"because it's the GSA that sets the rates that government agencies use to limit how much their employees can spend for hotel rooms, etc."
FTFY. The GSA rates are done for internal federal government purposes, not for other institutions. Other people use them because they are freely published, updated regularly, and represent a reasonable limit on local expenditures. They are not limits for spending, by the way, but limits for reimbursement. I once had TDY at Kennedy Space Center and rented a convertible. I paid the extra $20/day out of my pocket. I also got a 3 bedroom condo on the beach, but since I was there for a week, the weekly rate was actually less than the daily rate for lodging. Of the $490 allowance, I spent about $375; and I was only reimbursed $375 - you don't get to keep the difference (which is also fair, imho).
Personally, I think everyone who went to the conference should be charged the amount for their stay above the per diem rates. It will probably only come to a couple grand a person, but will be a reasonable deterrent for the rank and file in the future.
Have you every tried getting 1Gbps on a home network? You won't get it. And your typical home network is likely to have a hub, or in the best case a single server for data, which means you're still sharing that 1Gbps (usually closer to 200-300Mb peak without jumbo frames, which most devices are NOT setup to use out of the box) over all of your devices.
I like your "you can always add more cable" comment, too. Do you know how expensive it is to run physical wires to existing buildings? I'll give you the answer - prohibitive, at current subscriber rates, for anything but very high density areas.
There is probably 80% of the physical area of the country where it's cheaper (per Mbps, per subscriber) to connect people to the grid via wireless.
You must live in a city center with good landline coverage. I live in a town that SHOULD have fabulous connectivity. We (the town) were planning on every home having 10Mb lines by the late 90s (Blacksburg's Electronic Village model). The only reliable service I have is Verizon DSL, and the absolute peak speed they can deliver to me is 4.5/768k service. Comcast can theoretically provide 6Mb/1.5 service (at $60/mo), but the last time I used them I was without service for portions of 4-5 days a month (maybe 20-40 hours/mo total).
On the iPad I just bought, I get 6Mb/2.2Mb service in my basement via Verizon LTE. The chances of the LTE getting faster is much better than the chance that they re-string the last mile copper or fiber to my 1960s-1970s neighborhood in the center of town.
It sounds like the FO was napping, woke up and immediately put the plane into a dive based on a snap judgement, and the Captian (who we presume was not flying the plane or manning the controls) recognized the error and corrected.
It sounded like nobody was flying the plan (autopilot presumably), but that the FO, who was napping, was actually on the controls. It sounds more like a problem with pilots sleeping while they should be awake and alert. The article was so light it was impossible to actually tell, through.
If you don't beat your children but instead lie to them so that they are unprepared to properly deal with the realities of life as adults, have you not injured them just as grievously?
iCloud is free...to 5GB. My family pics take up close to 50GB of space. My iTunes library has some odd stuff in it, including indie artists and personal stuff - plus the collected CDs of the mainstream sort. It's about 80-90GB, if you don't include the 100 or so GB of books (okay, so a lot of that is, um, borrowed). The more you upload the more it costs. It's not going to be cheaper than S3, which is pushing $300/yr for my music and pictures. Even for the non-catalog stuff, it's $200+.
Streaming music is fine if you are into your mobile internet provider for $50-80/month for data; not so good if you're on a basic plan. Streaming TV/movies is going to take a huge bite from your wallet if your mobile, and get you a strongly worded letter if you have a standard residential plan with a 250GB/mo cap.
Upload isn't that big a deal, as you theoretically only do it once (though at 768kbps, it takes a while!), but every time you get a new device, you're going to d/l 40+GB of data? It takes a couple of hours to sync my iPhone after a reset, it takes a couple of days to pull down that much data over my internet connection.
If the music plan is $25, how much for the TV and Movie plan of the content I've purchased? When I want to take a movie with me, does that mean sucking 2GB over the internet (again?). Loading up my iPad for a vacation might take a day or two.
You're asking for difficult, expensive processes to be priced lower than easy ones. Big Macs are cheap to produce (even cheaper if you include finely textured beef product!), organic salads are more resource intensive, hence more expensive. As a bonus strike, the salad carries fewer calories. The bus a $1/day for unlimited use will cost more to run on your $10/gal fuel than $1.
Part of what you're paying for is R&D (and IP) on these new goods. The first million out the door have to cover the cost of creating the product, plus carrying costs, plus profit (no profit = no products). After that, it gets cheaper. Still, the difference between an electronic assembly built to an old standard and a piece of wire in a cheap glass enclosure is pretty stark. We could retrofit our houses for more efficient use of the technology and minimize the per-piece cost, but that makes the electronic assembly look cheap.
Usually they're less than the equivalent "wattage rating." Sometimes less than half. I don't bother with wattage any more, and usually check the lumens when compared to the lamp they're replacing.
Yes, color temp is a huge issue, as is CRI. I have seen some LEDs which were indistinguishable from incandescent (and, I was told, very expensive). Different color temps bugs me to no end, which is why I cringe when a CFL dies - they're almost impossible to match.
I get failure rates of anywhere between 10-15% on most packs of CFLs. They're not worth returning (costs more to mail them back / drive to the store than the replacement) so I typically by 1-2 more than I need.If they don't die on the first month or two they do tend to last for 2-3 years in many high-use fixtures.
If everything moves to the cloud, you become dependent on the cloud. How much is managing your iDevice worth? $0/yr? $10/yr? What if you could sync everything through that cloud - all your music, all your shows? Now how much would you pay? $10/month? $20/month? What about backing up all your photos and documents? $30/month? And offering some streaming content? $40/month? $50/month?
If the cloud option is popular enough, we'll see the PC version (and possibly even the Mac version) fall lower and lower on the priority list for bug fixes, upgrades, and UI unification. It may come that buying into an iDevice means a monthly fee to use effectively, just as if you buy a phone. Sure, you can try to cheat the system, but you're going to get a significantly inferior service, or you'll spend so much time just keeping things up to date that you'll find it's not worth it.
I see this as the next revenue stream for Apple.
Personally, I'm limited to a 4Mb DLS line as my fastest (reliable) internet option. Syncing 40-120GB of personal music on each device when it goes toes up (and most have done that at some point; my phone has twice) is going to be a real bear. Movies? TV? You can't store/swap them locally, and the network providers will be salivating over the b/w charges (or business-class fees for those that go over their caps).
Hmmm...that will make things interesting. If you're shelling out cash for that 10' interface, and it's a separate install, it's going to have to compete on a more equal footing with all the other media centers that are available. Will this be the beginning of the end of WMC?
Bribery comes in many forms. If there is a possible buyer for the property which will fill a shortfall gap in funding (even if it's only a years worth) and they can avoid a tax increase, that's basically a re-election guarantee for all the people screaming their taxes are too high.
Last year, our board of supervisors voted to approve bonds to build two schools and renovate a third, even though it meant an unpopular increase of 12c in the real estate tax rate. Why? Well, it was going to be $25M+ to fix a school who's gym collapsed, and it would still be about 100-200 students undersized when they finished. The school was on the schedule to be replaced in ~10 years, so they decided to commit $55M for a new school. Thing is, a high school on the other end of town had been waiting for a new high school for almost 10 years, along with a middle school renovation ($70M total). There was only budget for about $50-60M in debt service without a tax increase. The school community that didn't have their school collapse vowed to block replacing the school unless they got theirs too.
Well, com this spring, the board of supervisors capped the tax rate increase at 12c before the budget process started. Guess what - Virginia's portion of education expenses is probably going down by $5M to our county this year. Oops. Now their talking about closing 2 elementary schools and laying off a bunch of teachers and charging kids for every sport they participate in.
This board would sell their mother if they could avoid a tax increase. The biggest opponents are (1) the guy in the district that just got a new Elem school and new HS (a 600 student school for a 275 student body, with no real growth potential) and (2) the two women in the district that aren't going to get her HS renovated. If someone promised to give them money for a prime site, I'm betting they'd kick the kids out faster than you can say "but it's not a bribe."
I have Verizon DSL, and if there's a cap, I haven't found it yet. I only have a 4M/768k ADSL, but based on my router data, I've been doing anywhere from 300 to 800 GB per month for the last year.
Virginia Tech found a domestic murder case in a dorm five years ago, police came, followed standard procedure. Four hours later 30 more students and the assailant were dead after a horrific shooting spree on the opposite side of campus. Nothing like it had ever happened before on any US campus, and probably had never happened anywhere in the US in historical memory. Two of the victims parents sued the school for not notifying the student body earlier to warn them that the domestic violence case they had contained earlier that morning would erupt into the worst school shooting in US history, and won.
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
It's made to provide feedback to the user. I turn it off the moment I power it on for the first time. I kind of wish my SLR was quieter (or silent) to be honest.
So you've got a bunch of space shuttle guys from Johnson Space Center, which does pretty much zero climate science, asking the administrator to censor the group at Goddard Space Flight Center, which is co-located with NOAA and is the center for earth sensing and earth science about an earth-science related topic? Really?
And yes, I happen to be a former NASA/Goddard principal engineer with a whole wall of mission paraphernalia on my office wall. So, hey, JSC can suck it.
Yeah, Georgia is not going to be happy when they lose their entire country domain space to General Electric. GE has a market cap of something like 10X Georgia's GDP, so I assume it would be a slam dunk that the TLD be turned over to the rightful owner.
Even unvaccinated for whooping cough, your kid is far more likely to land in the ER for a case of pneumonia stemming from the flu. Yes, you don't want to take stupid chances, but let's keep some perspective on the scale of this."
Don't vaccinate anybody for 50 years, then get back to me and let me know how that's working for you.
If I'm going to have my kids near your kids, you damned well better have them vaccinated. If you're willing to keep them out of public, vaccinated events and areas (stadia, soccer leagues, public schools, the private school _I_ go to, public parks, my private club, etc.), then have at it.
Just as I don't want you to come into work with the flu, or shake my hand if you've got an open wound on your palm, please don't force your kids to infect the rest of the world with your 19th century diseases.
Did you know that after 50 years, we were almost rid of Polio? The International Rotary Foundation, and now with the help and massive warchest of the Bill Gates Foundation (to the historical combines tune of something like a Billion dollars) is trying to get rid of the last pockets of Polio on this planet. All it takes is one small village, mostly isolated from everyone, to keep this stuff around - destroying lives and families.
Please excuse me if I take this opportunity to say a hearty "FUCK YOU, GET YOUR GOD DAMNED KIDS VACCINATED" and quit perpetuating these diseases. This doesn't come from the government, it's from your next door neighbor, a parent who cares about his kids. Trust me.
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"because it's the GSA that sets the rates that government agencies use to limit how much their employees can spend for hotel rooms, etc."
FTFY. The GSA rates are done for internal federal government purposes, not for other institutions. Other people use them because they are freely published, updated regularly, and represent a reasonable limit on local expenditures. They are not limits for spending, by the way, but limits for reimbursement. I once had TDY at Kennedy Space Center and rented a convertible. I paid the extra $20/day out of my pocket. I also got a 3 bedroom condo on the beach, but since I was there for a week, the weekly rate was actually less than the daily rate for lodging. Of the $490 allowance, I spent about $375; and I was only reimbursed $375 - you don't get to keep the difference (which is also fair, imho).
Personally, I think everyone who went to the conference should be charged the amount for their stay above the per diem rates. It will probably only come to a couple grand a person, but will be a reasonable deterrent for the rank and file in the future.
Have you every tried getting 1Gbps on a home network? You won't get it. And your typical home network is likely to have a hub, or in the best case a single server for data, which means you're still sharing that 1Gbps (usually closer to 200-300Mb peak without jumbo frames, which most devices are NOT setup to use out of the box) over all of your devices.
I like your "you can always add more cable" comment, too. Do you know how expensive it is to run physical wires to existing buildings? I'll give you the answer - prohibitive, at current subscriber rates, for anything but very high density areas.
There is probably 80% of the physical area of the country where it's cheaper (per Mbps, per subscriber) to connect people to the grid via wireless.
You must live in a city center with good landline coverage. I live in a town that SHOULD have fabulous connectivity. We (the town) were planning on every home having 10Mb lines by the late 90s (Blacksburg's Electronic Village model). The only reliable service I have is Verizon DSL, and the absolute peak speed they can deliver to me is 4.5/768k service. Comcast can theoretically provide 6Mb/1.5 service (at $60/mo), but the last time I used them I was without service for portions of 4-5 days a month (maybe 20-40 hours/mo total).
On the iPad I just bought, I get 6Mb/2.2Mb service in my basement via Verizon LTE. The chances of the LTE getting faster is much better than the chance that they re-string the last mile copper or fiber to my 1960s-1970s neighborhood in the center of town.
It sounds like the FO was napping, woke up and immediately put the plane into a dive based on a snap judgement, and the Captian (who we presume was not flying the plane or manning the controls) recognized the error and corrected.
It sounded like nobody was flying the plan (autopilot presumably), but that the FO, who was napping, was actually on the controls. It sounds more like a problem with pilots sleeping while they should be awake and alert. The article was so light it was impossible to actually tell, through.
My preference has always been to convert the region into a continuous sheet of radioactive glass. I think "New Iowa" would be a nice name.
Without religion, there are no religious fundamentalist extremists.
If you don't beat your children but instead lie to them so that they are unprepared to properly deal with the realities of life as adults, have you not injured them just as grievously?
iCloud is free...to 5GB. My family pics take up close to 50GB of space. My iTunes library has some odd stuff in it, including indie artists and personal stuff - plus the collected CDs of the mainstream sort. It's about 80-90GB, if you don't include the 100 or so GB of books (okay, so a lot of that is, um, borrowed). The more you upload the more it costs. It's not going to be cheaper than S3, which is pushing $300/yr for my music and pictures. Even for the non-catalog stuff, it's $200+.
Streaming music is fine if you are into your mobile internet provider for $50-80/month for data; not so good if you're on a basic plan. Streaming TV/movies is going to take a huge bite from your wallet if your mobile, and get you a strongly worded letter if you have a standard residential plan with a 250GB/mo cap.
Upload isn't that big a deal, as you theoretically only do it once (though at 768kbps, it takes a while!), but every time you get a new device, you're going to d/l 40+GB of data? It takes a couple of hours to sync my iPhone after a reset, it takes a couple of days to pull down that much data over my internet connection.
If the music plan is $25, how much for the TV and Movie plan of the content I've purchased? When I want to take a movie with me, does that mean sucking 2GB over the internet (again?). Loading up my iPad for a vacation might take a day or two.
You're asking for difficult, expensive processes to be priced lower than easy ones. Big Macs are cheap to produce (even cheaper if you include finely textured beef product!), organic salads are more resource intensive, hence more expensive. As a bonus strike, the salad carries fewer calories. The bus a $1/day for unlimited use will cost more to run on your $10/gal fuel than $1.
Part of what you're paying for is R&D (and IP) on these new goods. The first million out the door have to cover the cost of creating the product, plus carrying costs, plus profit (no profit = no products). After that, it gets cheaper. Still, the difference between an electronic assembly built to an old standard and a piece of wire in a cheap glass enclosure is pretty stark. We could retrofit our houses for more efficient use of the technology and minimize the per-piece cost, but that makes the electronic assembly look cheap.
Usually they're less than the equivalent "wattage rating." Sometimes less than half. I don't bother with wattage any more, and usually check the lumens when compared to the lamp they're replacing.
Yes, color temp is a huge issue, as is CRI. I have seen some LEDs which were indistinguishable from incandescent (and, I was told, very expensive). Different color temps bugs me to no end, which is why I cringe when a CFL dies - they're almost impossible to match.
They're made by the same people who wire Christmas Tree lights.
I get failure rates of anywhere between 10-15% on most packs of CFLs. They're not worth returning (costs more to mail them back / drive to the store than the replacement) so I typically by 1-2 more than I need.If they don't die on the first month or two they do tend to last for 2-3 years in many high-use fixtures.
If everything moves to the cloud, you become dependent on the cloud. How much is managing your iDevice worth? $0/yr? $10/yr? What if you could sync everything through that cloud - all your music, all your shows? Now how much would you pay? $10/month? $20/month? What about backing up all your photos and documents? $30/month? And offering some streaming content? $40/month? $50/month?
If the cloud option is popular enough, we'll see the PC version (and possibly even the Mac version) fall lower and lower on the priority list for bug fixes, upgrades, and UI unification. It may come that buying into an iDevice means a monthly fee to use effectively, just as if you buy a phone. Sure, you can try to cheat the system, but you're going to get a significantly inferior service, or you'll spend so much time just keeping things up to date that you'll find it's not worth it.
I see this as the next revenue stream for Apple.
Personally, I'm limited to a 4Mb DLS line as my fastest (reliable) internet option. Syncing 40-120GB of personal music on each device when it goes toes up (and most have done that at some point; my phone has twice) is going to be a real bear. Movies? TV? You can't store/swap them locally, and the network providers will be salivating over the b/w charges (or business-class fees for those that go over their caps).
Hmmm...that will make things interesting. If you're shelling out cash for that 10' interface, and it's a separate install, it's going to have to compete on a more equal footing with all the other media centers that are available. Will this be the beginning of the end of WMC?
Why would you have to type in c code? I would expect machine code, like they had in the old Byte(?) magazine.
You clearly have never seen the show Survivor. Elected bodies are some of the most catty, petty, and vindictive groups of people on this earth.
Bribery comes in many forms. If there is a possible buyer for the property which will fill a shortfall gap in funding (even if it's only a years worth) and they can avoid a tax increase, that's basically a re-election guarantee for all the people screaming their taxes are too high.
Last year, our board of supervisors voted to approve bonds to build two schools and renovate a third, even though it meant an unpopular increase of 12c in the real estate tax rate. Why? Well, it was going to be $25M+ to fix a school who's gym collapsed, and it would still be about 100-200 students undersized when they finished. The school was on the schedule to be replaced in ~10 years, so they decided to commit $55M for a new school. Thing is, a high school on the other end of town had been waiting for a new high school for almost 10 years, along with a middle school renovation ($70M total). There was only budget for about $50-60M in debt service without a tax increase. The school community that didn't have their school collapse vowed to block replacing the school unless they got theirs too.
Well, com this spring, the board of supervisors capped the tax rate increase at 12c before the budget process started. Guess what - Virginia's portion of education expenses is probably going down by $5M to our county this year. Oops. Now their talking about closing 2 elementary schools and laying off a bunch of teachers and charging kids for every sport they participate in.
This board would sell their mother if they could avoid a tax increase. The biggest opponents are (1) the guy in the district that just got a new Elem school and new HS (a 600 student school for a 275 student body, with no real growth potential) and (2) the two women in the district that aren't going to get her HS renovated. If someone promised to give them money for a prime site, I'm betting they'd kick the kids out faster than you can say "but it's not a bribe."
I have Verizon DSL, and if there's a cap, I haven't found it yet. I only have a 4M/768k ADSL, but based on my router data, I've been doing anywhere from 300 to 800 GB per month for the last year.
Yeah, I originally had a tag line ...or kill all the lawyers. I may as well ask for a pony and free beer if I go that far, though.
Virginia Tech found a domestic murder case in a dorm five years ago, police came, followed standard procedure. Four hours later 30 more students and the assailant were dead after a horrific shooting spree on the opposite side of campus. Nothing like it had ever happened before on any US campus, and probably had never happened anywhere in the US in historical memory. Two of the victims parents sued the school for not notifying the student body earlier to warn them that the domestic violence case they had contained earlier that morning would erupt into the worst school shooting in US history, and won.
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
It's made to provide feedback to the user. I turn it off the moment I power it on for the first time. I kind of wish my SLR was quieter (or silent) to be honest.
So you've got a bunch of space shuttle guys from Johnson Space Center, which does pretty much zero climate science, asking the administrator to censor the group at Goddard Space Flight Center, which is co-located with NOAA and is the center for earth sensing and earth science about an earth-science related topic? Really?
And yes, I happen to be a former NASA/Goddard principal engineer with a whole wall of mission paraphernalia on my office wall. So, hey, JSC can suck it.
Yeah, Georgia is not going to be happy when they lose their entire country domain space to General Electric. GE has a market cap of something like 10X Georgia's GDP, so I assume it would be a slam dunk that the TLD be turned over to the rightful owner.
Even unvaccinated for whooping cough, your kid is far more likely to land in the ER for a case of pneumonia stemming from the flu. Yes, you don't want to take stupid chances, but let's keep some perspective on the scale of this."
Don't vaccinate anybody for 50 years, then get back to me and let me know how that's working for you.
If I'm going to have my kids near your kids, you damned well better have them vaccinated. If you're willing to keep them out of public, vaccinated events and areas (stadia, soccer leagues, public schools, the private school _I_ go to, public parks, my private club, etc.), then have at it.
Just as I don't want you to come into work with the flu, or shake my hand if you've got an open wound on your palm, please don't force your kids to infect the rest of the world with your 19th century diseases.
Did you know that after 50 years, we were almost rid of Polio? The International Rotary Foundation, and now with the help and massive warchest of the Bill Gates Foundation (to the historical combines tune of something like a Billion dollars) is trying to get rid of the last pockets of Polio on this planet. All it takes is one small village, mostly isolated from everyone, to keep this stuff around - destroying lives and families.
Please excuse me if I take this opportunity to say a hearty "FUCK YOU, GET YOUR GOD DAMNED KIDS VACCINATED" and quit perpetuating these diseases. This doesn't come from the government, it's from your next door neighbor, a parent who cares about his kids. Trust me.