier and petty) or if they do approve, its a choice between critical infrastructure (mail servers, firewalls, core networking) versus vanity needs (5 marketing people who want top-of-the-line Mac laptops and full design suites, despite being top-10 "How do I create a folder?" help desk callers).
Sure, people ask for and do stupid things and IT needs to be careful with tracking changes and such - but there is a lot of flat out lying (because it is convenient) and other bullshit that goes on because IT departments forget who their customers are. I've always found the customer-centric analogy fundamentally flawed in IT, at least in your most common centrally funded IT departments. You're only a customer if you're *paying* somewhat directly for your IT services; usually its "we want this and that and we don't care what it costs or who else is inconvenienced companywide."
I've never worked in a chargeback-centric organization, but it would be interesting to see if some of the most abusive "customer" behavior disappeared along with some of the worst IT policies if at the end of the day IT didn't *have* to act as a gatekeeper, since the business unit in question was *paying* for what they wanted, and had some internal pressures to eliminate some of the dumb behavior and waste lest continuing demands (ie, more mail storage, etc) erode business unit margins.
You just can't win in IT. If you block access to something, you're all about control and limiting innovation. When something stupid happens, you own the problem 110% because you didn't do enough to prevent it from happening.
What's funny is that nobody seems to think its "unfair" that you can't make yourself more efficient by cutting a hole in the wall and creating your own doorway to the parking lot, but cutting a hole in IT security with filesharing is OK because it makes you more efficient.
I'm sympathetic to the end users as many IT policies do seem irrational, but I'm also sympathetic to IT since its unlikely they have been given a mandate to enable the end users to do whatever they want.
Mirroring is an expensive waste of disk space unless you really need the fast write times.
I think a 4 disk RAID-5 is a better sweet spot, since you lose less storage to parity/recovery data and it seems cheaper to buy 4x smaller drives than 2x larger drives. 2 300GB disks looks around $200 and 4x 120GB disks is around $220, but you end up with 60GB more space for the $20.
I've had very inconsistent experiences with CFL lifespans. I've been buying them for several years now and try to use them wherever possible, primarily for the electrical savings (I'm an admitted light-forget-to-turn-off-er).
But I have a few fixtures that CFLs simply don't last in. My office is one where it makes the least sense -- 4 identical recessed ceiling fixtures, all on the same circuit and all bought at the same time. CFLs in one fixture simply don't last -- the three others are all the same CFLs I installed originally.
One side benefit I take advantage (and hasn't correlated with my early dying problem) is the ability to up-lamp a fixture -- using a 100-watt equivalent in a fixture designed for only a 60 watt incandescent and STILL saving electricity. I've even made use of the 150-watt equivalent bulbs, although they're kind of big.
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What kind of losses did you incur as a result of the plaintiff's refusal to complete the purchase?
If the answer is "none" then you probably didn't have much of a case, at least in terms of fairness, since you didn't actually "lose" anything. I would imagine that even within one state, the laws on punitive contract clauses vary widely and there are probably a ton of consumer protection laws that drastically limit them as well.
Can you imagine putting down a down payment on some item and when you go to pick it up they've either substituted a less expensive or more expensive item and won't release the item without completing the purchase, perhaps at a higher price AND they can keep your down payment?
Bush is a part of the problem, but I think the problem is that he's kind of a prisoner of his advisors.
I'm generally a conservative -- very pro-gun, willing to try the "surge" in Iraq, generally favor Republican policies over Democratic ones -- but I'm to the point now where I think the Bush administration (which I've never really felt comfortable with) has demonstrated that it is entirely corrupt -- lying to get into Iraq, lying about Plame, and now the total fix/lie-fest of the US Attorney mess.
Bush needs to hang Rove out to dry -- let a special prosecutor send that guy to a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, can Gonzalez and seal the door to Cheney's office.
A friend taking flying lessons said that FAA regulations required the chopper used at the flight school to have its engine completely rebuilt every 1000 flight hours. I'm sure that's probably not entirely accurate (my memory or her quote), but I'm sure they do require significant rebuild/replacement of major components really frequently.
My client sells this and most of the sales stuff he has around the office makes it look more like just plastic braces nobody can see.
What looks cooler (and uses many of the same 3D modeling techniques) is a system that uses special wires; the tooth movements are modeled on screen and the wires are bent by robots with a precision that they can't get with hand tools. The upshot is supposedly 50% faster treatments due to the wires (stronger?) and the precision bending.
I wonder why it took you Intel lovers nearly 10 years to catch up to what I was using 10 years ago? If it was so great, why is HPaq phasing them out?
There was an urban legend in our building about being able to press and hold some button when entering the elevator that would cause it to "express" back down to the lobby, skipping any calls to other floors on the way down.
Our building had the lobby on 2, but the full bank of elevators would go to the 1st floor, exiting in a dimly lit elevator lobby that was exit-only and presumably only for emergencies. "Normal" traffic had to walk across the first floor, ride the escalator to 2, and then walk around the security desk to get to the elevators and vice-versa to exit.
The elevators all had a blank button that presumably went to 1 if it was only button pressed; pressing any other floor (like 2) would cause it to be ignored. Whenever you got on the elevator with a courier as the only occupant, the blank button was lit and the couriers would all groan when you hit any other floor button since they then had to walk an extra 100 yards or so and ride the escalator to get out of the building.
Neither trick worked for me when I tried them. Occasionally the elevator would go to 1 on its own (it must have been a fail-safe exit floor in the event of a mechanical problem that put the elevator out of service), and it was kind of weird when you were the only one on the elevator and not paying attention -- the doors would open and you'd be presented with this weird, empty space that was rather dark.
That looks nice. The only thing missing, though, is networking; it'd be nice to just plug it in and have it monitor a shared disk somewhere else.
That would make much more sense to me, as would a front slot for ripping them to the backend storage.
While I occasionally enjoy Krugman's columns, it's only window dressing that Krugman and the Cato institute are on opposite sides. They really represent a duopoly of opinion that relies on "the other side" to give "their side" some sort of validity.
Periodic ideological alignment is necessary to demonstrate that both "sides" are willing to engage in creative problem solving and aren't just part of an ideological game.
I think the ideal BoD is comprised of:
1) Industry experts
2) Business experts from outside the industry
3) Good rank-and-file employee sampling (proportionate represenation; ie, not all lunchboxes or suits)
You need input from all three to run the company well. All the genius industry expertise means crap of rank-and-file says it isn't working, and business experts from outside the industry can bring P&L/governance/etc expertise that might not be well represented within the industry, as well as provide market guidance (ie, HP sells PCs to the tech industry, but most go OUTSIDE the tech industry -- having non-tech experts on the board could provide really helpful advice).
> But it raises a question, which I've been on about at length in this thread: how do you verify? You do the research, but if it's not your area of expertise, you ask experts. If they tell you what you want to hear, how do you know?
It's a worthy problem, and I think it highlights a couple of problems:
1) Over-reliance on expert opinion. I think this is due to both lack of knowledge on the part of the decision makers and excessive scope of decision making. A decision maker perhaps should be smarter and/or better educated so that they can review some primary material and make a more informed decision *or* they should reduce the scope about which they make decisions.
2) Politicization. Advisory positions used to be above or outside of politics; experts relied on for specialized knowledge should be rank-and-file types judged and valued for their knowledge and analysis skills, not their political allegiances. We reached that point because decision makers have placed yes-men in advisory roles, and I also think a certain portion of the expert community has also allowed itself to bias the information they provide in the hope of decisions they favor -- something of a feedback loop.
I took the New Yorker article with a bit of a grain of salt. I think it went a little too far in accepting Patty's image of herself as a non-nonsense board member interested corporate governance buffeted between Carly haters and narcissistic venture capitalists.
I'm also skeptical of the usual "but they told me it was OK" finger-pointing merry-go-round that seems to indicate that merely asking someone else's opinion of the ethics of an action clears you of responsibility. We get that from every corporate scandal, when in reality its always a situation of them getting the answer they were looking for in the first place or yet another culture of don't-ask-don't-tell where results matter only slightly less than not getting caught.
But couldn't you also say that Wolfenstein was also stolen from the original Apple ][ Wolfenstein that I played back in 1982?
No, I mean any of your post-colonial shitholes with no constitutional protections of free speech, run by enlightened leaders with no history of censorship or thuggishness towards even their domestic press, like Sudan, Zimbabwe, hey, even Russia (how many dead journalists in the last year?) and China.
Since the U.S. has a constitutional guarantee of free speech, a strong judiciary with no interest in prior restraint, as well as a vibrant free press, I don't think we qualify.
Your PKI doesn't do shit when some third-world government thug runs a few dozen 7.62x39 rounds through your camera. They generally don't want to steal your video, they don't want anyone to SEE your video AT ALL, and AK rounds accomplish this nicely.
Google Browser Sync seems to do a good job on passwords and cookies, but it does a *weird* job on bookmarks.
I organizized my bookmarks shortly after installing it and made the mistake of doing a full refresh, thinking it would somehow sync up my bookmarks the way I had just organized them on my home PC. Instead, it totally *trashed* my bookmarks. But strangely they kind of half-recovered about a month or so later.
What GBS needs is a way to to config sync for each item it syncs. I'd like to have multiple RW, RO relationships, conflict resolution rules (perhaps with some browser considered the winner always), and a way to specify what a refresh should do -- push out changes or pull down changes.
Since my bookmarks have stabilized it seems better, though.
Could probably hack it up in linux in 20 minutes... getting anyone else to use it of course would take longer. We're probably going to have to wait to see if a big player like MS does it first. I think the implementation trick is making the "protocol" extensible, secure and easy to use. MS takeup would help, too.
It seems like not a dumb idea -- if you think about it, port numbers enable 65k additional virtual IPs in a sense.
I always liked IPX numbering better than IP, if only because it integrated so easily with Ethernet and had such a larger pool of addresses.
The company I worked for was affiliated with a larger entity that had TWO /16s. One was very sparsely used as their public IP space and the other /16 was used internally. Yes, they NAT'd from one public 16 to another public 16.
/30s or /29s but can hand out single IP addresses.
/29 or even a single IP can be reused anywhere without the 1990s style whining about routing table sizes?
My guess is that we'll very nearly never run out of IPv4 addresses -- as they become scarcer, ISPs will quit giving them away or come up with more effecient ways of giving them out so they don't need to hand out
I wouldn't also be surprised to see more work done on automagic NAT mapping protocols that can allow for dynamic inbound mappings, further eliminating the need for multiple public IPs just to satisfy port number conflicts.
And shouldn't we expect faster and smarter routers less dependent on CIDR block-type allocations so that a recovered
Clearly this is an "organized" crime, why not a RICO prosecution which would enable much larger fines and many of the executives involved an opportunity to get to know some of the finer Federal institutions?
These cash-only fines do NOTHING except encourge everyone involved to up the ante to cover future fines (if they even need to -- $12.5 is probably a quarter-days advertising PROFIT for all the entities involved).
These arrogant corporate pricks need to get the kind of life-alterting punishment the rest of us get from the government; even if it is a fine, it needs to be substantial and PERSONALLY payable by the executives involved -- to the extent that the agency collecting it both collects it from the exec's assets (confiscating and/or selling assets as required) as well as monitoring the exec's income for 10 years to insure that they are not compensated by the corporation (making the corporation and its officers criminally liable for any compensatory payments would help, too).
Even in situations where the basic business problem is being solved (ie, replacing desperately old machines first on a companywide basis), I've had departmental managers tell me "I don't care what the company needs, I want my people taken care of first." What business problem is THAT solving? Even for those problems that they are aware of, frequently problem solving takes a back-seat to the problems of structure within IT itself (well, the desktop team has to approve it after they get the purchase order for the technology liasion and then it needs to go to the network team for approval before I can do anything), silly procedural rules designed for no-trust situations which ironically create zero trust because of their application (any time we do a change you need to send me two emails the first saying "I've checked the code in pre-production and it should be promoted...blah blah blah), IT arrogance (we do not provide that service and you can't go elsewhere for it), etc. At the end of the day/week/month/year, IT has its own internal accountability which determines pay, raises, bonuses, promotions, and so on, typically following a company wide model. I got tired of being taken to the woodshed when I violated obviously stupid IT policy for the benefit of users; I have to respect what side of the bread gets buttered. And then there's the *financial* accountability -- often wanting to support users in the way they'd like involves spending money in ways that finance won't approve (often for reasons cavalier and petty) or if they do approve, its a choice between critical infrastructure (mail servers, firewalls, core networking) versus vanity needs (5 marketing people who want top-of-the-line Mac laptops and full design suites, despite being top-10 "How do I create a folder?" help desk callers). Sure, people ask for and do stupid things and IT needs to be careful with tracking changes and such - but there is a lot of flat out lying (because it is convenient) and other bullshit that goes on because IT departments forget who their customers are. I've always found the customer-centric analogy fundamentally flawed in IT, at least in your most common centrally funded IT departments. You're only a customer if you're *paying* somewhat directly for your IT services; usually its "we want this and that and we don't care what it costs or who else is inconvenienced companywide."
I've never worked in a chargeback-centric organization, but it would be interesting to see if some of the most abusive "customer" behavior disappeared along with some of the worst IT policies if at the end of the day IT didn't *have* to act as a gatekeeper, since the business unit in question was *paying* for what they wanted, and had some internal pressures to eliminate some of the dumb behavior and waste lest continuing demands (ie, more mail storage, etc) erode business unit margins.
You just can't win in IT. If you block access to something, you're all about control and limiting innovation. When something stupid happens, you own the problem 110% because you didn't do enough to prevent it from happening.
What's funny is that nobody seems to think its "unfair" that you can't make yourself more efficient by cutting a hole in the wall and creating your own doorway to the parking lot, but cutting a hole in IT security with filesharing is OK because it makes you more efficient.
I'm sympathetic to the end users as many IT policies do seem irrational, but I'm also sympathetic to IT since its unlikely they have been given a mandate to enable the end users to do whatever they want.
How often do you see raid controllers actually fail? I'm not sure I've ever seen one fail since I started working with them in the early 90s.
Mirroring is an expensive waste of disk space unless you really need the fast write times.
I think a 4 disk RAID-5 is a better sweet spot, since you lose less storage to parity/recovery data and it seems cheaper to buy 4x smaller drives than 2x larger drives. 2 300GB disks looks around $200 and 4x 120GB disks is around $220, but you end up with 60GB more space for the $20.
I've had very inconsistent experiences with CFL lifespans. I've been buying them for several years now and try to use them wherever possible, primarily for the electrical savings (I'm an admitted light-forget-to-turn-off-er).
But I have a few fixtures that CFLs simply don't last in. My office is one where it makes the least sense -- 4 identical recessed ceiling fixtures, all on the same circuit and all bought at the same time. CFLs in one fixture simply don't last -- the three others are all the same CFLs I installed originally.
One side benefit I take advantage (and hasn't correlated with my early dying problem) is the ability to up-lamp a fixture -- using a 100-watt equivalent in a fixture designed for only a 60 watt incandescent and STILL saving electricity. I've even made use of the 150-watt equivalent bulbs, although they're kind of big.