I have 2 tweens and a teen in my house, and they say "search it up". They never say "google it". I've done an experiment where I've switched the default search engine on the home computers to Bing and they didn't even notice.
Portability or cross-platform use is only one reason you may want to build something as a web app. Remote access, avoiding cost and complexity of distribution and installation, faster update cycles, and developer pool skills may also need to be considered.
I'd do exactly the opposite. Go back to.com,.org,.net,.mil, and.edu, and if you need to classify by country that's your own problem. us.yoyodyne.com and uk.yoyodyne.com would work fine for that.
Well, maybe I would kill.net. It's just a second banana.com now anyway.
You're mostly right with your reasoning, but I don't think that will stop it from happening.
The original discussions between Apple and Verizon broke down because Verizon wasn't willing to give "ownership" of the customer to Apple. Verizon leverages (or used to leverage) its channel to nickel and dime its subscribers (e.g. disable bluetooth file browsing so they can charge you 25 cents to export a photo via an email to yourself or extort a monthly PictureMail package from you). Apple wanted none of that; they wanted a different uncluttered experience for iPhone users, and AT&T was more than willing to let them have it in exchange for exclusivity.
With Android, Verizon has started to loosen its grip on the subscriber a bit: a non-Verizon app store (The Marketplace) was a huge step for them. Remember, a few years ago, Verizon phones were much more limited. In fact, as a policy, Verizon refused WiFi capability for any phone on their network. I remember having discussions with their enterprise sales teams where they'd say things like, "Why would you ever want to waste your time and money building out a WiFi network when we've built the most reliable 3G network with coverage everywhere?" Umm... simultaneous voice and data, best path call routing with fixed-mobile convergence, coverage sucks in some buildings, etc. They've since realized that WiFi is a great way to offload some data traffic and maintain a more constant QoS for their customers. Anyway, this, along with attitudes toward Bluetooth and VoIP have changed, largely due to the influence of Android and Google.
On a side note, Google has been slacking a bit as a partner for Verizon. Verizon has been pushing and pushing them to make certain changes to the platform to make it more "enterprise ready" (e.g. device-wide policy enforcement, encrypted storage, for a couple), and it's taking too darn long. So, MOT and VZW have started to take some of this into their own hands, because their enterprise customers are telling them "no droids until they are at least as secure as the iPhone, but ideally as secure as Blackberry". Perhaps bringing another Android competitor into the stable will spur Google into action.
Anyway, my point is that Verizon is much more "open" than it used to be, but don't mistake "open" for FOSS in this discussion -- Verizon doesn't give a crap about that. They are simply more willing now to allow customers and partners to do more with their network, because they've proven to themselves that their network quality is enough to maintain retention and grow sales. So whereas before Verizon wanted no part of the Apple/iTunes/iPhone experience for fear of dilution of their brand and services, now they've "grown up", you could say, and they are willing to just Be The Network for some of their customers. Because, in the end, customers are customers.
Now after I've said all that, all my contacts at Apple and AT&T remind me that it was a 5 year deal for exclusivity, and that takes us into 2012. However, what they don't know is whether the iPad 3G deal modified that original agreement or not.
...and I really hope they put something - anything - on it besides Windows 7. The hardware is actually pretty nice - standard USB and SD card slots and a dock with more USB and an HDMI port.
Good analogy, but it's no secret. Google is more than happy to take your open source, contributed works and use them for profit. It's free engineering work on components that just aren't very useful without all the proprietary other parts, and as long as there are corporate fanboys out there willing to do it, Google and Apple would be stupid to not take advantage of it.
I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:
Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
That's the real question. Is it for ethanol or for food? If it's for food, which food? People food? Animal food? Many GM foods find their way into processed items like ketchup, cereal (yep, like Corn Flakes), and canned soup, and the food industry is not required to tell you that GM food was used in the creation of these processed foods. So we could already be eating this stuff.
I'm actually okay with GM food being used in these things, but I want a nice big orange label telling me so, so I can choose other products. But, then there's the problem of contaminating or overpowering existing organic crops...
Reminds me of a science fiction short story I read as a kid where this guy travels to the future and finds all the sources of real food are gone or mutated into poison and the only thing people can eat are pills. The government and religious institutions reacted to the crisis by declaring eating real food was obscene. Pictures of real food were considered pornographic.
The article says the missing tapes include the Apollo 11 footage. 698 of 700 are missing, so what was left?
What would/could someone do with these tapes (assuming they were taken) if the only place that can read them is the DEL at Goddard? How hard would it be to build something that could read these tapes?
This is why all that stuff needs to be tagged with RFID or something, so that a record is made everytime when it leaves or enters a storage room or the building. Sure, it wouldn't stop King George II from destroying evidence, but it would stop Joe Mopbucket or Sally Shelf-straightener from throwing it in the trash.
Actually, the Interstate system was developed for similar purposes. I did some consulting for the Michigan DOT a while back, and they said that all the building specs and codes for the Interstate (and the bridges that cross over it) are designed to allow the movement of mobile missile launchers and transport of nuclear missiles on trucks.
This is old news. Joe Firmage was the founder, CEO, and Chief Strategist for USWeb. USWeb eventually became USWeb/CKS and then marchFIRST, and then in spectacular ejaculation of curiously misguided recruiting commercials.... *poof*.
Joe got out when the gettin' was good, so to speak. At age 28 and worth hundreds of million$, he stepped down from his position shortly after the CKS deal to pursue the truth about UFO's.
In fact he wrote a rather lengthy online book about his theories, called "The Truth". Look for it.
Yes, they could put a button and a panel and all the wiring and logic boards to enable them at the cost of $5 per car and then wait another 3 years for those cars to hit the road, OR they could use the equipment that's already in the vehicles on the road today.
And yes, the vehicle design, development, and test cycle really is at least 3 years.
And yes, the vehicle brand managers are that sensitive to increases in production price on their cars. I've heard arguments last months over a nickel.
So I was trying to find one *good* Exoman site, and I couldn't find any. (It was a short-lived 1977 TV series about a paralyzed scientist who created his own exo-suit in which he would fight crime yada yada yada).
Forwarding to the PSAP on record isn't the same as knowing your specific location. This would be important if you couldn't speak.
From the Vonage Terms of Service:
2.10 Automated Location Identification At this time in the technical development of Vonage 911 Dialing, it is not possible to transmit identification of the address that you have listed to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and local emergency personnel for your area when you dial 911. You acknowledge and understand that you will need to state the nature of your emergency promptly and clearly, including your location, as PSAP and emergency personnel will NOT have this information. You acknowledge and understand that PSAP and emergency personnel will not be able to find your location if the call is unable to be completed, is dropped or disconnected, if you are unable to speak to tell them your location and/or if the Service is not operational for any reason, including without limitation those listed elsewhere in this Agreement.
Notice that 911 isn't listed in the services offered. AOL's service likely suffers from the same deficiency as Vonage in this respect. Vonage's TOS says that if you cannot clearly state the nature of your emergency and your location, emergency services may not be dispatched. I'm sticking with my land line until the VoIP providers get the 911 thing figured out.
This is completely off-topic, but I haven't had my coffee yet and even the slightest reference to typical ignorant NRA dittohead blather is getting me upset. Yes, the Constitution use the words "right", "to", "bear", and "arms", but nobody ever seems to get the context right. The actual text is:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Specifically, most people choose to ignore the "well regulated militia" part. And yes, I own a shotgun for which I happily went through with the permit and waiting period. And, I'd happily attend any required periodic certification, if asked. Gun control isn't about taking guns away from people. It's about distributing them with the care due an instrument of death and maiming. Sure, anything can be used to kill, but a gun is solely a killing tool and doesn't lend itself easily to carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Self defense, sure -- but you never point a gun at anyone or anything without the intention or willingness to kill. I don't even know why this is an issue anymore. People are stupid.
You're kidding, right? You mean like that $6/hr greeter job at Walmart to replace that $45,000/yr manufacturing job that supported a family?
<soapbox>
On a related note, it always amazes me how many people say things like, "45K is too much for a manufacturing job anyway". Granted, it's not the most cerebral occupation, but you have to think of it as "hazard pay". Most manufacturing facilities are deadly, dangerous environments that take their toll often in terms of health, limbs, and life expectancy.
</soapbox>
"What exactly is replacing the white collar jobs?"
Apparently, the same thing that replaced the blue collar jobs.
A few (who am I kidding... several) years back, Gartner was promoting a different spin on why IT departements should adopt Java: "Train Once, Write Everywhere". The idea being that with Java, you could have (in theory) the same guys who are writing the GUIs and desktop apps write apps for the server and mobile environments too.
Yes, I know you could argue that "C" fits this bill nicely, too, but the fact is that most corporate IT shops at the time were VB and PowerBuilder clients talking directly to databases. Your average corporate developer would do more harm than good with C, and Java was seen as a simplified C++.
Anyway, I don't know if Gartner ever changed its stance on this, but the reality became quite different with the introduction of J2EE; J2EE required quite a different set of skills compared to good ol' J2SE, and many developers still can't adequately grok distributed server-side development.
Java is just a language, and I firmly believe that more attention needs to be given to the art of programming rather than to any specific language. It seems nobody cares anymore for appropriate use of patterns and careful selection of algorithms. It's all brute force programming. Get it done. Here's your soup - go code.
You can learn all the languages you want -- learn to speak English, Russian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, German and Greek -- but if you don't know how to communicate...
$359 for a keyboard??? I know, I know -- you can't put a price on health, but the miser in me feels a monkey escaping his ass when I consider buying this.
We've been making fun of this for years. My pet peeve of the moment is the over-use of slightly ambiguous statements followed by "from a this-or-that perspective".
Example: Instead of saying "What is your schedule?" I get: "What is your timeline, from a scheduling perspective?"
Or, instead of "How is the project going?", I get: "How are things going, from a project perspective?"
I swear to God that the people I work with can't form a sentence without this. It drives me nuts. That, and people who say "processees". Fucking ignorant.
I always ask for an FMEA - Failure Mode and Effects Analysis - for typical and HA deployments. Big, expensive equipment tends to fail in big, expensive ways, and I want to know all the ways it can fail, all the potential effects of those failures, and what impact they have on my enterprise. Then, I want to know the recommended mechanisms and patterns that can be employed to minimize failure impact.
Cultural generalizations aside (not that I don't agree with the basis -- it's the conclusion that falls a little on the racist side), I'm guessing a primary factor in this "low cost" number is the differences in salary between American and Indian engineers and scientists. Around here, we typically get 2 to 3 Indians for the price of one American.
Then factor in costs associated with regulation (or non-regulation) of manufacturing processes. For example, it probably costs less to deal with hazardous waste products in India because of less-stringent regulation on air, water, and ground pollution (anyone remember what CocaCola did?).
Dollar-to-dollar comparisons of manufacturing between the US and a third world nations don't compute. It's different cost basis across the spectrum. Like comparing apples to fighter jets.
We had an attempted break-in this summer, and man did it freak me out. They didn't get in, but I could see the handprints on the windows they had tried to open. I called the police.
When the cop arrived, he pointed out a few things that he said could make the house more inaccessible, but he said that in all his years of investigating break-ins that he's never seen anything taken from a house with a dog. Not a fuzzy laprat -- a dog of 40 pounds or more. In fact, he mentioned that the people across the street from me were broken into that night and had some cash and jewelry stolen. They don't have a dog.
Then, a week later, I received a packet from the local police department, about 50 pages or so on how to protect your home. It included some very useful information. It showed the differences between cheap and useful locks on doors and windows. It showed how thieves try to circumvent most common types of doors, windows, and locks. It covered security lighting, alarms, realistic opinions of subscription security services (i.e. waste of money), landscaping considerations and patio furniture considerations.
So, rather than ask a bunch of tech nuts, just call your local police department and see if they have such a packet. As much as we hate cops when we get speeding tickets or raided for warez ops, when it comes to protecting your family they're generally willing to help.
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I have 2 tweens and a teen in my house, and they say "search it up". They never say "google it". I've done an experiment where I've switched the default search engine on the home computers to Bing and they didn't even notice.
Portability or cross-platform use is only one reason you may want to build something as a web app. Remote access, avoiding cost and complexity of distribution and installation, faster update cycles, and developer pool skills may also need to be considered.
I'd do exactly the opposite. Go back to .com, .org, .net, .mil, and .edu, and if you need to classify by country that's your own problem. us.yoyodyne.com and uk.yoyodyne.com would work fine for that.
Well, maybe I would kill .net. It's just a second banana .com now anyway.
Let's start a Kickstarter campaign for .dotdot
You're mostly right with your reasoning, but I don't think that will stop it from happening.
The original discussions between Apple and Verizon broke down because Verizon wasn't willing to give "ownership" of the customer to Apple. Verizon leverages (or used to leverage) its channel to nickel and dime its subscribers (e.g. disable bluetooth file browsing so they can charge you 25 cents to export a photo via an email to yourself or extort a monthly PictureMail package from you). Apple wanted none of that; they wanted a different uncluttered experience for iPhone users, and AT&T was more than willing to let them have it in exchange for exclusivity.
With Android, Verizon has started to loosen its grip on the subscriber a bit: a non-Verizon app store (The Marketplace) was a huge step for them. Remember, a few years ago, Verizon phones were much more limited. In fact, as a policy, Verizon refused WiFi capability for any phone on their network. I remember having discussions with their enterprise sales teams where they'd say things like, "Why would you ever want to waste your time and money building out a WiFi network when we've built the most reliable 3G network with coverage everywhere?" Umm... simultaneous voice and data, best path call routing with fixed-mobile convergence, coverage sucks in some buildings, etc. They've since realized that WiFi is a great way to offload some data traffic and maintain a more constant QoS for their customers. Anyway, this, along with attitudes toward Bluetooth and VoIP have changed, largely due to the influence of Android and Google.
On a side note, Google has been slacking a bit as a partner for Verizon. Verizon has been pushing and pushing them to make certain changes to the platform to make it more "enterprise ready" (e.g. device-wide policy enforcement, encrypted storage, for a couple), and it's taking too darn long. So, MOT and VZW have started to take some of this into their own hands, because their enterprise customers are telling them "no droids until they are at least as secure as the iPhone, but ideally as secure as Blackberry". Perhaps bringing another Android competitor into the stable will spur Google into action.
Anyway, my point is that Verizon is much more "open" than it used to be, but don't mistake "open" for FOSS in this discussion -- Verizon doesn't give a crap about that. They are simply more willing now to allow customers and partners to do more with their network, because they've proven to themselves that their network quality is enough to maintain retention and grow sales. So whereas before Verizon wanted no part of the Apple/iTunes/iPhone experience for fear of dilution of their brand and services, now they've "grown up", you could say, and they are willing to just Be The Network for some of their customers. Because, in the end, customers are customers.
Now after I've said all that, all my contacts at Apple and AT&T remind me that it was a 5 year deal for exclusivity, and that takes us into 2012. However, what they don't know is whether the iPad 3G deal modified that original agreement or not.
...and I really hope they put something - anything - on it besides Windows 7. The hardware is actually pretty nice - standard USB and SD card slots and a dock with more USB and an HDMI port.
Good analogy, but it's no secret. Google is more than happy to take your open source, contributed works and use them for profit. It's free engineering work on components that just aren't very useful without all the proprietary other parts, and as long as there are corporate fanboys out there willing to do it, Google and Apple would be stupid to not take advantage of it.
I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.
I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:
Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.
That's the real question. Is it for ethanol or for food? If it's for food, which food? People food? Animal food? Many GM foods find their way into processed items like ketchup, cereal (yep, like Corn Flakes), and canned soup, and the food industry is not required to tell you that GM food was used in the creation of these processed foods. So we could already be eating this stuff.
I'm actually okay with GM food being used in these things, but I want a nice big orange label telling me so, so I can choose other products. But, then there's the problem of contaminating or overpowering existing organic crops...
Reminds me of a science fiction short story I read as a kid where this guy travels to the future and finds all the sources of real food are gone or mutated into poison and the only thing people can eat are pills. The government and religious institutions reacted to the crisis by declaring eating real food was obscene. Pictures of real food were considered pornographic.
Wish I could remember the title of that story.
The article says the missing tapes include the Apollo 11 footage. 698 of 700 are missing, so what was left?
What would/could someone do with these tapes (assuming they were taken) if the only place that can read them is the DEL at Goddard? How hard would it be to build something that could read these tapes?
This is why all that stuff needs to be tagged with RFID or something, so that a record is made everytime when it leaves or enters a storage room or the building. Sure, it wouldn't stop King George II from destroying evidence, but it would stop Joe Mopbucket or Sally Shelf-straightener from throwing it in the trash.
Actually, the Interstate system was developed for similar purposes. I did some consulting for the Michigan DOT a while back, and they said that all the building specs and codes for the Interstate (and the bridges that cross over it) are designed to allow the movement of mobile missile launchers and transport of nuclear missiles on trucks.
That's the real reason we have an Interstate.
This is old news. Joe Firmage was the founder, CEO, and Chief Strategist for USWeb. USWeb eventually became USWeb/CKS and then marchFIRST, and then in spectacular ejaculation of curiously misguided recruiting commercials.... *poof*.
Joe got out when the gettin' was good, so to speak. At age 28 and worth hundreds of million$, he stepped down from his position shortly after the CKS deal to pursue the truth about UFO's.
In fact he wrote a rather lengthy online book about his theories, called "The Truth". Look for it.
Yes, they could put a button and a panel and all the wiring and logic boards to enable them at the cost of $5 per car and then wait another 3 years for those cars to hit the road, OR they could use the equipment that's already in the vehicles on the road today.
And yes, the vehicle design, development, and test cycle really is at least 3 years.
And yes, the vehicle brand managers are that sensitive to increases in production price on their cars. I've heard arguments last months over a nickel.
So I was trying to find one *good* Exoman site, and I couldn't find any. (It was a short-lived 1977 TV series about a paralyzed scientist who created his own exo-suit in which he would fight crime yada yada yada).
Forwarding to the PSAP on record isn't the same as knowing your specific location. This would be important if you couldn't speak.
From the Vonage Terms of Service:
2.10 Automated Location Identification
At this time in the technical development of Vonage 911 Dialing, it is not possible to transmit identification of the address that you have listed to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and local emergency personnel for your area when you dial 911. You acknowledge and understand that you will need to state the nature of your emergency promptly and clearly, including your location, as PSAP and emergency personnel will NOT have this information. You acknowledge and understand that PSAP and emergency personnel will not be able to find your location if the call is unable to be completed, is dropped or disconnected, if you are unable to speak to tell them your location and/or if the Service is not operational for any reason, including without limitation those listed elsewhere in this Agreement.
Interesting -- was not aware of this. But can someone explain how 911 works (on a landline) if there is no dial tone?
Notice that 911 isn't listed in the services offered. AOL's service likely suffers from the same deficiency as Vonage in this respect. Vonage's TOS says that if you cannot clearly state the nature of your emergency and your location, emergency services may not be dispatched. I'm sticking with my land line until the VoIP providers get the 911 thing figured out.
This is completely off-topic, but I haven't had my coffee yet and even the slightest reference to typical ignorant NRA dittohead blather is getting me upset. Yes, the Constitution use the words "right", "to", "bear", and "arms", but nobody ever seems to get the context right. The actual text is:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Specifically, most people choose to ignore the "well regulated militia" part. And yes, I own a shotgun for which I happily went through with the permit and waiting period. And, I'd happily attend any required periodic certification, if asked. Gun control isn't about taking guns away from people. It's about distributing them with the care due an instrument of death and maiming. Sure, anything can be used to kill, but a gun is solely a killing tool and doesn't lend itself easily to carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Self defense, sure -- but you never point a gun at anyone or anything without the intention or willingness to kill. I don't even know why this is an issue anymore. People are stupid.
Now to go get that coffee...
You're kidding, right? You mean like that $6/hr greeter job at Walmart to replace that $45,000/yr manufacturing job that supported a family? On a related note, it always amazes me how many people say things like, "45K is too much for a manufacturing job anyway". Granted, it's not the most cerebral occupation, but you have to think of it as "hazard pay". Most manufacturing facilities are deadly, dangerous environments that take their toll often in terms of health, limbs, and life expectancy."What exactly is replacing the white collar jobs?"
Apparently, the same thing that replaced the blue collar jobs.
A few (who am I kidding... several) years back, Gartner was promoting a different spin on why IT departements should adopt Java: "Train Once, Write Everywhere". The idea being that with Java, you could have (in theory) the same guys who are writing the GUIs and desktop apps write apps for the server and mobile environments too.
Yes, I know you could argue that "C" fits this bill nicely, too, but the fact is that most corporate IT shops at the time were VB and PowerBuilder clients talking directly to databases. Your average corporate developer would do more harm than good with C, and Java was seen as a simplified C++.
Anyway, I don't know if Gartner ever changed its stance on this, but the reality became quite different with the introduction of J2EE; J2EE required quite a different set of skills compared to good ol' J2SE, and many developers still can't adequately grok distributed server-side development.
Java is just a language, and I firmly believe that more attention needs to be given to the art of programming rather than to any specific language. It seems nobody cares anymore for appropriate use of patterns and careful selection of algorithms. It's all brute force programming. Get it done. Here's your soup - go code.
You can learn all the languages you want -- learn to speak English, Russian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, German and Greek -- but if you don't know how to communicate...
$359 for a keyboard??? I know, I know -- you can't put a price on health, but the miser in me feels a monkey escaping his ass when I consider buying this.
Seriously, though. Which model did you buy?
We've been making fun of this for years. My pet peeve of the moment is the over-use of slightly ambiguous statements followed by "from a this-or-that perspective".
Example: Instead of saying "What is your schedule?" I get: "What is your timeline, from a scheduling perspective?"
Or, instead of "How is the project going?", I get: "How are things going, from a project perspective?"
I swear to God that the people I work with can't form a sentence without this. It drives me nuts. That, and people who say "processees". Fucking ignorant.
I always ask for an FMEA - Failure Mode and Effects Analysis - for typical and HA deployments. Big, expensive equipment tends to fail in big, expensive ways, and I want to know all the ways it can fail, all the potential effects of those failures, and what impact they have on my enterprise. Then, I want to know the recommended mechanisms and patterns that can be employed to minimize failure impact.
Cultural generalizations aside (not that I don't agree with the basis -- it's the conclusion that falls a little on the racist side), I'm guessing a primary factor in this "low cost" number is the differences in salary between American and Indian engineers and scientists. Around here, we typically get 2 to 3 Indians for the price of one American.
Then factor in costs associated with regulation (or non-regulation) of manufacturing processes. For example, it probably costs less to deal with hazardous waste products in India because of less-stringent regulation on air, water, and ground pollution (anyone remember what CocaCola did?).
Dollar-to-dollar comparisons of manufacturing between the US and a third world nations don't compute. It's different cost basis across the spectrum. Like comparing apples to fighter jets.
We had an attempted break-in this summer, and man did it freak me out. They didn't get in, but I could see the handprints on the windows they had tried to open. I called the police.
When the cop arrived, he pointed out a few things that he said could make the house more inaccessible, but he said that in all his years of investigating break-ins that he's never seen anything taken from a house with a dog. Not a fuzzy laprat -- a dog of 40 pounds or more. In fact, he mentioned that the people across the street from me were broken into that night and had some cash and jewelry stolen. They don't have a dog.
Then, a week later, I received a packet from the local police department, about 50 pages or so on how to protect your home. It included some very useful information. It showed the differences between cheap and useful locks on doors and windows. It showed how thieves try to circumvent most common types of doors, windows, and locks. It covered security lighting, alarms, realistic opinions of subscription security services (i.e. waste of money), landscaping considerations and patio furniture considerations.
So, rather than ask a bunch of tech nuts, just call your local police department and see if they have such a packet. As much as we hate cops when we get speeding tickets or raided for warez ops, when it comes to protecting your family they're generally willing to help.
No, I clearly remember him using the definition Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network. I just googled it to make sure I'm not crazy.