But there is an obvious conflict of interest when a faculty member requires a text that he or she wrote for a course at the home institution, as the author/instructor gets some of the money (not much, though, even for a $180 text, I'm afraid.) At a normal university with standards and ethics, there generally is a mechanism for making textbook adoption decisions revenue-neutral for the instructor.
Supposedly the department has been using that book for years. In fact, the department was using that book for 15 years before the author even worked for the school. See the comment from argStyopa. If they were already using the book, it doesn't sound like the author of the book had any influence in it's adoption once he became a faculty member.
I'm not saying that we have to go all pessimistic on the world. But again I would say he is NOT a tinkerer. He's a kid with a screwdriver. And he was told to put it away by multiple teachers before he got sent to the principal's office. If he was playing with one of those electronic kits and made a clock I would consider him a tinkerer. That's what makes me question his motives. Plus the kid has never come out and admitted that he didn't even build the clock despite the fact that it is obvious.
His engineering teacher, upon seeing the clock said, "That's really nice", but advised him to keep the device in his backpack for the rest of the school day.
I can't tell if that is supposed to be sarcastic but I would not say "That's really nice" without at least a hint of sarcasm. It just doesn't sound very genuine to me. And like I said, you could see the logo silk screened onto the circuit board even in low quality images - something I would expect an engineering teacher to notice. So that just further leads me to believe that the praise was sarcastic. But maybe I'm just a jerk and harsher than his teachers.
You realize what the endgame is here, of course. It's to elevate the organizers to the point where they get paid to shut up (usually with no benefit to the community they claim to represent) as soon as they declare interest in a lucrative project.
See Jesse Jackson for a great example of this. Lots of protesting, leading to little or no improvement in "his" community but instead large financial gains for himself and his family (e.g., beer distributorships for his sons).
That is not always true. My dad used to lead a community group for a section of town that covered about 10-15k people in a community of 100,000. The part of the community we lived in was often neglected by the rest of the city. We did not have a grocery store that was less than 15 minutes away by car without traffic. There was one park and no library. The city got its hands on something like 1000 acres of land in that area. My dad's group help ensured that part of that land was used to bring a library, a grocery store, and a new park to the local residents. The city just wanted to sell the land off to large multinational corporations. I spent a lot of time gathering signatures for petitions and other such things and I never saw my dad get so much as a coupon for all our hard work.
I honestly don't care whether or not this was some conspiracy or not. It annoys me that the kid got an invite to the white house and google for the same accomplishments of a six year old. It also annoys me that he was arrested for something stupid. And as to your first point how many people believed that Joe Paterno was involved in a conspiracy to conceal sexual abuse of little boys by his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky? There was no evidence that Joe knew what was going on for some 10 years before someone finally came clean about it. The lack of evidence means nothing. Especially when the only possible evidence would be communication between a father and a son. And my argument all this time is that the kid had no strong motive to behave the way that he did the day he was arrested. SO if argument B doesn't work for me, why should it work any better for you?
To you the evidence suggests he was just being a normal kid curious about electronics. To me, the level of curiosity he was showing about electronics was so cursory that I don't see him as any sort of tinkerer. That could just be a product of upbringing, who knows. It doesn't really matter much, does it? There is no tangible evidence for either one of us at this time. Once they move to Qatar no one will likely ever hear from any of these clowns again.
It needs to stop. I can't even load some webpages on my iPad (the first gen Mini with Retina display) because the websites are so slow they are unusable. There are websites that I just completely ignore because all their interactive content bogs my device down to the point where I just close the page out of sheer frustration. They're really shooting themselves in the foot.
I think that the influence of one's parents can be pretty strong at that age. If his dad wanted him to do something to make a scene, he probably would have thought it was a pretty cool idea. And the Wikipedia article I linked earlier said that the English teacher asked to see it after it made the noise. The teacher then told him to put it back in his bag and he persisted in fiddling with it. Of course that could be a revisionist statement from the English teacher. I just think his behavior through the whole event was a bit shifty, even for a 14 year old boy. I do believe he was trying to make a statement and I don't think that it had anything to do with his skills as a tinkerer.
Why do you think that such a conspiracy between father and son is so incredibly implausible and unlikely? How many times have we seen a conspiracy between father and son to hide things such as physical abuse, sexual assault, murder, and other far more heinous things that making a political statement?
It's impossible for anyone outside his family to know. I just don't see any "Geek Cred" in taking an alarm clock out of its enclosure and putting it inside of a different box. Anyone with a screwdriver can do that. I'm pretty sure the average 6 year old could handle that. That's why what he did makes zero sense to me. Especially after being warned to put it away by two separate teachers.
Of course everything you mention is not at all what the person i replied to was talking about.
Well you have to wonder what motive he had for even bringing the device to school in the first place. It's not apparent, but there is no question that his dad is politically motivated. I think there is a strong enough distaste and distrust of politicians for one to expect a father to use their child for attention. So if it was obvious to anyone who looked that the device was not invented by the student, what caused him to want to show it off at school? Especially after his science teacher told him to keep the clock in his bag and he later took it out and caused the alarm to go off in the middle of class? Even his English teacher told him to put it away and had to eventually confiscate it and send him to the principal's office. So what was his purpose in doing all of this? Obviously the principal overreacted but only after he had several opportunities to put it away and continue on with his life. So if his motive wasn't to garner attention, what was it?
If you explain your point and site sources then people don't think you're making things up.
What better source do you need than the actual photos of his arrest and the clock? You can see the circuit board was etched by a company that sold alarm clocks to Radioshack in the 1970s. You can see the logo for the company silkscreened right onto the board. Unless you think that the young lad decided to put a company logo on his 'invention'?
Sometimes I will copy and paste a function and just do some minor tweaks were I could have just added a parameter.
Why do I do this? Readability. Having a function called SplitPersonName(string name) and another one called SplitCompanyName(string name) So when I run the function it will be easily readable, as well if there is a bug in one of the fuctions but it works fine for the other. I can just change that one function without having to unit test other parts that could have been effected.
Also I avoid too much Classes that are extended from other classes, that tends to add confusion on where a particular code is being called if you are debugging it from the middle of the class structure.
It is OK to break rules, but you should have a good reason to do so. Also you should feel free to not break the rules when you do not have a good reason to do so.
So why don't you publicly expose the SplitPersonName function and the SplitCompanyName function and have those functions call a single function that is just called SplitString? Then you can have your readable code and only have to make changes to the split function in one place. It's like the best of both worlds. When I need a new parameter in a function, I keep the original function and just have it call the new function with a default value for the new parameter. Then I don't have to change anything anywhere, you just make sure your unit tests still work.
This stuff? A few million cubic feet of soil? Easy, dump it in the Ocean.
It's not like this stuff is horribly dangerous or really radio active. Just barge it out to sea where it's really deep and push it over the side. End of problem. Want to keep it tied up a few thousand years? Encase it in concrete and push it over the side one block at a time. Either way, cheap and easy.
Ohh we should dump it off the coast of Japan, near Tokyo. I've been waiting for Godzilla for a long time now.
Wow that is a hard nut, you claim that something is impossible by design which would mean that these bombs were the only devices humans created that worked as intended.
Believe it or not, a nuclear explosion is pretty difficult to create. It is far easier to take measures to ensure your nuclear material does not go critical than it is to actually make it go critical. My understanding is that the explosions in these bombs need to be controlled very precisely to avoid a fizzle. So even if the surrounding explosive accidentally caused an implosion of the nuclear material you'd only ever see the nuclear material blown across the countryside. And for the bomb to create fusion, you would need the tritrium to be injected into the center of the fission explosion at exactly the right ratio and time. So, yes, given the complexity I think it's quite easy to make it fail safely.
Didn't you see the movie? San Francisco and Silicon Valley are bike ride away from each other!
Well Google does have an office in San Francisco not too far from the Bay Bridge but I think it's the main campus in Mountain View that has all the amenities that the article is talking about.
I'm sure they would, but SF won't let them. SF has brought this on themselves by refusing to allow sufficient development.
SF dwellers wanted to keep the quaint neighborhoods and everything, but there's a reason that those neighborhoods were bulldozed in other urban areas. They keep the maximum population density very low. That keeps prices extremely high.
I have sympathy for not wanting to live in a crowded, overbuilt urban area, but without development, even things like rent control would just force everyone to move out to the suburbs, where those house prices would skyrocket instead, and everyone would have to commute somehow.
You do realize that Google's main campus is a solid 30 miles south of San Francisco, right?
This doesn't seem to be right. To make online transactions you need the CCV number on the back of the card. That number is not normally transmitted when you make a chip-and-pin payment. At least, that's the way it works in Europe, maybe the US chip-and-pin system is different.
The CVV can be read, in clear text, from the terminal data. It is not encrypted. While they do not need to store the CVV data separately from the encrypted card data, Target could still have access to this info.
Just good to mention that Chip & PIN cards would not have prevented the Target breach in any way as mentioned in Brian Krebs follow up article:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...
"0 – The number of customer cards that Chip-and-PIN-enabled terminals would have been able to stop the bad guys from stealing had Target put the technology in place prior to the breach (without end-to-end encryption of card data, the card numbers and expiration dates can still be stolen and used in online transactions)."
Except that chip cards don't provide the same card number for every transaction. In an EMV transaction the cashier requests that the terminal read the chip. Data from the chip gets sent to the processor. The processor sends data back to the card, which is then used to perform an action on the chip. Once the chip is done, it sends all of the information needed to capture the transaction to the processor. But it does not contain the actual card number.
EMV transactions all contain cryptograms with the card number. Target would only be able to see, at most, the first 6 digits and the last 4 digits of every card. Target would not have had anything to compromise. The processor would have had information that would be usable once to complete a single transaction. The card could not have been cloned. The card number could not have been reused in an online transaction because it would have been marked as a duplicate and fraudulent transaction. So therefore, chip and pin would have protected everyone in the Target breach. That's assuming an actual EMV spec transaction occurred. The back and forth communication between the card chip and the processor is the reason that the card must be left in during the transaction.
My parents tech support needs are very little, even without reboots and Mac Minis, and I help them readily, thankyouverymuch. That doesn't mean I need their computers to break before spending time with them, or that I wish their computers broke more often.
Who said anything about needing their computers to break to spend time with them? The GP complained that he wanted to do other things when he's at his parents. Like spend time with them. The point of the VPN is that you can fix their computer problems at your convenience and when you are not trying to do other things with them. I'll jump on the VPN while I am waiting for a build at work, or am doing things around the house. They get the the help they need and I don't feel drained by the process. I still get to talk to them or go out and do things with them instead of saving up months of issues for the next moment I am in town. If only I could do remotely help them fix things up around the house.
Not only is this "just deserts", but it's also quite probable. Institutional and architectural information tends to fade quickly, at least for myself. 6 months into a new job and I will only have passing knowledge on the systems. 1 year out and I'm back to almost square one with a weird sense of deja-foo ( on purpose ).
So fuck them. Take the money, develop amnesia and when they come calling, create chaos under the guise of "being helpful".
Ahh but why even bother with that? The contract supposedly requires only "reasonable" help. Who considers working for the bank for free to be reasonable? I don't think a judge would. I would sign the contract and if they called me even a day after severance I would tell them that I can't reasonably afford to help without compensation as I'm too busy trying to find new employment in order to ease the burden on government unemployment resources.
I think the reason that Apple still supports these older devices is the iPad 2. They have a bunch of education contracts that require them to make devices available to school districts for a specific price (replacement devices for iPad 2). If they stop manufacturing the iPad 2 then they have to supply newer hardware to schools at the same price, thereby decreasing their profit margins. This is pure speculation on my part, however.
Google supports Nexus phones with major updates for "at least two years" now, and security updates for "the longer of three years from initial availability or 18 months from last sale of the device via the Google Store," which is better than any other Android OEM out there. After the Stagefright vulnerability cropped up, Google instituted a monthly security update schedule, and so far Nexus devices have gotten OTAs in August, September, and October, right on schedule.
It's good to see this stated up front. I'm hoping that this becomes a trend in the industry. The expected lifetime of the phone is going to be a very important factor when deciding on my next one.
I have a Nexus 4 that has been getting major updates for about 3 years now. If you look at Apple's compatibility chart for iOS 9 you'll see that it supports devices about as old as the Nexus 4. So it looks like they are maintaining status quo with Apple.
Quest and Labcorp are the only games in town around here. I can't say that I have ever had a problem with either one. I set an appointment, show up 5 minutes before hand and fill out the paperwork. I do my thing and never even think about the lab again. I've never received a bill from any of them. A few weeks later, I get a copy of the lab report in the mail from my doctor. It's entirely painless.
You raise a good point, but constantly fixing someone else's computer problems is draining, especially if the help is one-way and never reciprocated. It does nobody's relationship any good if you dread every call for the hour it's going to take to fix whatever broke.
Imagine instead if their computers actually worked, and you could therefore instead talk about whatever you wanted instead of why the printer isn't working. "Spending time with your child" is one thing, but I'm welcome to visit even when the Internet isn't broken; and, when visiting, I'd rather spend the time with them instead of their computer. Likewise, my folks are welcome to visit me even when I don't have a busted clutch slave cylinder or leaking fuel tank; and, likewise, the time is better spent on discretionary projects we want to tackle for the purposes of fun and/or bonding as opposed to helping with an emergency.
Work smarter then, not harder. I support my parents from across the United States. I have my own machine running on their network with a VPN configured so that I can jump on and see exactly what the problem is. It saves me a lot of time and frustration that way. The only time that doesn't work is if their internet isn't working properly. Then I have them reboot all their network gear and I'm usually back in business. I spent about $700 on the hardware - $200 to replace their networking gear with higher quality stuff and another $500 on a mac mini that sits unobtrusively in a corner. I expect most people's parents have sacrificed enough for their children that they deserve a little help with things outside of their expertise.
In conversations that I've had with marketing people, they insisted that consumers want to see advertisements, if those advertisements are relevant. They showed me surveys where consumers were asked if they would want to see ads on web pages, provided those ads weren't intrusive and had relevant content. The results were more in the "yes" category than not.
.
Whoever typed up the report forgot three important keystrokes from the original survey and the ad executives read "Provided those ads were intrusive and had relevant content.
Slashdot Mirror
But there is an obvious conflict of interest when a faculty member requires a text that he or she wrote for a course at the home institution, as the author/instructor gets some of the money (not much, though, even for a $180 text, I'm afraid.) At a normal university with standards and ethics, there generally is a mechanism for making textbook adoption decisions revenue-neutral for the instructor.
Supposedly the department has been using that book for years. In fact, the department was using that book for 15 years before the author even worked for the school. See the comment from argStyopa. If they were already using the book, it doesn't sound like the author of the book had any influence in it's adoption once he became a faculty member.
Hey bro, you're the one with a low UID. It was your generation of slashdot user that burned and pillaged the earth.
I'm not saying that we have to go all pessimistic on the world. But again I would say he is NOT a tinkerer. He's a kid with a screwdriver. And he was told to put it away by multiple teachers before he got sent to the principal's office. If he was playing with one of those electronic kits and made a clock I would consider him a tinkerer. That's what makes me question his motives. Plus the kid has never come out and admitted that he didn't even build the clock despite the fact that it is obvious.
I can't tell if that is supposed to be sarcastic but I would not say "That's really nice" without at least a hint of sarcasm. It just doesn't sound very genuine to me. And like I said, you could see the logo silk screened onto the circuit board even in low quality images - something I would expect an engineering teacher to notice. So that just further leads me to believe that the praise was sarcastic. But maybe I'm just a jerk and harsher than his teachers.
>> Community groups...voice their concerns
You realize what the endgame is here, of course. It's to elevate the organizers to the point where they get paid to shut up (usually with no benefit to the community they claim to represent) as soon as they declare interest in a lucrative project.
See Jesse Jackson for a great example of this. Lots of protesting, leading to little or no improvement in "his" community but instead large financial gains for himself and his family (e.g., beer distributorships for his sons).
That is not always true. My dad used to lead a community group for a section of town that covered about 10-15k people in a community of 100,000. The part of the community we lived in was often neglected by the rest of the city. We did not have a grocery store that was less than 15 minutes away by car without traffic. There was one park and no library. The city got its hands on something like 1000 acres of land in that area. My dad's group help ensured that part of that land was used to bring a library, a grocery store, and a new park to the local residents. The city just wanted to sell the land off to large multinational corporations. I spent a lot of time gathering signatures for petitions and other such things and I never saw my dad get so much as a coupon for all our hard work.
I honestly don't care whether or not this was some conspiracy or not. It annoys me that the kid got an invite to the white house and google for the same accomplishments of a six year old. It also annoys me that he was arrested for something stupid. And as to your first point how many people believed that Joe Paterno was involved in a conspiracy to conceal sexual abuse of little boys by his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky? There was no evidence that Joe knew what was going on for some 10 years before someone finally came clean about it. The lack of evidence means nothing. Especially when the only possible evidence would be communication between a father and a son. And my argument all this time is that the kid had no strong motive to behave the way that he did the day he was arrested. SO if argument B doesn't work for me, why should it work any better for you?
To you the evidence suggests he was just being a normal kid curious about electronics. To me, the level of curiosity he was showing about electronics was so cursory that I don't see him as any sort of tinkerer. That could just be a product of upbringing, who knows. It doesn't really matter much, does it? There is no tangible evidence for either one of us at this time. Once they move to Qatar no one will likely ever hear from any of these clowns again.
It needs to stop. I can't even load some webpages on my iPad (the first gen Mini with Retina display) because the websites are so slow they are unusable. There are websites that I just completely ignore because all their interactive content bogs my device down to the point where I just close the page out of sheer frustration. They're really shooting themselves in the foot.
I think that the influence of one's parents can be pretty strong at that age. If his dad wanted him to do something to make a scene, he probably would have thought it was a pretty cool idea. And the Wikipedia article I linked earlier said that the English teacher asked to see it after it made the noise. The teacher then told him to put it back in his bag and he persisted in fiddling with it. Of course that could be a revisionist statement from the English teacher. I just think his behavior through the whole event was a bit shifty, even for a 14 year old boy. I do believe he was trying to make a statement and I don't think that it had anything to do with his skills as a tinkerer.
Why do you think that such a conspiracy between father and son is so incredibly implausible and unlikely? How many times have we seen a conspiracy between father and son to hide things such as physical abuse, sexual assault, murder, and other far more heinous things that making a political statement?
It's impossible for anyone outside his family to know. I just don't see any "Geek Cred" in taking an alarm clock out of its enclosure and putting it inside of a different box. Anyone with a screwdriver can do that. I'm pretty sure the average 6 year old could handle that. That's why what he did makes zero sense to me. Especially after being warned to put it away by two separate teachers.
Of course everything you mention is not at all what the person i replied to was talking about.
Well you have to wonder what motive he had for even bringing the device to school in the first place. It's not apparent, but there is no question that his dad is politically motivated. I think there is a strong enough distaste and distrust of politicians for one to expect a father to use their child for attention. So if it was obvious to anyone who looked that the device was not invented by the student, what caused him to want to show it off at school? Especially after his science teacher told him to keep the clock in his bag and he later took it out and caused the alarm to go off in the middle of class? Even his English teacher told him to put it away and had to eventually confiscate it and send him to the principal's office. So what was his purpose in doing all of this? Obviously the principal overreacted but only after he had several opportunities to put it away and continue on with his life. So if his motive wasn't to garner attention, what was it?
If you explain your point and site sources then people don't think you're making things up.
What better source do you need than the actual photos of his arrest and the clock? You can see the circuit board was etched by a company that sold alarm clocks to Radioshack in the 1970s. You can see the logo for the company silkscreened right onto the board. Unless you think that the young lad decided to put a company logo on his 'invention'?
Sometimes I will copy and paste a function and just do some minor tweaks were I could have just added a parameter. Why do I do this? Readability. Having a function called SplitPersonName(string name) and another one called SplitCompanyName(string name) So when I run the function it will be easily readable, as well if there is a bug in one of the fuctions but it works fine for the other. I can just change that one function without having to unit test other parts that could have been effected.
Also I avoid too much Classes that are extended from other classes, that tends to add confusion on where a particular code is being called if you are debugging it from the middle of the class structure.
It is OK to break rules, but you should have a good reason to do so. Also you should feel free to not break the rules when you do not have a good reason to do so.
So why don't you publicly expose the SplitPersonName function and the SplitCompanyName function and have those functions call a single function that is just called SplitString? Then you can have your readable code and only have to make changes to the split function in one place. It's like the best of both worlds. When I need a new parameter in a function, I keep the original function and just have it call the new function with a default value for the new parameter. Then I don't have to change anything anywhere, you just make sure your unit tests still work.
This stuff? A few million cubic feet of soil? Easy, dump it in the Ocean.
It's not like this stuff is horribly dangerous or really radio active. Just barge it out to sea where it's really deep and push it over the side. End of problem. Want to keep it tied up a few thousand years? Encase it in concrete and push it over the side one block at a time. Either way, cheap and easy.
Ohh we should dump it off the coast of Japan, near Tokyo. I've been waiting for Godzilla for a long time now.
Wow that is a hard nut, you claim that something is impossible by design which would mean that these bombs were the only devices humans created that worked as intended.
Believe it or not, a nuclear explosion is pretty difficult to create. It is far easier to take measures to ensure your nuclear material does not go critical than it is to actually make it go critical. My understanding is that the explosions in these bombs need to be controlled very precisely to avoid a fizzle. So even if the surrounding explosive accidentally caused an implosion of the nuclear material you'd only ever see the nuclear material blown across the countryside. And for the bomb to create fusion, you would need the tritrium to be injected into the center of the fission explosion at exactly the right ratio and time. So, yes, given the complexity I think it's quite easy to make it fail safely.
Didn't you see the movie? San Francisco and Silicon Valley are bike ride away from each other!
Well Google does have an office in San Francisco not too far from the Bay Bridge but I think it's the main campus in Mountain View that has all the amenities that the article is talking about.
I'm sure they would, but SF won't let them. SF has brought this on themselves by refusing to allow sufficient development.
SF dwellers wanted to keep the quaint neighborhoods and everything, but there's a reason that those neighborhoods were bulldozed in other urban areas. They keep the maximum population density very low. That keeps prices extremely high.
I have sympathy for not wanting to live in a crowded, overbuilt urban area, but without development, even things like rent control would just force everyone to move out to the suburbs, where those house prices would skyrocket instead, and everyone would have to commute somehow.
You do realize that Google's main campus is a solid 30 miles south of San Francisco, right?
This doesn't seem to be right. To make online transactions you need the CCV number on the back of the card. That number is not normally transmitted when you make a chip-and-pin payment. At least, that's the way it works in Europe, maybe the US chip-and-pin system is different.
The CVV can be read, in clear text, from the terminal data. It is not encrypted. While they do not need to store the CVV data separately from the encrypted card data, Target could still have access to this info.
Just good to mention that Chip & PIN cards would not have prevented the Target breach in any way as mentioned in Brian Krebs follow up article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/20... "0 – The number of customer cards that Chip-and-PIN-enabled terminals would have been able to stop the bad guys from stealing had Target put the technology in place prior to the breach (without end-to-end encryption of card data, the card numbers and expiration dates can still be stolen and used in online transactions)."
Except that chip cards don't provide the same card number for every transaction. In an EMV transaction the cashier requests that the terminal read the chip. Data from the chip gets sent to the processor. The processor sends data back to the card, which is then used to perform an action on the chip. Once the chip is done, it sends all of the information needed to capture the transaction to the processor. But it does not contain the actual card number.
EMV transactions all contain cryptograms with the card number. Target would only be able to see, at most, the first 6 digits and the last 4 digits of every card. Target would not have had anything to compromise. The processor would have had information that would be usable once to complete a single transaction. The card could not have been cloned. The card number could not have been reused in an online transaction because it would have been marked as a duplicate and fraudulent transaction. So therefore, chip and pin would have protected everyone in the Target breach. That's assuming an actual EMV spec transaction occurred. The back and forth communication between the card chip and the processor is the reason that the card must be left in during the transaction.
My parents tech support needs are very little, even without reboots and Mac Minis, and I help them readily, thankyouverymuch. That doesn't mean I need their computers to break before spending time with them, or that I wish their computers broke more often.
Who said anything about needing their computers to break to spend time with them? The GP complained that he wanted to do other things when he's at his parents. Like spend time with them. The point of the VPN is that you can fix their computer problems at your convenience and when you are not trying to do other things with them. I'll jump on the VPN while I am waiting for a build at work, or am doing things around the house. They get the the help they need and I don't feel drained by the process. I still get to talk to them or go out and do things with them instead of saving up months of issues for the next moment I am in town. If only I could do remotely help them fix things up around the house.
Not only is this "just deserts", but it's also quite probable. Institutional and architectural information tends to fade quickly, at least for myself. 6 months into a new job and I will only have passing knowledge on the systems. 1 year out and I'm back to almost square one with a weird sense of deja-foo ( on purpose ).
So fuck them. Take the money, develop amnesia and when they come calling, create chaos under the guise of "being helpful".
Ahh but why even bother with that? The contract supposedly requires only "reasonable" help. Who considers working for the bank for free to be reasonable? I don't think a judge would. I would sign the contract and if they called me even a day after severance I would tell them that I can't reasonably afford to help without compensation as I'm too busy trying to find new employment in order to ease the burden on government unemployment resources.
I think the reason that Apple still supports these older devices is the iPad 2. They have a bunch of education contracts that require them to make devices available to school districts for a specific price (replacement devices for iPad 2). If they stop manufacturing the iPad 2 then they have to supply newer hardware to schools at the same price, thereby decreasing their profit margins. This is pure speculation on my part, however.
So, how long will a $400-500 phone last us?
Google supports Nexus phones with major updates for "at least two years" now, and security updates for "the longer of three years from initial availability or 18 months from last sale of the device via the Google Store," which is better than any other Android OEM out there. After the Stagefright vulnerability cropped up, Google instituted a monthly security update schedule, and so far Nexus devices have gotten OTAs in August, September, and October, right on schedule.
It's good to see this stated up front. I'm hoping that this becomes a trend in the industry. The expected lifetime of the phone is going to be a very important factor when deciding on my next one.
I have a Nexus 4 that has been getting major updates for about 3 years now. If you look at Apple's compatibility chart for iOS 9 you'll see that it supports devices about as old as the Nexus 4. So it looks like they are maintaining status quo with Apple.
Quest and Labcorp are the only games in town around here. I can't say that I have ever had a problem with either one. I set an appointment, show up 5 minutes before hand and fill out the paperwork. I do my thing and never even think about the lab again. I've never received a bill from any of them. A few weeks later, I get a copy of the lab report in the mail from my doctor. It's entirely painless.
You raise a good point, but constantly fixing someone else's computer problems is draining, especially if the help is one-way and never reciprocated. It does nobody's relationship any good if you dread every call for the hour it's going to take to fix whatever broke.
Imagine instead if their computers actually worked, and you could therefore instead talk about whatever you wanted instead of why the printer isn't working. "Spending time with your child" is one thing, but I'm welcome to visit even when the Internet isn't broken; and, when visiting, I'd rather spend the time with them instead of their computer. Likewise, my folks are welcome to visit me even when I don't have a busted clutch slave cylinder or leaking fuel tank; and, likewise, the time is better spent on discretionary projects we want to tackle for the purposes of fun and/or bonding as opposed to helping with an emergency.
Work smarter then, not harder. I support my parents from across the United States. I have my own machine running on their network with a VPN configured so that I can jump on and see exactly what the problem is. It saves me a lot of time and frustration that way. The only time that doesn't work is if their internet isn't working properly. Then I have them reboot all their network gear and I'm usually back in business. I spent about $700 on the hardware - $200 to replace their networking gear with higher quality stuff and another $500 on a mac mini that sits unobtrusively in a corner. I expect most people's parents have sacrificed enough for their children that they deserve a little help with things outside of their expertise.
In conversations that I've had with marketing people, they insisted that consumers want to see advertisements, if those advertisements are relevant. They showed me surveys where consumers were asked if they would want to see ads on web pages, provided those ads weren't intrusive and had relevant content. The results were more in the "yes" category than not.
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Whoever typed up the report forgot three important keystrokes from the original survey and the ad executives read "Provided those ads were intrusive and had relevant content.