That's perfect - it's sort of pirate-self-limiting. That's what the RIAA wants - to make it inconvenient, not impossible.
As for power consumption, make it a toggle button with an auto-off for no devices in range. If you only use the extra juice during transfer, it shouldn't have a serious impact.
OTOH, the other post about bluetooth headsets is pretty enticing. I'd be next in line to buy one if I could get it with a waterproof BT headset for swimming laps (the ipod being safely inside a sealed pouch).
Because they're being careful, rather than just blasting their way in so they can suck it all out and bottle it at a huge profit. I would expect them to seal it when they're done, as well. And, honestly, these soon-to-be-endangered microbes are arguably no longer an active part of the overall ecosystem. Low chance of upsetting the current ecological "balance", high likelihood of information which will help fill in some scientific blanks. There's also very little to "destroy" on the surface, and no existing tourist trade to upset (unless you count idiot solo pilots) on the continent.
Now, it sounds like you'd like to tap a few spots to see if they brew texas tea the same way up in ANWR as they do on daddy's ranch (sorry, that was a low shot, but it sounded good). I think you have a good point - we should let you drill. Of course, you'll be expected to be as carful as a scientist, have low or no impact on the current ecology, airlift everything in and out on a once-monthly schedule, and make sure that any facilities are low-impact, eco-friendly, don't interrupt the current viewshed, and are completely dismantled and no visible trace remains when you leave. Oh, and since you're not a governmental body with a guaranteed cash source, we'll be asking you to put up a bond for the cleanup and any potential spill remediation. Enjoy!
Clearly I didn't get the reference. I just thought "Boy, if I'd been in freezing water for half a million years, you'd better believe there's be some serious shrinkage."
"If you're creative, you can come up with more problems for this solution fairly easily."
Wow, that's just like SmartCards! And they've practically revolutionized the worl^H^H^H^H...um. Well, they've made DTV a PITA.
Usually a solution without a problem is just an excuse to come up with more problems.
Sorry, flonker, didn't mean to lash out at you specifically, it's just that part of your comment just struck me as way too close to the smartcard parallel, which has been a wholesale disaster for the consumer. All control, no liberation.
Make sure you add the line: if the company is ever sold, you information will be deleted prior to the sale. If these terms ever change, your information will be deleted unless you affirm the new policy. The company or purchaser will be liable for $10,000 per record which is compromised, distributed, transferred or sold for any reason without the express written consent of the record subject.
That should do it. But I still won't register. Your primary reason for having me register is to limit my use of your site. No thanks.
Did you just make my point again? Veggie oil is more expensive than pertrolium based fuels...by a factor of 8 or more. (That's gallon for gallon. I'm not sure what the available energy is in a gallon of vegetable oil, but it's probably not 8 fold gasoline)
I'm not saying its bad, I'm saying its not economical. Veggie deisel looks kinda neat, but so do batteries or solar, they're just not quite prime-time.
Of course its random, otherwise it could be further compressed. Not saying that it wouldn't stand out (I'm not a rf nut, so I'm way out of my depth here) but any digital signal which isn't esentially random (I'm not a mathemetician, so I'm way out of my depth here) can be further compressed (I am a former rocket scientist and have dealt with getting data to and from satellites, and relatively random data better not be counting on 2:1 lossless compression). Since the whole idea is to maximize the bandwidth, the compression of the singnal needs to be maximized, though I'll give you parity and error correction on a random stream.
Actually, it's kind of funny, but the TiVo survives in my house as an everyday-use appliance for three reasons - "Season Pass" which means we never know when the live show is on, and never have to. "Suggestions," which find about 2/3 to 3/4 of what my wife watches with only minimal maintenance or oversight. She used the Tu/Td for the first month and hasn't touched it since, and she's always got 15-20 interesting (to her) programs to watch at any moment. Simple storage of broadcast TV - they all do this, and TiVo could organize stuff better, but damnit, it works, and when my 2 year old asks for Bear in the Big Blue House, I've got the four least-annoying episodes ready to go.
Sure, I'd be nice to be able to do all the gee whiz stuff on a MediaPC, but it does one or two things so well, you get spoiled - and you just can't give it up. I think of it is the Mac syndrom. Sure there's better stuff out there, but I really, really like how it does the every day things. (I don't own a mac, and have always disliked them, but TiVo-ownership really is like a Mac thing)
Luckily, he was totally incompetent, or you'd have been practicing drawing red circles on the Sunday newspaper.
Seriously, though, it took you at least 4 months to hang this guy out to dry. If he'd had even a bit of common sense he'd have made you guys cry uncle in one way or another. And you have a CEO who appears to at least care a little bit - that sets your company apart from the 80% who's CEO determines policy by the size of this coming quarterly bonus.
But, as most folks have pointed out, that means you get to deduct only $320 of the $1320 you paid out, and that's only if your Broadband and Cell are 100% for work. You'd better have call records, and all the numbers better be to vendors or your office. 25% personal uses will totally wipe out your deduction.
Oh, and don't forget, your spouses income counts too. If she makes 50k, your combined floor is $2k.
That's why the brass all drive $50k vehicles that the company leases, right? Because they're business only, and they do so much business travel. I call bullshit. When the CEO drops his non-standard benefits package, I'll believe you.
No the CIO is "in" with the brass and will never get fired, no matter how shitty a job he does. As long at the CEO can check his email anytime he wants, it will look like the CIO is doing his job. When things get borked further down, it will be the employees fault.
Find another job and write off the company, or start your own business. I did, and now I get to post on/. whenever I want!
(of course, spending 30 mintes reading/. means I'll be working this evening on jobs that have to be done by tomorrow, but as my boss, I've approved the overtime pay;-)
Though they'd probably still fire you out of vindictiveness, it costs the better part of a year's salary to train a new employee if you've got a file full of qualified resumes and most of them are out of work and can start immediately. The cost for a talent search, down time, temps, and retraining can go as high as 3xsalary if you're not prepared. It's really not financially worth letting you go over a cell phone bill, but the same @sshole who can't find $500 for your benefit will always seem to find that extra $50k to replace you.
If they're cutting good-morale benefits like subsidized broadband, I'm going to guess that they're not carrying a bunch of extra IT guys on the payroll for the crunch times.
You mean $800 a year, right? I'm going to give the company the benefit of the doubt and say you're in a 7% state and 25% federal bracket. You pay ~7.5% in FICA. 1/(1-.395)*$480=$794. Woe be unto you if you and your spouse are in higher tax bracket(s).
But you can only deduct it from your taxes if it exceeds 2% of you AGI. Now, you may be getting paid poorly, but I'm guessing that your broadband connection, cell phone, blackberry, and other gizmos don't add up to 2%, even if they were exclusively used for work.
I can't add much, but I don't have mod points, but this is such a good FP, I just had to chime in with a "me too" post.
What the company used to give you was, to some extent, a benefit to partially compensate you for your availability. They have chosen to reduce your benfits. You make the call.
You must be from SoCal. In Virginia I cool a 300SF office on the top floor of a drafty, 12' ceilinged, uninsulated 1930s school building in 85 degree weather for about $5 worth of electricity per month. And I'm the only A/C'd office in the building (mostly warehouse space now), so I get no cooling from the adjacent spaces.
It may work fine for me, but if the whole family has to use it, it had better work perfectly 99.95% of the time. Features are wonderful, but if it doesn't work when you wife presses the "do this" button on the remote twice in a three month period, you may as well have purchased a rock with flashing lights on it.
MediaPCs are still for hobbiests interested in playing around, not for consumer use.
Interesting. I've had two TiVos, and both required occasioanl rebooting. The first required it every two weeks to two months, the second has had to be rebooted three times in the year I've owned it. Giving the simplicity of the software running and total control over the OS and software, I don't think that's any better than having to reboot my XP workstation every three weeks to a month.
I'm not going to even suggest that I can pull spherical geometry ratios out of my ass on a moment's notice, but I'm guessing one of you is wrong. Over a 300 mile distance, a sphere of the earth's size is pretty flat. For one of you to get an r=153 miles and the other to get 309 miles seems out of proportion. I would have guessed a difference in the under-5% range.
No, these will only be viable over population centers. In other words, if you already have three or four broadband choices and WiFi coverage from terrestrial sources, you'll probably get one more option. If you're more than fifty miles outside a city with population >1M, you'll still be stuck with dialup or analog cell modem.
It's a great idea, although the concept is somewhat old. Earlier suggestions had multiple solar powered aircraft orbting a fixed point to provide redundant operations for failures and maintenance.
That would be great! Of course, then I'd have to pay to rent the vehicle, spend an hour in the rental place, drive to and from the rental place, and probably get a bigger, less gas-efficient vehicle than if I'd got something to drive on an everyday basis. Hmmmm, maybe that'd be a total pain in the ass.
Plus, if you run out in downtown Washington DC, you'd better have a metro card to get back home and brew up another pot, 'cause filling stations don't carry it.;-)
And they kept the speed limits at 55 'cause it generated lost of ticket revenue. (Though "55 saves lives" was a popular slogan, one might recommend that elimiating air traffic would also save lives, but it's not really a practical or economical solution.)
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That's perfect - it's sort of pirate-self-limiting. That's what the RIAA wants - to make it inconvenient, not impossible.
As for power consumption, make it a toggle button with an auto-off for no devices in range. If you only use the extra juice during transfer, it shouldn't have a serious impact.
OTOH, the other post about bluetooth headsets is pretty enticing. I'd be next in line to buy one if I could get it with a waterproof BT headset for swimming laps (the ipod being safely inside a sealed pouch).
Because they're being careful, rather than just blasting their way in so they can suck it all out and bottle it at a huge profit. I would expect them to seal it when they're done, as well. And, honestly, these soon-to-be-endangered microbes are arguably no longer an active part of the overall ecosystem. Low chance of upsetting the current ecological "balance", high likelihood of information which will help fill in some scientific blanks. There's also very little to "destroy" on the surface, and no existing tourist trade to upset (unless you count idiot solo pilots) on the continent.
Now, it sounds like you'd like to tap a few spots to see if they brew texas tea the same way up in ANWR as they do on daddy's ranch (sorry, that was a low shot, but it sounded good). I think you have a good point - we should let you drill. Of course, you'll be expected to be as carful as a scientist, have low or no impact on the current ecology, airlift everything in and out on a once-monthly schedule, and make sure that any facilities are low-impact, eco-friendly, don't interrupt the current viewshed, and are completely dismantled and no visible trace remains when you leave. Oh, and since you're not a governmental body with a guaranteed cash source, we'll be asking you to put up a bond for the cleanup and any potential spill remediation. Enjoy!
Clearly I didn't get the reference. I just thought "Boy, if I'd been in freezing water for half a million years, you'd better believe there's be some serious shrinkage."
"If you're creative, you can come up with more problems for this solution fairly easily."
Wow, that's just like SmartCards! And they've practically revolutionized the worl^H^H^H^H...um. Well, they've made DTV a PITA.
Usually a solution without a problem is just an excuse to come up with more problems.
Sorry, flonker, didn't mean to lash out at you specifically, it's just that part of your comment just struck me as way too close to the smartcard parallel, which has been a wholesale disaster for the consumer. All control, no liberation.
Make sure you add the line: if the company is ever sold, you information will be deleted prior to the sale. If these terms ever change, your information will be deleted unless you affirm the new policy. The company or purchaser will be liable for $10,000 per record which is compromised, distributed, transferred or sold for any reason without the express written consent of the record subject.
That should do it. But I still won't register. Your primary reason for having me register is to limit my use of your site. No thanks.
Did you just make my point again? Veggie oil is more expensive than pertrolium based fuels...by a factor of 8 or more. (That's gallon for gallon. I'm not sure what the available energy is in a gallon of vegetable oil, but it's probably not 8 fold gasoline)
I'm not saying its bad, I'm saying its not economical. Veggie deisel looks kinda neat, but so do batteries or solar, they're just not quite prime-time.
Of course its random, otherwise it could be further compressed. Not saying that it wouldn't stand out (I'm not a rf nut, so I'm way out of my depth here) but any digital signal which isn't esentially random (I'm not a mathemetician, so I'm way out of my depth here) can be further compressed (I am a former rocket scientist and have dealt with getting data to and from satellites, and relatively random data better not be counting on 2:1 lossless compression). Since the whole idea is to maximize the bandwidth, the compression of the singnal needs to be maximized, though I'll give you parity and error correction on a random stream.
Actually, it's kind of funny, but the TiVo survives in my house as an everyday-use appliance for three reasons - "Season Pass" which means we never know when the live show is on, and never have to. "Suggestions," which find about 2/3 to 3/4 of what my wife watches with only minimal maintenance or oversight. She used the Tu/Td for the first month and hasn't touched it since, and she's always got 15-20 interesting (to her) programs to watch at any moment. Simple storage of broadcast TV - they all do this, and TiVo could organize stuff better, but damnit, it works, and when my 2 year old asks for Bear in the Big Blue House, I've got the four least-annoying episodes ready to go.
Sure, I'd be nice to be able to do all the gee whiz stuff on a MediaPC, but it does one or two things so well, you get spoiled - and you just can't give it up. I think of it is the Mac syndrom. Sure there's better stuff out there, but I really, really like how it does the every day things. (I don't own a mac, and have always disliked them, but TiVo-ownership really is like a Mac thing)
Luckily, he was totally incompetent, or you'd have been practicing drawing red circles on the Sunday newspaper.
Seriously, though, it took you at least 4 months to hang this guy out to dry. If he'd had even a bit of common sense he'd have made you guys cry uncle in one way or another. And you have a CEO who appears to at least care a little bit - that sets your company apart from the 80% who's CEO determines policy by the size of this coming quarterly bonus.
But, as most folks have pointed out, that means you get to deduct only $320 of the $1320 you paid out, and that's only if your Broadband and Cell are 100% for work. You'd better have call records, and all the numbers better be to vendors or your office. 25% personal uses will totally wipe out your deduction.
;-)
Oh, and don't forget, your spouses income counts too. If she makes 50k, your combined floor is $2k.
You'd be better off with a dog that has a SSN
That's why the brass all drive $50k vehicles that the company leases, right? Because they're business only, and they do so much business travel. I call bullshit. When the CEO drops his non-standard benefits package, I'll believe you.
No the CIO is "in" with the brass and will never get fired, no matter how shitty a job he does. As long at the CEO can check his email anytime he wants, it will look like the CIO is doing his job. When things get borked further down, it will be the employees fault.
/. whenever I want!
/. means I'll be working this evening on jobs that have to be done by tomorrow, but as my boss, I've approved the overtime pay ;-)
Find another job and write off the company, or start your own business. I did, and now I get to post on
(of course, spending 30 mintes reading
Though they'd probably still fire you out of vindictiveness, it costs the better part of a year's salary to train a new employee if you've got a file full of qualified resumes and most of them are out of work and can start immediately. The cost for a talent search, down time, temps, and retraining can go as high as 3xsalary if you're not prepared. It's really not financially worth letting you go over a cell phone bill, but the same @sshole who can't find $500 for your benefit will always seem to find that extra $50k to replace you.
If they're cutting good-morale benefits like subsidized broadband, I'm going to guess that they're not carrying a bunch of extra IT guys on the payroll for the crunch times.
You mean $800 a year, right? I'm going to give the company the benefit of the doubt and say you're in a 7% state and 25% federal bracket. You pay ~7.5% in FICA. 1/(1-.395)*$480=$794. Woe be unto you if you and your spouse are in higher tax bracket(s).
But you can only deduct it from your taxes if it exceeds 2% of you AGI. Now, you may be getting paid poorly, but I'm guessing that your broadband connection, cell phone, blackberry, and other gizmos don't add up to 2%, even if they were exclusively used for work.
I can't add much, but I don't have mod points, but this is such a good FP, I just had to chime in with a "me too" post.
What the company used to give you was, to some extent, a benefit to partially compensate you for your availability. They have chosen to reduce your benfits. You make the call.
You must be from SoCal. In Virginia I cool a 300SF office on the top floor of a drafty, 12' ceilinged, uninsulated 1930s school building in 85 degree weather for about $5 worth of electricity per month. And I'm the only A/C'd office in the building (mostly warehouse space now), so I get no cooling from the adjacent spaces.
It may work fine for me, but if the whole family has to use it, it had better work perfectly 99.95% of the time. Features are wonderful, but if it doesn't work when you wife presses the "do this" button on the remote twice in a three month period, you may as well have purchased a rock with flashing lights on it.
MediaPCs are still for hobbiests interested in playing around, not for consumer use.
Interesting. I've had two TiVos, and both required occasioanl rebooting. The first required it every two weeks to two months, the second has had to be rebooted three times in the year I've owned it. Giving the simplicity of the software running and total control over the OS and software, I don't think that's any better than having to reboot my XP workstation every three weeks to a month.
I'm not going to even suggest that I can pull spherical geometry ratios out of my ass on a moment's notice, but I'm guessing one of you is wrong. Over a 300 mile distance, a sphere of the earth's size is pretty flat. For one of you to get an r=153 miles and the other to get 309 miles seems out of proportion. I would have guessed a difference in the under-5% range.
Is there a factor of two lurking somewhere?
No, these will only be viable over population centers. In other words, if you already have three or four broadband choices and WiFi coverage from terrestrial sources, you'll probably get one more option. If you're more than fifty miles outside a city with population >1M, you'll still be stuck with dialup or analog cell modem.
It's a great idea, although the concept is somewhat old. Earlier suggestions had multiple solar powered aircraft orbting a fixed point to provide redundant operations for failures and maintenance.
That would be great! Of course, then I'd have to pay to rent the vehicle, spend an hour in the rental place, drive to and from the rental place, and probably get a bigger, less gas-efficient vehicle than if I'd got something to drive on an everyday basis. Hmmmm, maybe that'd be a total pain in the ass.
Buy the case, veggie oil costs $8/gal.
;-)
Plus, if you run out in downtown Washington DC, you'd better have a metro card to get back home and brew up another pot, 'cause filling stations don't carry it.
And they kept the speed limits at 55 'cause it generated lost of ticket revenue. (Though "55 saves lives" was a popular slogan, one might recommend that elimiating air traffic would also save lives, but it's not really a practical or economical solution.)