GPS as far as I know works in one direction. How does TomTom collect data? They upload it if you log in on the net for an update?
Neither of TFA's linked in the summary are very long, your answer is in the second one:
When you use one of our products we ask for your permission to collect travel time information on an anonymous basis. The vast majority of you do indeed grant us that permission. When you connect your TomTom to a computer we aggregate this information and use it for a variety of applications, most importantly to create high quality traffic information and to route you around traffic jams.
Does anyone see this as anything other that a PR stunt? Facebook's datacenter uses 30MW of electricity -- a 100KW solar panel array will produce 0.1% of their power - not even a drop in the bucket. (note that it's not 0.3% since the solar panels don't provide power all day).
If they were really interested in reducing their carbon footprint with solar, they'd be investing in one of the large-scale power plants being built in the desert where they can buy more KW per dollar. it doesn't matter whether they reduce carbon in Arizona or in Oregon, it's all the same to the environment.
And if they were *really* interested in reducing their carbon footprint, they'd use a small nuclear reactor to generate 100% of their power on-site. Which would make a *real* difference in their carbon footprint rather than a meaningless symbolic gesture.
No they need Obama Skull fucking his dead corpse. That would send a message.
Yeah, because if people in the USA saw some Al Qaida member skull fucking the corpse of someone in our military (or even a political leader), we'd get the message that they are bad-asses and concede the war and back down immediately.
t would be unreasonable to expect Grandma & grandpa who barely know how to turn on a computer to learn Linux...
This is on oft repeated fallacy. And it is a fallacy. There is nothing harder for 'grandma and grandpa' about Linux vs. Windows. Especially if they don't already know Windows. My computer-literate, non-programmer friends who want technical support from me use Linux, and I hardly ever get a call.
My elderly parents (> 70 years old) have been running Linux for about 5 years. They don't know or care what the underlying operating system - all they want is a web browser so they can send mail and browse the web. I gave them some desktop shortcuts for some common websites and set their browser homepage to to a page on my webserver so I can give them additional shortcuts (like a link to my sister's Picasa page) anytime I want. I moved them to Linux after multiple viral infections (despite anti-virus "protection") made their computer unusable under Windows. When I gave them a new laptop 2 years ago and showed them Windows, they wanted it back how it was, so I ditched WinXP and moved them back to Linux/Gnome.
Looks like they'll be staying with Gnome2 for the forseeable future since I don't want to teach them to Navigate Gnome3's new interface (or, worse, Unity).
Oh, and the printer they bought as Best Buy works fine.
Surely at that price it would be more cost effective to just buy a new car every day. $24M @ $30k per car would get you 800 days or over 2 years before you have to go searching for another day's car. If you drive a cheaper car and/or buy in bulk you could probably push that to 3 1/2 years. Or better yet buy or fit one out so that it's keyless. Of course your car won't be as cool as anything that can submerge a few thousand feet and still operate, but hey thems the breaks kid.
If you're looking for cost effectiveness, why not just buy an endless supply of spare keys? Or one keyfinder?
The main advantage of paper is that it lasts a long time. Many banks and financial institutions say they'll keep records for 10 years, which sounds like a long time, but sometimes you need longer. For me, I inherited some stock some 30 or so years ago. If I sell the stock, I need to know the cost basis, so I need information from 30 years ago, and I need to track mergers and splits over that time period.
Paper records last a long time... until your first fire or flood. My sister lost her house to a fire, including the documents stored in the consumer grade fire-safe. I'm sure there are commercial grade fire safes that can provide better protection, but then you still only have one copy of your document. Offsite backups of paper documents are possible, but there's still a lag time between when you make the backup copy and when you actually take it off site to your bank safe deposit box (or grandma's house).
Electronic records lend themselves well to off-site storage. Keep a copy on your hard drive and have it backed up automatically to an online backup service. If you're worried about privacy, encrypt the files.
Even a photocopied (as in - copied onto a dead tree format) documents will be useless in many cases if you are required to have the original receipt/bill/invoice.
What is one of those cases? As a private citizen, I've never had a need for a "wet-ink" original document, copies have been fine for everything, even when I had a dispute with my mortgage company.
As for filing... Stick everything into plastic sheet protectors. [amazon.com] If you need to label them in some way, either attach a post-it from the inside or simply write the label on the sheet protector with a marker.
Wow, are you that OCD with everything? Even in companies I've worked at where they have million dollar contracts that have a 10 year lifetime, they just put the originals in manilla envelopes in a file cabinet (and keep an electronic copy) -- what purpose does the sheet protector serve?
WIth thermal printed receipts, if you don't have a scanned or photocopied copy of the receipt, in 2 years, it's likely that all you'll have a blank piece of paper. The fade over time eventually becoming impossible to read.
Well, at least that's what happens with my storage system of throwing them into a box in my non-airconditioned home office. Maybe if I stored them in more climate-controlled conditions they'd last longer.
I have all (well nearly all) of my bills sent to Paytrust.
I set their address as my billing address, when they receive the paper bills, they scan them in and store them for me. Then they pay the bills for me -- I set up payment rules so, for example, if my electric bill is less than $50, they pay it automatically, if it's more than that, they email me an exception notice and wait for me to take action. It's also possible to set a maximum payment, so for example with a credit card bill, I can tell them to pay a maximum of $200 on my bill (or the total payment due if it's less than $200).
For most merchants that have electronic bill retrieval, they retrieve the electronic copy of the bill so I don't have to have a paper bill sent to them.
For merchants that don't send a bill (i.e. my landlord), I can schedule automatic payments (or do one-time payments) just like any online payment service.
They have electronic payment arrangements for most major billers (credit card companies, utilities,etc), so they don't even need to send out a check in many cases, they pay electronically so there's no chance of the bill getting lost in the mail (though I believe that with some smaller billers, instead of an EFT, they send one paper check for all of their customers along with a list of account numbers to apply the payment to)
In about 10 years of using their service, they've never lost a payment - I've had a few checks in the mail fail to be delivered, but in all but one case, the check eventually made it, it was delayed by the post office.
Some merchants get confused when your billing address is not the same as your physical address. Sometimes they sent notices to the paytrust address, which Paytrust either scans in for you, or if it's something like an auto insurance card, they forward it to you by mail.
The only missing feature that I really wish they had is a way to upload my own invoices, so if I get a bill from my plumber I can upload it to my Paytrust account to store it and send him a check.
At the end of the year, they sell me a CD with all of my bill images on it.
I know this sounds like a paid advertisement for Paytrust, but I am just a very satisfied customer - I'm usually terrible about paying bills on time, Paytrust makes sure I make all of my bills are paid on time. Does anyone know if there any other competing services? My bank's online bill-pay service just doesn't compare - they have no way to receive paper bills and pay them for me.
Theres no reason any company needs to shove 10 year old hardware on an intern. You call up Dell or whoever, say you need a thousand PCs and they will bring it out.
Nor is there any reason why they need interns, just just need to post a help-wanted add and a thousand people will send their resume.
There's just the small matter of funding - when you get a real job in the real world, you'll find that unbudgeted capital expenditures and adding headcount take more than a phone call to a vendor to resolve.
The TV industry is telling me that I need to have BluRay player (~ 16GB/hour) to take advantage of my expensive new HD TV, now you're saying "Bah, even DVD is too much, you don't need that kind of quality, highly compressed 480i (0.5 GB/hour) is good enough for your 1080p TV"
2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?
What exactly do people gain by using their internet connection to watch live sports, news, or the latest episode of their favorite sitcom, instead of just watching it as broadcast or recording the broadcast, like they have done every day for the last 30 years?
Yeah, and why should they need cable either - they can watch over-the-air broadcasts through an antenna on their roof like they did every day for the last 70 years. Sure they may only get a few broadcast networks, but that should be good enough for anyone. I mean what possible reason could there be for cable? Is there really any difference between broadcast tv and cable?
Sure, I understand how oversubscription works, but don't say that your service is great for video streaming when I'd hit your cap in 15 days if I tried to replace my normal TV viewing with streaming.
I really don't care what the economics of being an ISP are - if they can't support the use they are claiming it's for, then they shouldn't be making that claim. It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.
It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their latest pickup is great for heavy construction use... then in the fine print they note "Warranty invalid if used for heavy construction use".
Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.
But those exceptions have to be rare events, not common occurrences, IIRC.
I wonder if that's what I meant when I said "there are a few exceptions..."
The clarification being made is that those few exceptions can only be used on rare occasions, they can not be regular events.
I've never heard of a permitted single-instance exception, but the normal example of a permitted permanent exception is the security guard in a remote location that can't leave his desk:
I'm certain that many employees violate the rule in special circumstances (i.e. if someone is out sick, so the other employee has to cover the phone over lunch), but I'm not aware of any exception to the law that allows this -- those employees are technically entitled to and must receive their meal break.
In looking at the picture, it's possible that the kit really doesn't come with chemicals (except maybe for some litmus strips or something like that).
The experiments sound like something you'd do with household chemicals like water, salt, soap, baking soda, etc.
So it's fair to bash the kit on the lack of interesting chemical experiments, but not fair to bash it only for the "Chemical free" label.
Though to be honest, even my old-school chemistry set with real chemicals with hundreds of "experiments" wasn't all that exciting for me and didn't do anything to give me good lab habits. Plus the powdered chemicals often congealed into a solid chunk and you had to scrape them off of the chunk. It was fun playing with the alcohol burner, though.
Sure, but how exactly is that disgruntled employee going to prove it? I mean, I'm going to claim whatever I'm going to claim regarding my workhours... Truth or not. His word against mine...
He doesn't have to prove anything about *your* work hours, he just has to prove that the lunches were mandatory, perhaps by presenting 200 emails from the departmental manager all saying something like "Today's lunch is at Taco Bell down on 4th street. I expect the whole team to attend since I'm going to talk about the new performance review process"
If the labor board agrees that this makes the meals work related and compensable, then they can order the company to pay back pay to every (non-exempt) attendee, whether you want the money or not.
if you're an exempt employee, I'm not aware of any law that would force you to take a lunch break. Your employer can tell you to work through breakfast lunch and dinner, and your only recourse is to quit.
No. There is also the option of filing a complaint with the labor board. I once worked for a company that was caught up in a labor related lawsuit due to a sister company's actions (both companys owned by the same parent). Today the courts in California are ruling that too many people are considered exempt employees, that employers are trying to make an end run around labor laws. Basically all the engineers and lower level managers at the company had to reclassified from exempt salary to non-exempt hourly. If a company in California is still classifying its engineers and developers as exempt then change is one visit from the labor relations folks away.
I did say if you're an exempt employee. Obviously if you're wrongly classified as an exempt employee, then you are not one.
But those exceptions have to be rare events, not common occurrences, IIRC.
I wonder if that's what I meant when I said "there are a few exceptions..."
Just as soon as Activesync became viable and the onslaught of WinMo phones that supported it came out I began to see customers at the mid/small level abandon the expensive and complicated BES for direct SSL communication. No more dedicated BES server, no more expensive licenses.
We saw the same thing happen when exec's started clamoring for iPhones. But most of them came back to Blackberry when they realized that they were missing some important functionality, (like the ability to see availability when booking a meeting), had problems with dropped appointments accepted on their iPhone, and have had problems with missing emails -- emails that show up in their inbox on outlook and blackberry, but not on the iPhone.
For me personally, the big thing that's missing on my Android/ActiveSync mail client is a way to configure message filters to decide what to deliver to the device. I get some status messages from some devices that I generally want to read during the day, but don't want to see them on my Blackberry (and don't want to get woken up at 3am by a flurry of unimportant informational status messages, but I do want to be woken up by the ones that say we're out of disk space).
I have about a dozen filters on my blackberry to filter out the noise, and though I can set up Outlook filtering, the kind of filtering I want to do is client-only, not server side, so if Outlook isn't running on my desktop, the messages don't get filtered.
The Blackberry has another nice feature that saved my butt once - I was out of town, and our VPN concentrator failed and didn't failover to the backup device. No one could VPN into the office to fix it or even diagnose. Since my blackberry is essentially on our internal network, I was able to ssh into the backup concentrator, reboot it and get it online. All while 8000 miles from home. Took me 10 minutes to fix it, while it would have taken an hour or two to get someone to the office to fix it. I realize that this also makes the blackberry a potential back door into the network, so most people don't have unrestricted network access on their BB.
I don't think Activesync is going to push out all of the corporate RIM/BES users just yet.
So? If the state laws don't allow it, ignore them. Similar laws exist in my country and I never ever would lunch with my coworkers. It's on par with ignoring speed limits, everybody does it and the odds of being caught are even lower. What are they going to do? Inspection? Well, go on lunch if that ever happens. If asked, you took lunch outside in the park.
I have no problem lying about this. I mean, they can't prove it's not true.
The problem with ignoring labor laws is not the happy content employees are are willing to put in extra time and other things necessary to just "get the job done".
The problem is when you end up with a disgruntled employee that wants to make things bad for the company - they can make a labor complaint, show that the the manager required all 20 people on the team to participate in group lunches, and then suddenly the employer is faced with paying 2 years of overtime to all 20 team members.
This is why HR departments exist - to protect the company from future litigation.
I find that the after work drink outings with my coworkers are *much* better at building camaraderie. I don't consider myself to be sad and lonely, but I prefer to take my lunches alone. However, many of us get together for a weekly happy hour, including a few coworkers that don't drink alcohol.
I find that lunch outings tend to be an extension of the office - everyone is focused on work. If I wanted a lunchtime meeting, I would have scheduled one -- I prefer to take a mid-day break from work.
if you're an exempt employee, I'm not aware of any law that would force you to take a lunch break. Your employer can tell you to work through breakfast lunch and dinner, and your only recourse is to quit.
If you're non-exempt, in California you have to take a 30 minute (unpaid) lunch whether you want to or not. (there are a few exceptions that would allow an on-duty meal break)
I think the limiting factor here is just that, that DirecTV is developing this product as an addition to their standard satellite package, rather than as a unique product, and as such are reducing the pool of potential viewers to only their current client base. Netflix is alternate entertainment provider agnostic and given the way DirecTV nickels and dimes you on EVERYTHING, somehow I doubt this will be cheaper than Netflix's offering.
That may limit their potential market size but may also mean they can get more content - content owners won't be as afraid to license their content because they won't be so worried about cannibalizing their broadcast markets since they know that DirecTV customers are already paying to receive broadcast content.
Slashdot Mirror
GPS as far as I know works in one direction. How does TomTom collect data? They upload it if you log in on the net for an update?
Neither of TFA's linked in the summary are very long, your answer is in the second one:
When you use one of our products we ask for your permission to collect travel time information on an anonymous basis. The vast majority of you do indeed grant us that permission. When you connect your TomTom to a computer we aggregate this information and use it for a variety of applications, most importantly to create high quality traffic information and to route you around traffic jams.
Does anyone see this as anything other that a PR stunt? Facebook's datacenter uses 30MW of electricity -- a 100KW solar panel array will produce 0.1% of their power - not even a drop in the bucket. (note that it's not 0.3% since the solar panels don't provide power all day).
If they were really interested in reducing their carbon footprint with solar, they'd be investing in one of the large-scale power plants being built in the desert where they can buy more KW per dollar. it doesn't matter whether they reduce carbon in Arizona or in Oregon, it's all the same to the environment.
And if they were *really* interested in reducing their carbon footprint, they'd use a small nuclear reactor to generate 100% of their power on-site. Which would make a *real* difference in their carbon footprint rather than a meaningless symbolic gesture.
No they need Obama Skull fucking his dead corpse. That would send a message.
Yeah, because if people in the USA saw some Al Qaida member skull fucking the corpse of someone in our military (or even a political leader), we'd get the message that they are bad-asses and concede the war and back down immediately.
t would be unreasonable to expect Grandma & grandpa who barely know how to turn on a computer to learn Linux...
This is on oft repeated fallacy. And it is a fallacy. There is nothing harder for 'grandma and grandpa' about Linux vs. Windows. Especially if they don't already know Windows. My computer-literate, non-programmer friends who want technical support from me use Linux, and I hardly ever get a call.
My elderly parents (> 70 years old) have been running Linux for about 5 years. They don't know or care what the underlying operating system - all they want is a web browser so they can send mail and browse the web. I gave them some desktop shortcuts for some common websites and set their browser homepage to to a page on my webserver so I can give them additional shortcuts (like a link to my sister's Picasa page) anytime I want. I moved them to Linux after multiple viral infections (despite anti-virus "protection") made their computer unusable under Windows. When I gave them a new laptop 2 years ago and showed them Windows, they wanted it back how it was, so I ditched WinXP and moved them back to Linux/Gnome.
Looks like they'll be staying with Gnome2 for the forseeable future since I don't want to teach them to Navigate Gnome3's new interface (or, worse, Unity).
Oh, and the printer they bought as Best Buy works fine.
Surely at that price it would be more cost effective to just buy a new car every day. $24M @ $30k per car would get you 800 days or over 2 years before you have to go searching for another day's car. If you drive a cheaper car and/or buy in bulk you could probably push that to 3 1/2 years. Or better yet buy or fit one out so that it's keyless. Of course your car won't be as cool as anything that can submerge a few thousand feet and still operate, but hey thems the breaks kid.
If you're looking for cost effectiveness, why not just buy an endless supply of spare keys? Or one keyfinder?
The main advantage of paper is that it lasts a long time. Many banks and financial institutions say they'll keep records for 10 years, which sounds like a long time, but sometimes you need longer. For me, I inherited some stock some 30 or so years ago. If I sell the stock, I need to know the cost basis, so I need information from 30 years ago, and I need to track mergers and splits over that time period.
Paper records last a long time... until your first fire or flood. My sister lost her house to a fire, including the documents stored in the consumer grade fire-safe. I'm sure there are commercial grade fire safes that can provide better protection, but then you still only have one copy of your document. Offsite backups of paper documents are possible, but there's still a lag time between when you make the backup copy and when you actually take it off site to your bank safe deposit box (or grandma's house).
Electronic records lend themselves well to off-site storage. Keep a copy on your hard drive and have it backed up automatically to an online backup service. If you're worried about privacy, encrypt the files.
Even a photocopied (as in - copied onto a dead tree format) documents will be useless in many cases if you are required to have the original receipt/bill/invoice.
What is one of those cases? As a private citizen, I've never had a need for a "wet-ink" original document, copies have been fine for everything, even when I had a dispute with my mortgage company.
As for filing...
Stick everything into plastic sheet protectors. [amazon.com]
If you need to label them in some way, either attach a post-it from the inside or simply write the label on the sheet protector with a marker.
Wow, are you that OCD with everything? Even in companies I've worked at where they have million dollar contracts that have a 10 year lifetime, they just put the originals in manilla envelopes in a file cabinet (and keep an electronic copy) -- what purpose does the sheet protector serve?
WIth thermal printed receipts, if you don't have a scanned or photocopied copy of the receipt, in 2 years, it's likely that all you'll have a blank piece of paper. The fade over time eventually becoming impossible to read.
Well, at least that's what happens with my storage system of throwing them into a box in my non-airconditioned home office. Maybe if I stored them in more climate-controlled conditions they'd last longer.
Sorry, bad link in my post - it should link to: Paytrust. I dropped the "http" in the link, and apparently that makes it link to this article.
I have all (well nearly all) of my bills sent to Paytrust.
I set their address as my billing address, when they receive the paper bills, they scan them in and store them for me. Then they pay the bills for me -- I set up payment rules so, for example, if my electric bill is less than $50, they pay it automatically, if it's more than that, they email me an exception notice and wait for me to take action. It's also possible to set a maximum payment, so for example with a credit card bill, I can tell them to pay a maximum of $200 on my bill (or the total payment due if it's less than $200).
For most merchants that have electronic bill retrieval, they retrieve the electronic copy of the bill so I don't have to have a paper bill sent to them.
For merchants that don't send a bill (i.e. my landlord), I can schedule automatic payments (or do one-time payments) just like any online payment service.
They have electronic payment arrangements for most major billers (credit card companies, utilities ,etc), so they don't even need to send out a check in many cases, they pay electronically so there's no chance of the bill getting lost in the mail (though I believe that with some smaller billers, instead of an EFT, they send one paper check for all of their customers along with a list of account numbers to apply the payment to)
In about 10 years of using their service, they've never lost a payment - I've had a few checks in the mail fail to be delivered, but in all but one case, the check eventually made it, it was delayed by the post office.
Some merchants get confused when your billing address is not the same as your physical address. Sometimes they sent notices to the paytrust address, which Paytrust either scans in for you, or if it's something like an auto insurance card, they forward it to you by mail.
The only missing feature that I really wish they had is a way to upload my own invoices, so if I get a bill from my plumber I can upload it to my Paytrust account to store it and send him a check.
At the end of the year, they sell me a CD with all of my bill images on it.
I know this sounds like a paid advertisement for Paytrust, but I am just a very satisfied customer - I'm usually terrible about paying bills on time, Paytrust makes sure I make all of my bills are paid on time. Does anyone know if there any other competing services? My bank's online bill-pay service just doesn't compare - they have no way to receive paper bills and pay them for me.
Theres no reason any company needs to shove 10 year old hardware on an intern. You call up Dell or whoever, say you need a thousand PCs and they will bring it out.
Nor is there any reason why they need interns, just just need to post a help-wanted add and a thousand people will send their resume.
There's just the small matter of funding - when you get a real job in the real world, you'll find that unbudgeted capital expenditures and adding headcount take more than a phone call to a vendor to resolve.
1 - People rip DVDs to files around 700MB / 1GB that's 2 hours. And that's good enough for TV
http://www.digitalhome.ca/2011/04/netflix-now-has-800000-canadian-customers/
a High Definition video stream which consumes about 2.3 GB per hour.
The TV industry is telling me that I need to have BluRay player (~ 16GB/hour) to take advantage of my expensive new HD TV, now you're saying "Bah, even DVD is too much, you don't need that kind of quality, highly compressed 480i (0.5 GB/hour) is good enough for your 1080p TV"
2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?
http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes
What exactly do people gain by using their internet connection to watch live sports, news, or the latest episode of their favorite sitcom, instead of just watching it as broadcast or recording the broadcast, like they have done every day for the last 30 years?
Yeah, and why should they need cable either - they can watch over-the-air broadcasts through an antenna on their roof like they did every day for the last 70 years. Sure they may only get a few broadcast networks, but that should be good enough for anyone. I mean what possible reason could there be for cable? Is there really any difference between broadcast tv and cable?
Sure, I understand how oversubscription works, but don't say that your service is great for video streaming when I'd hit your cap in 15 days if I tried to replace my normal TV viewing with streaming.
I really don't care what the economics of being an ISP are - if they can't support the use they are claiming it's for, then they shouldn't be making that claim. It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.
It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their latest pickup is great for heavy construction use... then in the fine print they note "Warranty invalid if used for heavy construction use".
Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.
But those exceptions have to be rare events, not common occurrences, IIRC.
I wonder if that's what I meant when I said "there are a few exceptions..."
The clarification being made is that those few exceptions can only be used on rare occasions, they can not be regular events.
I've never heard of a permitted single-instance exception, but the normal example of a permitted permanent exception is the security guard in a remote location that can't leave his desk:
http://www.gotmealbreaks.com/
I'm certain that many employees violate the rule in special circumstances (i.e. if someone is out sick, so the other employee has to cover the phone over lunch), but I'm not aware of any exception to the law that allows this -- those employees are technically entitled to and must receive their meal break.
In looking at the picture, it's possible that the kit really doesn't come with chemicals (except maybe for some litmus strips or something like that).
The experiments sound like something you'd do with household chemicals like water, salt, soap, baking soda, etc.
So it's fair to bash the kit on the lack of interesting chemical experiments, but not fair to bash it only for the "Chemical free" label.
Though to be honest, even my old-school chemistry set with real chemicals with hundreds of "experiments" wasn't all that exciting for me and didn't do anything to give me good lab habits. Plus the powdered chemicals often congealed into a solid chunk and you had to scrape them off of the chunk. It was fun playing with the alcohol burner, though.
Sure, but how exactly is that disgruntled employee going to prove it? I mean, I'm going to claim whatever I'm going to claim regarding my workhours... Truth or not. His word against mine...
He doesn't have to prove anything about *your* work hours, he just has to prove that the lunches were mandatory, perhaps by presenting 200 emails from the departmental manager all saying something like "Today's lunch is at Taco Bell down on 4th street. I expect the whole team to attend since I'm going to talk about the new performance review process"
If the labor board agrees that this makes the meals work related and compensable, then they can order the company to pay back pay to every (non-exempt) attendee, whether you want the money or not.
if you're an exempt employee, I'm not aware of any law that would force you to take a lunch break. Your employer can tell you to work through breakfast lunch and dinner, and your only recourse is to quit.
No. There is also the option of filing a complaint with the labor board. I once worked for a company that was caught up in a labor related lawsuit due to a sister company's actions (both companys owned by the same parent). Today the courts in California are ruling that too many people are considered exempt employees, that employers are trying to make an end run around labor laws. Basically all the engineers and lower level managers at the company had to reclassified from exempt salary to non-exempt hourly. If a company in California is still classifying its engineers and developers as exempt then change is one visit from the labor relations folks away.
I did say if you're an exempt employee. Obviously if you're wrongly classified as an exempt employee, then you are not one.
But those exceptions have to be rare events, not common occurrences, IIRC.
I wonder if that's what I meant when I said "there are a few exceptions..."
Just as soon as Activesync became viable and the onslaught of WinMo phones that supported it came out I began to see customers at the mid/small level abandon the expensive and complicated BES for direct SSL communication. No more dedicated BES server, no more expensive licenses.
We saw the same thing happen when exec's started clamoring for iPhones. But most of them came back to Blackberry when they realized that they were missing some important functionality, (like the ability to see availability when booking a meeting), had problems with dropped appointments accepted on their iPhone, and have had problems with missing emails -- emails that show up in their inbox on outlook and blackberry, but not on the iPhone.
For me personally, the big thing that's missing on my Android/ActiveSync mail client is a way to configure message filters to decide what to deliver to the device. I get some status messages from some devices that I generally want to read during the day, but don't want to see them on my Blackberry (and don't want to get woken up at 3am by a flurry of unimportant informational status messages, but I do want to be woken up by the ones that say we're out of disk space).
I have about a dozen filters on my blackberry to filter out the noise, and though I can set up Outlook filtering, the kind of filtering I want to do is client-only, not server side, so if Outlook isn't running on my desktop, the messages don't get filtered.
The Blackberry has another nice feature that saved my butt once - I was out of town, and our VPN concentrator failed and didn't failover to the backup device. No one could VPN into the office to fix it or even diagnose. Since my blackberry is essentially on our internal network, I was able to ssh into the backup concentrator, reboot it and get it online. All while 8000 miles from home. Took me 10 minutes to fix it, while it would have taken an hour or two to get someone to the office to fix it. I realize that this also makes the blackberry a potential back door into the network, so most people don't have unrestricted network access on their BB.
I don't think Activesync is going to push out all of the corporate RIM/BES users just yet.
So? If the state laws don't allow it, ignore them. Similar laws exist in my country and I never ever would lunch with my coworkers. It's on par with ignoring speed limits, everybody does it and the odds of being caught are even lower. What are they going to do? Inspection? Well, go on lunch if that ever happens. If asked, you took lunch outside in the park.
I have no problem lying about this. I mean, they can't prove it's not true.
The problem with ignoring labor laws is not the happy content employees are are willing to put in extra time and other things necessary to just "get the job done".
The problem is when you end up with a disgruntled employee that wants to make things bad for the company - they can make a labor complaint, show that the the manager required all 20 people on the team to participate in group lunches, and then suddenly the employer is faced with paying 2 years of overtime to all 20 team members.
This is why HR departments exist - to protect the company from future litigation.
I find that the after work drink outings with my coworkers are *much* better at building camaraderie. I don't consider myself to be sad and lonely, but I prefer to take my lunches alone. However, many of us get together for a weekly happy hour, including a few coworkers that don't drink alcohol.
I find that lunch outings tend to be an extension of the office - everyone is focused on work. If I wanted a lunchtime meeting, I would have scheduled one -- I prefer to take a mid-day break from work.
Your state laws may not allow that option
if you're an exempt employee, I'm not aware of any law that would force you to take a lunch break. Your employer can tell you to work through breakfast lunch and dinner, and your only recourse is to quit.
If you're non-exempt, in California you have to take a 30 minute (unpaid) lunch whether you want to or not. (there are a few exceptions that would allow an on-duty meal break)
I think the limiting factor here is just that, that DirecTV is developing this product as an addition to their standard satellite package, rather than as a unique product, and as such are reducing the pool of potential viewers to only their current client base. Netflix is alternate entertainment provider agnostic and given the way DirecTV nickels and dimes you on EVERYTHING, somehow I doubt this will be cheaper than Netflix's offering.
That may limit their potential market size but may also mean they can get more content - content owners won't be as afraid to license their content because they won't be so worried about cannibalizing their broadcast markets since they know that DirecTV customers are already paying to receive broadcast content.
Why do you need to suck cock?
Because it keeps my boyfriend from being so bitchy?