The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.
Which would seem to cover all books already in my Kindle account.
It also seems to cover sex-toys that I may have purchased through Amazon -- will Apple forbid me access to my sex toys unless I purchased the iDildo direct from Apple!?
Agreed, the Android store doesn't need greater quantity, it needs more polished *quality* apps. Overall I've found that IOS apps seem to be more polished than functionally equivalent Android apps. There are 30,000 apps in the Android app store, which makes it unwieldy already - how many fart apps does the market really need? How about a good web interface into the app store that I can browse from my desktop. Just because I own an Android phone doesn't mean that I want to use it for everything - I'd much rather browse the app store from my desktop where I have more screen real estate.
How about they make they audit the existing apps and get rid of the crap.
How about we breathe deeply and take a second to see if the sentence we just typed makes sense?
How about Slashdot figure out how to allow someone to edit comments. I've made the same mistake as the parent myself - I've started typing a sentence, then editing or copy-and-pasting to change the sentence and ending up with something non-sensical that I didn't notice until after I submitted (I'm a terrible proofreader of my own writing, I know what I meant to say so that's what I read).
I've heard that some databases these days are no longer wrote-once and actually allow you to edit content.
If they are worried about people abusing comment ratings, erase positive points upon editing to keep someone from posting a +5 comment and turning it into flamebait with an edit.
Send regular backups tapes off-site to someplace like Ironmountain. Only give authority to retrieve tapes to collection managers and/or company executives, not to server admins. This also protects your collection in case your office or coloc goes up in flames.
Keep at least 6 months of tapes off-site so you have 6 months to discover a time-bomb or hidden corruption left behind by the rogue sysadmin.
Cracked password means likely 1 or more credit card numbers per account compromised, which is a decent pay-off.
I don't see how a hacked account leads to a compromised credit card number. My full credit card number is not visible to me on Amazon, and if I try to ship an order to a new address, it asks for CC number again (or maybe just the card verification code).
So the worst that could happen would be that someone would order 100 copies of Sarah Palin's book and have them shipped to my home address.
My torque converter works in both directions -- when I take my foot off the gas engine braking slows me down. If I want greater engine braking, I shift into a lower gear, just as I would with a manual transmission. Doesn't your car work like that?
Two, your typical minivan driver thinks one or the other pedal has to be pressed flat to the floor at all times.
So maybe it requires some driver retraining -- give them an MPG display and let them learn that coasting as long as possible before stop lights gives them a higher MPG. Many Prius drivers already alter their driving habits based on the MPG indicator.
Three, your typical minivan driver doesn't understand what gears are
Why does this matter? The whole point of an automatic is that the driver doesn't have to shift gears. If the car can upshift automatically, why can't it downshift automatically? Something like: When the driver backs off on the accelerator, downshift from 4th to 3rd for mild braking. When the driver applies light brake pressure, downshift to 2nd and continue downshifting as the car slows.
Or, more likely, use a CVT, then the car can offer smooth control over engine braking.
And four (I'll come in again) even if she did
Ahh, so you just wanted to make some statement about how clueless women drivers are. In my experience, it's the male drivers who act like "one or the other pedal has to be pressed flat to the floor". It's especially evident at red lights where the guy in his fast car shoots off when the light turns green, only to get stopped at the next light while the rest of the traffic catches up.
The problem can be with the T. The hot compressed gas cools to ambient over time, dissipating energy
If only I had said something like:
if you prevent heat loss
I don't think this compressed gas storage system is meant to be a "plug-in hybrid" that you "charge up" at night so you can drive to work on stored energy, but is meant more to efficiently recapture energy lost to braking, so heat loss can be minimized since the energy is only stored for minutes, not hours.
I don't think you necessarily need high pressures to make it efficient but you need high pressures to keep the storage tank, compressor/motor piston, and interconnect hoses down to a reasonable size. You could make a system that ran at 1 psi, but the storage tank would need to be huge.
Generators cause drag so you loose some energy but this type of system would add friction into the mix which would waste more energy. Seems more like an energy shell game with looses from friction along the way.
Why is it that this system would necessarily waste more energy than a electrical system? You say that this system would add friction, which is just another word for the "drag" that the generator adds in an electrical system. Why is this more of an energy shell game than an electric hybrid? It's just replacing the generator/battery combo with a compressor/accumulator combo.
Assuming that it's mostly a short-term compress/decompress cycles, as long as the accumulator is well insulated to prevent heat loss, it should be fairly efficient. Perhaps more efficient than a battery.
This article suggests that a hydraulic/compressed gas system can have 75% energy recovery for start/stop conditions as compared with 15 - 20% for a gasoline-electric hybrid:
If you have to click through a EULA to use the CD-ROM drive and you disagree with the terms of use for it, you should be able to send it back for a refund.
using your mouse example -- if the computer box says "Comes with mouse", but in order to use the mouse you're required to install special software and click through a EULA that says "This mouse and software cannot be transferred to any other computer or resold to another person", then you should be able to return it for a refund since you haven't really bought the mouse if you can't decide to move it to your mom's computer.
I'd be happy to pay for the Windows license if I were allowed to sell it on Ebay since I won't be using it. Just like I can sell the keyboard from my new computer if I decide not to use it.
Here we'd have closed the airport for days to make it look like we were doing something. There, they just pick up the pieces and move on. Guess who's not going to still be running things in twenty years?
I was struck by the same thing. In the USA, the affected airport terminal would be closed for days if not weeks, causing millions or tens of millions of dollars in travel disruptions with likely flight disruption across the country as airlines reschedule flights around the damaged terminal, further compounding the economic damage from the attack.
And really, why wouldn't they? Why would the US Government pass up on the ability to spy on foreign nations? Wikileaks has shown that we're willing to spy on our "friends" in the UN and why should the government allow a US company to enable foreign powers to lock up documents out of our view?
On desktop machines users demand windows. Probably a lot of the time hardware compatibility is the reason. If you buy a device you get a driver and utility disk with it. That software won't help the average user with Linux.
That's why China is in a unique position to mandate open source -- they are a huge, growing market and if they mandate that only products with open source drivers (or at least published specs that can allow a driver to be built) can be sold in their country, manufacturers will comply. Besides, Chinese companies are probably manufacturing 90% of those products in the first place!
Rather than convince its citizens to send billions of Yuan to a US company, maybe the Chinese government would be better served to promote FOSS solutions like (Linux + Openoffice come to mind immediately but I'm sure there are other free/cheap office suites)
If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd trust a Chinese forked Redhat distribution combed by loyal Chinese developers a lot more than a closed source operating system from a large US company to keep my secrets safe -- there's no telling what backdoors the US goverment asked MS to embed.
Most CMSses are built on scripting languages. Scripting languages are typically interpreted -- line for line, byte for byte -- creating overhead.
Ahh, but PHP programmers are cheap and C++ programmers are more expensive.
And hardware is cheap - I can throw another 8 cores + 8GB of RAM at my Drupal installation for $2K, less than a week of a developer's salary. Maybe not the best way to scale to many thousands of users, but most people that are using Drupal only need to scale to hundreds (or 10's) of simultaneous users.
And why stop at C++, C is even closer to the hardware. Assembly language is closer still.
There's video footage of me engaging in one of my hobbies on Youtube. Why is that any more socially acceptable than a student engaging in a perfectly normal student hobby?
You haven't said what your hobby is and what this perfectly normal college activity is. If your hobby is carving wood with a chainsaw, I'd see you as an artistically talented individual. If your hobby is getting sloppy drunk and vomiting in your girlfriend's lap (which I, regrettably, did in college, but the photos are not online), then I'd be less than impressed.
Discretion matters if it's secretive stuff. When it's things that are in the public domain anyway then why hide it? Maybe you're ashamed of your student days but I know I'm not.
As an employer, it's the Discretion that I'm most concerned with. I don't really care if a potential employee engages in cottaging in his spare time. However if he shows such poor discretion that he posts a video of his Cottaging activities online in a public forum, that's where I become concerned.
My problem is not with the activity, it is with the apparent lack of discretion that he showed by posting it online.
I don't care if there's a picture of him at a party with a beer in his hand. But if there's picture of someone holding up his legs to do a keg stand, then again, I question his discretion in a business environment. I don't work in a particularly conservative industry but rather than take the risk that his public persona will offend some future client, I'll give preference to the other candidate (who may have very well done the same activities, but showed enough discretion to not post the pics for all to see).
And of course, I hope that you sense this disapproval when you're interviewing and decide that you don't want to work here - I'm sure there are plenty of places to work that will value you and embrace your public cottaging activities.
I'm happy to take a pay cut if it'll change somebodies bad habits
Well except that it won't change anyone's habits -- I'm more likely to hire (or pay more for) the guy that doesn't have pictures on his FB profile showing him doing a kegstand. The guy who does have that picture on his profile shows a distinct lack of judgement and I probably don't want to rely on him.
As an employer, I feel that you're free to do what you like in private, just show a little discretion in a public forum. I don't want to see pictures online of you drunk and naked at our company christmas party someday.
Wow, you must have a vast knowledge of the entire united states to know what coffee is cheapest and closest to me. My nearest McDonalds is over a mile from me (which is a long way if you're not in a car), I don't know of a single Dunkin Donuts in this city. Are you available to tell me what else I'm doing wrong in my life?
My train drops me off 10 feet from a Starbucks and I pass no other coffee shops on my way to work. I could walk an extra block out of the way to an independent shop, but they actually charge *more* than Starbucks.
I'm no coffee connoisseur, so Starbucks coffee is everything I need -- it's black (which I cover up with cream and sugar anyway) and has caffeine, and is very consistent in flavor, I know it will taste the same tomorrow as it did yesterday.
The other alternative is the coffee of inconsistent strength from the work machine (too weak, too strong) and powdered "non dairy" creamer.
you've obviously never been to Starbucks, if you order a 'coffee' there they'll say "huh? what kind of coffee".
It's not about making it easier for you to buy a coffee, it's about reducing their CC transaction fees. If they can drop the fees a fraction of a percent, that's a huge win for them.
I don't own any of the devices that they have the app for (iPhone, iPod, or Blackberry), but I don't have to *start up" my $500 Android device, at Starbucks I probably have it in my hand already after checking email, so I just enter my passcode (takes about a second for my 5 digit code), and then could start up the app from my home screen. Faster than I could fish out my wallet and extract the credit card.
This would be more interesting if it let you pre-enter your drink order in the app then when they scan it, it automatically prints out the drink label.
That way, those people that order incredibly complicated drinks don't need to yell over the sound of the barista frothing milk 2 feet from the register.
I even have a hard enough time getting them to hear my simple drink order "Tall coffee with room for cream. Ok Grande coffee, do you want room? No, I asked for a 'tall'! Sorry it's loud here, ok tall latte"
I order the same thing every time I go in, there could be a single button click on the app that says "repeat last order".
They said that a phone was costing around $36/person, and I saw nothing that said that cell phones were displacing landlines.
An enterprise phone system with 500 seats would cost a government agency around $400K in implementation costs, and maybe $30K/year in maintenance. Local+Long distance will cost around 2 cents/minute (should be much less than that with a 200K minute/month commit), plus maybe $1000/mo for a few T1 PRI's. Intraoffice calls (which still seems to dominate office communications) are free. This ignores the required network infrastructure since VOIP can run over existing infrasructure, the user's computer can use the ethernet passthrough port on the phone.
If users average 400 minutes/month or outside calls, then the 5 year cost for the landline is:
Or around $850K. So the monthly cost per user is around $28.
Cheaper than the cell phone.
Using this figure, the annual cost of giving everyone a cell phone is $216K, and the cost of giving everyone a landline plus cell phones for 20% of employees is: $211K
There is some admin cost in administering the phone system, but there's also admin cost in administering mobile phones. And not many agencies will be willing to forgo landlines entirely, so the landline cost would never go to zero.
I fail to see how eliminating cell phones for all by 20% of employees will fail to save money, but then I'm *in* california so perhaps I'm drinking the same kool-aid as the governor. I don't have a problem with spending cuts than only address.03% of government waste.
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They will in time, even the record industry realized that people were willing to pay for non-encumbered MP3's.
The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.
Which would seem to cover all books already in my Kindle account.
It also seems to cover sex-toys that I may have purchased through Amazon -- will Apple forbid me access to my sex toys unless I purchased the iDildo direct from Apple!?
Agreed, the Android store doesn't need greater quantity, it needs more polished *quality* apps. Overall I've found that IOS apps seem to be more polished than functionally equivalent Android apps. There are 30,000 apps in the Android app store, which makes it unwieldy already - how many fart apps does the market really need? How about a good web interface into the app store that I can browse from my desktop. Just because I own an Android phone doesn't mean that I want to use it for everything - I'd much rather browse the app store from my desktop where I have more screen real estate.
How about they make they audit the existing apps and get rid of the crap.
How about we breathe deeply and take a second to see if the sentence we just typed makes sense?
How about Slashdot figure out how to allow someone to edit comments. I've made the same mistake as the parent myself - I've started typing a sentence, then editing or copy-and-pasting to change the sentence and ending up with something non-sensical that I didn't notice until after I submitted (I'm a terrible proofreader of my own writing, I know what I meant to say so that's what I read).
I've heard that some databases these days are no longer wrote-once and actually allow you to edit content.
If they are worried about people abusing comment ratings, erase positive points upon editing to keep someone from posting a +5 comment and turning it into flamebait with an edit.
Send regular backups tapes off-site to someplace like Ironmountain. Only give authority to retrieve tapes to collection managers and/or company executives, not to server admins. This also protects your collection in case your office or coloc goes up in flames.
Keep at least 6 months of tapes off-site so you have 6 months to discover a time-bomb or hidden corruption left behind by the rogue sysadmin.
Test restores regularly.
When what you usually order is 100 vibrating butt plugs?
Amazon sells the vibrating ones?! Wish I'd know that before my last order!
Cracked password means likely 1 or more credit card numbers per account compromised, which is a decent pay-off.
I don't see how a hacked account leads to a compromised credit card number. My full credit card number is not visible to me on Amazon, and if I try to ship an order to a new address, it asks for CC number again (or maybe just the card verification code).
So the worst that could happen would be that someone would order 100 copies of Sarah Palin's book and have them shipped to my home address.
One, most US cars are automatics
My torque converter works in both directions -- when I take my foot off the gas engine braking slows me down. If I want greater engine braking, I shift into a lower gear, just as I would with a manual transmission. Doesn't your car work like that?
Two, your typical minivan driver thinks one or the other pedal has to be pressed flat to the floor at all times.
So maybe it requires some driver retraining -- give them an MPG display and let them learn that coasting as long as possible before stop lights gives them a higher MPG. Many Prius drivers already alter their driving habits based on the MPG indicator.
Three, your typical minivan driver doesn't understand what gears are
Why does this matter? The whole point of an automatic is that the driver doesn't have to shift gears. If the car can upshift automatically, why can't it downshift automatically? Something like: When the driver backs off on the accelerator, downshift from 4th to 3rd for mild braking. When the driver applies light brake pressure, downshift to 2nd and continue downshifting as the car slows.
Or, more likely, use a CVT, then the car can offer smooth control over engine braking.
And four (I'll come in again) even if she did
Ahh, so you just wanted to make some statement about how clueless women drivers are. In my experience, it's the male drivers who act like "one or the other pedal has to be pressed flat to the floor". It's especially evident at red lights where the guy in his fast car shoots off when the light turns green, only to get stopped at the next light while the rest of the traffic catches up.
The problem can be with the T. The hot compressed gas cools to ambient over time, dissipating energy
If only I had said something like:
if you prevent heat loss
I don't think this compressed gas storage system is meant to be a "plug-in hybrid" that you "charge up" at night so you can drive to work on stored energy, but is meant more to efficiently recapture energy lost to braking, so heat loss can be minimized since the energy is only stored for minutes, not hours.
I don't think you necessarily need high pressures to make it efficient but you need high pressures to keep the storage tank, compressor/motor piston, and interconnect hoses down to a reasonable size. You could make a system that ran at 1 psi, but the storage tank would need to be huge.
There is a theoretical limit to how efficient a compression/expansion 'battery' can be.
Ideally speaking, if you prevent heat loss, PV=nRT says that it can be 100% efficient.
I do recall that to get decent efficiency the high pressure side needs to be very high pressure.
Like 5000psi?
Generators cause drag so you loose some energy but this type of system would add friction into the mix which would waste more energy. Seems more like an energy shell game with looses from friction along the way.
Why is it that this system would necessarily waste more energy than a electrical system? You say that this system would add friction, which is just another word for the "drag" that the generator adds in an electrical system. Why is this more of an energy shell game than an electric hybrid? It's just replacing the generator/battery combo with a compressor/accumulator combo.
Assuming that it's mostly a short-term compress/decompress cycles, as long as the accumulator is well insulated to prevent heat loss, it should be fairly efficient. Perhaps more efficient than a battery.
This article suggests that a hydraulic/compressed gas system can have 75% energy recovery for start/stop conditions as compared with 15 - 20% for a gasoline-electric hybrid:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydraulic-hybrid-vehicle
If you have to click through a EULA to use the CD-ROM drive and you disagree with the terms of use for it, you should be able to send it back for a refund.
using your mouse example -- if the computer box says "Comes with mouse", but in order to use the mouse you're required to install special software and click through a EULA that says "This mouse and software cannot be transferred to any other computer or resold to another person", then you should be able to return it for a refund since you haven't really bought the mouse if you can't decide to move it to your mom's computer.
I'd be happy to pay for the Windows license if I were allowed to sell it on Ebay since I won't be using it. Just like I can sell the keyboard from my new computer if I decide not to use it.
Here we'd have closed the airport for days to make it look like we were doing something. There, they just pick up the pieces and move on. Guess who's not going to still be running things in twenty years?
I was struck by the same thing. In the USA, the affected airport terminal would be closed for days if not weeks, causing millions or tens of millions of dollars in travel disruptions with likely flight disruption across the country as airlines reschedule flights around the damaged terminal, further compounding the economic damage from the attack.
Because there has been some real speculation that the NSA does have a backdoor into Windows encryption:
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-03/tech/9909_03_windows.nsa.02_1_national-security-agency-cryptography-windows-nt4?_s=PM:TECH
And really, why wouldn't they? Why would the US Government pass up on the ability to spy on foreign nations? Wikileaks has shown that we're willing to spy on our "friends" in the UN and why should the government allow a US company to enable foreign powers to lock up documents out of our view?
On desktop machines users demand windows. Probably a lot of the time hardware compatibility is the reason. If you buy a device you get a driver and utility disk with it. That software won't help the average user with Linux.
That's why China is in a unique position to mandate open source -- they are a huge, growing market and if they mandate that only products with open source drivers (or at least published specs that can allow a driver to be built) can be sold in their country, manufacturers will comply. Besides, Chinese companies are probably manufacturing 90% of those products in the first place!
Rather than convince its citizens to send billions of Yuan to a US company, maybe the Chinese government would be better served to promote FOSS solutions like (Linux + Openoffice come to mind immediately but I'm sure there are other free/cheap office suites)
If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd trust a Chinese forked Redhat distribution combed by loyal Chinese developers a lot more than a closed source operating system from a large US company to keep my secrets safe -- there's no telling what backdoors the US goverment asked MS to embed.
The Whitehouse claims (or at least claimed) that it's running Drupal:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal
Perhaps Akamai helps hide some of the drupal-isms?
There are some Drupal tags in the HTML for the home page, but of course that doesn't prove anything.
Most CMSses are built on scripting languages. Scripting languages are typically interpreted -- line for line, byte for byte -- creating overhead.
Ahh, but PHP programmers are cheap and C++ programmers are more expensive.
And hardware is cheap - I can throw another 8 cores + 8GB of RAM at my Drupal installation for $2K, less than a week of a developer's salary. Maybe not the best way to scale to many thousands of users, but most people that are using Drupal only need to scale to hundreds (or 10's) of simultaneous users.
And why stop at C++, C is even closer to the hardware. Assembly language is closer still.
There's video footage of me engaging in one of my hobbies on Youtube. Why is that any more socially acceptable than a student engaging in a perfectly normal student hobby?
You haven't said what your hobby is and what this perfectly normal college activity is. If your hobby is carving wood with a chainsaw, I'd see you as an artistically talented individual. If your hobby is getting sloppy drunk and vomiting in your girlfriend's lap (which I, regrettably, did in college, but the photos are not online), then I'd be less than impressed.
Discretion matters if it's secretive stuff. When it's things that are in the public domain anyway then why hide it? Maybe you're ashamed of your student days but I know I'm not.
As an employer, it's the Discretion that I'm most concerned with. I don't really care if a potential employee engages in cottaging in his spare time. However if he shows such poor discretion that he posts a video of his Cottaging activities online in a public forum, that's where I become concerned.
My problem is not with the activity, it is with the apparent lack of discretion that he showed by posting it online.
I don't care if there's a picture of him at a party with a beer in his hand. But if there's picture of someone holding up his legs to do a keg stand, then again, I question his discretion in a business environment. I don't work in a particularly conservative industry but rather than take the risk that his public persona will offend some future client, I'll give preference to the other candidate (who may have very well done the same activities, but showed enough discretion to not post the pics for all to see).
And of course, I hope that you sense this disapproval when you're interviewing and decide that you don't want to work here - I'm sure there are plenty of places to work that will value you and embrace your public cottaging activities.
I'm happy to take a pay cut if it'll change somebodies bad habits
Well except that it won't change anyone's habits -- I'm more likely to hire (or pay more for) the guy that doesn't have pictures on his FB profile showing him doing a kegstand. The guy who does have that picture on his profile shows a distinct lack of judgement and I probably don't want to rely on him.
As an employer, I feel that you're free to do what you like in private, just show a little discretion in a public forum. I don't want to see pictures online of you drunk and naked at our company christmas party someday.
Wow, you must have a vast knowledge of the entire united states to know what coffee is cheapest and closest to me. My nearest McDonalds is over a mile from me (which is a long way if you're not in a car), I don't know of a single Dunkin Donuts in this city. Are you available to tell me what else I'm doing wrong in my life?
My train drops me off 10 feet from a Starbucks and I pass no other coffee shops on my way to work. I could walk an extra block out of the way to an independent shop, but they actually charge *more* than Starbucks.
I'm no coffee connoisseur, so Starbucks coffee is everything I need -- it's black (which I cover up with cream and sugar anyway) and has caffeine, and is very consistent in flavor, I know it will taste the same tomorrow as it did yesterday.
The other alternative is the coffee of inconsistent strength from the work machine (too weak, too strong) and powdered "non dairy" creamer.
you've obviously never been to Starbucks, if you order a 'coffee' there they'll say "huh? what kind of coffee".
It's not about making it easier for you to buy a coffee, it's about reducing their CC transaction fees. If they can drop the fees a fraction of a percent, that's a huge win for them.
I don't own any of the devices that they have the app for (iPhone, iPod, or Blackberry), but I don't have to *start up" my $500 Android device, at Starbucks I probably have it in my hand already after checking email, so I just enter my passcode (takes about a second for my 5 digit code), and then could start up the app from my home screen. Faster than I could fish out my wallet and extract the credit card.
This would be more interesting if it let you pre-enter your drink order in the app then when they scan it, it automatically prints out the drink label.
That way, those people that order incredibly complicated drinks don't need to yell over the sound of the barista frothing milk 2 feet from the register.
I even have a hard enough time getting them to hear my simple drink order "Tall coffee with room for cream. Ok Grande coffee, do you want room? No, I asked for a 'tall'! Sorry it's loud here, ok tall latte"
I order the same thing every time I go in, there could be a single button click on the app that says "repeat last order".
So who is more ROM friendly? Samsung? LG? HTC? Someone else?
They said that a phone was costing around $36/person, and I saw nothing that said that cell phones were displacing landlines.
An enterprise phone system with 500 seats would cost a government agency around $400K in implementation costs, and maybe $30K/year in maintenance. Local+Long distance will cost around 2 cents/minute (should be much less than that with a 200K minute/month commit), plus maybe $1000/mo for a few T1 PRI's. Intraoffice calls (which still seems to dominate office communications) are free. This ignores the required network infrastructure since VOIP can run over existing infrasructure, the user's computer can use the ethernet passthrough port on the phone.
If users average 400 minutes/month or outside calls, then the 5 year cost for the landline is:
$400K + $30K * 5 + $1K * 60 + 400 min * .02 cents * 500 users * 60 months
Or around $850K. So the monthly cost per user is around $28.
Cheaper than the cell phone.
Using this figure, the annual cost of giving everyone a cell phone is $216K, and the cost of giving everyone a landline plus cell phones for 20% of employees is: $211K
There is some admin cost in administering the phone system, but there's also admin cost in administering mobile phones. And not many agencies will be willing to forgo landlines entirely, so the landline cost would never go to zero.
I fail to see how eliminating cell phones for all by 20% of employees will fail to save money, but then I'm *in* california so perhaps I'm drinking the same kool-aid as the governor. I don't have a problem with spending cuts than only address .03% of government waste.