It seems that most of the online price checking takes place at OTHER stores, with customers checking the price of something on AMAZON. If Amazon thought to patent this method, maybe it's because they don't want competitors to block these online price checks.
Spare me the straw-man arguments. There is hardly any difference between Republicans paid by PAC money and Democrats paid by PAC money. Both parties have more in common than either would like to admit.
This is a bad idea that the airline lobby floats every few years. When the Democrats had control, they almost bought it until cooler heads prevailed. With Republicans in charge, it's time for another try. There really isn't much that the Federal government couldn't improve with privatization, but this is one of those things.
If this passes, the airlines will dominate the privatized company, transferring as much cost as they can to general aviation, while abusing their power for the purpose of limiting competition. They will dumb-down the controllers, resulting in chaos. It's hard to believe anyone could make the air travel industry any less accountable than it already is, but empowering an industry with a notoriously poor reputation of policing itself would be one way to do it.
Have we learned nothing from privatized airport security? Although I despise TSA, I have to admit that privatized airport security prior to 9/11 was absolutely useless. TSA, for all its well-documented flaws, ended the concept of minimum wage and constant turnover among security agents.
I had a Kindle Fire HD that went into brick mode a few years ago. Despite numerous attempts with Amazon tech support, Internet research, and all sorts of recovery procedures involving a "factory cable" to get into fast boot mode, it remains a brick to this day. It starts up OK, but when it gets to the unlock screen, it freezes after the swipe, leaving no keypad and thus no way to enter an unlock code. I have found others with the same problem, but not a single one seems to have a solution.
When Amazon elected to customize Android, they acquired the blame for any problems that vanilla Android does not have. IMHO, they have failed in this endeavor, on various devices in various ways. There are many reliable Android implementations out there, but I doubt any of them are from Amazon.
1. Auto delete any voice mail from numbers that are not in my address book. 2. Access code required to leave a voice mail message. Unauthenticated senders need not apply. 3. Voice recognition software screens each voice mail, comparing new messages to a centralized database of spam messages.
I will do whatever it takes to make sure these crap calls fail. At worst, I'll ditch voice mail altogether.
There is something to be said for putting the telephone out of its misery. With so many illegal telemarketers ignoring the do not call list, the days of voice telephone service are numbered anyway. A tsunami of crap voice mail would finish it off immediately.
I think Colbert's brand of stupidity has no entertainment value. I vote against him every night with my TV remote control. He doesn't offend me because I don't watch him. Changing the channel is a 100% solution -- no FCC action required.
It's going to take more than fuel savings to phase out the fossil fuel car, otherwise it would have happened already. Fortunately, a fleet of self-driving on-demand robo-cars offers a number of additional cost savings:
1. Insurance. The cost may never fully go away, but automated driving software should start to outperform humans in a few years. 2. Parking. Robo cars never have to pay for overpriced urban parking. They can be parked and recharged in the outer suburbs, or in some cases, out of state. They can drive around while waiting to be summoned by a passenger. 3. Property tax. The robo cars will be registered in a state that does not charge property tax on motor vehicles. 4. Driver. You get the benefit of a chauffeur without paying a human to do the work.
Bear in mind, there are many special interests that make a lot of money from the status quo. For one thing, government is heavily invested in mass transit, traffic cams, speeding tickets, etc. Traditional cabs and private cars might be the first things to go, but nobody is going to bother with a bus or train when it's easier to summon a robo car and have it take you directly to your destination.
One could reasonably make the case that TCP/IP was not designed to elevate one customer's packets over another. Application layer protocols (video + voice over web and email) certainly, but even then, the original intent was to set those priorities for each user's own network.
When consumers purchase "Internet access" (for home use or a commercial server farm), they expect to have equal access to all of it, subject to the traditional limitations of how much bandwidth the other side has purchased, how many hops it takes to efficiently route the traffic, and any weak spots along the way. Deliberately degrading certain destinations (the "slow lane") and still calling the service "Internet" is IMHO selling an adulterated product, just as a product labelled "ground beef" is expected to be made from beef instead of soy.
I have VM with voice + 5G of data for $35/month, on an HTC phone that I bought for $150. It's not easy to beat that deal.
Verizon, on the other hand, has no service at my house. All of the other carriers do. Therefore, my choice for wireless carrier is "anyone but Verizon".
Interesting point. HR due diligence usually involves a "background check", which is a euphemism for gathering data which is loosely related or sometimes unrelated to job requirements. Asking for a W-2 costs nothing so background checking services do it routinely.
I had a situation where I was applying for a job while self-employed. For complicated reasons, supplying a W-2 was not an option. In the end, the employer and I both agreed that my current income had nothing to do with the price of tea in China, so they made their offer based on what they were willing to pay. The offer made sense, so I accepted it. Alternatively, if they really wanted to use my current income as the baseline for salary negotiation, there was always the possibility that I would demand a salary commensurate with my best year as a self-employed consultant, or at least the average, at which point the deal falls apart.
I'm not a fan of lying about any part of the job application process. It can lead to all sorts of trouble and I have no reason to do it. So I tell the truth and let the process play out. Unfortunately, not everyone plays by these rules. I know of several people with various issues that would never pass a routine background check, and yet they end up working at some of the largest employers in America! If I use LinkedIn to look up people that I know, sometimes I find fake degrees, inflated job titles, fictional jobs at real companies, and fictional jobs at fictional companies. At first i thought it was hilarious, until I realized that honest job seekers are competing against these people. Even worse, I considered the "verifiability" of my own situation and found some problems. Long after my departure, several of my former employers have merged, downsized, sold, relocated, outsourced, or discontinued their operations. Any document that I produce could easily be drafted in Word or Photoshop -- nobody is in a position to prove or disprove anything. If I provide references, they could just as easily be friends with a script.
Thanks to modern technology, it is now easier to "verify" a fake background than a real one!
If you have multiple planes trying to land and any pilot can approach from any direction, only one can land at any given time unless somebody coordinates the touchdown point for each of them. Lotsa luck ensuring proper separation while trying to control how many degrees of the arc is allocated to each plane. A traditional airport will have several runways operating at any given time, so the circular runway does not seem to be much of an advantage. And then there is the side loading problem that comes from takeoff and landing on a curved runway.
One way to solve both problems is to make the entire runway revolve to match the speed of the current aircraft on final approach. As soon as the wheels touch down, the pilot hits the brakes and the runway decelarates to match. The aircraft lands in place, with very little space required. Then the plane taxis to the inner track of taxiways, while the runway accelerates to match the speed of the next approaching aircraft.
Although I think the idea of a circular runway is crazy, and the concept of a revolving runway is a monumental challenge, it might actually work.
For all we know, the CIA might have written deliberate vulnerabilities to be patched into production code. Either that, or maybe they bullied software companies into ignoring certain vulnerabilities that would otherwise be fixed. Considering how many tech companies have been enlisted by big-government and how many cover stories have been busted, nothing can surprise me anymore.
The panda eats shoots and leaves. The lack of a comma means that "and" is the conjunction between "shoots" and "leaves". What is the panda doing? Eating.
But consider this: The panda eats, shoots, and leaves. What is the [armed] panda doing? Eating, shooting, and leaving.
In the first example, there is no comma, and therefore the words are interpreted as a single action. In the second example, 2 commas create a list with exactly 3 items.
Applying the panda scenario to today's crisis, it becomes obvious that commas determine the number of items on a list, and words in the absence of a comma are interpreted together when there is no punctuation to group them any other way.
I agree. It seems bizarre to determine a truck driver's eligibility for overtime based on what is hauled in his truck. Would any legislature deliberately create a situation in which a truck driver is _sometimes_ eligible for overtime (hauling Atari "E.T." cartridges to the landfill) and sometimes not (hauling frozen chicken to a warehouse)? What if a trucker performs both activities in the same week?
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.
I think the lack of punctuation explains what the legislature intended. The number of commas determines the number of items on the list. The last item is everything after the last comma. Notice the lack of punctuation in "shipment or distribution". Those terms belong together because there is no punctuation to indicate otherwise. In like manner, there is no punctuation after the "for" so we end up with "for shipment or distribution". What does the "for" clause apply to? packing. The last item on the list is "packing", qualified by the rest of the words. If the legislature had something else in mind, they would have written this differently.
But Cape Cod is a region famous for its pastoral ocean views, including the one visible from the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport. Once built, the wind-power plant would be faintly visible on the skyline of this tourist-dependent community, particularly during clear days.
"We wouldn't build a wind farm in the middle of Yosemite," Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has argued. "People want to look out and see the same sight the Pilgrims saw."
I mentioned it because there have been numerous wind farm proposals near Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, and ALL of them have been defeated. The excuses change every so often, as the NIMBYs align themselves with whatever allies they can find.
So far, NIMBYs have been very effective at killing offshore wind farms. Waterfront property is typically owned by "special" people, and they don't like the noise of wind turbines. http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
There is a free service called NoMoRobo that implements a massive cooperative blacklist on a grand scale. I use it on my Comcast phone (requires multiple ring). One of the few workarounds for tele-scammers is to falsify caller id with a random number in the victim's area code and exchange. Most telemarketers who call me are dumped by NoMoRobo after the first ring, but once in a while I see what appears to be a local call from an unrecognized number. Any number I don't recognize ends up in voice mail, which is where telemarketer calls go to die.
Apple needs to rediscover the wisdom of Frasier Crane: "If less is more, just think of how much more more would be."
They need to do a serious re-think about the missing ports, crappy Intel video, soldered RAM/SSD, glued batteries, etc. Apple has effectively discontinued the MacBook Pro and renamed a slightly beefed-up MacBook Air to take its place. If they're going to abandon the Pro market, they should at least be honest about it.
What happens then? Does cold weather affect battery performance? Without an internal combustion engine, the only way to get heat in the cabin is via electricity, which is going to impose a considerable burden on the battery.
Not an exaggeraion, IMHO. The impact of patent abuse is a lot worse than a few cases you hear about. It's the cases you DON'T hear about, where the mere threat of a bogus patent lawsuit is enough to suppress competition and prevent new products and services from reaching the market. This ruling in this case does not provide a universal solution to the problem, but it's a good start.
Fixable if they mount the left & right monitors with a hinge and let the user manually "unfold" to deploy. The motorized bit is as flimsy as you say, and therefore relegated to demonstrations at CES.
The only way Apple can replace the glued batteries in a Retina MPB is to replace the upper case and keyboard too. What was once a $100 battery change is now a $200 battery change because they have to replace extra parts.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that most of the online price checking takes place at OTHER stores, with customers checking the price of something on AMAZON. If Amazon thought to patent this method, maybe it's because they don't want competitors to block these online price checks.
Spare me the straw-man arguments. There is hardly any difference between Republicans paid by PAC money and Democrats paid by PAC money. Both parties have more in common than either would like to admit.
This is a bad idea that the airline lobby floats every few years. When the Democrats had control, they almost bought it until cooler heads prevailed. With Republicans in charge, it's time for another try. There really isn't much that the Federal government couldn't improve with privatization, but this is one of those things.
If this passes, the airlines will dominate the privatized company, transferring as much cost as they can to general aviation, while abusing their power for the purpose of limiting competition. They will dumb-down the controllers, resulting in chaos. It's hard to believe anyone could make the air travel industry any less accountable than it already is, but empowering an industry with a notoriously poor reputation of policing itself would be one way to do it.
Have we learned nothing from privatized airport security? Although I despise TSA, I have to admit that privatized airport security prior to 9/11 was absolutely useless. TSA, for all its well-documented flaws, ended the concept of minimum wage and constant turnover among security agents.
I had a Kindle Fire HD that went into brick mode a few years ago. Despite numerous attempts with Amazon tech support, Internet research, and all sorts of recovery procedures involving a "factory cable" to get into fast boot mode, it remains a brick to this day. It starts up OK, but when it gets to the unlock screen, it freezes after the swipe, leaving no keypad and thus no way to enter an unlock code. I have found others with the same problem, but not a single one seems to have a solution.
When Amazon elected to customize Android, they acquired the blame for any problems that vanilla Android does not have. IMHO, they have failed in this endeavor, on various devices in various ways. There are many reliable Android implementations out there, but I doubt any of them are from Amazon.
1. Auto delete any voice mail from numbers that are not in my address book.
2. Access code required to leave a voice mail message. Unauthenticated senders need not apply.
3. Voice recognition software screens each voice mail, comparing new messages to a centralized database of spam messages.
I will do whatever it takes to make sure these crap calls fail. At worst, I'll ditch voice mail altogether.
There is something to be said for putting the telephone out of its misery. With so many illegal telemarketers ignoring the do not call list, the days of voice telephone service are numbered anyway. A tsunami of crap voice mail would finish it off immediately.
I think Colbert's brand of stupidity has no entertainment value. I vote against him every night with my TV remote control. He doesn't offend me because I don't watch him. Changing the channel is a 100% solution -- no FCC action required.
It's going to take more than fuel savings to phase out the fossil fuel car, otherwise it would have happened already. Fortunately, a fleet of self-driving on-demand robo-cars offers a number of additional cost savings:
1. Insurance. The cost may never fully go away, but automated driving software should start to outperform humans in a few years.
2. Parking. Robo cars never have to pay for overpriced urban parking. They can be parked and recharged in the outer suburbs, or in some cases, out of state. They can drive around while waiting to be summoned by a passenger.
3. Property tax. The robo cars will be registered in a state that does not charge property tax on motor vehicles.
4. Driver. You get the benefit of a chauffeur without paying a human to do the work.
Bear in mind, there are many special interests that make a lot of money from the status quo. For one thing, government is heavily invested in mass transit, traffic cams, speeding tickets, etc. Traditional cabs and private cars might be the first things to go, but nobody is going to bother with a bus or train when it's easier to summon a robo car and have it take you directly to your destination.
One could reasonably make the case that TCP/IP was not designed to elevate one customer's packets over another. Application layer protocols (video + voice over web and email) certainly, but even then, the original intent was to set those priorities for each user's own network.
When consumers purchase "Internet access" (for home use or a commercial server farm), they expect to have equal access to all of it, subject to the traditional limitations of how much bandwidth the other side has purchased, how many hops it takes to efficiently route the traffic, and any weak spots along the way. Deliberately degrading certain destinations (the "slow lane") and still calling the service "Internet" is IMHO selling an adulterated product, just as a product labelled "ground beef" is expected to be made from beef instead of soy.
I have VM with voice + 5G of data for $35/month, on an HTC phone that I bought for $150. It's not easy to beat that deal.
Verizon, on the other hand, has no service at my house. All of the other carriers do. Therefore, my choice for wireless carrier is "anyone but Verizon".
Interesting point. HR due diligence usually involves a "background check", which is a euphemism for gathering data which is loosely related or sometimes unrelated to job requirements. Asking for a W-2 costs nothing so background checking services do it routinely.
I had a situation where I was applying for a job while self-employed. For complicated reasons, supplying a W-2 was not an option. In the end, the employer and I both agreed that my current income had nothing to do with the price of tea in China, so they made their offer based on what they were willing to pay. The offer made sense, so I accepted it. Alternatively, if they really wanted to use my current income as the baseline for salary negotiation, there was always the possibility that I would demand a salary commensurate with my best year as a self-employed consultant, or at least the average, at which point the deal falls apart.
I'm not a fan of lying about any part of the job application process. It can lead to all sorts of trouble and I have no reason to do it. So I tell the truth and let the process play out. Unfortunately, not everyone plays by these rules. I know of several people with various issues that would never pass a routine background check, and yet they end up working at some of the largest employers in America! If I use LinkedIn to look up people that I know, sometimes I find fake degrees, inflated job titles, fictional jobs at real companies, and fictional jobs at fictional companies. At first i thought it was hilarious, until I realized that honest job seekers are competing against these people. Even worse, I considered the "verifiability" of my own situation and found some problems. Long after my departure, several of my former employers have merged, downsized, sold, relocated, outsourced, or discontinued their operations. Any document that I produce could easily be drafted in Word or Photoshop -- nobody is in a position to prove or disprove anything. If I provide references, they could just as easily be friends with a script.
Thanks to modern technology, it is now easier to "verify" a fake background than a real one!
If you have multiple planes trying to land and any pilot can approach from any direction, only one can land at any given time unless somebody coordinates the touchdown point for each of them. Lotsa luck ensuring proper separation while trying to control how many degrees of the arc is allocated to each plane. A traditional airport will have several runways operating at any given time, so the circular runway does not seem to be much of an advantage. And then there is the side loading problem that comes from takeoff and landing on a curved runway.
One way to solve both problems is to make the entire runway revolve to match the speed of the current aircraft on final approach. As soon as the wheels touch down, the pilot hits the brakes and the runway decelarates to match. The aircraft lands in place, with very little space required. Then the plane taxis to the inner track of taxiways, while the runway accelerates to match the speed of the next approaching aircraft.
Although I think the idea of a circular runway is crazy, and the concept of a revolving runway is a monumental challenge, it might actually work.
For all we know, the CIA might have written deliberate vulnerabilities to be patched into production code. Either that, or maybe they bullied software companies into ignoring certain vulnerabilities that would otherwise be fixed. Considering how many tech companies have been enlisted by big-government and how many cover stories have been busted, nothing can surprise me anymore.
The panda eats shoots and leaves.
The lack of a comma means that "and" is the conjunction between "shoots" and "leaves". What is the panda doing? Eating.
But consider this:
The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
What is the [armed] panda doing? Eating, shooting, and leaving.
In the first example, there is no comma, and therefore the words are interpreted as a single action.
In the second example, 2 commas create a list with exactly 3 items.
How hard is it to disarm a panda? All you have to do is get rid the commas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Applying the panda scenario to today's crisis, it becomes obvious that commas determine the number of items on a list, and words in the absence of a comma are interpreted together when there is no punctuation to group them any other way.
I agree. It seems bizarre to determine a truck driver's eligibility for overtime based on what is hauled in his truck. Would any legislature deliberately create a situation in which a truck driver is _sometimes_ eligible for overtime (hauling Atari "E.T." cartridges to the landfill) and sometimes not (hauling frozen chicken to a warehouse)? What if a trucker performs both activities in the same week?
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.
I think the lack of punctuation explains what the legislature intended. The number of commas determines the number of items on the list. The last item is everything after the last comma. Notice the lack of punctuation in "shipment or distribution". Those terms belong together because there is no punctuation to indicate otherwise. In like manner, there is no punctuation after the "for" so we end up with "for shipment or distribution". What does the "for" clause apply to? packing. The last item on the list is "packing", qualified by the rest of the words. If the legislature had something else in mind, they would have written this differently.
Microwave on high. 15 seconds should be enough.
DIrect quote from the article:
But Cape Cod is a region famous for its pastoral ocean views, including the one visible from the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport. Once built, the wind-power plant would be faintly visible on the skyline of this tourist-dependent community, particularly during clear days.
"We wouldn't build a wind farm in the middle of Yosemite," Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has argued. "People want to look out and see the same sight the Pilgrims saw."
I mentioned it because there have been numerous wind farm proposals near Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, and ALL of them have been defeated. The excuses change every so often, as the NIMBYs align themselves with whatever allies they can find.
So far, NIMBYs have been very effective at killing offshore wind farms. Waterfront property is typically owned by "special" people, and they don't like the noise of wind turbines. http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
There is a free service called NoMoRobo that implements a massive cooperative blacklist on a grand scale. I use it on my Comcast phone (requires multiple ring). One of the few workarounds for tele-scammers is to falsify caller id with a random number in the victim's area code and exchange. Most telemarketers who call me are dumped by NoMoRobo after the first ring, but once in a while I see what appears to be a local call from an unrecognized number. Any number I don't recognize ends up in voice mail, which is where telemarketer calls go to die.
I suggest VerComChaSuck.
Apple needs to rediscover the wisdom of Frasier Crane: "If less is more, just think of how much more more would be."
They need to do a serious re-think about the missing ports, crappy Intel video, soldered RAM/SSD, glued batteries, etc. Apple has effectively discontinued the MacBook Pro and renamed a slightly beefed-up MacBook Air to take its place. If they're going to abandon the Pro market, they should at least be honest about it.
What happens then? Does cold weather affect battery performance? Without an internal combustion engine, the only way to get heat in the cabin is via electricity, which is going to impose a considerable burden on the battery.
Not an exaggeraion, IMHO. The impact of patent abuse is a lot worse than a few cases you hear about. It's the cases you DON'T hear about, where the mere threat of a bogus patent lawsuit is enough to suppress competition and prevent new products and services from reaching the market. This ruling in this case does not provide a universal solution to the problem, but it's a good start.
Fixable if they mount the left & right monitors with a hinge and let the user manually "unfold" to deploy. The motorized bit is as flimsy as you say, and therefore relegated to demonstrations at CES.
'Tis a shame that comment score is capped at 5, as I have mod points and the willingness to use them.
The only way Apple can replace the glued batteries in a Retina MPB is to replace the upper case and keyboard too. What was once a $100 battery change is now a $200 battery change because they have to replace extra parts.