A product can never cost less than the cost of the embodied energy in it - it can be seen as a lower bound on the price. (It can, but only if somebody is planning on going out of business)
Anyway, much of the cost of products comes from the embodied energy - materials are free, for the most part, but cost a great deal of energy to extract, refine, and produce. Human costs also factor in, but since most humans spend a great percentage of their money on energy (gas, food[energy to harvest and ship], stuff[energy to manufacture]), it's in there, too. To the cost of a product can be reasonably estimated to be 90%+ embodied energy at some point in the chain.
If the payback period is high (or negative after maintenance), then it's not a good ecological choice. Sure there's better energy sources, but by and large the energy used is non-renewable right now. In fact, most people would be hard pressed to document more than about 25% renewable energy in any product that sits on a mass market store shelf.
Not at all, as long as I don't have to look at it. These systems, imho, are trying to capitalize on the "green" craze and with a 20 year payback (probably without TVM or maintenance figured in) just don't pass muster. I'm with you on the the fun, cheap stuff. Reusing old parts is excellent (remember - reduce, reuse, recycle...in that order), and likely far greener than new turbines even if less efficient.
Then again, maybe I'm just jealous because my house sits on the leeward side of a ridge, so I get very little wind. Of course, in a 40 year old house, being out of the wind in the winter is definitely a _good_ thing for reducing my overall energy consumption!
That's the great thing about the cost - it's already rolled into the price (the energy costs). Power from a major generation facility also factors in the capital costs of the plant (embodied energy) and the cost of fuel, plus the cost of maintenance and upgrades. The summary indicates a 20 year payback. That's usually done without the time value of money factored in, and without maintenance costs. Once you get beyond 7-10 years, it's generally not economical from a business point of view. Also, with a 20 year payback, it means that the energy embodied in the unit is nearly as high as the total lifetime output of the unit. Solar cells (photovoltaics) are the same way, though there's always a new technology right around the corner that plans to change that, but it never seems to be commercially viable.
Personally, I'm a practical green. I'm even willing to pay a small premium for green, provided it's equivalent to the non-green alternative. Being in the building industry, where we get greenwashing all over the place, so I tend to be skeptical. The old marketing slogan, "reduce, reuse, recycle" should have has a tag line, "in that order." I can't say I'm living it completely, but where it's practical I'm in. Wind turbines can be a positive source of energy, but they can also be an eyesore. They are also one step removed from the primary source of power - solar. Once we figure out how to efficiently capture and store even a small fraction of the 1200W/m^2 that hits the earth, we'll go a long way to solving our energy problems. It's as close to an ideal solution as can be had, though it's not without pitfalls. Still, I look forward to 40% efficient solar panels with lifetimes measured in at least years, if not decades, which can be bought for less than a penny per kilowatt hour. I'll use them to power my flying car;-)
This isn't about people putting turbines in to lower their electric bills as much as it is about people voting with their dollars to help the environment in some small way Because the energy embodied in all those manufactured items is less than the equivalent high-efficiency central generation plant, or because you get the one-up the Joneses in their Prius? Never trust the words of someone who is looking to sell you something.
Every bit is sacred? Is that how robots do it, a whole bunch of 1's headed in a race to get to the 0 first? The two bits become a nibble, nibbles become bytes, bytes become words, and pretty soon you've got the start of a new robot?
(All you old timers...how long since you've heard of four bits as a nibble? Wasn't that the name of an Apple magazine?)
...when all their familiar applications, which they have learned through osmosis over the past decade, are either preinstalled or can be installed by inserting the CD or clicking the file named "setup" with the friendly setup icon. For those not familiar with such programs, I suggest you ponder the common list:
Microsoft Office Microsoft Outlook [Express] AOL (whatever it is they send out these days) The Print Shop (with a billion clip arts included!) iTunes Epson/HP/Brother print drivers and their utilities Photoshop [Elements] All that shit that comes with Kodak cameras
Yes, yes, yes...of course there are Linux flavored alternatives that are just as good (and better!), but that's not the point. The point is that most people can't figure out how to use a program from a howto, and they've spend years and years learning what each icon does. They have scads of old files which are in the proprietary formats of the above mentioned programs. The Christmas missive merge file somebody helped them set up 7 years ago probably won't work in the F/OSS package and there will be hell to pay when it's December 23rd and the envelopes won't print. That list isn't exhaustive, either...I just can't remember all the stuff on my parent's computer desk at the moment.
For the record, I like Ubuntu. Granted, it was easier to buy a new wireless card for my 4 year old laptop than figure out how to get the drivers for the one I had, but it was still cheaper than a copy of Vista Basic OEM. Of course, I'm not running it anymore. Why? The game I bought for my 5 year old is windows only, and there is no Linux equivalent (or at least none that I've found). What's that? Wine? See the requirements above: Put in disc, play software. No, that doesn't always work in Windows either, but it never works in Linux. Yet.
I thought out-gassing was what happened in a vacuum, and off-gassing is what occurred within an atmosphere.
FWIW, Sharpie marks don't out-gas once dry (an odd bit of trivia you may need when deciding what to use if you every want to tag anything on the space shuttle)
It sounds a lot like a 1:1000 chance (or greater) of increasing the earth-impact probability from 1:45000 to a maximum of 1:450. I can live with those odds. I also agree that we probably don't know the ephemeris to great enough accuracy, no can we simulate the n-body problem to sufficient accuracy, to determine the effect of a delta-v on the order of hundreds of nm/s. I'm sure the project is a nice bit of work, especially for a 13 year old. I can't imagine doing orbital mechanics in 8th or 9th grade. It was fun when I did it in college, but there are some mathematical concepts in it which I didn't fully grasp back in middle school.
Not quite. As I understand it, you cannot use a patented technology for commercial use. Personal use is still free and clear - you just can't sell it or use it in commerce. In this case, the unwitting farmer who replants seeds which are contaminated* by GM IP is using them in commerce as he intends to sell the end product. The problem is that he can't _not_ use them, as he has no control over the pollination process.
*I use this in the technical sense, not claiming GM to be good or bad. We've been hybridizing for centuries. IMO the jury is out on GM.
...and even I think this is a BAD idea. You want to mess with your own PC, okay - there's some merit there for some people. Mess with the network - hell no. There are too many things that need to get done, and the ability for one person - even an otherwise knowledgeable person - outside of IT to screw things up is just too much of an unknown.
I'm not usually one to chime in on the side of IT, as they often throw out the baby with the bath water, but letting people who's primary function is something other than keeping the network up mess with the network is just a massively bad idea. Screw up a workstation and one guy is dead for a day. Screw up the network and the whole company can go toes up.
They will only sue if you collect the seed and replant it. I don't think that's too unreasonable. Let's face it: most of these hick farmers should know it wasn't their ingenuity that led to them having these superior crops, and know exactly what they're doing by replanting. That would be fine if seeds came from the seed fairy. But they don't. Seed come from plants, and farmers have been harvesting seeds for replanting for millenia. Now if you happen to farm next to a field that has Monsanto(r) plants, you can't use the same technique used for 1000s of years, simply because the bees next door didn't absee the "no cross pollination" sign.
I'm sorry you missed the implied humor. Then again, we're not talking about people who blog "on the side," but rather about people who blog 18-20 hours a day as their JOB. Of course there are bloggers who are PhDs, but I would still say that you would find their numbers, as a percentage of the professional bloggers for whom blogging is their _only_ profession and at which they spend more than 18 hours a day trying to keep up with the news stories a diminishingly small fraction.
Or, did you perhaps not read the f'n article before posting?
You could, but then grandma would go to a website and download the "free virus check" for her linux box, and it would get infected. Since she needs to run the check (the popup in Firefox told her so), she'd just sudo and install it, per the included directions. You see, it's not the OS, it's the users. Sure, windows is an easy target, but its an easy target because there are so many users who don't know better. You can infect any machine that has internet access and a local accomplice with administrative rights. Since a single user system - i.e. just about any home system - has someone with the ability to elevate to administrative privileges sitting in front of the keyboard ready to install the virus^Wnew solitaire game, there is no real barrier.
Instead you should ban the internet. It will be much more effective in stopping bots, though it may reduce other desirable characteristics of modern computing.
I don't mean that in a negative way - there's nothing wrong with a small penis. But you seem very concerned about finding a woman who will have you, and you seem to feel that cash is the only way to "score" a good woman.
And you don't need to move to Bumfuck, Idaho. Find a city with 50k-200k people and you'll have a pretty good selection, but still be where you can afford to live on a 5 figure salary. The outskirts of Charlotte or Greensboro, NC come to mind, or even larger like some of the 'burbs around Raleigh. Even better, and closer to my 50-200k number, find a town with a major college. Blacksburg and Charlottesville, VA, or Amhearst, MA, or Ithaca, NY. All small towns with great primary and secondary schools, affordable housing, and lots of hot chicks.
(1) $25k isn't exactly punitive to Google - it probably wouldn't even cover litigation costs if this went to court. Eric Schmidt probably loses that much change in his sofa each year.
(2) Others have posted that there are no signs visible indicating that this named road is private, or that trespassing is prohibited. It is entirely likely (though I don't know for certain) that there is, in fact, a public right of way centered on the road. That is often the case in Virginia even when the road is listed as private.
(3) They must be going fucking bonkers over their county's GIS website, which lists data on the property and sales price information.
I'm more libertarian than the average Joe, but I have a very hard time getting worked up over this. Get back to me if they start tracking people movements without consent...I'll back you up at that point.
Doctors, Lawyers, CEO's and other professions make over $100k Congratulations, we've finally identified that professions with high barriers to entry (intelligence, schooling, well placed parents, etc.) make higher salaries. Blogging requires, um, a keyboard and an ability to type. Oh, sure, there are probably PhDs out there blogging. Okay, okay, I'm kidding - I sincerely doubt it - unless they were useless in their fields to begin with.
I'll agree with you that they should all strive to make six figures, but the reality is that the supply far exceeds the demand, and the talent pool is relatively shallow on average. I know people working just as hard, for just as many hours, usually at multiple jobs, to barely make ends meet. They do it because they don't have the training or ability to perform work that has a higher value in society. Heck, I could make more as a doctor or a lawyer, but I really like being an engineer and I spent my college money to become one.
As for finding a mate, they one's who are primarily interested in the size of your wallet are much more likely to leave you if that wallet ever deflates. I recommend finding one who would marry you if you lost every penny you had in the world. You'll be a lot happier than if you make $100k and had someone who constantly griped about not having enough money to live the way he or she likes.
If you are a blogger, set your hours. Sure, you'll violate them once in a while (I'm posting from work on a Sunday...I'm in a crunch time in my business - it happens). But seriously, if you don't post for 14 hours a day, the world will not stop. Provided that you have people to do the shifts to keep the information flowing, people will not abandon the blog forever. Taco doesn't spend 20 hours a day posting dupes - he's hired people to do that.
This isn't really about blogging, it's about small business. Small, one man shops really are a drain on your life. You fear that if you close too early or open too late you'll miss that one big customer. Until you get big enough to spread the load, that will be the case.
A note for bloggers - you might want to move. There were two in that story - one in SF, one (I believe) in NY. Note: you're bloggers, nobody cares where you live and you can source from anywhere in the (US/NA/World). Based on the "all day and night at the keyboard" comments, these folks aren't getting their inside scoops from wandering the streets of the big technology cities. Might I suggest somewhere inexpensive, somewhere relaxing from which to blog. Make it within 100 miles of an airline hub if you do a lot of conferences. Office space in small towns is often $8/SF (per year) or less, and really good housing is actually affordable on 40k-50k/yr.
For that kind of money, he can rent an office, hire a staff (sounds like he has one), and be a real small business owner. Heck, most small companies (i.e. 5 employees) would kill to have a seven figure annual budget, and without physical inventory to turn, no less! Even more, blogging can be run from an $8/SF office space in a small town. Sure, there's lot of time and stress involved - welcome to the world of small businesses. You're growing or you're dying.
I'd like to feel bad for him, but - as a small business owner with 5 employees and noticeably less than a million dollars in annual revenue - I just can't seem to get the tears going while I browse the 'net at lunch from my office.
I'm sure part of it is to determine what is passing through the network and how to reduce the overall traffic flow - which would reduce the amount of physical plant needed. It's not all sunshine and light - they make money any way they can, and if snooping does it for them, they'll do it until it is illegal. I'm just pointing out that ignoring all traffic and building out physical plant isn't necessarily in the financial interest of the ISPs. Using what they have in the most "efficient" way is. Their efficiency may not be in line with your bandwidth usage expectations, of course.
I know this is a bit late, but thank you for your response. It was possibly one of the best analogies I've seen (and it didn't even involve a car!). I can make the common user's head spin in the windows CLI (being an old DOS man, myself), and I can _navigate_ through the linux file system, but trying to _do_ anything is dicey at best. It has, to some extent, been made "worst" by windows - everything has an installer these days, so you double click the pre-packaged executable and it installs the program. I chafe a bit at it, as I often don't want all the install options, but in windows I can track down the offending parts and kill them. I know where programs are installed, and usually where the installation files end up. It's not as easy as it once was, with an.ini file in the program directory which controlled the SW. I once thought the registry was a good idea, now it's just a place to hide and obfuscate settings from the user.
And, if you will let me vent momentarily, man is about as useful as the windows help files. They give you syntax as long as you already know what commands are necessary to perform a task. Neither can help you find out what you need to do to accomplish a task.
IANAPL, but my understanding is that producers of a product are liable. Neither end users nor aggregators (sure it's the wrong word in IP speak) are liable. In other words, if you buy something and use it, and the company who sold it to you violated a patent, you are not liable. Also, if you buy an "infringing" widget from a company and include it in your super-widget, the original company is liable, but you are not. You didn't produce the infringing widget so, again, you are not liable.
What keeps big corporations from playing the Hollywood "never a profit" game with shadow/shell companies is that if the shell corp is found to be infringing, the main corp can no longer use the product (as it cannot be produced). Also, with little funding, the shell corp will be unable to significantly defend itself against a serious IP lawsuit.
Yes, they bid the spectrum up to the threshold, but it went far beyond that. Further, they stood to have to make good on their bids. And, of course, they were not the owner of the airwaves, so the bidding can only be though of as foolishness. One should wonder more why the government "allowed" such self-raising bids in their auction - it's never done in a traditional auction format.
As for yuour concern, it's true that the winners will need to charge more to make back the money, but in reality it's a small fraction of their operating costs. I suspect they pay out a higher percentage to their retailers (who do excactly nothing for that money after the customer walks out the door) than they do for this spectrum.
This isn't magic - we just had a census 7 years ago, and it was all entered into a database. It seems that the baseline system was already specified. You've got a paper and pencil interface - the existing forms - which need to be filled out electronically. You have an existing database which needs to be populated for this go round, so you have your back end interface target.
By my count, that leaves the GUI to be written, the local (temporary) database, and the interface to the main system to write. Ideally, there should be an extensibility to add fields and space in the gui to accommodate those additional fields.
Clearly there is a lot of work between the existing conditions and final product, but often the most difficult part is defining such points. One would hope that there isn't some contractor modifying the main database for 2010, making for a moving target (that's the owners fault, of course).
Is letting users manage their own PCs an IT time-saver or time bomb waiting to happen? It is both. I'm not sure about the new kids coming out of school, but us old-school computer guys are just as literate as most of the IT folks. The problem is that when we screw something up, it's screwed up pretty badly. I would venture to say that 95% of those who want to manage their computers can do so far more efficiently than the corporate IT staff. The other 5% will likely cause major grief.
For those in IT who think this is not the case, consider your power users. Many really can function - even if not to corporate standards of security or conformity - with very little help. They probably will spend an extra $200-$400 per machine for stuff that has marginal use, but they'll feel better about it and be productive. The problem is that there's that one guy - and everyone in IT know who he is - that is way out of his depth and just doesn't know it. You spend a lot of time praying he doesn't screw up more than his own workstation. The good thing is that considerably more than half of modern staffs will likely just want you to set it all up and keep it running.
In the case for users managing their own PCs, NASA used to be this way where I worked in the 90s. We ordered our own PCs, set them up, installed all software. The IT staff would help get us on the network and keep the network running. There were exceptionally few problems. This was, however, before most people had access to the internet, and predominantly before the web existed.
Slashdot Mirror
A product can never cost less than the cost of the embodied energy in it - it can be seen as a lower bound on the price. (It can, but only if somebody is planning on going out of business)
Anyway, much of the cost of products comes from the embodied energy - materials are free, for the most part, but cost a great deal of energy to extract, refine, and produce. Human costs also factor in, but since most humans spend a great percentage of their money on energy (gas, food[energy to harvest and ship], stuff[energy to manufacture]), it's in there, too. To the cost of a product can be reasonably estimated to be 90%+ embodied energy at some point in the chain.
If the payback period is high (or negative after maintenance), then it's not a good ecological choice. Sure there's better energy sources, but by and large the energy used is non-renewable right now. In fact, most people would be hard pressed to document more than about 25% renewable energy in any product that sits on a mass market store shelf.
Not at all, as long as I don't have to look at it. These systems, imho, are trying to capitalize on the "green" craze and with a 20 year payback (probably without TVM or maintenance figured in) just don't pass muster. I'm with you on the the fun, cheap stuff. Reusing old parts is excellent (remember - reduce, reuse, recycle...in that order), and likely far greener than new turbines even if less efficient.
Then again, maybe I'm just jealous because my house sits on the leeward side of a ridge, so I get very little wind. Of course, in a 40 year old house, being out of the wind in the winter is definitely a _good_ thing for reducing my overall energy consumption!
That's the great thing about the cost - it's already rolled into the price (the energy costs). Power from a major generation facility also factors in the capital costs of the plant (embodied energy) and the cost of fuel, plus the cost of maintenance and upgrades. The summary indicates a 20 year payback. That's usually done without the time value of money factored in, and without maintenance costs. Once you get beyond 7-10 years, it's generally not economical from a business point of view. Also, with a 20 year payback, it means that the energy embodied in the unit is nearly as high as the total lifetime output of the unit. Solar cells (photovoltaics) are the same way, though there's always a new technology right around the corner that plans to change that, but it never seems to be commercially viable.
;-)
Personally, I'm a practical green. I'm even willing to pay a small premium for green, provided it's equivalent to the non-green alternative. Being in the building industry, where we get greenwashing all over the place, so I tend to be skeptical. The old marketing slogan, "reduce, reuse, recycle" should have has a tag line, "in that order." I can't say I'm living it completely, but where it's practical I'm in. Wind turbines can be a positive source of energy, but they can also be an eyesore. They are also one step removed from the primary source of power - solar. Once we figure out how to efficiently capture and store even a small fraction of the 1200W/m^2 that hits the earth, we'll go a long way to solving our energy problems. It's as close to an ideal solution as can be had, though it's not without pitfalls. Still, I look forward to 40% efficient solar panels with lifetimes measured in at least years, if not decades, which can be bought for less than a penny per kilowatt hour. I'll use them to power my flying car
Every bit is sacred? Is that how robots do it, a whole bunch of 1's headed in a race to get to the 0 first? The two bits become a nibble, nibbles become bytes, bytes become words, and pretty soon you've got the start of a new robot?
(All you old timers...how long since you've heard of four bits as a nibble? Wasn't that the name of an Apple magazine?)
...when all their familiar applications, which they have learned through osmosis over the past decade, are either preinstalled or can be installed by inserting the CD or clicking the file named "setup" with the friendly setup icon. For those not familiar with such programs, I suggest you ponder the common list:
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Outlook [Express]
AOL (whatever it is they send out these days)
The Print Shop (with a billion clip arts included!)
iTunes
Epson/HP/Brother print drivers and their utilities
Photoshop [Elements]
All that shit that comes with Kodak cameras
Yes, yes, yes...of course there are Linux flavored alternatives that are just as good (and better!), but that's not the point. The point is that most people can't figure out how to use a program from a howto, and they've spend years and years learning what each icon does. They have scads of old files which are in the proprietary formats of the above mentioned programs. The Christmas missive merge file somebody helped them set up 7 years ago probably won't work in the F/OSS package and there will be hell to pay when it's December 23rd and the envelopes won't print. That list isn't exhaustive, either...I just can't remember all the stuff on my parent's computer desk at the moment.
For the record, I like Ubuntu. Granted, it was easier to buy a new wireless card for my 4 year old laptop than figure out how to get the drivers for the one I had, but it was still cheaper than a copy of Vista Basic OEM. Of course, I'm not running it anymore. Why? The game I bought for my 5 year old is windows only, and there is no Linux equivalent (or at least none that I've found). What's that? Wine? See the requirements above: Put in disc, play software. No, that doesn't always work in Windows either, but it never works in Linux. Yet.
I thought out-gassing was what happened in a vacuum, and off-gassing is what occurred within an atmosphere.
FWIW, Sharpie marks don't out-gas once dry (an odd bit of trivia you may need when deciding what to use if you every want to tag anything on the space shuttle)
It sounds a lot like a 1:1000 chance (or greater) of increasing the earth-impact probability from 1:45000 to a maximum of 1:450. I can live with those odds. I also agree that we probably don't know the ephemeris to great enough accuracy, no can we simulate the n-body problem to sufficient accuracy, to determine the effect of a delta-v on the order of hundreds of nm/s. I'm sure the project is a nice bit of work, especially for a 13 year old. I can't imagine doing orbital mechanics in 8th or 9th grade. It was fun when I did it in college, but there are some mathematical concepts in it which I didn't fully grasp back in middle school.
Sadly, the article is very light on details.
Not quite. As I understand it, you cannot use a patented technology for commercial use. Personal use is still free and clear - you just can't sell it or use it in commerce. In this case, the unwitting farmer who replants seeds which are contaminated* by GM IP is using them in commerce as he intends to sell the end product. The problem is that he can't _not_ use them, as he has no control over the pollination process.
*I use this in the technical sense, not claiming GM to be good or bad. We've been hybridizing for centuries. IMO the jury is out on GM.
...and even I think this is a BAD idea. You want to mess with your own PC, okay - there's some merit there for some people. Mess with the network - hell no. There are too many things that need to get done, and the ability for one person - even an otherwise knowledgeable person - outside of IT to screw things up is just too much of an unknown.
I'm not usually one to chime in on the side of IT, as they often throw out the baby with the bath water, but letting people who's primary function is something other than keeping the network up mess with the network is just a massively bad idea. Screw up a workstation and one guy is dead for a day. Screw up the network and the whole company can go toes up.
I'm sorry you missed the implied humor. Then again, we're not talking about people who blog "on the side," but rather about people who blog 18-20 hours a day as their JOB. Of course there are bloggers who are PhDs, but I would still say that you would find their numbers, as a percentage of the professional bloggers for whom blogging is their _only_ profession and at which they spend more than 18 hours a day trying to keep up with the news stories a diminishingly small fraction.
Or, did you perhaps not read the f'n article before posting?
You could, but then grandma would go to a website and download the "free virus check" for her linux box, and it would get infected. Since she needs to run the check (the popup in Firefox told her so), she'd just sudo and install it, per the included directions. You see, it's not the OS, it's the users. Sure, windows is an easy target, but its an easy target because there are so many users who don't know better. You can infect any machine that has internet access and a local accomplice with administrative rights. Since a single user system - i.e. just about any home system - has someone with the ability to elevate to administrative privileges sitting in front of the keyboard ready to install the virus^Wnew solitaire game, there is no real barrier.
Instead you should ban the internet. It will be much more effective in stopping bots, though it may reduce other desirable characteristics of modern computing.
I don't mean that in a negative way - there's nothing wrong with a small penis. But you seem very concerned about finding a woman who will have you, and you seem to feel that cash is the only way to "score" a good woman.
And you don't need to move to Bumfuck, Idaho. Find a city with 50k-200k people and you'll have a pretty good selection, but still be where you can afford to live on a 5 figure salary. The outskirts of Charlotte or Greensboro, NC come to mind, or even larger like some of the 'burbs around Raleigh. Even better, and closer to my 50-200k number, find a town with a major college. Blacksburg and Charlottesville, VA, or Amhearst, MA, or Ithaca, NY. All small towns with great primary and secondary schools, affordable housing, and lots of hot chicks.
(1) $25k isn't exactly punitive to Google - it probably wouldn't even cover litigation costs if this went to court. Eric Schmidt probably loses that much change in his sofa each year.
(2) Others have posted that there are no signs visible indicating that this named road is private, or that trespassing is prohibited. It is entirely likely (though I don't know for certain) that there is, in fact, a public right of way centered on the road. That is often the case in Virginia even when the road is listed as private.
(3) They must be going fucking bonkers over their county's GIS website, which lists data on the property and sales price information.
I'm more libertarian than the average Joe, but I have a very hard time getting worked up over this. Get back to me if they start tracking people movements without consent...I'll back you up at that point.
I'll agree with you that they should all strive to make six figures, but the reality is that the supply far exceeds the demand, and the talent pool is relatively shallow on average. I know people working just as hard, for just as many hours, usually at multiple jobs, to barely make ends meet. They do it because they don't have the training or ability to perform work that has a higher value in society. Heck, I could make more as a doctor or a lawyer, but I really like being an engineer and I spent my college money to become one.
As for finding a mate, they one's who are primarily interested in the size of your wallet are much more likely to leave you if that wallet ever deflates. I recommend finding one who would marry you if you lost every penny you had in the world. You'll be a lot happier than if you make $100k and had someone who constantly griped about not having enough money to live the way he or she likes.
If you are a blogger, set your hours. Sure, you'll violate them once in a while (I'm posting from work on a Sunday...I'm in a crunch time in my business - it happens). But seriously, if you don't post for 14 hours a day, the world will not stop. Provided that you have people to do the shifts to keep the information flowing, people will not abandon the blog forever. Taco doesn't spend 20 hours a day posting dupes - he's hired people to do that.
This isn't really about blogging, it's about small business. Small, one man shops really are a drain on your life. You fear that if you close too early or open too late you'll miss that one big customer. Until you get big enough to spread the load, that will be the case.
A note for bloggers - you might want to move. There were two in that story - one in SF, one (I believe) in NY. Note: you're bloggers, nobody cares where you live and you can source from anywhere in the (US/NA/World). Based on the "all day and night at the keyboard" comments, these folks aren't getting their inside scoops from wandering the streets of the big technology cities. Might I suggest somewhere inexpensive, somewhere relaxing from which to blog. Make it within 100 miles of an airline hub if you do a lot of conferences. Office space in small towns is often $8/SF (per year) or less, and really good housing is actually affordable on 40k-50k/yr.
Learn to live on less than a million dollars a year. That would free up some of that income to capitalize the infrastructure.
For that kind of money, he can rent an office, hire a staff (sounds like he has one), and be a real small business owner. Heck, most small companies (i.e. 5 employees) would kill to have a seven figure annual budget, and without physical inventory to turn, no less! Even more, blogging can be run from an $8/SF office space in a small town. Sure, there's lot of time and stress involved - welcome to the world of small businesses. You're growing or you're dying.
I'd like to feel bad for him, but - as a small business owner with 5 employees and noticeably less than a million dollars in annual revenue - I just can't seem to get the tears going while I browse the 'net at lunch from my office.
I'm sure part of it is to determine what is passing through the network and how to reduce the overall traffic flow - which would reduce the amount of physical plant needed. It's not all sunshine and light - they make money any way they can, and if snooping does it for them, they'll do it until it is illegal. I'm just pointing out that ignoring all traffic and building out physical plant isn't necessarily in the financial interest of the ISPs. Using what they have in the most "efficient" way is. Their efficiency may not be in line with your bandwidth usage expectations, of course.
I know this is a bit late, but thank you for your response. It was possibly one of the best analogies I've seen (and it didn't even involve a car!). I can make the common user's head spin in the windows CLI (being an old DOS man, myself), and I can _navigate_ through the linux file system, but trying to _do_ anything is dicey at best. It has, to some extent, been made "worst" by windows - everything has an installer these days, so you double click the pre-packaged executable and it installs the program. I chafe a bit at it, as I often don't want all the install options, but in windows I can track down the offending parts and kill them. I know where programs are installed, and usually where the installation files end up. It's not as easy as it once was, with an .ini file in the program directory which controlled the SW. I once thought the registry was a good idea, now it's just a place to hide and obfuscate settings from the user.
And, if you will let me vent momentarily, man is about as useful as the windows help files. They give you syntax as long as you already know what commands are necessary to perform a task. Neither can help you find out what you need to do to accomplish a task.
IANAPL, but my understanding is that producers of a product are liable. Neither end users nor aggregators (sure it's the wrong word in IP speak) are liable. In other words, if you buy something and use it, and the company who sold it to you violated a patent, you are not liable. Also, if you buy an "infringing" widget from a company and include it in your super-widget, the original company is liable, but you are not. You didn't produce the infringing widget so, again, you are not liable.
What keeps big corporations from playing the Hollywood "never a profit" game with shadow/shell companies is that if the shell corp is found to be infringing, the main corp can no longer use the product (as it cannot be produced). Also, with little funding, the shell corp will be unable to significantly defend itself against a serious IP lawsuit.
Yes, they bid the spectrum up to the threshold, but it went far beyond that. Further, they stood to have to make good on their bids. And, of course, they were not the owner of the airwaves, so the bidding can only be though of as foolishness. One should wonder more why the government "allowed" such self-raising bids in their auction - it's never done in a traditional auction format.
As for yuour concern, it's true that the winners will need to charge more to make back the money, but in reality it's a small fraction of their operating costs. I suspect they pay out a higher percentage to their retailers (who do excactly nothing for that money after the customer walks out the door) than they do for this spectrum.
This isn't magic - we just had a census 7 years ago, and it was all entered into a database. It seems that the baseline system was already specified. You've got a paper and pencil interface - the existing forms - which need to be filled out electronically. You have an existing database which needs to be populated for this go round, so you have your back end interface target.
By my count, that leaves the GUI to be written, the local (temporary) database, and the interface to the main system to write. Ideally, there should be an extensibility to add fields and space in the gui to accommodate those additional fields.
Clearly there is a lot of work between the existing conditions and final product, but often the most difficult part is defining such points. One would hope that there isn't some contractor modifying the main database for 2010, making for a moving target (that's the owners fault, of course).
For those in IT who think this is not the case, consider your power users. Many really can function - even if not to corporate standards of security or conformity - with very little help. They probably will spend an extra $200-$400 per machine for stuff that has marginal use, but they'll feel better about it and be productive. The problem is that there's that one guy - and everyone in IT know who he is - that is way out of his depth and just doesn't know it. You spend a lot of time praying he doesn't screw up more than his own workstation. The good thing is that considerably more than half of modern staffs will likely just want you to set it all up and keep it running.
In the case for users managing their own PCs, NASA used to be this way where I worked in the 90s. We ordered our own PCs, set them up, installed all software. The IT staff would help get us on the network and keep the network running. There were exceptionally few problems. This was, however, before most people had access to the internet, and predominantly before the web existed.