Aside from ripping the first four paragraphs verbatim, it says ITFA:
"What's more, some of the brain cells to be implanted will be derived from aborted fetuses, which Caplan also said raised ethical concerns for some."
so the whole misdirection of not being embrionic is "technical" in nature for the right-to-life crowd.
Anyway, it all seems academic until you read the bit at the bottom about the fellow who is going to enroll his 5 year old son, in hopes of not having to see his child die a horrible, slow death right in front of his eyes, with nothing he can do to save him. I think you have to be a parent to understand the enormity of the situation - I know for a fact that before I had a child, I wouldn't have experienced that "oh, my god" sinking feeling when reading his comments. I hope it works, and I fear that it works.
Why do I fear that it works? Politics. If it works, there will be a "cure" for this horrible affliction. And it will likely require stem cells from pre-term fetuses, at least initially. If there's only one thing I can think of that's worse that seeing your child die slowly and painfully in front of you while you can't do anything to help, it would be having your child die slowly and painfully in front of you, knowing that there is a cure and not being able to get the cure. The fact that it would be the "religious" right that would block you from saving your own child is just and extra bone to try and swallow.
Based on personal experience, it's not necessarily the color temperature but the "completeness" of the spectrum. That said, it is also a bit unnerving to have a color temperature inconsistant with light output. A 3000K, 15W CFL lamp looks creepy (don't believe me? put one in a big globe fixture in an old building and turn just that light on at night. Creepy, I guarantee). In the incandescent world, brighter corresponds to higher color temperature, and we're "used to it". Once you get to a certain brightness, color temperature is just a matter of matching the scene.
Oh, and for gosh sakes, don't mix color temperature fluorescent lamps in one room. I think that annoys me more than anything.
I'd add: Shitty color rendition, misleading wattage equivalents, and poor compatibility with incandescent (read: affordable) dimmers.
I have yet to purchase a fluorescent which has fooled me into thinking it was an incandescent from a color rendition standpoint. Maybe I'm just sensitive, but I really, really like the glow of blackbody radiation. It feels comfortable, warm, and inviting.
Now, I have used fluorescents for specific tasks - kitchen "boost" lighting over a work surface and soffit lighting in a closet. Both were high CRI (93 or 95, if I remember correctly, at about 4000K) and did their job admirably. If I had to do it again, I'd probably go with the 5000K 98CRI lamps (aka daylight). Still, I wouldn't want them in my living room or bedroom.
I think the perceptable wattage difference is about 1/2 to 2/3 of what is advertised. I find that I need to almost double the "recommended" replacement value to get equivalent light.
Finally - dimmability. I like to have lots of light - hundreds of watts in a typical room - when I'm working, but I prefer much lower light for TV viewing or casual times. Take a bathroom, for instance - 200W is about right for getting ready in the morning, or during the day, but you could burn your retinas out in the middle of the night or when yo ufirst roll out of bed. A dimmer solves this - low light when you need it, high light when you can take it. In fact, I put dimmers in most of the my rooms, and CFLs just usually don't work. In fact, I've taken to carrying an incandescent around with me on travel so I can get a "real" light by my bed. Also, I wake up with a SunRizr (just google it) which simulates a sunrise with bedside lamp intensity - can't do that with a CFL. (If you have to get up before dawn, and would like a painless way to do so, go get one. Yes, they're stupid expensive - $130 give or take. Worth every penny, I swear!)
Yikes, you must have a lot of waste in our house. My last house (one I built 5 years ago) was 4000SF with 10(+) foot ceilings and about 7kW of incandescent lighting and gobs of windows (~30,000 worth of Pella Arch Series). The walls were R-19 batt, attic was R-30-45 (varied from R-30 batt to R-45 blown, all in 24" o/c framing). I was ona well - 750' down, 2HP pump. All electric - heating, cooling, cooking, hot water. Heck, the heat pumps were a 5T 12 seer and a 3T 10 seer. My wife and I both like long, hot showers. I live in Virginia, so we've got a mixed climate. My average electric bill was $110/mo. Peak was in the winter - worst month in 4 years we blew through $200 or $220. Most summers went up to $140 max. Spring/Fall with minimal heating and cooling was about $70. We almost never opened the windows (allergies of s/o), so the AC was king in the summer. Oh, yeah - two refrigerators and a freezer, too. And we usually kept the thermostat at 68-69 in the winter and 71-72 in the summer.
Did I mention that I had 7kW of incandescent light? Yup - over 100 incandescent recessed ceiling cans. Now, I also had some fluorescent (soffits and over the kitchen island), but they were all 93+ CRI, so not terrifically efficient as fluorescent goes. Over 80% of the lighting wattage was on dimmers, however. Still, lighting is a fairly small portion of electric usage, especially when you figure that during the darkerst months, you're also typically heating, so the lights perform double duty, and in the lightest months you use less artificial light, which is good because you'd have to extract that heat through A/C.
I hate fluorescent. Flicker (even correctly working ones), poor color rendition, annoying startup/shutdown (instant vs. nearly imperceptable heat-up), poor dimming performance. It's okay for certain uses as long as the CRI is high, or you don't spend much time, but I'll likely never put CFL in my fixtures. The thought makes me shiver. I'll take a dimmed incadescent and pay a dollar or two more a month, thankyyouverymuch. (Or pay less, as it seems I've done)
You'd better hope he gets paid more than average. I mean, at least NFL players get a large salary (min is $180k this year?) for a job that effectively burns them out completely in 10 years or less (exceptions exist, of course).
The worst thing is that this kind of hype will draw more moths to the flame of $$$, ignoring entirely the quality-of-life considerations kids should be considering.
Oh, and yes - it's almost impossible to teach kids the valuse of time off, family, and job satisfaction. I was lucky that I chose a career that paid resonably and was way-cool. Down side was that there are only a few places in the US where I could find gainful employment - and very few are really nice places to raise a family. So I got a second degree, switched careers (a laterl shift really, not a radical change), and found a fantastic place to live. I'm just happy I figured out the game before I was 35.
Oh, and yes, it's a stupid idea. The fact that it is convenient seems to blind people to the danger. Hydrogen has a significanlty wider flammability range, iirc, and could be considered a great deal more dangerous (though it is harder to confine due to its lower density).
So, how would you describe the local case here in Virginia where a man putting away a rifle (iirc) in his gun cabinet managed to accidentally discharge the weapon, sending the bullet through the floor above, where it glanced off a metal component of (?) his daughters bedframe and through his daughters head as she sat in her room, killing her nearly instantly?
In your words "someone is responsible for any discharge resulting in a death. SOMEBODY was pointing a loaded weapon at another person in that situation, and it was their negligence that cause that death." Does that apply here?
Now, I tend not to get in the middle of the gun/anti-gun wars. I must wonder in the above case, why would you store a loaded firearm in a locked cabinet in your basement? It certainly isn't for rapid response for self defense.
Ahem, earth to Sen. Luger: Nearly all journalists work for corporations, whose primary motivation is profit. They're all businesses.
It appears that if you blog and want to get away with it, you will ned to establish that you are a periodical publishing online. Since periodical is not defined, it may be an irregular periodical, or perhaps they will require Slate or ArsTechica status. Hard to tell. Based on the corporate interests lined up against such a "free speech" law, you should expect some very narrow language in the several-hundred page final draft. It will likely be sandwiched between amandments on prayer in schools and pork funding for some bumfark-nowhere bridge project.
Yeah, its amazing how much is on, espeically if you're into history. My wife has just about monopoized one of our TiVos with stuff on the american revolution, civil war, ancient rome, and ancient egyptian programming. I'm considering not adding the new HD TiVo to the univeral remote, just so that I can get a few of my shows recorded and kept for more than a day or two.
And kids shows...there are some real gems out there. Charlie & Lola, a series of 10 minute shorts, has got to be one of the "nicest" sibling shows on TV, and they've really nailed the whole 3 to 5 year old character traits. Stanley is another sleeper show that's mostly education about animals. Dora the Explorer and Go! Diego, Go! are both (minimally) spanish learning shows which emphasize pattern recognition and sequencing, as well as counting and problem solving. The music can get a bit annoying for adults, but the kids seem to love it.
Actually, you don't have to be an owner to sign a document as a PE. In fact, most laws require the engineer who performs or directly supervises the work sign (though this is routinely ignored by engineering companies, who generally only have principals/owners sign). The point is that the person who signs for the software (1) is intimiely familiar and invoved in the management of the design, if not performing the design/coding and (2) is perosnally liable for any errors which occur.
Software developers are actually lucky, as they can update their code to fix bugs for relatively little cost. Finding an error in an analysis, even if it only applies to one building, can result in repair costs that exceed the entire design fee.
I agree about the reconfiguring/changing (hacking) the software - if you decide to add several hundred amps of load to a system or remove a bearing wall - well, it's your own darned fault when things go wrong.
There are a bazillion enclosures out there, I'm sure you've found. I picked up an "old" (but brand new) FW400 tower on ebay for $300. It holds 8 drives on 4 bridges which you can daisy chain. Came with a fan or two, and 6 drives totalling about 1TB have been cranking away for a year and a half now with no failures. It's the size and shape of a tower PC. Not really a cute companion for your mini.
Alternately, I've got a pair of Sabrent enclosures which I use for backup of my laptop and mp3s. I can take them on the road with me. They run off of USB power (USB2 transfer), and are only slightly bigger than the notebook drives they enclose. I won't say that they're fool proof, as I had to send one back almost immediatly after recieving it because it had a bad contriller board. However, they're supersmall and I haven't noticed heat issues, though they're not used in a hot environment. Down side is that they require 2.5" (notebook) drives, which will run you a bit more than a 3.5" on a per-gig basis, and you can't get a really big one (120GB max on the market right now, iirc).
Of course, you could also look at one of these which is a 2 bay, optional HW RAID 0, FW800 PATA (the old IDE/ATA spec) enclosure for $130. It's got fans and at least a bit of style, and with two 500GB drives would certainly give you room to spare.
I'm not even hoping for the new system to be as good as TiVo, just nearly as useful. I have no illusions that the interface will be better - TiVo is just too darned simple, and the remote is too good to expect a better internal solution from DirecTV. I look at what TiVo has done since the code split, and how little has been done on the DirecTV side, and can only assume that the sole-source model can only mean crappy results. I just hope they don't screw it up too much.
It's not much different than designing/building a building. There is no way to fully test a building, and 99% of the time it will be under low-stress conditions, never testing the limits it was designed for. It rests on a foundation which is extremly variable, with a material which is pooly understood at the designer level, and is subject to hidden flaws. And yet we weem to have a handle on liability issues, and who'e responsible for what. You speak of viruses and hackers, I speak of arsonists and stupid car/truck drivers that run into building columns.
I'm not saying its easy, but there should still be some responsibility for product qualtiy, and right now there is no accountability.
It's interesting to watch the erosion of personal responsibility in the design fields. Before the large corporations paid for their exemption, it was all personal liability. As a professional engineer, I am both corporately and personally liable for any errors in my work. The corporation does nothing to sheild me. Now, if I were in manufacturing, there are special exeptions that were bought from the legispatures which allow those engineers to shirk their responsibilities. This is the same thing - it's just that someone with a loud voice is pissed off enough to say we should return to where every designer must be resposible for his or her actions.
Can you imagine how products would be different if a single human in charge of a product/project would have to sign his or her name personally that it was done correctly, with proper safety standards in place and checked? There are some down side to this, don't get me wrong (longer cycles, higher costs), but its one thing to get something out the door, its another to put your name, reputation, and financial means on it before it goes.
Before I finish, I should mention that most engineering laws require engineering firms to be owned (usu at least 51%) by registered professionals, and it is common practice that the name on the design paperwork is an owner. This reduces the liklihood that a bean-counter will be an owner and require an incomplete project to go out the door in the name of finances alone.
But you agreed to the EULA when you installed, which states that the software deveopers have no liability whatsoever, even if the software is unusable, prodcues faulty results, and causes you direct harm. I mean, you agreed to it, right? Right? Sounds like he wants to make those clauses explicitly null and void, Rather than them being theoretcially invalid, but requiring a great deal of cash and a bucket of luck to prove they're invalid only after a loss has occured.
Didn't this all start back with visicalc, or some other spreadsheet, which included the "if it makes a mistake and your building collapses due to a calculatino error it's not our fault" clause back in the early 80s?
No, gun manufacturers should be liable for producing faulty safetys which do not function properly, or firing pins which may actuate without a trigger press.
You're confusing "one way to entertain" with "the only way to entertain".
On a 6 hour trip, kids will get bored. My 3 year old "reads", colors, and watches TV on long trips, as well as listens to some childrens books on cd/tape. You may also be confusing Rugrats and GTA for more educational TV and games (you're allowed to put Sesame Street on if you feel that learning spanish and memory skills from Dora is too progressive). If you think that TV is not educational, I would say that you're not using it right. I would suggest you need to watch a bit more childrens television to find the programs which are useful. I've found very few "educational" books for my daughter that didn't require active adult participation. No that adult participation is bad, but reading stuff to kids for 6 hours in a car is not my idea of a relaxing trip.
I grew up when it was common place for kids to crawl around the back seat and count licence plates, do Mad Libs, color, sing, and ask "are we there yet" every fifteen minutes. I remember being bored out of my mind for most of the time, regarles of the number of games we had. I suspect that an hour or two fo Superfriends would have gon a long way to my childhood trips being more enjoyable. I can only imagine that beingn strapped into a 5-way harness as required by law can only make the process less enjoyable today.
...or if you do, you don't take them on long road trips. There's nothing like having a stash of Dora the Explorer or a disc full of Charlie and Lola to keep them entertained for boring parts of the trip. (For those who do not have children, and/or have forgotten what its was like to ride for a couple of hours in the car as a child, the "boring parts" would include the time from when the key goes into the ignition until you actually get out of the car at the destination. License plate games, I spy, and all the rest are boring...just not as boring as sitting quietly.)
I've captured a bunch of stuff off my DirecTivo (via analog capture) and reauthored it onto disc. It not only helps on long car rides, but also expands the number of shows available when we're at home without filling up the TiVo needlessly.
I've yet to see a movie on PPV that has been released before DVD, at least for major titles.
A, B and C are all techically true, but you've missed the point that they are selling convenience. Think of it as buying a DVD by mail order / internet, but getting to watch the show immediately. It's a combination of shop-in-your-underwear lazy and gotta-drive-to-the-store instant gratification. For $17, it's a reasonable deal for most movies, especially new releases which typicall retial in the $15-18 range opening week, and rise to $20-$30 when moved to the standard racks. It's not nearly as good a deal as buying a bunch from Columbia House ($7-8/disc average), but - one again - instant gratification is in play here. Finally, of course you can try to record it, as long as your cable co's TOS and media flags allow you to do so, or you have circumvention equipment to defeat the limits (think macrovision defeaters). It may be legal, but they (the cable cos) aren't required to make it easy. This is easy, and remember that the target audience is the shop-in-your-underwear lazy crowd.
Medicine is getting better. As a result, people who are currently uncurable are generally able to live longer with their diseases. Pharmaceutical companies really do want to find cures for stuff. Cures are very valuable. Would you pay $20,000 to be cured of your disease, or pay $5/day to treat the symptoms? To the drug companies, $20,000 now is better than $5 a day from a financial standpoint. However, cures are very difficult and expensive, so they are happy with $5 a day to help you live with your disease until they can charge you $20,000 to cure you.
Healthcare costs are rising because we can do more, and liability requires them to do more to ensure minimal failure rates. 100 years ago, a torn ACL meant you would limp the rest of your life. We now have a multi-million dollar machine which can be run by a trained, certified technician making 6 figures annual salary, which can diagnozse your problem, and it can be fixed by a team of medical professionals billing several hundred dollars per hour in a secure facility with large fixed costs, and you can recover/heal with very little pain and almost no chance of secondary infection through the use of costly drugs. You'll be as good as new. How much is a life of pain and disability worth to you?
Medicine is better. More involved procedures cost more. The insideous part is that we all want these advances applied to us, because they are percieved as "needs", even though they didn't exist 100, 50, or 20 years ago. When you hurt, you want everything possible done.
Will you require extended absences due to illness? Could you end up with large, anticipated medical bills?
Both of these things cost the company money. How? Well, if you're out frequently, then there's the lost productivity - not just for you but for your entire team, and for any team which must work with your product. Also, if you incur large medical bills, you can be a reason for the companies health insurer to raise premiums. If the company pays, then it comes right out of their profit, if the employees pay, then it comes out of your coworkers pockets, and reduces moral.
It may not directly affect your job performace, but it affects the performance of the company as a whole. Now, it can help and hurt - like having an employee with children. The down side is that they will want "family time" and will be more resistant to 80 hour workweeks, plus there's the sick-kid time off and the other associated non-work activites, The up side is that they need the regular paycheck more than ever and will (grudgingly) perform extra work to keep from being layed off.
In the case of medical, there used to be a minor upside for the companies - if you leave you lose health insurance, and your new employer didn't have to cover preexisting conditions. With the new laws, insurance portability removes that obstacle. (BTW - I think that's a good thing. I just wish there was a private buy-in option that was available, too, but medicine has become so good that cure and care has been extended to finacially non-universal limits. Pretty sad if you think about it too much)
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Don't worry, they're not human embryonic stem cells, they're human fetal brain stem cells (according to the article).
;-)
I know that made you feel better about the whole process, didn't it.
Aside from ripping the first four paragraphs verbatim, it says ITFA:
"What's more, some of the brain cells to be implanted will be derived from aborted fetuses, which Caplan also said raised ethical concerns for some."
so the whole misdirection of not being embrionic is "technical" in nature for the right-to-life crowd.
Anyway, it all seems academic until you read the bit at the bottom about the fellow who is going to enroll his 5 year old son, in hopes of not having to see his child die a horrible, slow death right in front of his eyes, with nothing he can do to save him. I think you have to be a parent to understand the enormity of the situation - I know for a fact that before I had a child, I wouldn't have experienced that "oh, my god" sinking feeling when reading his comments. I hope it works, and I fear that it works.
Why do I fear that it works? Politics. If it works, there will be a "cure" for this horrible affliction. And it will likely require stem cells from pre-term fetuses, at least initially. If there's only one thing I can think of that's worse that seeing your child die slowly and painfully in front of you while you can't do anything to help, it would be having your child die slowly and painfully in front of you, knowing that there is a cure and not being able to get the cure. The fact that it would be the "religious" right that would block you from saving your own child is just and extra bone to try and swallow.
Based on personal experience, it's not necessarily the color temperature but the "completeness" of the spectrum. That said, it is also a bit unnerving to have a color temperature inconsistant with light output. A 3000K, 15W CFL lamp looks creepy (don't believe me? put one in a big globe fixture in an old building and turn just that light on at night. Creepy, I guarantee). In the incandescent world, brighter corresponds to higher color temperature, and we're "used to it". Once you get to a certain brightness, color temperature is just a matter of matching the scene.
Oh, and for gosh sakes, don't mix color temperature fluorescent lamps in one room. I think that annoys me more than anything.
Hmmmm...
I'd add: Shitty color rendition, misleading wattage equivalents, and poor compatibility with incandescent (read: affordable) dimmers.
I have yet to purchase a fluorescent which has fooled me into thinking it was an incandescent from a color rendition standpoint. Maybe I'm just sensitive, but I really, really like the glow of blackbody radiation. It feels comfortable, warm, and inviting.
Now, I have used fluorescents for specific tasks - kitchen "boost" lighting over a work surface and soffit lighting in a closet. Both were high CRI (93 or 95, if I remember correctly, at about 4000K) and did their job admirably. If I had to do it again, I'd probably go with the 5000K 98CRI lamps (aka daylight). Still, I wouldn't want them in my living room or bedroom.
I think the perceptable wattage difference is about 1/2 to 2/3 of what is advertised. I find that I need to almost double the "recommended" replacement value to get equivalent light.
Finally - dimmability. I like to have lots of light - hundreds of watts in a typical room - when I'm working, but I prefer much lower light for TV viewing or casual times. Take a bathroom, for instance - 200W is about right for getting ready in the morning, or during the day, but you could burn your retinas out in the middle of the night or when yo ufirst roll out of bed. A dimmer solves this - low light when you need it, high light when you can take it. In fact, I put dimmers in most of the my rooms, and CFLs just usually don't work. In fact, I've taken to carrying an incandescent around with me on travel so I can get a "real" light by my bed. Also, I wake up with a SunRizr (just google it) which simulates a sunrise with bedside lamp intensity - can't do that with a CFL. (If you have to get up before dawn, and would like a painless way to do so, go get one. Yes, they're stupid expensive - $130 give or take. Worth every penny, I swear!)
Yikes, you must have a lot of waste in our house. My last house (one I built 5 years ago) was 4000SF with 10(+) foot ceilings and about 7kW of incandescent lighting and gobs of windows (~30,000 worth of Pella Arch Series). The walls were R-19 batt, attic was R-30-45 (varied from R-30 batt to R-45 blown, all in 24" o/c framing). I was ona well - 750' down, 2HP pump. All electric - heating, cooling, cooking, hot water. Heck, the heat pumps were a 5T 12 seer and a 3T 10 seer. My wife and I both like long, hot showers. I live in Virginia, so we've got a mixed climate. My average electric bill was $110/mo. Peak was in the winter - worst month in 4 years we blew through $200 or $220. Most summers went up to $140 max. Spring/Fall with minimal heating and cooling was about $70. We almost never opened the windows (allergies of s/o), so the AC was king in the summer. Oh, yeah - two refrigerators and a freezer, too. And we usually kept the thermostat at 68-69 in the winter and 71-72 in the summer.
Did I mention that I had 7kW of incandescent light? Yup - over 100 incandescent recessed ceiling cans. Now, I also had some fluorescent (soffits and over the kitchen island), but they were all 93+ CRI, so not terrifically efficient as fluorescent goes. Over 80% of the lighting wattage was on dimmers, however. Still, lighting is a fairly small portion of electric usage, especially when you figure that during the darkerst months, you're also typically heating, so the lights perform double duty, and in the lightest months you use less artificial light, which is good because you'd have to extract that heat through A/C.
I hate fluorescent. Flicker (even correctly working ones), poor color rendition, annoying startup/shutdown (instant vs. nearly imperceptable heat-up), poor dimming performance. It's okay for certain uses as long as the CRI is high, or you don't spend much time, but I'll likely never put CFL in my fixtures. The thought makes me shiver. I'll take a dimmed incadescent and pay a dollar or two more a month, thankyyouverymuch. (Or pay less, as it seems I've done)
You'd better hope he gets paid more than average. I mean, at least NFL players get a large salary (min is $180k this year?) for a job that effectively burns them out completely in 10 years or less (exceptions exist, of course).
The worst thing is that this kind of hype will draw more moths to the flame of $$$, ignoring entirely the quality-of-life considerations kids should be considering.
Oh, and yes - it's almost impossible to teach kids the valuse of time off, family, and job satisfaction. I was lucky that I chose a career that paid resonably and was way-cool. Down side was that there are only a few places in the US where I could find gainful employment - and very few are really nice places to raise a family. So I got a second degree, switched careers (a laterl shift really, not a radical change), and found a fantastic place to live. I'm just happy I figured out the game before I was 35.
Well, now that you mention it...
It recently happened to a family down the road from me
Oh, and yes, it's a stupid idea. The fact that it is convenient seems to blind people to the danger. Hydrogen has a significanlty wider flammability range, iirc, and could be considered a great deal more dangerous (though it is harder to confine due to its lower density).
So, how would you describe the local case here in Virginia where a man putting away a rifle (iirc) in his gun cabinet managed to accidentally discharge the weapon, sending the bullet through the floor above, where it glanced off a metal component of (?) his daughters bedframe and through his daughters head as she sat in her room, killing her nearly instantly?
In your words "someone is responsible for any discharge resulting in a death. SOMEBODY was pointing a loaded weapon at another person in that situation, and it was their negligence that cause that death." Does that apply here?
Now, I tend not to get in the middle of the gun/anti-gun wars. I must wonder in the above case, why would you store a loaded firearm in a locked cabinet in your basement? It certainly isn't for rapid response for self defense.
Ahem, earth to Sen. Luger: Nearly all journalists work for corporations, whose primary motivation is profit. They're all businesses.
It appears that if you blog and want to get away with it, you will ned to establish that you are a periodical publishing online. Since periodical is not defined, it may be an irregular periodical, or perhaps they will require Slate or ArsTechica status. Hard to tell. Based on the corporate interests lined up against such a "free speech" law, you should expect some very narrow language in the several-hundred page final draft. It will likely be sandwiched between amandments on prayer in schools and pork funding for some bumfark-nowhere bridge project.
Yeah, its amazing how much is on, espeically if you're into history. My wife has just about monopoized one of our TiVos with stuff on the american revolution, civil war, ancient rome, and ancient egyptian programming. I'm considering not adding the new HD TiVo to the univeral remote, just so that I can get a few of my shows recorded and kept for more than a day or two.
And kids shows...there are some real gems out there. Charlie & Lola, a series of 10 minute shorts, has got to be one of the "nicest" sibling shows on TV, and they've really nailed the whole 3 to 5 year old character traits. Stanley is another sleeper show that's mostly education about animals. Dora the Explorer and Go! Diego, Go! are both (minimally) spanish learning shows which emphasize pattern recognition and sequencing, as well as counting and problem solving. The music can get a bit annoying for adults, but the kids seem to love it.
Actually, you don't have to be an owner to sign a document as a PE. In fact, most laws require the engineer who performs or directly supervises the work sign (though this is routinely ignored by engineering companies, who generally only have principals/owners sign). The point is that the person who signs for the software (1) is intimiely familiar and invoved in the management of the design, if not performing the design/coding and (2) is perosnally liable for any errors which occur.
Software developers are actually lucky, as they can update their code to fix bugs for relatively little cost. Finding an error in an analysis, even if it only applies to one building, can result in repair costs that exceed the entire design fee.
I agree about the reconfiguring/changing (hacking) the software - if you decide to add several hundred amps of load to a system or remove a bearing wall - well, it's your own darned fault when things go wrong.
and how portable does it have to be?
There are a bazillion enclosures out there, I'm sure you've found. I picked up an "old" (but brand new) FW400 tower on ebay for $300. It holds 8 drives on 4 bridges which you can daisy chain. Came with a fan or two, and 6 drives totalling about 1TB have been cranking away for a year and a half now with no failures. It's the size and shape of a tower PC. Not really a cute companion for your mini.
Alternately, I've got a pair of Sabrent enclosures which I use for backup of my laptop and mp3s. I can take them on the road with me. They run off of USB power (USB2 transfer), and are only slightly bigger than the notebook drives they enclose. I won't say that they're fool proof, as I had to send one back almost immediatly after recieving it because it had a bad contriller board. However, they're supersmall and I haven't noticed heat issues, though they're not used in a hot environment. Down side is that they require 2.5" (notebook) drives, which will run you a bit more than a 3.5" on a per-gig basis, and you can't get a really big one (120GB max on the market right now, iirc).
Of course, you could also look at one of these which is a 2 bay, optional HW RAID 0, FW800 PATA (the old IDE/ATA spec) enclosure for $130. It's got fans and at least a bit of style, and with two 500GB drives would certainly give you room to spare.
That was the sound of the parent post humor rushing right over your heads.
I'm not even hoping for the new system to be as good as TiVo, just nearly as useful. I have no illusions that the interface will be better - TiVo is just too darned simple, and the remote is too good to expect a better internal solution from DirecTV. I look at what TiVo has done since the code split, and how little has been done on the DirecTV side, and can only assume that the sole-source model can only mean crappy results. I just hope they don't screw it up too much.
It's not much different than designing/building a building. There is no way to fully test a building, and 99% of the time it will be under low-stress conditions, never testing the limits it was designed for. It rests on a foundation which is extremly variable, with a material which is pooly understood at the designer level, and is subject to hidden flaws. And yet we weem to have a handle on liability issues, and who'e responsible for what. You speak of viruses and hackers, I speak of arsonists and stupid car/truck drivers that run into building columns.
I'm not saying its easy, but there should still be some responsibility for product qualtiy, and right now there is no accountability.
It's interesting to watch the erosion of personal responsibility in the design fields. Before the large corporations paid for their exemption, it was all personal liability. As a professional engineer, I am both corporately and personally liable for any errors in my work. The corporation does nothing to sheild me. Now, if I were in manufacturing, there are special exeptions that were bought from the legispatures which allow those engineers to shirk their responsibilities. This is the same thing - it's just that someone with a loud voice is pissed off enough to say we should return to where every designer must be resposible for his or her actions.
Can you imagine how products would be different if a single human in charge of a product/project would have to sign his or her name personally that it was done correctly, with proper safety standards in place and checked? There are some down side to this, don't get me wrong (longer cycles, higher costs), but its one thing to get something out the door, its another to put your name, reputation, and financial means on it before it goes.
Before I finish, I should mention that most engineering laws require engineering firms to be owned (usu at least 51%) by registered professionals, and it is common practice that the name on the design paperwork is an owner. This reduces the liklihood that a bean-counter will be an owner and require an incomplete project to go out the door in the name of finances alone.
But you agreed to the EULA when you installed, which states that the software deveopers have no liability whatsoever, even if the software is unusable, prodcues faulty results, and causes you direct harm. I mean, you agreed to it, right? Right? Sounds like he wants to make those clauses explicitly null and void, Rather than them being theoretcially invalid, but requiring a great deal of cash and a bucket of luck to prove they're invalid only after a loss has occured.
Didn't this all start back with visicalc, or some other spreadsheet, which included the "if it makes a mistake and your building collapses due to a calculatino error it's not our fault" clause back in the early 80s?
No, gun manufacturers should be liable for producing faulty safetys which do not function properly, or firing pins which may actuate without a trigger press.
That, and TiVo2Go is not available at any price for DirecTV - the primary competitor to Dish.
You're confusing "one way to entertain" with "the only way to entertain".
On a 6 hour trip, kids will get bored. My 3 year old "reads", colors, and watches TV on long trips, as well as listens to some childrens books on cd/tape. You may also be confusing Rugrats and GTA for more educational TV and games (you're allowed to put Sesame Street on if you feel that learning spanish and memory skills from Dora is too progressive). If you think that TV is not educational, I would say that you're not using it right. I would suggest you need to watch a bit more childrens television to find the programs which are useful. I've found very few "educational" books for my daughter that didn't require active adult participation. No that adult participation is bad, but reading stuff to kids for 6 hours in a car is not my idea of a relaxing trip.
I grew up when it was common place for kids to crawl around the back seat and count licence plates, do Mad Libs, color, sing, and ask "are we there yet" every fifteen minutes. I remember being bored out of my mind for most of the time, regarles of the number of games we had. I suspect that an hour or two fo Superfriends would have gon a long way to my childhood trips being more enjoyable. I can only imagine that beingn strapped into a 5-way harness as required by law can only make the process less enjoyable today.
That would require Verizon to relinquish their very lucrative middle-man spot in the multimedia transfer chain.
It's all about the money. Once you realize that, all these seemingly convoluted legal tactics and marketing ploys make sense.
...or if you do, you don't take them on long road trips. There's nothing like having a stash of Dora the Explorer or a disc full of Charlie and Lola to keep them entertained for boring parts of the trip. (For those who do not have children, and/or have forgotten what its was like to ride for a couple of hours in the car as a child, the "boring parts" would include the time from when the key goes into the ignition until you actually get out of the car at the destination. License plate games, I spy, and all the rest are boring...just not as boring as sitting quietly.)
I've captured a bunch of stuff off my DirecTivo (via analog capture) and reauthored it onto disc. It not only helps on long car rides, but also expands the number of shows available when we're at home without filling up the TiVo needlessly.
Troll?
I've yet to see a movie on PPV that has been released before DVD, at least for major titles.
A, B and C are all techically true, but you've missed the point that they are selling convenience. Think of it as buying a DVD by mail order / internet, but getting to watch the show immediately. It's a combination of shop-in-your-underwear lazy and gotta-drive-to-the-store instant gratification. For $17, it's a reasonable deal for most movies, especially new releases which typicall retial in the $15-18 range opening week, and rise to $20-$30 when moved to the standard racks. It's not nearly as good a deal as buying a bunch from Columbia House ($7-8/disc average), but - one again - instant gratification is in play here. Finally, of course you can try to record it, as long as your cable co's TOS and media flags allow you to do so, or you have circumvention equipment to defeat the limits (think macrovision defeaters). It may be legal, but they (the cable cos) aren't required to make it easy. This is easy, and remember that the target audience is the shop-in-your-underwear lazy crowd.
Well, I'd say yes to all four of your queries.
Medicine is getting better. As a result, people who are currently uncurable are generally able to live longer with their diseases. Pharmaceutical companies really do want to find cures for stuff. Cures are very valuable. Would you pay $20,000 to be cured of your disease, or pay $5/day to treat the symptoms? To the drug companies, $20,000 now is better than $5 a day from a financial standpoint. However, cures are very difficult and expensive, so they are happy with $5 a day to help you live with your disease until they can charge you $20,000 to cure you.
Healthcare costs are rising because we can do more, and liability requires them to do more to ensure minimal failure rates. 100 years ago, a torn ACL meant you would limp the rest of your life. We now have a multi-million dollar machine which can be run by a trained, certified technician making 6 figures annual salary, which can diagnozse your problem, and it can be fixed by a team of medical professionals billing several hundred dollars per hour in a secure facility with large fixed costs, and you can recover/heal with very little pain and almost no chance of secondary infection through the use of costly drugs. You'll be as good as new. How much is a life of pain and disability worth to you?
Medicine is better. More involved procedures cost more. The insideous part is that we all want these advances applied to us, because they are percieved as "needs", even though they didn't exist 100, 50, or 20 years ago. When you hurt, you want everything possible done.
Will you require extended absences due to illness? Could you end up with large, anticipated medical bills?
Both of these things cost the company money. How? Well, if you're out frequently, then there's the lost productivity - not just for you but for your entire team, and for any team which must work with your product. Also, if you incur large medical bills, you can be a reason for the companies health insurer to raise premiums. If the company pays, then it comes right out of their profit, if the employees pay, then it comes out of your coworkers pockets, and reduces moral.
It may not directly affect your job performace, but it affects the performance of the company as a whole. Now, it can help and hurt - like having an employee with children. The down side is that they will want "family time" and will be more resistant to 80 hour workweeks, plus there's the sick-kid time off and the other associated non-work activites, The up side is that they need the regular paycheck more than ever and will (grudgingly) perform extra work to keep from being layed off.
In the case of medical, there used to be a minor upside for the companies - if you leave you lose health insurance, and your new employer didn't have to cover preexisting conditions. With the new laws, insurance portability removes that obstacle. (BTW - I think that's a good thing. I just wish there was a private buy-in option that was available, too, but medicine has become so good that cure and care has been extended to finacially non-universal limits. Pretty sad if you think about it too much)