I just figured out how to sell this thing. Parents can get them as a first car for their kids. The 50 mile range and 2-seat design means they'll never be the kid who initiates a road trip. They've got enough range to get to school and back and make a short side-trip but that's it. I imagine the interior will make it a horrible "inspiration point" experience. It's like a leash and chastity belt in one little package.
Reading has always been a pastime of misfits and weirdos. I don't know where you get the idea that reading for mind-expansion or pleasure has ever been a popular activity. Well, except for romance novels. Chicks have been devouring those since Gutenberg's time.
If anything, these new-fangled gadgets will increase the number of people who read for fun/enlightenment because they can obtain titles instantly, on a whim. No worries about someone seeing them at the bookstore with all those nerds. No ordering online and waiting days for delivery.
Well, not yet but it's on the agenda. I'll be going on walkabout for a few years and dragging a hundred linear feet of books around the world doesn't fit the plan. Nor does spending thousands to store my books and media. Especially when the chances of ever returning to my starting point are very slim.
Back in the 90s, I went cellular-only and I was a wild and crazy edge case. I couldn't order pizza from some places because my prefix wasn't valid. Friends were wary of calling me before they checked with the phone company to see if my prefix was a long distance call. Remember long distance calls? Took less than a decade for cellular-only to become normal. And that's with the cost of cellular going UP over time. When I dropped the land line, I paid $25/month for 240 peak minutes plus unlimited nights and weekends starting at 6pm. Try finding a deal like that today. Even my dad dropped his land line recently. I can only think of three people I know who have land lines. And one of them only has it so he can buzz people through the gate.
I think "generations" is a lot longer than it will take for electronic publication to make paper publication an anachronism. Right now we have messy DRM, several proprietary platforms, hugely inflated prices, and miserable standalone readers yet look at the trend. Amazon's already selling more electronic "books" than paper books. Imagine what will happen when we have large 300-400dpi color displays, rational pricing that properly reflects the savings and efficiency of electronic production/distribution/delivery, and content portable across platforms/brands.
By the time this tech is a couple human generations old, we'll probably have something similar to the "mediatronic paper" in Diamond Age. I'll keep a few of my special editions around and sentimental titles but most of my books are kept for content, not form.
Some people aren't living paycheck to paycheck with just debit and credit card charges to watch out for. That law/rule doesn't cover me if someone gets into an investment account and clears it out. What if they get into my bank account and wire the contents of my checking and savings accounts? Once it's wired, the thief converts it to cash and it's gone. That shit goes through in minutes to hours. By the time I get my monthly statement, they're in the Bahamas sipping rum-based drinks. Well, I'd get an SMS alert within minutes but I still might not be able to stop it in time.
Ding ding ding! You are winner! Close enough for gubmint work, anyway.
At least that's what our tour guide said during an NTS tour. Although Area 15 isn't adjacent. There's a gap. Area 15 is the northeasternmost "area" on most publicly available maps and you can see Groom Lake Road heading northeast from Area 15 in the direction of Area 51. 15.8 miles from the Sedan crater viewing point according to Google Maps.
When I was a kid, they still advertised 8mm films in the back of the seedier porn mags, usually with a cheap or free projector since nobody had them any more.
If you're paying someone high five to low six figures to write code and they want a $120 monitor, give them the fucking monitor. Christ. Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.
I rarely coded during my IT career but, when I did, I hooked up TWO additional monitors. Code in the middle, debugger on the left, reference material on the right. (Do kids still use debuggers these days?) When I was done with the coding, the extra monitors went back in the closet because those CRTs took up a lot of space.
You can't trust their accounting. I have an account with Clear and my monthly usage totals for one adapter seem to be different every time I look. And I'm talking about usage for months that are long closed. I've seen the total go from 130 gigs to over 500 gigs down to 460 gigs, then 380 gigs, and now 200 gigs. For the same month. It's ridiculous. Their inability to accurately track data usage is probably the reason they don't have a specified cap. Because people would pay more attention and notice the discrepancies.
I'll trust neutral DD-WRT data from my router over the ISP any day of the week.
I pay over $60/month just to have a water hookup. The amount I pay for the water itself is a fraction of what I pay for the connection. If they can't break even with every property in the community paying that much every month just for the infrastructure, something's screwed up.
My grandpa had an RPN calculator made by Novus. I don't remember which model but it came out in the mid-70s. I remember playing with it when I was a kid. CSB
I've never "renewed my pates" in my life. They send me a bill, I send them money, they send me a sticker to put on my plate. If we have to add in an odometer reading, who's going to be authorized to record that information? Am I going to have to go to the DMV every year? That place is already a clusterfuck. Am I going to have to do it when I get my car smogged? That happens every 2 years. Well, it will after the first 5 years or so. Am I going to have to make quarterly estimates or something until that happens?
I wouldn't. A consumption-based tax practically balances itself. The heavier vehicles create more wear due to their greater mass and they pay more into the tax fund because they consume more fuel to move that mass around. There's nothing to calculate or measure or derive. Vehicles are taxed according to their impact on the infrastructure. I realize it's not an absolute "prefect justice for all" scenario but there's very little bureaucracy involved in the current scenario so it should cost very little to implement (or, in this case, maintain). XX cents per gallon consumed. Done. All-electric and alternative fuel vehicles are such a small percentage that it's not worth the hassle of worrying about them at this point.
If part of their job involves working with sensitive data, protecting that data IS part of their job. Understanding how to use the tools necessary to provide that protection IS part of their job. But many people think that learning such things is beneath them and that it's IT's job to figure out how to design a system that doesn't require thought or comprehension.
It's not just IT. I've watched my company gut every department except legal and accounting over the last few years. When I started here, a significant number of employees had been here for 10 years or more. At least a third of the staff. Some over 20 years. I was genuinely shocked to see that in this day and age. Not any more. I'm now considered an old-timer because I've been here longer than at least 80% of the employees.
Seriously. I own all of my hardware and do a bare-metal install on every laptop but there's no telling when some piece of malware may come out that secretly takes snapshots with the webcam. Or maybe I do a video chat then forget to turn off the camera. Heck, my current laptop doesn't even have a status light to warn me if it's on.
If I was renting/borrowing a laptop, I'd be even more inclined to be careful. Heck, I'd probably do everything on a VM.
A class action is NEVER about making he victims whole. It's about punishing the offending corporation. Period.
If you ever go into a class action thinking you're going to gain something personally, you're an idiot. (Unless, of course, you're a lawyer.)
Since this is slashdot, I'll try to make a poor analogy. It's like the geeks and nerds at a school hiring a freelance bully to take care of their local bully. The nerds and geeks shouldn't expect to get anything out of it except a cessation of hostile activity from their local bully. The freelancer gets to keep the bulk of whatever he manages to recover from the local bully. He may get the bully to agree to give a candy bar to every kid in the school but the geeks and nerds aren't going to recover multiple years' worth of lunch money. The goal is to prevent future bad behavior on the part of the local bully and nothing more.
Reminds me of one branch of my family that is some sort of big dark secret. At a wake, my grandpa was talking with one of his sisters about how he really don't know much about his family beyond his parents. Met one set of grandparents a couple of times and nobody else. "I know Uncle Jack but that's about it." "Oh, Jack wasn't really our uncle. We just called him that." It turned out that, other than meeting their father's parents a couple of times, they'd never met any other family ever. His sister said she overheard something about piracy when she was little but dad wouldn't talk about it. Given the time frame of the late 20s, I assumed patches, peg-legs, and parrots but it probably wasn't that exciting. She said, "I think they were trying to distance themselves from some scandal."
So I've got two sides of my family tree going back to Europe, the redneck branch that nobody cared enough to trace, and the turn-of-the century pirate branch.
Yes. I used a wireless-G bridge to the router for years and the current setup was wireless-G direct to the router until I cleaned up the kludgy network "design" and ran wires about a month ago.
You make a good point about their accounting tricks and bullshit. I have a couple of Clear 4G adapters and was impressed that I'd managed to pull over 100 gigs through one of them for two months straight. I just went back last week to see what my most recent month had been and saw that I'd somehow gone back in time and moved over 500 gigs in both of those first couple months. And I just looked now and see I'm down to 400something and 200 gigs for those months. And last month's usage went from 128 to 131 gigs while I was poking around.
It's sitting in a garage with no heat or AC. I use just about every aspect of DD-WRT and have moved terabytes of data through it in the last few months. And that's hardly a record for my old Linksys routers.
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I just figured out how to sell this thing. Parents can get them as a first car for their kids. The 50 mile range and 2-seat design means they'll never be the kid who initiates a road trip. They've got enough range to get to school and back and make a short side-trip but that's it. I imagine the interior will make it a horrible "inspiration point" experience. It's like a leash and chastity belt in one little package.
Reading has always been a pastime of misfits and weirdos. I don't know where you get the idea that reading for mind-expansion or pleasure has ever been a popular activity. Well, except for romance novels. Chicks have been devouring those since Gutenberg's time.
If anything, these new-fangled gadgets will increase the number of people who read for fun/enlightenment because they can obtain titles instantly, on a whim. No worries about someone seeing them at the bookstore with all those nerds. No ordering online and waiting days for delivery.
Raises hand.
Well, not yet but it's on the agenda. I'll be going on walkabout for a few years and dragging a hundred linear feet of books around the world doesn't fit the plan. Nor does spending thousands to store my books and media. Especially when the chances of ever returning to my starting point are very slim.
Back in the 90s, I went cellular-only and I was a wild and crazy edge case. I couldn't order pizza from some places because my prefix wasn't valid. Friends were wary of calling me before they checked with the phone company to see if my prefix was a long distance call. Remember long distance calls? Took less than a decade for cellular-only to become normal. And that's with the cost of cellular going UP over time. When I dropped the land line, I paid $25/month for 240 peak minutes plus unlimited nights and weekends starting at 6pm. Try finding a deal like that today. Even my dad dropped his land line recently. I can only think of three people I know who have land lines. And one of them only has it so he can buzz people through the gate.
I think "generations" is a lot longer than it will take for electronic publication to make paper publication an anachronism. Right now we have messy DRM, several proprietary platforms, hugely inflated prices, and miserable standalone readers yet look at the trend. Amazon's already selling more electronic "books" than paper books. Imagine what will happen when we have large 300-400dpi color displays, rational pricing that properly reflects the savings and efficiency of electronic production/distribution/delivery, and content portable across platforms/brands.
By the time this tech is a couple human generations old, we'll probably have something similar to the "mediatronic paper" in Diamond Age. I'll keep a few of my special editions around and sentimental titles but most of my books are kept for content, not form.
Money?!? The perpetrators need to be in prison. Not county jail. Not weekend lockup. Not community service. Not probation. PRISON!
Some people aren't living paycheck to paycheck with just debit and credit card charges to watch out for. That law/rule doesn't cover me if someone gets into an investment account and clears it out. What if they get into my bank account and wire the contents of my checking and savings accounts? Once it's wired, the thief converts it to cash and it's gone. That shit goes through in minutes to hours. By the time I get my monthly statement, they're in the Bahamas sipping rum-based drinks. Well, I'd get an SMS alert within minutes but I still might not be able to stop it in time.
Are those like ATM machines?
Ding ding ding! You are winner! Close enough for gubmint work, anyway.
At least that's what our tour guide said during an NTS tour. Although Area 15 isn't adjacent. There's a gap. Area 15 is the northeasternmost "area" on most publicly available maps and you can see Groom Lake Road heading northeast from Area 15 in the direction of Area 51. 15.8 miles from the Sedan crater viewing point according to Google Maps.
Now I can check out dad's porn stash.
When I was a kid, they still advertised 8mm films in the back of the seedier porn mags, usually with a cheap or free projector since nobody had them any more.
If you're paying someone high five to low six figures to write code and they want a $120 monitor, give them the fucking monitor. Christ. Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.
I rarely coded during my IT career but, when I did, I hooked up TWO additional monitors. Code in the middle, debugger on the left, reference material on the right. (Do kids still use debuggers these days?) When I was done with the coding, the extra monitors went back in the closet because those CRTs took up a lot of space.
2007? Hell, I had a Toshiba Libretto back in the late 90s and I bought it used. About the size of a VHS tape. (Remember those?)
You can't trust their accounting. I have an account with Clear and my monthly usage totals for one adapter seem to be different every time I look. And I'm talking about usage for months that are long closed. I've seen the total go from 130 gigs to over 500 gigs down to 460 gigs, then 380 gigs, and now 200 gigs. For the same month. It's ridiculous. Their inability to accurately track data usage is probably the reason they don't have a specified cap. Because people would pay more attention and notice the discrepancies.
I'll trust neutral DD-WRT data from my router over the ISP any day of the week.
I pay over $60/month just to have a water hookup. The amount I pay for the water itself is a fraction of what I pay for the connection. If they can't break even with every property in the community paying that much every month just for the infrastructure, something's screwed up.
My grandpa had an RPN calculator made by Novus. I don't remember which model but it came out in the mid-70s. I remember playing with it when I was a kid. CSB
I've never "renewed my pates" in my life. They send me a bill, I send them money, they send me a sticker to put on my plate. If we have to add in an odometer reading, who's going to be authorized to record that information? Am I going to have to go to the DMV every year? That place is already a clusterfuck. Am I going to have to do it when I get my car smogged? That happens every 2 years. Well, it will after the first 5 years or so. Am I going to have to make quarterly estimates or something until that happens?
I wouldn't. A consumption-based tax practically balances itself. The heavier vehicles create more wear due to their greater mass and they pay more into the tax fund because they consume more fuel to move that mass around. There's nothing to calculate or measure or derive. Vehicles are taxed according to their impact on the infrastructure. I realize it's not an absolute "prefect justice for all" scenario but there's very little bureaucracy involved in the current scenario so it should cost very little to implement (or, in this case, maintain). XX cents per gallon consumed. Done. All-electric and alternative fuel vehicles are such a small percentage that it's not worth the hassle of worrying about them at this point.
If part of their job involves working with sensitive data, protecting that data IS part of their job. Understanding how to use the tools necessary to provide that protection IS part of their job. But many people think that learning such things is beneath them and that it's IT's job to figure out how to design a system that doesn't require thought or comprehension.
It's not just IT. I've watched my company gut every department except legal and accounting over the last few years. When I started here, a significant number of employees had been here for 10 years or more. At least a third of the staff. Some over 20 years. I was genuinely shocked to see that in this day and age. Not any more. I'm now considered an old-timer because I've been here longer than at least 80% of the employees.
And the new trend from above seems to be shifting from Design, Test, Deploy to Imagine, Deploy, Damage Control.
And enterprise users are dumb. It's a bad combination.
Seriously. I own all of my hardware and do a bare-metal install on every laptop but there's no telling when some piece of malware may come out that secretly takes snapshots with the webcam. Or maybe I do a video chat then forget to turn off the camera. Heck, my current laptop doesn't even have a status light to warn me if it's on.
If I was renting/borrowing a laptop, I'd be even more inclined to be careful. Heck, I'd probably do everything on a VM.
A class action is NEVER about making he victims whole. It's about punishing the offending corporation. Period.
If you ever go into a class action thinking you're going to gain something personally, you're an idiot. (Unless, of course, you're a lawyer.)
Since this is slashdot, I'll try to make a poor analogy. It's like the geeks and nerds at a school hiring a freelance bully to take care of their local bully. The nerds and geeks shouldn't expect to get anything out of it except a cessation of hostile activity from their local bully. The freelancer gets to keep the bulk of whatever he manages to recover from the local bully. He may get the bully to agree to give a candy bar to every kid in the school but the geeks and nerds aren't going to recover multiple years' worth of lunch money. The goal is to prevent future bad behavior on the part of the local bully and nothing more.
Reminds me of one branch of my family that is some sort of big dark secret. At a wake, my grandpa was talking with one of his sisters about how he really don't know much about his family beyond his parents. Met one set of grandparents a couple of times and nobody else. "I know Uncle Jack but that's about it." "Oh, Jack wasn't really our uncle. We just called him that." It turned out that, other than meeting their father's parents a couple of times, they'd never met any other family ever. His sister said she overheard something about piracy when she was little but dad wouldn't talk about it. Given the time frame of the late 20s, I assumed patches, peg-legs, and parrots but it probably wasn't that exciting. She said, "I think they were trying to distance themselves from some scandal."
So I've got two sides of my family tree going back to Europe, the redneck branch that nobody cared enough to trace, and the turn-of-the century pirate branch.
Yes. I used a wireless-G bridge to the router for years and the current setup was wireless-G direct to the router until I cleaned up the kludgy network "design" and ran wires about a month ago.
You make a good point about their accounting tricks and bullshit. I have a couple of Clear 4G adapters and was impressed that I'd managed to pull over 100 gigs through one of them for two months straight. I just went back last week to see what my most recent month had been and saw that I'd somehow gone back in time and moved over 500 gigs in both of those first couple months. And I just looked now and see I'm down to 400something and 200 gigs for those months. And last month's usage went from 128 to 131 gigs while I was poking around.
I don't know what you're doing wrong.
"Time: 10:28:55 up 315 days, 4:49, load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.00"
It's sitting in a garage with no heat or AC. I use just about every aspect of DD-WRT and have moved terabytes of data through it in the last few months. And that's hardly a record for my old Linksys routers.