You're not that important. I don't mean that in a nasty way, but in a pragmatic one. There are hundreds of moving parts in a successful business, and any one of them can bring the company to a standstill - IT is just one of them. Can IT help the bottom line? Of course, but so can accounting, reception, marketing, interior decorating, etc. I run a small business, and I do the IT. I'm not very good at it, but I'm passable, and the minor issues we have had are covered. While it may be true that a catastrophic failure would likely cost me tens of thousands of dollars, I can't pay that kind of money to keep IT on retainer - you see, in a business the potential loss does not equate to the ability to pay to prevent a low-probability occurance.
I am one of those owners that actually bought and display a Despair poster, and I think it's appropriate to consider: http://despair.com/worth.html
I posted it because I'm in a service industry and it applies to me, too. We are, at times, a necessary evil to our customers. We can also save our clients a large amount of money - sometimes. IT isn't "like" plumbing, or phones, or janitor service, or accounting...but it is just one part of many - essential, but not the prime focus.
The expense involved in getting IR right (and, to be honest, getting it done even poorly) is negatively perceived because it is necessary to the functioning of a modern business, but doesn't seem to provide any advantage in the marketplace. If you don't have it, it is clearly a disadvantage, but getting the best doesn't translate (proportionally) financially. The becoming-old saw of "if computers have made us so much more efficient, why are we still working more than 40 hours a week to get work done" applies here. IT is part of the ever accelerating treadmill of efficiency, and - honestly - it is hard to justify passing on all the costs.
...one day was 86,400 x 9,192,631,770, or to be less precise, the number of seconds in a "day" as we know it now, time exact frequency of the microwave spectral line emitted by atoms of the metallic element cesium, in particular its isotope of atomic weight 133 ("Cs-133").
Luckily, even before cesium existed, we know what the frequency is and can extrapolate backwards. Now, had we tried to make those measurements before the big bang, we would have been lost for a time reference, but luckily as soon as radiation came into existence we could choose a spectral line and count the cycles. We may have had to adjust to the "day" standard which came about 13.73B years later, but it couldn't be any harder than going from inches to meters. Anyone but an American could have done it in their heads.
Luckily, we have a chief justice that testified, under oath, to congress that one of his primary tenets - should he be confirmed - would be to respect established case law and prior Supreme Court rulings.
Oh, right - now that he's been it, it appears that he lied through his teeth. It was worth a shot.
If you can't build a scale model of your invention which can be presented to the USPTO in a 12"x12"x12" (excuse me, 300mm x 300m x 300mm) cube with your patent application, then you can't get a patent on it. The corollary to this is that if the object you are creating exists in nature, it cannot be patented (take that, DNA patent whores).
Flash sucks on WM6, or rather isn't installed by default, so my Hermes doesn't do flash. At least two companies which have a flash-only front page has lost my business in the past because of it. One of them has fixed the oversight, but I still won't shop there anymore.
Re:There is no real issue. Problem solved.
on
The U.S. Patent Backlog
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Bzzzt...thank you for playing. at $400 each, it doesn't even cover the cost of the prime examiner. A post above gave about 8 hrs of allowed time for a patent examination (10 per bi-week). Even if they all went to fresh-hires (i.e. inexperienced) at $63k/yr+ 10k bonus, with a typical "efficient" overhead and G&A of 80%, and accounting for sick, vacation, and holiday leave (264 hrs/yr to start), I get a net cost of $541 per patent. And that ignores training, startup, any other incentives, higher cost of experienced examiners, re-examination, etc.
Even with all the cash they have, they can't hire enough to get them back to even.
It's still just a storage mechanism, and a volumetrically inefficient one at that. Why not just store the electricity in batteries? Storing gaseous hydrogen is about the only thing stupider than storing a flammable liquid (gasoline) in a vehicle moving at 120fps being guided by someone on a cellphone.
Bonuses are taxed just like all other income. Taxes are determined by taking your compensation amount and multiplying it by (1/period over which that pay is earned) to get an effective annual rate. If your bonus comes through on your paycheck in a 2 week period, it gets taxes as if you're making that totalx26, and taxes are taken accordingly. If your accounting department was nice, they'd take your quarterly bonus and enter the payperiod as the 3 months, which would then be multiplied by 4 to get the "equivalent" annual rate.
Of course, it's somewhat moot, as it's all made even at tax filing time, but I'd rather have the money now and owe a couple extra dollars next April than get $1000 tax refund.
What we call health insurance in this country is actually a pre-paid health maintenance agreement. There is an insurance component, but by and large the costs are associated with routine care, not insured healt disasters. Right now, the closest thing we have is the high deductable health plans which work with a health savings account. In the HDHP, you pay every dollar of care out of pocket until you reach your deductable - about $2.5k for a single, or about 5-6k for a family. This excludes just about all routine care, which means that it doesn't kick in until you've hit a real stumbling block, healthwise. In return, the gov't lets you put away money, pre-tax, into an account (savings or investment) which you draw on to pay your health expenses.
Everyone on insurance already has a "single payer system," it's just that the "single payer" is the group of health insurance companies instead of the government, but they act and think with close to one voice. Right now we aren't covering everyone, though we could for about 1.2T/yr through the existing private system*. It would be a significant burden if the cost were borne by employers, as most businesses just can't foot the bill for $8-12k/yr/employee, especially when the coverage could cost more than the employee's salary.
Anyway, the point is that there may be two systems needed - one for health maintenance, and one for catastrophic coverage (which I like to call "hit-by-a-bus" coverage). As with all things, there are some gray lines at the boarder between the two. And this doesn't really address the DNA problem, though it would be reasonable to expect a test to get a rate for the catastrophic coverage, since that is a pretty straight forward way to more accurately determine risk, and no different than charging 22 year old males with sportscars more for auto insurance - even if the never drive more than 35 mph, and only take trips to church on Sundays. That's what probability and risk determination is about. If you don't like it, save your money yourself for that rainy day.
I will say that I would prefer cancellable "term" policies rather than the annual individual policies that are common today. Right now, if you're too expensive, you can simply not be renewed. With a term (say, 30 year) policy, you have a guarantee of coverage for your term with embedded annual escalation and whatnot, just like life insurance. You might even get a product similar to whole life insurance, which guarntees your coverage until you die. (Note: just like life insurance, health insurance has caps on your benefits).
As with all other things, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so the total money into the system = total money out of the system. There profit on gross in healthcare insurance is probably small, just like most businesses (2-8%). My point is that everyone can't just put in their $120/week, get routine healthcare (office visits, minor events, maintenance prescriptions, and some elective procedure) taken care of and then have a heart attack and run up a $280k tab, and expect the system to stay solvent. Healthcare is one area where manpower is necessary to get things done, and people who are competent and reliable cost a _lot_ of money to hire, train, and retain. Most people would be surprised to find that the job which pays them $25/hr requires billing them out at $75/hr to be worth while for the company (you know, that 2-8% profit margin). And hiring reliable people to work on the most basic parts of your health costs quite a bit more than $25/hr most places.
I thought about modding you, but it seems more appropriate to reply.
It's not about existing to generate a revenue stream, it's to provide a return on investment for services offered. There's no magic pot of free money to create cool stuff. Things cost money to create and run. Sure, it may only be $0.05/GB for transmission costs, but somebody paid to put in the infrastructure, set up the distribution, plan and code the software, implement the system, and a zillion other things before the first bit came out the other end. The people who paid for that would like a return on their investment, otherwise they'd go invest in something else that would make money. Don't forget that some of these investors are investing your money - they money you expect to grow so that someday you can retire.
Utilities, unlike grocery stores, would like to limit the amount of product to their current capacity. Installation of new facilities is wildly expensive, and it is hard to make back that capital expenditure. That's why power companies, for example, give rebates and discounts on energy saving appliances, and have time-of-use switches that they'll pay you to activate during peak (aka expensive) load times. The telecoms are worse off, as they have gone down the dangerous road of selling unmetered service, figuring that nobody would really use their (speed x time), or anything close. Switching back to a metered service is not going to be a happy, but added loads on the system is going to drive costs without additional revenue.
Is it their own damned fault? Yes. Will the consumer pay for it. Eventually.
It took a business of 150 people to develop and maintain a single patent? This must be horrendously complex, and worthy of a patent. What? Some banks developed their own in-house version? Based on conversations of the concept with the inventor? Clearly something so complex as to require 150 people couldn't have been exactly duplicated by someone else...unless it either (a) wasn't complicated to begin with and his bubble burst at the same time as the rest of silicon valley (i.e. the "invention" was obvious in its implementation), or (b) it was that complex and a different implementation was produced by the banks - in which case if the patent applies then it is too broadly worded and should be struck down.
Unfortunately, calling bullshit on the patent system just isn't enough to fix it.
I tend to disagree. B&M sales will remain strong for quite a long time. Partly because there is something permanent to the physical product, but mostly because broadband simply isn't capable of sustaining the on-demand bandwidth in 98% of the US. In fact, I would bet a dollar that more than 80% of the area of the US has sustained maximum home internet speeds of less than 3Mb/s for the length of a movie - and that's not even enough to stream a DVD, much less an HD disc. Worse, that's not going to change soon. Oh, sure, there are some places which will have that speed, but for most of the country it's just a pipe dream.
I get about 2.5TB for a 2 hour movie with deep color, provided that there's no error correction. Unless there's some breakthrough technology that we haven't heard of, it will be a decade before we have that kind of capacity in a disc format. Given the apparent slow down in HD sizes, it may still be three years before we see a multi-platter consumer drive with that much storage.
Oh, sorry, I had a top secret flashback for a moment. White LEDs, iirc, are essentially fluorescent light sources which use the LED to stimulate emission in several bands based on the phosphors used. As such, they are still discrete (though not monochromatic) frequency lights and cannot creat and exact replica of incandescent (i.e. blackbody) radiation. I've not seen much on LED CRIs or color temps...most people are just so amazed that they produce "white" light that they don't seem to care. White LEDs, as a result of how they work, are only about 1/2 as efficient per watt as their more efficient monochromatic counterparts.
You spend too much time with computers. This is a consumer electronics item. The thing about CE stuff is that the accepted version of usage involves (1) turning the machine on and (2) having it do it's stuff. If it's a toaster, it makes toast. If its a refrigerator, it makes things cold. If it's a media player it plays media (CD players play CDs, DVD players play DVDs). In this case, he has a BluRay(R) branded player which will not play a BluRay(R) branded discs. End of story.
Quite honestly, I'd want to list Sony on the suit for changing the format and not requiring player manufacturers to ensure that their existing, branded devices could play the discs. If I were Panasonic, I'd sue Sony for changing the God damned specification after hardware had been designed, built, and shipped. This whole DRM/BD+ shit has royally fucked over the entire home entertainment sector, and personally I hope they all end up with ebola, with their almost-dead bodies left out on the street to suffer, and maggots set up camp in their skulls while the rest of their bodies decay into unrecognizable, repulsive, fetid masses. And I don't even own a BluRay player.
For what its worth, everyone involved with the ever-changing HDMI spec can suffer the same fate.
Why would I want anything else - I like a clean desktop, and some goofy background image is just distraction. Of course, I also set everthing to display windows classic. The only change I make is that I prefer the old "brick" color scheme to the blue one, so I go with that instead. Yes, I still miss NT3.51.
There are quite a few corporate sites which incorporate flash to "enhance" their site, and there are some sites which won't even let you in unless you pass the flash-only home page. If you don't have flash, they don't want your business. (At least, that seem to be the opinion of the web IT staff, I haven't contacted corporate to see if they agree with that assessment). As for examples, Bath & Body Works used to be that way (I emailed them, they are no longer flash-limited...I don't believe those two things are linked, though). Rainforest Cafe is another. BBW didn't get my business back then, and Rainforest missed out on a dinner guest recently - I couldn't find their location, and couldn't use my mobile browser to get to their page. Will they care that they probably lost less than $100, of course not. But it certainly would have been nice if they wouldn't have had a "no flash, no service" sign out front.
Please refrain from making logical comments on slashdot...it only aggravates the mods.;-)
Given the problems associated with the SR-71 as an operational aircraft, and the lack of significant, physics-defying advancements in heat-resistant skin materials, I'm quite comfotable with the fact that this will be as quick to market at Moller's car.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not that important. I don't mean that in a nasty way, but in a pragmatic one. There are hundreds of moving parts in a successful business, and any one of them can bring the company to a standstill - IT is just one of them. Can IT help the bottom line? Of course, but so can accounting, reception, marketing, interior decorating, etc. I run a small business, and I do the IT. I'm not very good at it, but I'm passable, and the minor issues we have had are covered. While it may be true that a catastrophic failure would likely cost me tens of thousands of dollars, I can't pay that kind of money to keep IT on retainer - you see, in a business the potential loss does not equate to the ability to pay to prevent a low-probability occurance.
I am one of those owners that actually bought and display a Despair poster, and I think it's appropriate to consider: http://despair.com/worth.html
I posted it because I'm in a service industry and it applies to me, too. We are, at times, a necessary evil to our customers. We can also save our clients a large amount of money - sometimes. IT isn't "like" plumbing, or phones, or janitor service, or accounting...but it is just one part of many - essential, but not the prime focus.
The expense involved in getting IR right (and, to be honest, getting it done even poorly) is negatively perceived because it is necessary to the functioning of a modern business, but doesn't seem to provide any advantage in the marketplace. If you don't have it, it is clearly a disadvantage, but getting the best doesn't translate (proportionally) financially. The becoming-old saw of "if computers have made us so much more efficient, why are we still working more than 40 hours a week to get work done" applies here. IT is part of the ever accelerating treadmill of efficiency, and - honestly - it is hard to justify passing on all the costs.
sensitive/urgent/otherwise critical
I'd suggest that there are often times that those can be applied to the needs associated with the toilet.
...one day was 86,400 x 9,192,631,770, or to be less precise, the number of seconds in a "day" as we know it now, time exact frequency of the microwave spectral line emitted by atoms of the metallic element cesium, in particular its isotope of atomic weight 133 ("Cs-133").
Luckily, even before cesium existed, we know what the frequency is and can extrapolate backwards. Now, had we tried to make those measurements before the big bang, we would have been lost for a time reference, but luckily as soon as radiation came into existence we could choose a spectral line and count the cycles. We may have had to adjust to the "day" standard which came about 13.73B years later, but it couldn't be any harder than going from inches to meters. Anyone but an American could have done it in their heads.
Luckily, we have a chief justice that testified, under oath, to congress that one of his primary tenets - should he be confirmed - would be to respect established case law and prior Supreme Court rulings.
Oh, right - now that he's been it, it appears that he lied through his teeth. It was worth a shot.
If you can't build a scale model of your invention which can be presented to the USPTO in a 12"x12"x12" (excuse me, 300mm x 300m x 300mm) cube with your patent application, then you can't get a patent on it. The corollary to this is that if the object you are creating exists in nature, it cannot be patented (take that, DNA patent whores).
Flash sucks on WM6, or rather isn't installed by default, so my Hermes doesn't do flash. At least two companies which have a flash-only front page has lost my business in the past because of it. One of them has fixed the oversight, but I still won't shop there anymore.
Bzzzt...thank you for playing. at $400 each, it doesn't even cover the cost of the prime examiner. A post above gave about 8 hrs of allowed time for a patent examination (10 per bi-week). Even if they all went to fresh-hires (i.e. inexperienced) at $63k/yr+ 10k bonus, with a typical "efficient" overhead and G&A of 80%, and accounting for sick, vacation, and holiday leave (264 hrs/yr to start), I get a net cost of $541 per patent. And that ignores training, startup, any other incentives, higher cost of experienced examiners, re-examination, etc.
Even with all the cash they have, they can't hire enough to get them back to even.
Wensleydale, I think.
A couple scuba tanks full of air and 8 gallons of gasoline to go 1000 miles at nearly 100mph. Just for fun, I picked up my HP48...
assume 2 sq m frontal area on the vehicle, and a coeff of drag of 0.2
100mph ~ 50m/s
density of air = 1.225 kg/m^3
force at speed = 1.225*50^2*2m*0.2 = 1225 N
distance = 1000miles = 1620 km = 1.62E6m
1225N * 1.62E6 m = 1.98E9 Joules
Remember...we're assuming frictionless everything and no hills - just wind resistance...
1.98E9 Joules / 131MJ/gallon (c/o Wikipedia) = 15.1 gallons of gasoline.
I call bullshit (or bad math...this is slashdot - I'm not going to check my numbers)
It's still just a storage mechanism, and a volumetrically inefficient one at that. Why not just store the electricity in batteries? Storing gaseous hydrogen is about the only thing stupider than storing a flammable liquid (gasoline) in a vehicle moving at 120fps being guided by someone on a cellphone.
Bonuses are taxed just like all other income. Taxes are determined by taking your compensation amount and multiplying it by (1/period over which that pay is earned) to get an effective annual rate. If your bonus comes through on your paycheck in a 2 week period, it gets taxes as if you're making that totalx26, and taxes are taken accordingly. If your accounting department was nice, they'd take your quarterly bonus and enter the payperiod as the 3 months, which would then be multiplied by 4 to get the "equivalent" annual rate.
Of course, it's somewhat moot, as it's all made even at tax filing time, but I'd rather have the money now and owe a couple extra dollars next April than get $1000 tax refund.
What we call health insurance in this country is actually a pre-paid health maintenance agreement. There is an insurance component, but by and large the costs are associated with routine care, not insured healt disasters. Right now, the closest thing we have is the high deductable health plans which work with a health savings account. In the HDHP, you pay every dollar of care out of pocket until you reach your deductable - about $2.5k for a single, or about 5-6k for a family. This excludes just about all routine care, which means that it doesn't kick in until you've hit a real stumbling block, healthwise. In return, the gov't lets you put away money, pre-tax, into an account (savings or investment) which you draw on to pay your health expenses.
Everyone on insurance already has a "single payer system," it's just that the "single payer" is the group of health insurance companies instead of the government, but they act and think with close to one voice. Right now we aren't covering everyone, though we could for about 1.2T/yr through the existing private system*. It would be a significant burden if the cost were borne by employers, as most businesses just can't foot the bill for $8-12k/yr/employee, especially when the coverage could cost more than the employee's salary.
Anyway, the point is that there may be two systems needed - one for health maintenance, and one for catastrophic coverage (which I like to call "hit-by-a-bus" coverage). As with all things, there are some gray lines at the boarder between the two. And this doesn't really address the DNA problem, though it would be reasonable to expect a test to get a rate for the catastrophic coverage, since that is a pretty straight forward way to more accurately determine risk, and no different than charging 22 year old males with sportscars more for auto insurance - even if the never drive more than 35 mph, and only take trips to church on Sundays. That's what probability and risk determination is about. If you don't like it, save your money yourself for that rainy day.
I will say that I would prefer cancellable "term" policies rather than the annual individual policies that are common today. Right now, if you're too expensive, you can simply not be renewed. With a term (say, 30 year) policy, you have a guarantee of coverage for your term with embedded annual escalation and whatnot, just like life insurance. You might even get a product similar to whole life insurance, which guarntees your coverage until you die. (Note: just like life insurance, health insurance has caps on your benefits).
As with all other things, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so the total money into the system = total money out of the system. There profit on gross in healthcare insurance is probably small, just like most businesses (2-8%). My point is that everyone can't just put in their $120/week, get routine healthcare (office visits, minor events, maintenance prescriptions, and some elective procedure) taken care of and then have a heart attack and run up a $280k tab, and expect the system to stay solvent. Healthcare is one area where manpower is necessary to get things done, and people who are competent and reliable cost a _lot_ of money to hire, train, and retain. Most people would be surprised to find that the job which pays them $25/hr requires billing them out at $75/hr to be worth while for the company (you know, that 2-8% profit margin). And hiring reliable people to work on the most basic parts of your health costs quite a bit more than $25/hr most places.
*extend the federal employee group for BCBS standard to count every citizen, paid at roughly 100M policies at 12,300/yr, per http://www.opm.gov/insure/health/08rates/2008non_postal_ffs.pdf
I read it the same way I read "the company admits no wrongdoing, but the terms of the settlement were not disclosed."
... and it involves a $400M cash payment. No need for question marks for these gnomes.
I thought about modding you, but it seems more appropriate to reply.
It's not about existing to generate a revenue stream, it's to provide a return on investment for services offered. There's no magic pot of free money to create cool stuff. Things cost money to create and run. Sure, it may only be $0.05/GB for transmission costs, but somebody paid to put in the infrastructure, set up the distribution, plan and code the software, implement the system, and a zillion other things before the first bit came out the other end. The people who paid for that would like a return on their investment, otherwise they'd go invest in something else that would make money. Don't forget that some of these investors are investing your money - they money you expect to grow so that someday you can retire.
Utilities, unlike grocery stores, would like to limit the amount of product to their current capacity. Installation of new facilities is wildly expensive, and it is hard to make back that capital expenditure. That's why power companies, for example, give rebates and discounts on energy saving appliances, and have time-of-use switches that they'll pay you to activate during peak (aka expensive) load times. The telecoms are worse off, as they have gone down the dangerous road of selling unmetered service, figuring that nobody would really use their (speed x time), or anything close. Switching back to a metered service is not going to be a happy, but added loads on the system is going to drive costs without additional revenue.
Is it their own damned fault? Yes. Will the consumer pay for it. Eventually.
It took a business of 150 people to develop and maintain a single patent? This must be horrendously complex, and worthy of a patent. What? Some banks developed their own in-house version? Based on conversations of the concept with the inventor? Clearly something so complex as to require 150 people couldn't have been exactly duplicated by someone else...unless it either (a) wasn't complicated to begin with and his bubble burst at the same time as the rest of silicon valley (i.e. the "invention" was obvious in its implementation), or (b) it was that complex and a different implementation was produced by the banks - in which case if the patent applies then it is too broadly worded and should be struck down.
Unfortunately, calling bullshit on the patent system just isn't enough to fix it.
I tend to disagree. B&M sales will remain strong for quite a long time. Partly because there is something permanent to the physical product, but mostly because broadband simply isn't capable of sustaining the on-demand bandwidth in 98% of the US. In fact, I would bet a dollar that more than 80% of the area of the US has sustained maximum home internet speeds of less than 3Mb/s for the length of a movie - and that's not even enough to stream a DVD, much less an HD disc. Worse, that's not going to change soon. Oh, sure, there are some places which will have that speed, but for most of the country it's just a pipe dream.
I get about 2.5TB for a 2 hour movie with deep color, provided that there's no error correction. Unless there's some breakthrough technology that we haven't heard of, it will be a decade before we have that kind of capacity in a disc format. Given the apparent slow down in HD sizes, it may still be three years before we see a multi-platter consumer drive with that much storage.
There are no good white basketball players...
Oh, sorry, I had a top secret flashback for a moment. White LEDs, iirc, are essentially fluorescent light sources which use the LED to stimulate emission in several bands based on the phosphors used. As such, they are still discrete (though not monochromatic) frequency lights and cannot creat and exact replica of incandescent (i.e. blackbody) radiation. I've not seen much on LED CRIs or color temps...most people are just so amazed that they produce "white" light that they don't seem to care. White LEDs, as a result of how they work, are only about 1/2 as efficient per watt as their more efficient monochromatic counterparts.
Yes, but as a spectator sport? That takes innovation. And a lot of really easily-entertained spectators.
You spend too much time with computers. This is a consumer electronics item. The thing about CE stuff is that the accepted version of usage involves (1) turning the machine on and (2) having it do it's stuff. If it's a toaster, it makes toast. If its a refrigerator, it makes things cold. If it's a media player it plays media (CD players play CDs, DVD players play DVDs). In this case, he has a BluRay(R) branded player which will not play a BluRay(R) branded discs. End of story.
Quite honestly, I'd want to list Sony on the suit for changing the format and not requiring player manufacturers to ensure that their existing, branded devices could play the discs. If I were Panasonic, I'd sue Sony for changing the God damned specification after hardware had been designed, built, and shipped. This whole DRM/BD+ shit has royally fucked over the entire home entertainment sector, and personally I hope they all end up with ebola, with their almost-dead bodies left out on the street to suffer, and maggots set up camp in their skulls while the rest of their bodies decay into unrecognizable, repulsive, fetid masses. And I don't even own a BluRay player.
For what its worth, everyone involved with the ever-changing HDMI spec can suffer the same fate.
Why would I want anything else - I like a clean desktop, and some goofy background image is just distraction. Of course, I also set everthing to display windows classic. The only change I make is that I prefer the old "brick" color scheme to the blue one, so I go with that instead. Yes, I still miss NT3.51.
There are quite a few corporate sites which incorporate flash to "enhance" their site, and there are some sites which won't even let you in unless you pass the flash-only home page. If you don't have flash, they don't want your business. (At least, that seem to be the opinion of the web IT staff, I haven't contacted corporate to see if they agree with that assessment). As for examples, Bath & Body Works used to be that way (I emailed them, they are no longer flash-limited...I don't believe those two things are linked, though). Rainforest Cafe is another. BBW didn't get my business back then, and Rainforest missed out on a dinner guest recently - I couldn't find their location, and couldn't use my mobile browser to get to their page. Will they care that they probably lost less than $100, of course not. But it certainly would have been nice if they wouldn't have had a "no flash, no service" sign out front.
Just before I opened this session, I had upgraded.
Oh, well, just one more unlocked door in the grass hut I call a computer.
I mean, I know they're pretty dangerous - especially when they're in the Senate - but geez, at least let 'em fly!
Please refrain from making logical comments on slashdot...it only aggravates the mods. ;-)
Given the problems associated with the SR-71 as an operational aircraft, and the lack of significant, physics-defying advancements in heat-resistant skin materials, I'm quite comfotable with the fact that this will be as quick to market at Moller's car.