Wait a minute, did you just estimate I could drive a TESLA for about the same total price as an Honda Accord?
Sure, if your personal driving habits match my assumptions:
Free electricity to fuel the Tesla
$5/gallon for gasoline
No mileage tax imposed on the EV by states to cover the loss of gas tax
You drive 15,000 miles annually
Cost of maintenance for both cars is similar
You keep the cars for 10 years + 150,000 miles
The Tesla battery lasts for 10 years + 150,000 miles
Ignoring the time value of money since you'll start with $30K in the bank with the Honda (which may be somewhat canceled out by increasing energy costs over 10 years)
Then yeah, if you buy one of the most expensive Honda Accords, your 10 year cost will be about the same as the Tesla. But I made a lot of assumptions that may or may not be true, so YMMV (pun intended). Though if you were worried about costs and mileage, you'd probably buy the $22K, 30mpg EX 4cyl CVT Accord (which would be about $13K cheaper given the same assumptions)
The Model S starts in the $60k range and for many people who finance and factor in the gas savings monthly the payments are equivalent to that of more reasonably priced car right out the door. Also Tesla has stated that they are planning a more mass market mid-priced car in 2-3 years.
A Honda Accord EX-L V6 is between "reasonably priced" and "luxury" with a list price of $30K and gets 25 mpg (combined).
So that's $30,000 cheaper than the $60K model S. If I drive 15,000 miles/year and pay nothing for electricity used to fuel the Tesla, at $5/gallon, I can fuel the Honda for 10 years on the money I saved by getting the cheaper car.
The Tesla is not a good choice for someone who wants to save money.
What I'm afraid is that there will no longer be explosions when a car barely collides in movies [U+2e2e]
[Unless it is a documentary about 'accidents' like Michael Hastings'...]
Don't worry, movie producers will rig the cars with Tesla Coils and there will be an impressive array of electrical discharge arcs emanating from the car, incinerating everything in the vicinity.
That's one way to reduce the number of sysadmins effectively.
I don't think that's true in an enterprise environment with thousands of servers.
In my experience, it takes a larger installation to justify the team size for a well run Windows Server installation (to administer all of the Microsoft System Center components (SCCM, SCOM, etc)), but once that investment in management tool configuration is done, then administering large numbers of Windows Servers doesn't really take more people than administering large numbers of Linux servers. LIke most MS Enterprise products, the MSC components can be complicated to configure and take a certain amount of dedicated resource to configure and use them well.
The same scalability may not hold true once you get to Google Scale with a million servers to manage, since at that point you can justify spending a lot more resource on writing custom management and support tools even down to customizing kernels if you want to.
In a small shop where you may have a few dozen servers, then you may find the MSC tools to be overkill and not worth the effort to set them up well so Linux can be simpler and easier to administer.
20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus. Kim Lardass is full of shit.
Regardless of whether human response time is 10ms, 100ms or 1000ms, if you're able to respond to events on average 30ms faster than your competitor, you're going to beat them by an average of 30ms every time.
Why does the FCC need to regulate IPTV at all? It's not like traditional TV where viewers are stuck with a few providers that have an FCC granted monopoly through spectrum allocation, or a single cable company granted a monopoly by municipal contracts.
What is there to regulate with IPTV? If you don't like your IPTV provider, you can choose another one instantly.
The FTC can regulate the IPTV providers like any other business to prevent monopoly abuse, unfair business practices, etc. Why does the FCC need to get involved?
Another name for government imposed "regulatory fees" is a "tax".
Since when is "I will find you and kill you" useful feedback, let alone appropriate? And who should have to listen to dreck like that?
I guess "I will find you and kill you" became acceptable feedback when many of the top games on Xbox Live are games in which you try to find and kill people.
Don't train your customers to enjoy killing people in gameplay if you don't want them to treat the very thought of killing someone so casually.
Your mom, who never played them? I strongly suspect this is just a case of content creators expecting the "content consumers" to have an attention span of under 30s, similarly to what happens with "Lost" or "Star Trek" fans bashing the product for not being consistent with itself.
Just shut up and buy, damn it!
If you don't want strangers to comment on your game and complain when it doesn't evolve the way they want to (and are willing to pay for), then don't release your game to the public - keep it for yourself and close friends who will be more tactful with feedback.
But if you release it to the world and are willing to take money from all of these rabid fans, then don't be surprised when those that are paying your paycheck want some input into the direction of what they are paying for.
It's not just the gaming industry that faces feedback from its customers... at least game players (for the most part) are not physically in your face, try running a retail store and face the woman that feels she was cheated on some purchase and brings her burly husband to back her up right at closing time when you're the only one in the store.
Prop 13 contains an interesting violation of the Bill of Rights, specifically a violation of the 9th Amendment right to travel, one of the rights subject to strict scrutiny.
In short, people who live in California in the same place for a long time pay vastly lower property taxes than those who move into the state, for identical houses, sometimes in amounts exceeding tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If you're paying "tens of thousands of dollars per year" higher property taxes, you probably won't get very far by complaining that you're discriminated against since you would have to own a $1.5M house to get taxes in that range. Besides, there's no "right to buy a house", if you can't afford the taxes on that $1.5M house, you can rent a studio apartment if you really want to live in California
Unless you have any special contractual obligations, no notice is necessary in an "at-will" employment state like California. That goes both ways - both employees and employers are allowed to terminate employment without notice (except in certain situations like a mass layoff which might have some legal requirements to give notice, severance pay, etc. It's possible that if the employer generally gives severance pay, they may be obligated to give you severance pay if they terminate you, but you might have to take them to court to get it.
That said, I've never worked at an employer that didn't give at least 2 weeks of severance pay and/or notice even when they escorted the employee to the door on the day of the termination. This was true even for employees let go due to performance reasons... I haven't been involved with a termination involving misconduct so it's possible that those fired with-cause have been let go without any severance. Sometimes severance pay was longer than 2 weeks, based on how long the employee was employed at the company. At one startup where I worked that closed suddenly after running out of cash, the CEO paid 2 weeks of severance and up to 3 months of health insurance premiums out of his own pocket to all 30 employees.
As an employee, I've never given less than 2 weeks of notice as a courtesy. (and have always offered transitional consulting services after departing the company to help with bringing the new employee up to speed). I don't like to burn bridges because you never know when you're going to run into a former employer or coworker again. Screwing them over by leaving without giving any notice is not going to earn you any points if you end up interviewing with them at some future company.
At one company I worked at, we had someone start working for us and after 2 weeks he stopped showing up at work. He didn't respond to phone calls, and eventually, HR finally tracked him down through the Emergency Contact he listed on his HR forms - we all thought he'd been in some kind of accident or something. It turns out that he had just decided not to work there anymore and didn't see the need to tell anyone. His manager found out through a contact at the guy's former employer that the guy had never left his job at that employer and had taken 2 weeks of vacation to come to our company and check it out, he didn't like working at our company, so decided to go back to his former employer after his "vacation". The manager from our company told the manager at the other company, when they found out what happened, they fired him. Thanks to it being a relatively close-knit industry with a lot of people knowing each other, the guy was not able to find another job in the same industry and last we heard he had left the country.
So, the moral of the story is - don't screw over your employer because you don't know who your boss knows and when you might come across him again.
If they were public buses instead of company buses, would they clog the streets any less? Whoever owns and rides them, they are mass transit. Only in San Francisco would people complain about folks using mass transit. I'm no big fan of Silly Valley and its satellite communities like San Francisco, but this has to be one of the silliest, and most hypocritical, complaints I've ever heard.
Adding more passengers to Caltrain wouldn't clog the freeways - maybe it would get the MTC to stop dragging their feet on funding the Caltrain electrification and adding more trainsets to allow faster and more frequent service. Buses could drop employees off at Caltrain in SF, with local shuttles at the Caltrain station 40 miles south to get them to work.
Really. So companies provide employees with a free benefit, thereby reducing pollution, and relieving traffic congestion, and this means that things are "getting worse"? This is the stupidest article I have read so far today.
I think the problem is that it's turning SF into a "bedroom community" for employers far to the south rather than having the workers live *and* work in the city (thus they are spending less time and money in the city. When I worked in SF during the first dot-com boom, my coworkers and I all went out to lunch at local restaurants and met after work at local bars. The worker that leaves the city at 7am on a bus, and them comes home at 7pm to be dropped off in his neighborhood is probably not spending as much time going out and supporting local businesses. Further, the added influx of SF residents are driving up rents, so even those that *do* work in SF find it difficult and expensive to find a place to live. Oh, and the city receives no payroll tax for those employees, so not only does the city earn less tax revenue due to reduced spending by these workers, but they receive no payroll tax either.
Rather than subsidizing bus travel to make it more attractive to live in SF and work 40 miles south, it would be nice to see the Peninsula cities and tech companies work on making it more attractive for their employees to live closer to work. It's no fun to live next to an office park that becomes a big unwalkable, bike unfriendly concrete wasteland after working hours.
WRONG. If you didn't live in Florida, which by the way was a swing state, your voting for Nader COULD NOT have affected the outcome. You make the mistake of assuming that the popular vote mattered. What mattered was the state vote and the electoral college votes that came with it.
It is a despicable lie to claim that Nader voters around the country were to blame, doubly so that the Democratic Party sycophants have modded this ill-reasoned comment to +5.
So as long as you only vote for the 3rd party candidate in a state where it doesn't make a difference, then voting for a 3rd party candidate makes no difference? That's kind of like saying "You'll never die in a plane crash if you don't fly in a plane that's going to crash."
The popular vote *does* matter in a state-by-state basis (well not so much for Maine and Nebraska) since that's what determines the electoral vote for that state. Regardless of how you feel about Nader or 3rd party candidates in general, if 500 of the 90,000 Nader voters had voted for Gore instead of Nader, then Gore would have taken Florida and the election.
Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against BOTH established parties.
Unless the most prominent 3rd party candidate tends to attract voters from one of the major parties, then votes for that 3rd candidate tends to take votes from one party more than the other.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
So it's better to never vote at all?
I have never seen a candidate with whom I agree with 100%, so every candidate is somewhat "evil" in that he's not completely in agreement with my principles.
If I feel that one candidate is 10% in line with my ideals, another one is 50% in line with my ideals, and a distant third candidate with no realistic hope of winning is 75% in line with my ideals, I'd rather use my vote to bring in the 50% candidate rather than vote for the 75% candidate knowing that makes the 10% candidate more likely to win.
Or I could just write-in myself since no running candidate is completely "non-evil".
how would voting for the other asshole have been any better?
There are more than two options.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils. In the past 4 presidential elections, the only time a 3rd party candidate managed to get more than 1% of the popular vote (yet still 0% of the electoral votes) was in 2000 when Nader had 2.78% of the popular vote and if a fraction of his votes had gone to Gore, George W Bush wouldn't have made it to the white house.
If they need the information they should have a secure way to receive it. I just refinanced, the broker had a secure site (SSL password protected file vault type interface hosted on their own servers) with a web interface that I could upload documents to.
If they don't have such a system in place already and routinely request and access peoples personal information your trust is severely misplaced.
That's not a secure system unless you know how it's protected on the other end. If the uploaded files end up on the corporate fileserver that everyone in the office has access to (including any virus that seeks out SSN's on file shares and emails them to the world, or a rogue employee that figures our that he can increase his income by selling SSN's that he's scraped out of the open fileserver), then it's just the illusion of security. Kind of like those websites that say "Your credit card is safe with us, we use 128 bit SSL encryption to protect it!" while the back end emails your card number to the merchant.
But at least that's a step above my broker who sent me a loan doc "protected" by encrypting it with the last 4 digits of my SSN. I started picking up documents in person after that. I asked about PGP and of course, they had no idea what I was talking about.
According to this calculator, I should be paying $210/month before any taxes and fees, with my particular carrier and profile. I am, in fact, paying $140 after all taxes and fees. Given that it provides incorrect information for what I know, I don't feel I can trust it to provide me correct information for comparison purposes.
Do you have a current plan or are you grandfathered in to a better plan that's no longer available?
My current rate plan is cheaper than what the calculator gave, but when I compared to a new plan on the carrier's website, it matched.
There is a significant install base of Windows in datacenters? Who knew...
Every fortune 500 company?
Once you get away from internet and other tech companies, Windows has a *huge* back office presence.
Once you make the investment into Windows to run your back office, there's not much incremental cost to add servers here and there to do other things, it's not worth the investment to switch to Linux for a few servers, and then as "a few servers here and there" grow to hundreds of servers running mission critical tasks, it's even harder to move away from Windows. Microsoft is good at lock-in -- their products work well (mostly) with each other, but poorly with everyone else. So once you move down the Windows path you get more and more ingrained in it. And, just like there are plenty of Linux zealots, there are plenty of Windows zealots that are firmly convinced that Microsoft is the One True Way to get things done in the corporate world - and of course, much of the software that you companies use to use to run their business only runs on Windows.
Because they're charging the same price as a paperback, or hardcover, sometimes even more.
And eBooks typically cost more than twice the price of used paperbacks. And I can give the paperback to someone else after I'm done or sell it again for a couple dollars so it's even cheaper.
I really like my Kindle (the paperwhite with backlight is great for reading in bed without disturbing my partner - better than the clip-on book light) and prefer reading on the Kindle over reading paper books, but not so much that i'll pay twice what it costs to have a used book delivered to my door. My kindle to paper book ratio is about 3:1 -- lately I've only been buying Kindle books when I travel.
I know the publishing industry says they can't sell eBooks any cheaper, so they will continue to get very little money from me as I stick with used books.
If they don't need 90% of their sysadmins, they should have fired them long ago.
But I suspect that they aren't all redundant, so how are they going to maintain their systems? It would be interesting to see their server-to-sysadmin ratio and compare to other companies.
Without the sysadmins to maintain and secure their systems, they may be making their data even easier for hackers to access, so the NSA may end up being a huge liability to the security of the country. I don't see why no lawmaker understands this - data breaches happen every day, even to large companies that follow best practices to secure their data. Why do they think that the NSA's vast data warehouse is not going to be breached when it's such a huge target to non-friendly governments and hackers throughout the world - even governments of countries where most computer hardware is made that have the resources to hide backdoors in that hardware.
Seriously, do you not understand that the *carrier* can do whatever they want here? They know where all of their customer's cells are all the time, they could implement this with SMS messages just as easily as the system they did end up implementing.
The carriers cannot deliver real-time geographically targeted messages with SMS. I've been told that by more than one carrier engineer when asked if our venue's dedicated cell tower could be used to send SMS messages to customers in the event of an emergency. He said many people ask for it, but it's not remotely possible and that if we had public safety messages to send, we'd have to work with FEMA and local public safety agencies to send an WEA alert. The towers can't autonomously send SMS messages to all connected phones, and due to roaming, the carrier itself may not have immediate access to the cell phone number of all phones associated with a tower.
Or a system that DIDN'T USE SMS but had the same effect (ever heard of iMessage?)
Isn't that what they did? Implemented a system that doesn't use SMS, but has the same effect -- but unlike iMessage, it allows for geographically targeted messages and works with any phone, not just smart phones.
I don't know, seems pretty fucking obvious to me.
But in the end, as I already said, I'm not against the idea, just the implementation. Who the hell cares which protocol is used to get the message to your phone, the key point is they needed to present it in a way that didn't just piss off people so the turned off the feature, and it was a big failure in that regard.
So in what way would you implement a system that needs to communicate time sensitive information to consumers without using a loud alert tone to get their attention? It's hard to argue that an Amber alert is not time sensitive -- having it flash on your screen only to be discovered in the morning may make the data too stale to use. You can certainly argue that many people don't care about Amber alerts, but those people can just disable the alerts.
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Wait a minute, did you just estimate I could drive a TESLA for about the same total price as an Honda Accord?
Sure, if your personal driving habits match my assumptions:
Then yeah, if you buy one of the most expensive Honda Accords, your 10 year cost will be about the same as the Tesla. But I made a lot of assumptions that may or may not be true, so YMMV (pun intended). Though if you were worried about costs and mileage, you'd probably buy the $22K, 30mpg EX 4cyl CVT Accord (which would be about $13K cheaper given the same assumptions)
The Model S starts in the $60k range and for many people who finance and factor in the gas savings monthly the payments are equivalent to that of more reasonably priced car right out the door. Also Tesla has stated that they are planning a more mass market mid-priced car in 2-3 years.
A Honda Accord EX-L V6 is between "reasonably priced" and "luxury" with a list price of $30K and gets 25 mpg (combined).
So that's $30,000 cheaper than the $60K model S. If I drive 15,000 miles/year and pay nothing for electricity used to fuel the Tesla, at $5/gallon, I can fuel the Honda for 10 years on the money I saved by getting the cheaper car.
The Tesla is not a good choice for someone who wants to save money.
You invent a cheaper rechargeable battery that matches LiIon on energy density, and congratulations, you've reduced the price of a model S.
If the battery was free, it would still cost twice what I paid for a decent car. This is a top end luxury vehicle, not a green vehicle.
And if were built to the same standards as your decent car, it wouldn't have received the 5 star safety rating. Everything is a tradeoff.
What I'm afraid is that there will no longer be explosions when a car barely collides in movies [U+2e2e]
[Unless it is a documentary about 'accidents' like Michael Hastings'...]
Don't worry, movie producers will rig the cars with Tesla Coils and there will be an impressive array of electrical discharge arcs emanating from the car, incinerating everything in the vicinity.
That's one way to reduce the number of sysadmins effectively.
I don't think that's true in an enterprise environment with thousands of servers.
In my experience, it takes a larger installation to justify the team size for a well run Windows Server installation (to administer all of the Microsoft System Center components (SCCM, SCOM, etc)), but once that investment in management tool configuration is done, then administering large numbers of Windows Servers doesn't really take more people than administering large numbers of Linux servers. LIke most MS Enterprise products, the MSC components can be complicated to configure and take a certain amount of dedicated resource to configure and use them well.
The same scalability may not hold true once you get to Google Scale with a million servers to manage, since at that point you can justify spending a lot more resource on writing custom management and support tools even down to customizing kernels if you want to.
In a small shop where you may have a few dozen servers, then you may find the MSC tools to be overkill and not worth the effort to set them up well so Linux can be simpler and easier to administer.
20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus. Kim Lardass is full of shit.
Regardless of whether human response time is 10ms, 100ms or 1000ms, if you're able to respond to events on average 30ms faster than your competitor, you're going to beat them by an average of 30ms every time.
Why does the FCC need to regulate IPTV at all? It's not like traditional TV where viewers are stuck with a few providers that have an FCC granted monopoly through spectrum allocation, or a single cable company granted a monopoly by municipal contracts.
What is there to regulate with IPTV? If you don't like your IPTV provider, you can choose another one instantly.
The FTC can regulate the IPTV providers like any other business to prevent monopoly abuse, unfair business practices, etc. Why does the FCC need to get involved?
Another name for government imposed "regulatory fees" is a "tax".
Since when is "I will find you and kill you" useful feedback, let alone appropriate? And who should have to listen to dreck like that?
I guess "I will find you and kill you" became acceptable feedback when many of the top games on Xbox Live are games in which you try to find and kill people.
Don't train your customers to enjoy killing people in gameplay if you don't want them to treat the very thought of killing someone so casually.
Your mom, who never played them? I strongly suspect this is just a case of content creators expecting the "content consumers" to have an attention span of under 30s, similarly to what happens with "Lost" or "Star Trek" fans bashing the product for not being consistent with itself.
Just shut up and buy, damn it!
If you don't want strangers to comment on your game and complain when it doesn't evolve the way they want to (and are willing to pay for), then don't release your game to the public - keep it for yourself and close friends who will be more tactful with feedback.
But if you release it to the world and are willing to take money from all of these rabid fans, then don't be surprised when those that are paying your paycheck want some input into the direction of what they are paying for.
It's not just the gaming industry that faces feedback from its customers... at least game players (for the most part) are not physically in your face, try running a retail store and face the woman that feels she was cheated on some purchase and brings her burly husband to back her up right at closing time when you're the only one in the store.
Prop 13 contains an interesting violation of the Bill of Rights, specifically a violation of the 9th Amendment right to travel, one of the rights subject to strict scrutiny.
In short, people who live in California in the same place for a long time pay vastly lower property taxes than those who move into the state, for identical houses, sometimes in amounts exceeding tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If you're paying "tens of thousands of dollars per year" higher property taxes, you probably won't get very far by complaining that you're discriminated against since you would have to own a $1.5M house to get taxes in that range. Besides, there's no "right to buy a house", if you can't afford the taxes on that $1.5M house, you can rent a studio apartment if you really want to live in California
Unless you have any special contractual obligations, no notice is necessary in an "at-will" employment state like California. That goes both ways - both employees and employers are allowed to terminate employment without notice (except in certain situations like a mass layoff which might have some legal requirements to give notice, severance pay, etc. It's possible that if the employer generally gives severance pay, they may be obligated to give you severance pay if they terminate you, but you might have to take them to court to get it.
That said, I've never worked at an employer that didn't give at least 2 weeks of severance pay and/or notice even when they escorted the employee to the door on the day of the termination. This was true even for employees let go due to performance reasons... I haven't been involved with a termination involving misconduct so it's possible that those fired with-cause have been let go without any severance. Sometimes severance pay was longer than 2 weeks, based on how long the employee was employed at the company. At one startup where I worked that closed suddenly after running out of cash, the CEO paid 2 weeks of severance and up to 3 months of health insurance premiums out of his own pocket to all 30 employees.
As an employee, I've never given less than 2 weeks of notice as a courtesy. (and have always offered transitional consulting services after departing the company to help with bringing the new employee up to speed). I don't like to burn bridges because you never know when you're going to run into a former employer or coworker again. Screwing them over by leaving without giving any notice is not going to earn you any points if you end up interviewing with them at some future company.
At one company I worked at, we had someone start working for us and after 2 weeks he stopped showing up at work. He didn't respond to phone calls, and eventually, HR finally tracked him down through the Emergency Contact he listed on his HR forms - we all thought he'd been in some kind of accident or something. It turns out that he had just decided not to work there anymore and didn't see the need to tell anyone. His manager found out through a contact at the guy's former employer that the guy had never left his job at that employer and had taken 2 weeks of vacation to come to our company and check it out, he didn't like working at our company, so decided to go back to his former employer after his "vacation". The manager from our company told the manager at the other company, when they found out what happened, they fired him. Thanks to it being a relatively close-knit industry with a lot of people knowing each other, the guy was not able to find another job in the same industry and last we heard he had left the country.
So, the moral of the story is - don't screw over your employer because you don't know who your boss knows and when you might come across him again.
Sounds like a great idea, but until MTC gets its act together, what should these companies and their employees do?
Put pressure on MTC? Google's been running the buses for years yet Caltrain electrification is still at least 6 years away.
If they were public buses instead of company buses, would they clog the streets any less? Whoever owns and rides them, they are mass transit. Only in San Francisco would people complain about folks using mass transit. I'm no big fan of Silly Valley and its satellite communities like San Francisco, but this has to be one of the silliest, and most hypocritical, complaints I've ever heard.
Adding more passengers to Caltrain wouldn't clog the freeways - maybe it would get the MTC to stop dragging their feet on funding the Caltrain electrification and adding more trainsets to allow faster and more frequent service. Buses could drop employees off at Caltrain in SF, with local shuttles at the Caltrain station 40 miles south to get them to work.
Really. So companies provide employees with a free benefit, thereby reducing pollution, and relieving traffic congestion, and this means that things are "getting worse"? This is the stupidest article I have read so far today.
I think the problem is that it's turning SF into a "bedroom community" for employers far to the south rather than having the workers live *and* work in the city (thus they are spending less time and money in the city. When I worked in SF during the first dot-com boom, my coworkers and I all went out to lunch at local restaurants and met after work at local bars. The worker that leaves the city at 7am on a bus, and them comes home at 7pm to be dropped off in his neighborhood is probably not spending as much time going out and supporting local businesses. Further, the added influx of SF residents are driving up rents, so even those that *do* work in SF find it difficult and expensive to find a place to live. Oh, and the city receives no payroll tax for those employees, so not only does the city earn less tax revenue due to reduced spending by these workers, but they receive no payroll tax either.
Rather than subsidizing bus travel to make it more attractive to live in SF and work 40 miles south, it would be nice to see the Peninsula cities and tech companies work on making it more attractive for their employees to live closer to work. It's no fun to live next to an office park that becomes a big unwalkable, bike unfriendly concrete wasteland after working hours.
WRONG. If you didn't live in Florida, which by the way was a swing state, your voting for Nader COULD NOT have affected the outcome. You make the mistake of assuming that the popular vote mattered. What mattered was the state vote and the electoral college votes that came with it.
It is a despicable lie to claim that Nader voters around the country were to blame, doubly so that the Democratic Party sycophants have modded this ill-reasoned comment to +5.
So as long as you only vote for the 3rd party candidate in a state where it doesn't make a difference, then voting for a 3rd party candidate makes no difference? That's kind of like saying "You'll never die in a plane crash if you don't fly in a plane that's going to crash."
The popular vote *does* matter in a state-by-state basis (well not so much for Maine and Nebraska) since that's what determines the electoral vote for that state. Regardless of how you feel about Nader or 3rd party candidates in general, if 500 of the 90,000 Nader voters had voted for Gore instead of Nader, then Gore would have taken Florida and the election.
How the fuck is this insightful?
Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against BOTH established parties.
Unless the most prominent 3rd party candidate tends to attract voters from one of the major parties, then votes for that 3rd candidate tends to take votes from one party more than the other.
When 20 percent of people vote for a third candidate, the existing system that selects republicrats will become unsustainable.
In 1992, 18.9% voted for Ross Perot (who also got 0% of the electoral votes).
In 1996, Perot picked up 8% of the popular vote.
Are you sure that 20% is the tipping point?
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
So it's better to never vote at all?
I have never seen a candidate with whom I agree with 100%, so every candidate is somewhat "evil" in that he's not completely in agreement with my principles.
If I feel that one candidate is 10% in line with my ideals, another one is 50% in line with my ideals, and a distant third candidate with no realistic hope of winning is 75% in line with my ideals, I'd rather use my vote to bring in the 50% candidate rather than vote for the 75% candidate knowing that makes the 10% candidate more likely to win.
Or I could just write-in myself since no running candidate is completely "non-evil".
Which is more of a waste of my vote?
how would voting for the other asshole have been any better?
There are more than two options.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils. In the past 4 presidential elections, the only time a 3rd party candidate managed to get more than 1% of the popular vote (yet still 0% of the electoral votes) was in 2000 when Nader had 2.78% of the popular vote and if a fraction of his votes had gone to Gore, George W Bush wouldn't have made it to the white house.
If they need the information they should have a secure way to receive it. I just refinanced, the broker had a secure site (SSL password protected file vault type interface hosted on their own servers) with a web interface that I could upload documents to.
If they don't have such a system in place already and routinely request and access peoples personal information your trust is severely misplaced.
That's not a secure system unless you know how it's protected on the other end. If the uploaded files end up on the corporate fileserver that everyone in the office has access to (including any virus that seeks out SSN's on file shares and emails them to the world, or a rogue employee that figures our that he can increase his income by selling SSN's that he's scraped out of the open fileserver), then it's just the illusion of security. Kind of like those websites that say "Your credit card is safe with us, we use 128 bit SSL encryption to protect it!" while the back end emails your card number to the merchant.
But at least that's a step above my broker who sent me a loan doc "protected" by encrypting it with the last 4 digits of my SSN. I started picking up documents in person after that. I asked about PGP and of course, they had no idea what I was talking about.
The calculator is also wrong.
According to this calculator, I should be paying $210/month before any taxes and fees, with my particular carrier and profile. I am, in fact, paying $140 after all taxes and fees. Given that it provides incorrect information for what I know, I don't feel I can trust it to provide me correct information for comparison purposes.
Do you have a current plan or are you grandfathered in to a better plan that's no longer available?
My current rate plan is cheaper than what the calculator gave, but when I compared to a new plan on the carrier's website, it matched.
There is a significant install base of Windows in datacenters? Who knew...
Every fortune 500 company?
Once you get away from internet and other tech companies, Windows has a *huge* back office presence.
Once you make the investment into Windows to run your back office, there's not much incremental cost to add servers here and there to do other things, it's not worth the investment to switch to Linux for a few servers, and then as "a few servers here and there" grow to hundreds of servers running mission critical tasks, it's even harder to move away from Windows. Microsoft is good at lock-in -- their products work well (mostly) with each other, but poorly with everyone else. So once you move down the Windows path you get more and more ingrained in it. And, just like there are plenty of Linux zealots, there are plenty of Windows zealots that are firmly convinced that Microsoft is the One True Way to get things done in the corporate world - and of course, much of the software that you companies use to use to run their business only runs on Windows.
Because they're charging the same price as a paperback, or hardcover, sometimes even more.
And eBooks typically cost more than twice the price of used paperbacks. And I can give the paperback to someone else after I'm done or sell it again for a couple dollars so it's even cheaper.
I really like my Kindle (the paperwhite with backlight is great for reading in bed without disturbing my partner - better than the clip-on book light) and prefer reading on the Kindle over reading paper books, but not so much that i'll pay twice what it costs to have a used book delivered to my door. My kindle to paper book ratio is about 3:1 -- lately I've only been buying Kindle books when I travel.
I know the publishing industry says they can't sell eBooks any cheaper, so they will continue to get very little money from me as I stick with used books.
If they don't need 90% of their sysadmins, they should have fired them long ago.
But I suspect that they aren't all redundant, so how are they going to maintain their systems? It would be interesting to see their server-to-sysadmin ratio and compare to other companies.
Without the sysadmins to maintain and secure their systems, they may be making their data even easier for hackers to access, so the NSA may end up being a huge liability to the security of the country. I don't see why no lawmaker understands this - data breaches happen every day, even to large companies that follow best practices to secure their data. Why do they think that the NSA's vast data warehouse is not going to be breached when it's such a huge target to non-friendly governments and hackers throughout the world - even governments of countries where most computer hardware is made that have the resources to hide backdoors in that hardware.
Seriously, do you not understand that the *carrier* can do whatever they want here? They know where all of their customer's cells are all the time, they could implement this with SMS messages just as easily as the system they did end up implementing.
The carriers cannot deliver real-time geographically targeted messages with SMS. I've been told that by more than one carrier engineer when asked if our venue's dedicated cell tower could be used to send SMS messages to customers in the event of an emergency. He said many people ask for it, but it's not remotely possible and that if we had public safety messages to send, we'd have to work with FEMA and local public safety agencies to send an WEA alert. The towers can't autonomously send SMS messages to all connected phones, and due to roaming, the carrier itself may not have immediate access to the cell phone number of all phones associated with a tower.
Or a system that DIDN'T USE SMS but had the same effect (ever heard of iMessage?)
Isn't that what they did? Implemented a system that doesn't use SMS, but has the same effect -- but unlike iMessage, it allows for geographically targeted messages and works with any phone, not just smart phones.
I don't know, seems pretty fucking obvious to me.
But in the end, as I already said, I'm not against the idea, just the implementation. Who the hell cares which protocol is used to get the message to your phone, the key point is they needed to present it in a way that didn't just piss off people so the turned off the feature, and it was a big failure in that regard.
So in what way would you implement a system that needs to communicate time sensitive information to consumers without using a loud alert tone to get their attention? It's hard to argue that an Amber alert is not time sensitive -- having it flash on your screen only to be discovered in the morning may make the data too stale to use. You can certainly argue that many people don't care about Amber alerts, but those people can just disable the alerts.