What better way to increase the profit margin on your products? Hire, train, and pay staff, pay rent on retail space? Develop a logistics network. Oh, Get into a market where you have no experience. Sounds like a fantastic way to cut costs and overhead.
Ch. 11 offers protection from creditors while you attempt to reorganize, While Ch 7 is outright bankruptcy. Sometimes it works, usually you're just staving off the inevitable. So the correct joke to use here is...
So what if the deployment or management tool is windows only? Big deal. I'm not looking for a total redevelopment of the browser engine to suit the needs of a single operating system. What I do want is an easy way to manage what's already there. But instead development is centering around improving address bar search functions and other spurious "improvements" that are ignoring the elephant in the room?
Look, Firefox does a great job of being a stand alone browser. But in a work environment, trying to manage it sucks across the board. They're not getting their asses kicked in the "integrated search" market, but that's what they keep focusing. Stability and deployment are real problems, but we keep getting low-hanging fruit 'improvements.'
That'd work out ok if Mozilla didn't create a profile folder with the structure of (gibberish).default within the profile location. Then there's also the problem of having more than one user to a machine, multiple (gibberish).default folders for a single user and no good way to tell which of those folders is the 'good' default (which I think has something to do with the upgrade process? I've seen this on machines that have been running for a while. Maybe one profile gets corrupted? Not really sure).
I can script out a way to push a user.js after some regex fidgeting, but again, it goes back to the point of...why? You guys made the browser, how hard is it to make a management tool? I'll take a snap-in, anything. I'm begging you. Give me a way to easily maintain your browser for a decent sized environment. I *WANT* firefox in the enterprise, I just don't want to get hung out to dry trying to support it myself.
Posting a link to a half-dead project run out of somebody's basement (a project that's a glorified clone of one of the dead projects I mentioned in the parent post, no less) proves my point. I want these tools *FROM MOZILLA.* You know, the people that actually developed the browser in the first place? Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell Mozilla as being better than IE when this shit is what passes for enterprise support? No, of course you don't. You know what IE settings I push via group policy? Home Page, ignore proxy for local domain, and proxy of 127.0.0.1. I don't let IE off my local network unless there's a damn good reason. Every user in my shop gets FF, and the IE icons get blown away, and it's been the same policy for four years now. Spyware? Barely heard of it. Firefox is the better browser in every last respect, except one.
This is Mozilla's problem. Not the guys that spend days hacking together fixes to make firefox almost sorta kinda work as good as IE, so long as you don't dink with it too much. If they want market share, why are they concerned with getting me to use their browser on the couple of PC's I use, instead of the hundreds I manage? If they want to be a seen as the better browser, why not step up to the plate and actually fight where it counts? Nope, they're apparently more interested in getting on grandma's PC than they are in getting on the Domain.
You wanna know where my head is? It's in the real world, watching IE get used in business because the guys who are making a better browser are more concerned with revolutionizing the way I use google fucking maps. Here, lemme contribute: F6 maps.google.com. There, I knocked out that whole search problem for ya. I've revolutionized searching. Now how about working on some better profile management tools?
Enough with the super-uber-awesome search crap. Give me an MSI (that I don't have to build myself), give me a way to push settings via group policy, and most of all give me a browser that I can centrally manage even half as easily as I can manage IE. Oh, and lemme just give some space here:
^ That's where you run-off-to-google-up-some-snark-for-my-reply folks can put your links to tools like FirefoxADM that haven't been touched in almost four years, or to frontmotion and their "give us a 150 bucks and we'll roll your MSI for you" service. Take this example; I want to change the homepage on 50 PC's, each with two or three different users. In IE it's a one-line group policy change. Firefox? roll up your sleves, you'll be there a while. Maybe push out a new prefs.js file into each user's profile. Maybe roll up a CCK custom XPI. Or just roll your own MSI and have it re-install the entire damned browser.
Until Chrome, Firefox, and Opera get over circle-jerking themselves about getting IE's sloppy seconds market share, there's not even enough motion to say that there's a even a "browser war" going on. I really hoped that Mozilla would take a decent swing at the enterprise market. Instead they're doing 110mph down the netscape road towards a bloated browser. Meanwhile, Chrome and Opera aren't doing much more than pulling on to the on-ramp of the same road, and touting how you'll go do the same path, only in style!
This honestly sounds more like terrorism than anything Bill O'Reilly spouts off about.
Think of it this way. Say you want to fund the Mumbai attacks ver. 2.0, but are short on cash. This sounds like a great plan straight from the terrorist handbook. All you need is a few willing or even unknowning smurfs and a decent hacker connection. How do you hide the four million dollars you just stole? Have people you don't know steal another five million on top of it. The FBI won't be inundated with false leads to chase, they'll be loaded with dozens of real suspects to chase down.
The article mentions the cards were cloned then cracked, so a lot of the math can go out the window. I wonder if any of the money was just wire transfered directly to the cards themselves, for later withdrawl or even use a a normal debit card? It doesn't say how much could be taken out at one time, only that there is normally a $500 dollar limit. Though it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the FBI is playing coy with the numbers. They've apparently been sitting on the story for three+ months.
This money will probably find its way back to the hands of the genuinely bad people of the world.
Given the way the game has gone the last five years, you don't need to worry about the score. For that matter, given the rabid hatred that comes out of Columbus, you don't need to check the score either. Just mention that you're a Michigan fan and an OSU football fan will make damn sure you know it, and will remind you of it for weeks to come...
While it's fun to sit back and yell "hur, hur, dumb jocks are ruining mah intarwebs!" it needs to be noted at ESPN's parent company is none other than that friend of the little guy, the copyright crusaders themselves, Disney. They are swinging ABC and ESPN around as their entertainment 'killer apps.' They've used their networks as tools like this before, go.com anyone?
I'd be thrilled if ESPN backed away from the amount of video they're using on their site. Call me crazy but I go to a website for an article I can read in peace, not for 30 seconds of commercials followed by whatever annoying, b-team anchor has gotten stuck doing web highlights. They've developed a handful of interesting and entertaining columnists, what they haven't developed are any decent anchors in the past five years.
Some of Lindros' problems were his own doing. He rose through the junior ranks so quickly that he never developed any on-ice vision. Be it either due to his meteoric rise or a simple lack of skill, he never had a decent sense of what was going on around him. Igor Larionov was generously listed as 5'8" 185 lbs, yet never once took the hits that I saw Lindros take.
And of course, Lindros had a habit of taking the puck up through center ice with his head down. That may have worked back in the OHL when he was 50lbs heavier than everyone and could muscle his way through just about any check, but that same move is just like ringing the dinner bell when you had guys like Scott Stevens patrolling the blue line.
It's not surprising, but it's also a bit of a slight to the way concussions are being handled today. These artciles give the impression that concussions are treated today the same way they were 30 years ago.
Ten years ago was the point where things really started to "click" when it came to concussions. Jim Everett's case in particular. He was an NFL quarterback who spent several years as a veritable punching bag for some god-awful teams, including the St. Louis Rams. Everett had actually taken to keeping his phone number in his wallet, since he frequently got lost on the way home (a 15 minute drive) from the stadium, and couldn't remember his address or phone number. At that point, a lot of NFL teams began taking notice. The tissue samples we're seeing are from guys who, for the most part, played in the 70's and 80's, back when "shut up and play you pussy, you just 'got your bell rung'" was a way of life. Now, concussions are handled with considerably more care. Is it enough? I don't know that anyone is sure yet. But at least they're being treated like the legitimate, serious injury they are.
But what's really waking up pro sports teams? Money. With teams investing over 100 million dollars over ten years in some players, the risk is losing not only what you've invested in development, but what you stand to earn in terms of marketing and merchandise revenues. What do you think a Peyton Manning-level players is worth to his franchise over his career? a quarter of a billion dollars? Half a billion? Do you think it's any different in the NHL? Or EPL?
It's interesting that Chris Nowinski is mentioned in the article. As a former pro-wrestler, hearing him talk about concussions is like hearing about gang violence from someone who lives in Compton. The WWE has an absolutely abysmal record of handling athlete injuries, especially concussions.
So how many of those 2.5 million are scammers and huckesters who are bilking the elderly and inept as we muddle through this insane clusterfuck? This mess is enough to turn the most die hard quasi-socialist into a small government, free market libertarian in the span of about 7 seconds.
Plus, now I've got to deal with four more months of commercials regarding this switch....ON MY CABLE FUCKING TV!!!! yeah, thanks comcast, thank you for reminding me every 29 seconds that the DTV switch is coming.
Why bother. I keep up to date images for all my hardware and, at the first whiff of trouble, it's bye bye birdy.
There's just not a huge list of reasons to dick with this stuff any more. Yeah, you might learn the attack vector, then you might be able to manually remove the nasty little bugger that's got you slowed down and patch against future intrusion. Or, you can start from scratch and move on with your life after an hour or so. Besides, if it is hardware, it'll be pretty apparent after you've reloaded (if you can reload at all.)
I no longer care what crapware my users have managed to infest themselves with. Ghost the machine, move on to genuinely interesting problems.
And yet you completely missed the "beowulf cluster of fridges" joke. There was also the possibility of "cold grits" modification meme, and an outside shot at a soviet russia joke.
The whole thing is disgusting to me though. We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
Easy enough to prevent. Don't move into a neighborhood with a "neighborhood association." You'd probably do well to check any the laws of any prospective home locations as well. Our township has a few ordinances that a homeowner could run afoul of, but nothing too major.
When we bought our house, I made damn sure there wasn't a neighborhood association to deal with and turned down several prospective houses for that very reason.
I meant commercial in terms of cargo. I neglected to engage brain before operating keyboard...
I've been hearing that the -400's are starting to make their way into the cargo ranks as well now. Kalitta replaced at least one of his recent 747 losses with a 400
No chance. The C-5 Fleet is as old or older than the 747-200's air force one is built around now, same issues too. Plus, ground handling an aircraft of that magnitude at many airports is simply more hassle than it'd be worth. Extra fuel isn't an issue, as Air Force One can and does refuel in flight.
(I've worked as ramp crew, and the largest aircraft I've handled are a C-130 and a DC-6. I also handle a B-17 on a semi regular basis. None of which are in the category of an Airbus or a 747, but are a handful in their own right.)
The A380 doesn't have a chance. There are a limited number of airfields in the world that can support a loaded A380 now, and air force one spends a great deal of its time shuffling the president around the US. There are thousands of fields that regularly have, currently do, or were built with handling a 747 in mind.
The "newness" of the airbus works against it more that anything else. The 747-200's that are still in service are almost exclusively commercial at this point, so it's nice to see that they're thinking of upgrading the fleet. Anyone betting against Boeing is fooling themselves, the new air force one will almost certainly be a 747-8, which will be in service. No sense in re-inventing the wheel.
That said, Apple is also now charging if you want to get rid of your DRM
That's been the case since iTunes Plus first started. If any of the tracks you purchases became available in iTunes Plus, you could upgrade for.30 per track.
"The early adopter penalty strikes again" or "Apple gets stuck trying to placate record companies, with whom they've had contracts since the beginning, while moving to what is apparently becoming the standard practice in digital music" Either way, the consumer takes it in the end. Personally, I think every dime of that 30 cent per track is going to straight to the record labels. They wouldn't dare let someone 'sell the same song twice' without a cut.
How convenient that the upgrade option becomes available right after the holiday season when so many itunes gift cards were sold....whoops, must have left my tin foil hat on.
-What about TV show and movie purchases? What level of DRM can be expected there (I don't know level of DRM applies now, so feel free to call me a clod who's talking out of an orifice other than stdout ). The verbiage seems to very carefully mention "songs" only, no other iTunes available media.
-What about my current iTunes song library? Will the DRM magically disappear with my next update? Do I need to download my library again, (and thereby lose the totally pointless play count next to my songs? What will I do? That's how I keep score damnit!)
Disclaimer: Electricity is dangerous, and can kill you. I am not an electrician. I am a slashdot poster.
The short answer for going-off grid: Buy lots of solar panels, which don't work as well here in SE Michigan (WTF is with you calling Michigan the "Northeast"?) in the winter time, but may be enough to get you by in conjunction with a good sized battery bank, and be prepared to significantly change the way you use electricity.
As for the short / halfass way most of us deal with generator usage: Backfeeding (which isn't always regarded as the safest / smartest thing to do, since there are always idiots out there that will screw it up)
-Go to your breaker box, shut off the main breaker or breakers (the ones at the top of your box that say "Main".)
Congratulations, your house is now just a giant circuit of wires, not connected to the grid.
-Shutoff any and all non-essential breakers, especially those connected to heavy draws (You're not going to run your electric stove unless you've got a beefy generator). You may just want to kill everything, then try individual breakers on over time.
-Fire up your generator. If your 401k is where mine is now, you may want to do this indoors, in a confined space....If breathing is a priority for you (pussy), do this outside, a reasonable distance from your house.
-Using a heavy gauge extension cord (Not a "move a lamp" cord, think "run a heavy appliance / machine" cord), plug in to a nearby outlet.
Congratulations, you are now "backfeeding" your house off the generator. Instead of coming from the power lines, your electricity is coming in through an outlet. *DO NOT TURN YOUR MAIN BREAKERS ON!!!* One, Your poor generator will now try to power the entire grid, something that no dinky little 2500watt Honda can do and two, you will send power down a line that the poor DTE linesmen will / may assume is dead. Improper backfeeds can kill (and usually do a few times a year).
Now you try and figure out what "side" of your box is being feed (if you have a typical, grey box with switch type fuses in two columns. If you have glass fuses in a quaint old house....call an electrician and move out. Oi). The breakers on the same side as the circuit your generator is plugged in to will now have power. If it's on the same side as your furnace, you can turn the furnace breaker on and, hopefully, the furnace should kick on and begin heating the house. If your furnace is on the other side as your power source, you can move the power line to an outlet that is on the same side, or plug in another extension cord from your generator to an outlet on the same side.
Once power returns to your area simply shut down your generator, unplug your cords, then turn your main breaker back on.
You have to prioritize what's important to you for power. Furnace and sump pump are your musts, and a sump pump can put out a very heavy load for a very short time, causing a brownout. Ditto a Refrigerator. After that, its your call based on what the generator will power. You can try to power your whole house on a 2000 watt generator, and the generator will run. You'll also kill the generator and probably damage your major appliances. Bigger the generator, the more you can power, and the greater the cost. Honda is the Sony of the Generator market. Generally quality stuff, but you'll pay for it.
You'd also do well to investigate your electrical box and spend a day labeling every breaker and determining what you have running on each circuit. (lest you find out that a cheap alarm clock shorted out while you were on vacation, causing a breaker to pop, and that breaker was the same circuit your sump pump is on, which explains why your basement is now a swimming pool.) When I moved it, my box had two labels "Furnace" and "stove", now all 22 circuits are labeled, and I've been putting together a diagram that covers every outlet in the house.
Those are today's top one hundred google searches. As of now, ten of the top forty searches are zune related. Something tells me this is a bit more that "a few people..." I agree that the article is sensationalist, but there's a hearty grain of truth in there.
Slashdot Mirror
What better way to increase the profit margin on your products? Hire, train, and pay staff, pay rent on retail space? Develop a logistics network. Oh, Get into a market where you have no experience. Sounds like a fantastic way to cut costs and overhead.
Ch. 11 offers protection from creditors while you attempt to reorganize, While Ch 7 is outright bankruptcy. Sometimes it works, usually you're just staving off the inevitable. So the correct joke to use here is...
FINISH HIM!
So what if the deployment or management tool is windows only? Big deal. I'm not looking for a total redevelopment of the browser engine to suit the needs of a single operating system. What I do want is an easy way to manage what's already there. But instead development is centering around improving address bar search functions and other spurious "improvements" that are ignoring the elephant in the room?
Look, Firefox does a great job of being a stand alone browser. But in a work environment, trying to manage it sucks across the board. They're not getting their asses kicked in the "integrated search" market, but that's what they keep focusing. Stability and deployment are real problems, but we keep getting low-hanging fruit 'improvements.'
That'd work out ok if Mozilla didn't create a profile folder with the structure of (gibberish).default within the profile location. Then there's also the problem of having more than one user to a machine, multiple (gibberish).default folders for a single user and no good way to tell which of those folders is the 'good' default (which I think has something to do with the upgrade process? I've seen this on machines that have been running for a while. Maybe one profile gets corrupted? Not really sure).
I can script out a way to push a user.js after some regex fidgeting, but again, it goes back to the point of...why? You guys made the browser, how hard is it to make a management tool? I'll take a snap-in, anything. I'm begging you. Give me a way to easily maintain your browser for a decent sized environment. I *WANT* firefox in the enterprise, I just don't want to get hung out to dry trying to support it myself.
Posting a link to a half-dead project run out of somebody's basement (a project that's a glorified clone of one of the dead projects I mentioned in the parent post, no less) proves my point. I want these tools *FROM MOZILLA.* You know, the people that actually developed the browser in the first place? Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell Mozilla as being better than IE when this shit is what passes for enterprise support? No, of course you don't. You know what IE settings I push via group policy? Home Page, ignore proxy for local domain, and proxy of 127.0.0.1. I don't let IE off my local network unless there's a damn good reason. Every user in my shop gets FF, and the IE icons get blown away, and it's been the same policy for four years now. Spyware? Barely heard of it. Firefox is the better browser in every last respect, except one.
This is Mozilla's problem. Not the guys that spend days hacking together fixes to make firefox almost sorta kinda work as good as IE, so long as you don't dink with it too much. If they want market share, why are they concerned with getting me to use their browser on the couple of PC's I use, instead of the hundreds I manage? If they want to be a seen as the better browser, why not step up to the plate and actually fight where it counts? Nope, they're apparently more interested in getting on grandma's PC than they are in getting on the Domain.
You wanna know where my head is? It's in the real world, watching IE get used in business because the guys who are making a better browser are more concerned with revolutionizing the way I use google fucking maps. Here, lemme contribute: F6 maps.google.com. There, I knocked out that whole search problem for ya. I've revolutionized searching. Now how about working on some better profile management tools?
But hey, you go ahead be happy with Awesome bar.
Enough with the super-uber-awesome search crap. Give me an MSI (that I don't have to build myself), give me a way to push settings via group policy, and most of all give me a browser that I can centrally manage even half as easily as I can manage IE. Oh, and lemme just give some space here:
^ That's where you run-off-to-google-up-some-snark-for-my-reply folks can put your links to tools like FirefoxADM that haven't been touched in almost four years, or to frontmotion and their "give us a 150 bucks and we'll roll your MSI for you" service. Take this example; I want to change the homepage on 50 PC's, each with two or three different users. In IE it's a one-line group policy change. Firefox? roll up your sleves, you'll be there a while. Maybe push out a new prefs.js file into each user's profile. Maybe roll up a CCK custom XPI. Or just roll your own MSI and have it re-install the entire damned browser.
Until Chrome, Firefox, and Opera get over circle-jerking themselves about getting IE's sloppy seconds market share, there's not even enough motion to say that there's a even a "browser war" going on. I really hoped that Mozilla would take a decent swing at the enterprise market. Instead they're doing 110mph down the netscape road towards a bloated browser. Meanwhile, Chrome and Opera aren't doing much more than pulling on to the on-ramp of the same road, and touting how you'll go do the same path, only in style!
That would still be more entertaining than.....
This honestly sounds more like terrorism than anything Bill O'Reilly spouts off about.
Think of it this way. Say you want to fund the Mumbai attacks ver. 2.0, but are short on cash. This sounds like a great plan straight from the terrorist handbook. All you need is a few willing or even unknowning smurfs and a decent hacker connection. How do you hide the four million dollars you just stole? Have people you don't know steal another five million on top of it. The FBI won't be inundated with false leads to chase, they'll be loaded with dozens of real suspects to chase down.
The article mentions the cards were cloned then cracked, so a lot of the math can go out the window. I wonder if any of the money was just wire transfered directly to the cards themselves, for later withdrawl or even use a a normal debit card? It doesn't say how much could be taken out at one time, only that there is normally a $500 dollar limit. Though it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the FBI is playing coy with the numbers. They've apparently been sitting on the story for three+ months.
This money will probably find its way back to the hands of the genuinely bad people of the world.
Given the way the game has gone the last five years, you don't need to worry about the score. For that matter, given the rabid hatred that comes out of Columbus, you don't need to check the score either. Just mention that you're a Michigan fan and an OSU football fan will make damn sure you know it, and will remind you of it for weeks to come...
While it's fun to sit back and yell "hur, hur, dumb jocks are ruining mah intarwebs!" it needs to be noted at ESPN's parent company is none other than that friend of the little guy, the copyright crusaders themselves, Disney. They are swinging ABC and ESPN around as their entertainment 'killer apps.' They've used their networks as tools like this before, go.com anyone?
I'd be thrilled if ESPN backed away from the amount of video they're using on their site. Call me crazy but I go to a website for an article I can read in peace, not for 30 seconds of commercials followed by whatever annoying, b-team anchor has gotten stuck doing web highlights. They've developed a handful of interesting and entertaining columnists, what they haven't developed are any decent anchors in the past five years.
Some of Lindros' problems were his own doing. He rose through the junior ranks so quickly that he never developed any on-ice vision. Be it either due to his meteoric rise or a simple lack of skill, he never had a decent sense of what was going on around him. Igor Larionov was generously listed as 5'8" 185 lbs, yet never once took the hits that I saw Lindros take.
And of course, Lindros had a habit of taking the puck up through center ice with his head down. That may have worked back in the OHL when he was 50lbs heavier than everyone and could muscle his way through just about any check, but that same move is just like ringing the dinner bell when you had guys like Scott Stevens patrolling the blue line.
It's not surprising, but it's also a bit of a slight to the way concussions are being handled today. These artciles give the impression that concussions are treated today the same way they were 30 years ago.
Ten years ago was the point where things really started to "click" when it came to concussions. Jim Everett's case in particular. He was an NFL quarterback who spent several years as a veritable punching bag for some god-awful teams, including the St. Louis Rams. Everett had actually taken to keeping his phone number in his wallet, since he frequently got lost on the way home (a 15 minute drive) from the stadium, and couldn't remember his address or phone number. At that point, a lot of NFL teams began taking notice. The tissue samples we're seeing are from guys who, for the most part, played in the 70's and 80's, back when "shut up and play you pussy, you just 'got your bell rung'" was a way of life. Now, concussions are handled with considerably more care. Is it enough? I don't know that anyone is sure yet. But at least they're being treated like the legitimate, serious injury they are.
But what's really waking up pro sports teams? Money. With teams investing over 100 million dollars over ten years in some players, the risk is losing not only what you've invested in development, but what you stand to earn in terms of marketing and merchandise revenues. What do you think a Peyton Manning-level players is worth to his franchise over his career? a quarter of a billion dollars? Half a billion? Do you think it's any different in the NHL? Or EPL?
It's interesting that Chris Nowinski is mentioned in the article. As a former pro-wrestler, hearing him talk about concussions is like hearing about gang violence from someone who lives in Compton. The WWE has an absolutely abysmal record of handling athlete injuries, especially concussions.
So how many of those 2.5 million are scammers and huckesters who are bilking the elderly and inept as we muddle through this insane clusterfuck? This mess is enough to turn the most die hard quasi-socialist into a small government, free market libertarian in the span of about 7 seconds.
Plus, now I've got to deal with four more months of commercials regarding this switch....ON MY CABLE FUCKING TV!!!! yeah, thanks comcast, thank you for reminding me every 29 seconds that the DTV switch is coming.
I need to drink more.
Why bother. I keep up to date images for all my hardware and, at the first whiff of trouble, it's bye bye birdy.
There's just not a huge list of reasons to dick with this stuff any more. Yeah, you might learn the attack vector, then you might be able to manually remove the nasty little bugger that's got you slowed down and patch against future intrusion. Or, you can start from scratch and move on with your life after an hour or so. Besides, if it is hardware, it'll be pretty apparent after you've reloaded (if you can reload at all.)
I no longer care what crapware my users have managed to infest themselves with. Ghost the machine, move on to genuinely interesting problems.
I'm all meme'd out now :-(
And yet you completely missed the "beowulf cluster of fridges" joke. There was also the possibility of "cold grits" modification meme, and an outside shot at a soviet russia joke.
The whole thing is disgusting to me though. We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
Easy enough to prevent. Don't move into a neighborhood with a "neighborhood association." You'd probably do well to check any the laws of any prospective home locations as well. Our township has a few ordinances that a homeowner could run afoul of, but nothing too major.
When we bought our house, I made damn sure there wasn't a neighborhood association to deal with and turned down several prospective houses for that very reason.
I meant commercial in terms of cargo. I neglected to engage brain before operating keyboard...
I've been hearing that the -400's are starting to make their way into the cargo ranks as well now. Kalitta replaced at least one of his recent 747 losses with a 400
No chance. The C-5 Fleet is as old or older than the 747-200's air force one is built around now, same issues too. Plus, ground handling an aircraft of that magnitude at many airports is simply more hassle than it'd be worth. Extra fuel isn't an issue, as Air Force One can and does refuel in flight.
(I've worked as ramp crew, and the largest aircraft I've handled are a C-130 and a DC-6. I also handle a B-17 on a semi regular basis. None of which are in the category of an Airbus or a 747, but are a handful in their own right.)
The A380 doesn't have a chance. There are a limited number of airfields in the world that can support a loaded A380 now, and air force one spends a great deal of its time shuffling the president around the US. There are thousands of fields that regularly have, currently do, or were built with handling a 747 in mind.
The "newness" of the airbus works against it more that anything else. The 747-200's that are still in service are almost exclusively commercial at this point, so it's nice to see that they're thinking of upgrading the fleet. Anyone betting against Boeing is fooling themselves, the new air force one will almost certainly be a 747-8, which will be in service. No sense in re-inventing the wheel.
I believe a "stranglehold" joke was what you were looking for here...
That said, Apple is also now charging if you want to get rid of your DRM
That's been the case since iTunes Plus first started. If any of the tracks you purchases became available in iTunes Plus, you could upgrade for .30 per track.
"The early adopter penalty strikes again" or "Apple gets stuck trying to placate record companies, with whom they've had contracts since the beginning, while moving to what is apparently becoming the standard practice in digital music" Either way, the consumer takes it in the end. Personally, I think every dime of that 30 cent per track is going to straight to the record labels. They wouldn't dare let someone 'sell the same song twice' without a cut.
How convenient that the upgrade option becomes available right after the holiday season when so many itunes gift cards were sold....whoops, must have left my tin foil hat on.
Two semi-glaring points:
-What about TV show and movie purchases? What level of DRM can be expected there (I don't know level of DRM applies now, so feel free to call me a clod who's talking out of an orifice other than stdout ). The verbiage seems to very carefully mention "songs" only, no other iTunes available media.
-What about my current iTunes song library? Will the DRM magically disappear with my next update? Do I need to download my library again, (and thereby lose the totally pointless play count next to my songs? What will I do? That's how I keep score damnit!)
No, apparently slashdot is populated by readers and mods who don't RTFA:
"Tuesday:
Journalspace is no more.
DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable."
My sister got bit by a moose once....
Disclaimer: Electricity is dangerous, and can kill you. I am not an electrician. I am a slashdot poster.
The short answer for going-off grid: Buy lots of solar panels, which don't work as well here in SE Michigan (WTF is with you calling Michigan the "Northeast"?) in the winter time, but may be enough to get you by in conjunction with a good sized battery bank, and be prepared to significantly change the way you use electricity.
As for the short / halfass way most of us deal with generator usage: Backfeeding (which isn't always regarded as the safest / smartest thing to do, since there are always idiots out there that will screw it up)
-Go to your breaker box, shut off the main breaker or breakers (the ones at the top of your box that say "Main".)
Congratulations, your house is now just a giant circuit of wires, not connected to the grid.
-Shutoff any and all non-essential breakers, especially those connected to heavy draws (You're not going to run your electric stove unless you've got a beefy generator). You may just want to kill everything, then try individual breakers on over time.
-Fire up your generator. If your 401k is where mine is now, you may want to do this indoors, in a confined space....If breathing is a priority for you (pussy), do this outside, a reasonable distance from your house.
-Using a heavy gauge extension cord (Not a "move a lamp" cord, think "run a heavy appliance / machine" cord), plug in to a nearby outlet.
Congratulations, you are now "backfeeding" your house off the generator. Instead of coming from the power lines, your electricity is coming in through an outlet. *DO NOT TURN YOUR MAIN BREAKERS ON!!!* One, Your poor generator will now try to power the entire grid, something that no dinky little 2500watt Honda can do and two, you will send power down a line that the poor DTE linesmen will / may assume is dead. Improper backfeeds can kill (and usually do a few times a year).
Now you try and figure out what "side" of your box is being feed (if you have a typical, grey box with switch type fuses in two columns. If you have glass fuses in a quaint old house....call an electrician and move out. Oi). The breakers on the same side as the circuit your generator is plugged in to will now have power. If it's on the same side as your furnace, you can turn the furnace breaker on and, hopefully, the furnace should kick on and begin heating the house. If your furnace is on the other side as your power source, you can move the power line to an outlet that is on the same side, or plug in another extension cord from your generator to an outlet on the same side.
Once power returns to your area simply shut down your generator, unplug your cords, then turn your main breaker back on.
You have to prioritize what's important to you for power. Furnace and sump pump are your musts, and a sump pump can put out a very heavy load for a very short time, causing a brownout. Ditto a Refrigerator. After that, its your call based on what the generator will power. You can try to power your whole house on a 2000 watt generator, and the generator will run. You'll also kill the generator and probably damage your major appliances. Bigger the generator, the more you can power, and the greater the cost. Honda is the Sony of the Generator market. Generally quality stuff, but you'll pay for it.
You'd also do well to investigate your electrical box and spend a day labeling every breaker and determining what you have running on each circuit. (lest you find out that a cheap alarm clock shorted out while you were on vacation, causing a breaker to pop, and that breaker was the same circuit your sump pump is on, which explains why your basement is now a swimming pool.) When I moved it, my box had two labels "Furnace" and "stove", now all 22 circuits are labeled, and I've been putting together a diagram that covers every outlet in the house.
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X
Those are today's top one hundred google searches. As of now, ten of the top forty searches are zune related. Something tells me this is a bit more that "a few people..." I agree that the article is sensationalist, but there's a hearty grain of truth in there.