The car analogy "license plate" is the IP address. And your license plate is captured by several systems without an infraction taking place. Toll systems, and general capture in some jurisdictions, red light cameras, some of which store video continuously, highway traffic systems, and likely more. But the analogy is flawed. License plates tell whose car is being driven, not who is driving. So my Internet License plate at the moment would say, for example, Charter Communications. My actual identity is more akin to my drivers license, which is private, even to the point of providing RFID shield envelopes for it at the DMV. This would be like the government providing me a means to anonymize my identity when I don't want to display it. So the Department of Homeland (Doh!) is proposing something akin to needing to present my drivers license constantly. In the case of my drivers license this promotes identity theft risks. In online cases it would do the same, except be much easier. Courts allow anonymity is protected in speech. cites here and here, internet specifically mentioned.
One generally accepted set of metrics is:
(1) that the plaintiff undertake to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena seeking their identity;
(2) that the plaintiff specify the exact statement alleged to constitute actionable speech;
(3) that the court review the complaint and other information to determine whether a viable claim against the anonymous defendants is presented;
(4) that the plaintiff produce sufficient evidence to support, prima facie, each element of its cause of action; and
(5) that the court then balance the First Amendment right of anonymous speech against the strength of the plaintiff's prima facie claim and the need for disclosure of the anonymous defendant's identity.
The old style protection was that copy machines could not reproduce the exact color (and a small range around it) of the green in US currency. Then as they became more in use for creating or copying photos that fell to the technique of printing a pattern of yellow dots on all things printed by color copiers and color printers. Some high end printers tried currency recognition but the latest trend to monopoly money colors and changing artwork made it mostly useless to try to recognize it. Now the microprinting on the bill and watermark features as well as the specific florescence under black light of the polyester fiber embedded with the bill denomination, and much more, make color photocopy technology moot. The yellow dots still exist to trace a document to a specific color printer though.
The best the government might do, short of banning what is heralded as the biggest thing for consumers in the next decade by some, is to force 3D printers to embed the serial number of the device into what they produce, but that alone might interfere with the structural integrity of the object.
The whole concept is moot though as if one were a criminal, you could buy a gun on the street cheaper than making one. Take one from someone in a secured area easier than smuggling one in is another option. I recall as well that organized crime ran an operation at a New Jersey plant where they used the lighter staffed second and third shift to manufacture firearms by resetting the tooling then setting it back, so that first shift had no clue. It ran for at least five years according to law enforcement. So organized crime will just manufacture guns. Lower echelons will steal them or buy them from people who stole them. Or legitimately purchase them. Or pay someone to purchase them for them.
Hobbyist types will continue to make them. 3D printing is just one technology. For the price of the higher quality 3D printer used to make the functional 3D firearm (this was not RepRap technology!) one could purchase a nice combo lathe and mill, and the CNC kit for it. Then produce the parts in metal. The afghani people have used hand tools and sourced their raw materials from things like car axels and scrap sheet steel and used very minimal machine shop work (I presume to machine the barrel / bore it out / chamber it) and the rest by hand with drills and files and a smallish box and pan brake. They cranked out enough AK replicas that they used a 55 gallon drum of boiling "paint" to coat them with (after care to protect the barrel and friction surfaces). A 3D printer (in plastics) just makes it simpler to make a bad gun. And is very expensive as well in comparison to making one out of metal.
The purpose of the 3D printed gun was to underline dramatically how futile it is to enact gun control in the manner the US tries to do. Not to produce marketable or truly useful completely plastic devices. And it did that to great excess. And as to the undetectable nature. I could as easily CNC machine plastics or even unfired ceramics to the same end. Heck, some materials I might be able to cast from easy to make molds.
Lastly if one has a legitimate firearm, and one wants to make a replacement part for that firearm, then that should be allowed. Do I insert a FOID card into the machine to allow it (assuming the impossible technology to detect it is destined for a firearm and not a toaster or my car stereo)? This is not a tractable problem. This poll is selective and designed to get the response reported... pure politics and feeds on question steering.
Acording to the last election there are at least 48% idiots in america. As an european, i would round that up to 96%, 'cause everyone who elects a president based on the color of his tie is an idiot...
It wasn't the color of the tie. It was much more subtle. It was the direction of the stripes diagonally. One is European. One is American. Oddly the only "American" striped tie I own was purchased in Ukraine.
And it is not an inflated price. A good political mailing list can cost upwards of $10 for highly qualified names. This is 170,000 highly qualified names. Well worth the asking price. Worth upwards to 1.7 million. $250K is a bargain. Any politician in this day an age that doesn't control the like named domain is just not being smart enough to vote for. Or has a plain enough name someone else beat them to it. The democratic National Committee should but the domain and mailing list and give the website / domain to Ron minus the mailing list. knowing ones anti-constituents has value too. They can filter what the send them and cause disarray among that particular libertarian group.
QR codes have an edge because they are a free to use standard. and unlike the RF spectrum of the rectennas use, the optical spectrum allows as many QR codes and sensing devices as you can cram together because the optics are simple. The RF equivalent "optics" are a bit more. I also see a problem climbing the side of a building to get to the rectenna's near field range.
Get a proxy or VPN account with a US provider. Hire a remailing service in New Hampshire. (one that gives a street address, not box number address) Get a US based Visa debit card.
Join the Virtual US!
YMMV, and you then must pay the shipping at consumer rates for hard goods, and then customs and import duties as required, and any local regional taxes on purchased materials above customs and duties fees, for example in Washington State we have a "use tax" on goods purchased out of state and brought into the state.
Compare cost to cost purchasing locally. Save? Woo Hoo!!! Lost money, welcome to the free market!
The free market also accounts for cost. If it costs more to sell somewhere, shopping, transit fees, etc. licensing agreements with the content providers included, you add those to the cost to buy in that area. Software comes with support issues as well. It could well be that in order to meet the requirements for service (like the whole one year versus two year current snafus) the cost is higher in another region. It is not because Apple or some other seller decided they don't like Australia (or some other region). They have actual cost differentials they add to the same base price to determine cost for a given market. And "free market" is more of a J.P. Morgan thing of "you charge what the market will bear"; suggested reading on this is "The Octopus". Free markets are about government controls, not financial decisions by the seller. Restricting the seller through legal means to a "level playing field" means lower cost to sell markets pay for selling in higher cost to sell markets, quite the opposite of a "free market".
Or since they burn natural gas in turbines to drive generators to generate the electricity to drive the motors to drive the compressors... which will drive turbines to drive generators to generate electricity can't we eliminate everything after the first "to generate electricity" and if not because of peak demand issues store the natural gas instead and still short circuit a lot of this. I think thermodynamics is being monkeyed with here...
If you are looking at colonization, send 4 women and redundant cryopaks of semen. Women have less weight burden on average so cheaper on resources, and women stand high g flight better so less complications there. And to maximize diversity you'll need 30 people on average to become stable without in breeding issues. So also consider some frozen embryos.
But this expedition is likely not focused on colonization... That alone would change the cost and weight balance unfavorably. The only way these folks would likely see more people is if earth sends more people. So I was surprised no one asked if all the developed hardware and software and plans, etc. would be open sourced to encourage more people to follow in their footsteps and improve along the way without the need for reinvention!
After the initial period of software problem support of months additional support is at our customary hourly rate of $$$ adjusted annually by no more than 10% from the acceptance date of the contracted work. A prepaid retainer of $$$2 may be paid for a yearly support contract. The $$$2 amount may be adjusted downwards annually to reflect past performance and upwards for inflation.
Then make $$$2 be about 20% of the contracts value.
I have been nickel and dime'd to death by major industry players who feel they are entitled to infinite support and even "small changes" for free. Sometimes a small enough matter (or occasionally a big one time one) is done as "good will", but don't get sucked into free support forever unless you build that into your contracts price. As in for contracts under a years duration quote a price at least 20 times your cost if you are so foolish as to include lifetime support for no additional cost.
Lower your import duties and maybe the price will be closer to a real parity. And wait for the middle of the night to call all the support calls in. Stuff a hundred million more users into Oz then get back to me about the strength of the Aussie dollar being something important in Adobe's pricing model. Alternately we subsidize worse economies than ours, so while yours is going stronger you can subsidize ours...
Regards shipping products, I can't get half the eBay Aussies to ship to the US at all, and when they do it takes 3-4 weeks... So that shipping thing goes both ways. I got a package from Kazakhstan faster than any from Australia. So... Buy from Amazon us. Get yourself a US credit card and buy it with that. Send it as a gift to yourself. Use the bank as the US remitter address. It will cost you a little bit each month for the account and a bit each time you fund it but _might_ work out to be a bargain in some cases.
Just make sure inland revenue or whatever the Oz tax agents are, get their due, that way you get to pay the import taxes directly! I wonder which Adobe CS6 package he was talking about... You might also download the demo versions, then pay by US credit card (above) to get the registration code... No shipping involved.
In a different world view, and one that is equally valid, is Comcast provides multiple products over the same pipe. The "Internet connection" is capped per the subscriber agreement (which by the way, pay approximately $50 more a month for a business Internet connection and caps go away and you can get static IPs to host your own services). The Comcast Xfinity App is provided under a different access arrangement. That they happen to use the same pipe is not meaningful. The Comcast Xfinity user is paying for an additional service bundled into their cable TV service. Likely Comcast VOIP service does not count towards the cap while Vonage likely does.
I have a solution for Netflix, as Comcast makes profit from the Cable subscription supporting use of the Xfinity App, Netflix could pay Comcast a portion of their profit to move Netflix into an additional service branded as Comcast Netflix... So it is not like Comcast is "giving away" the bandwidth for Xfinity usage. It is part of the bundled cost of cable tv service.
Man is not to blame. See the effect of solar output here. The nay sayers that attempt to put done the solar effect look at sunspot activity not total solar output. Man is a speck on the surface of the planet.
The earth's rotation will continue to slow down more and more. Dino-days were shorter. And eventually we will lose more and more atmosphere to space. And the radioactive material that keeps the earths interior molten will all graceful move towards iron, and the lower magnetic field will mean even more atmosphere erosion. The surface will be very very hot. No life as we know it will live there as the temperature will be over that of boiling water, our atmosphere will be much less dense and unbreathable, and the solar radiation will not be deflected because our magnetic field will have weakened and collapsed to far. Depending on your science this is 500 million to 1 billion years off. Earth will be a lifeless rocky planet.
Generally warmer climates predicted by the global warming fanatics are in the range of normal variation, the last warming period allowed the renaissance by longer growing seasons and thus more plentiful food in Europe.
We are "overdue for an ice age" (well and a eruption of the super volcano in west central US but that's another paranoid's dream). If and it is a horrendously HUGE if, mankind is contributing to global warming, then hurrah. Just learn when to stop. Worldwide food production will increase, and contrary to intuition the desert areas will actually subside because the alterations to the weather patterns will allow for more rainfall. We owe it to mankind (and Canada) to help stop the next ice age. Not likely we can, any more than we cause global warming.
The fundamental question is not is global warming happening (as in in the 1970s the next ice age was coming, same science behind both). The question is, "Is man causing global warming?"; the answer to that is no. To many facts show the effects of man are minor in comparison to natural events, like volcanos, slides of methane hydrates under water (don't tell the doomsday makers, but the North Atlantic has enough methane in seabed ice/methane hydrates to _really_ cause global warming). We don't as a species even try to track things like the effects of undersea earthquakes as they relate to global warming. There is a lot going on. Look for the strongest correlation. Occam's razor says solar output is the biggest contributor by far to global warming. Studies that dismiss it only look at selected portions of solar activity that support their hypothesis.
Recall that even Sauron did not have the power to make the palantiri show false images, but rather could force selective showing of truthful images to lead to deceit. The best lies are based in truth.
One big thing is when a program ends the contractors are no longer on the payroll. The US Government hiring direct, those employees would be assigned some other task and never fired or laid off. It just doesn't happen. We actually need to go in the opposite direction and hire more contractors. It behooves managers in the government to never fire employees. It reflects poorly on them, and possibly reduces their budget the next year. If they keep bad employees and assign them do nothing work, they still get periodic raises.
Consider if you need to hire a database analyst to set up a system that will accept some information from data entry folks, process it and then spit back some results in reports. If you are in the private sector the DBA can be a just OK level in his field and still cost twice or more what a normal programmer costs. A really good DBA can cost 4 to 5 times a normal programmer. If you are a corporation dealing with a few million records in the database the DBA can do things in the clearest most easy to maintain, non-optimal way to get the job done quickly. For dealing with potentially billions of records you need to have the most optimized ability to generate this reports or the next set will be due while you process the current set. So you need to hire the best possible talent. And they still need to test and document things so others can maintain them... (don't think this is an issue, ask the IRS that has scrapped more than 1 over a billion dollar project to revamp the tax records system). So there is a demonstrated need to hire very qualified talent. Now after the 6 months to a year project is over, put that same guy on payroll forever at his pay scale with increases while he reads Dilbert and writes tech journal articles all day since he has very very little to do. Or as a contractor the job is done, let him go.
Smaller government could use more contractors, and then implement better oversight over their actual use and deployments.
The working fluid is often water. Sometimes ammonia but usually not for electronics. It is under lower pressure so that its boiling point is near the working temperature of the device. Boils off or evaporates, condenses in the cold side of the heat exchanger, then capillary action sucks it back faster than it would otherwise travel to the hot side. My favorite heat pipe was a flat grill... awesomely uniform temperatures. Not sure what the working fluid was. Other ways besides fans are to immerse the cold side heat exchanger into more water at normal pressures and that can have even more surface area to cool the reservoir making an effective heatsink area that is HUGE...
Just as BurgerKIng uses McDonalds site planning and places stores near them, so Microsoft falls into the same seemingly profitable pattern. Hey! Yes Hey! Microsoft! Isn't McDonalds Bigger than Burger King??? Ever hear of first mover advantage? It applies to real estate too. If they liked your location they'd be there.
Try flying with $10,001 on you. They'll pronounce you a drug dealer and take your money, and you'll have to successfully sue the government to get it back. The 4th Amendment has been dead since Nixon declared the War on Drugs.
You can fly with any amount you care to in the US. You are required to declare it on international flights. And it is always a good idea to have the documentation of the source like a withdrawal record from the bank... that said... they may still confiscate it. But if you've shown the documentation you'll eventually get it back and have grounds likely for damages (after all you were likely flying somewhere to buy something... and missed the opportunity...) You never want to have large sums undocumented as they will do an interesting thing allowed under the US RICO laws. The local police will confiscate it, then hand it over to the FBI. The FBI gives a 10% "kickback" to the local LEOs. You'll recover the amount given the FBI (90%) but the 10% to the LEOs has bureaucratically been laundered out of existence.
Transfer their debt to their own countries to offset the loans the US had made over the years for various wars etc. that have never been repaid... If there are grounds at all since it was stolen property... not like the police can return your stolen cash when they find your empty wallet.
They just conveniently change the rules and force you to play... OH and that whole separate accounts thing... That is a lie. It is in the general fund and we "borrow" against it on paper by the government buying its own t-bills... Pathetic really.
If they are only reporting actual worked hours then 4 per day makes them as productive as an office bound drone. MSFT has a concept they push called "Core Hours" or did some time back. The core hours that can be scheduled in normal expectation is 20 per week. The rest is taken up by the social miscellany of office life.
Personally I work almost all my contracts from home, lately doing either software forensics or Apple iOS development, and I work a pretty solid 8-10 hours each day, sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more for the lawyers who schedule at the last minute. Sometimes less if demand is low. And occasionally I am forced by a job to fly all over the country and my actual work hours plummet. So for me at least, I am much more productive at my home office, though my social life suffers greatly. Well, more than greatly.
The metric the employers should be using is "Are they getting the job done as expected?" and if not change the situation, either pull them into the office a few days a week, or fire them. Do let them know they are below expectations and allow them to fix the behavior! Also I find a daily scheduled audio chat helps keep expectations aligned. My company has not had an office downtown for several years now and we are pretty much pure cottage industry with an on demand office for clients visiting us. And I dress for work, same as I would for an office, I am pretty casual though, jeans, tee shirts and slip on shoes. YOU LAZY A$$ BUMS LOAFING OUT THERE, GET TO WORK, YOU'RE SPOILING IT FOR THE OTHERS
Slashdot Mirror
One generally accepted set of metrics is:
(1) that the plaintiff undertake to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena seeking their identity; (2) that the plaintiff specify the exact statement alleged to constitute actionable speech; (3) that the court review the complaint and other information to determine whether a viable claim against the anonymous defendants is presented; (4) that the plaintiff produce sufficient evidence to support, prima facie, each element of its cause of action; and (5) that the court then balance the First Amendment right of anonymous speech against the strength of the plaintiff's prima facie claim and the need for disclosure of the anonymous defendant's identity.
The old style protection was that copy machines could not reproduce the exact color (and a small range around it) of the green in US currency. Then as they became more in use for creating or copying photos that fell to the technique of printing a pattern of yellow dots on all things printed by color copiers and color printers. Some high end printers tried currency recognition but the latest trend to monopoly money colors and changing artwork made it mostly useless to try to recognize it. Now the microprinting on the bill and watermark features as well as the specific florescence under black light of the polyester fiber embedded with the bill denomination, and much more, make color photocopy technology moot. The yellow dots still exist to trace a document to a specific color printer though.
... pure politics and feeds on question steering.
The best the government might do, short of banning what is heralded as the biggest thing for consumers in the next decade by some, is to force 3D printers to embed the serial number of the device into what they produce, but that alone might interfere with the structural integrity of the object.
The whole concept is moot though as if one were a criminal, you could buy a gun on the street cheaper than making one. Take one from someone in a secured area easier than smuggling one in is another option. I recall as well that organized crime ran an operation at a New Jersey plant where they used the lighter staffed second and third shift to manufacture firearms by resetting the tooling then setting it back, so that first shift had no clue. It ran for at least five years according to law enforcement. So organized crime will just manufacture guns. Lower echelons will steal them or buy them from people who stole them. Or legitimately purchase them. Or pay someone to purchase them for them.
Hobbyist types will continue to make them. 3D printing is just one technology. For the price of the higher quality 3D printer used to make the functional 3D firearm (this was not RepRap technology!) one could purchase a nice combo lathe and mill, and the CNC kit for it. Then produce the parts in metal. The afghani people have used hand tools and sourced their raw materials from things like car axels and scrap sheet steel and used very minimal machine shop work (I presume to machine the barrel / bore it out / chamber it) and the rest by hand with drills and files and a smallish box and pan brake. They cranked out enough AK replicas that they used a 55 gallon drum of boiling "paint" to coat them with (after care to protect the barrel and friction surfaces). A 3D printer (in plastics) just makes it simpler to make a bad gun. And is very expensive as well in comparison to making one out of metal.
The purpose of the 3D printed gun was to underline dramatically how futile it is to enact gun control in the manner the US tries to do. Not to produce marketable or truly useful completely plastic devices. And it did that to great excess. And as to the undetectable nature. I could as easily CNC machine plastics or even unfired ceramics to the same end. Heck, some materials I might be able to cast from easy to make molds.
Lastly if one has a legitimate firearm, and one wants to make a replacement part for that firearm, then that should be allowed. Do I insert a FOID card into the machine to allow it (assuming the impossible technology to detect it is destined for a firearm and not a toaster or my car stereo)? This is not a tractable problem. This poll is selective and designed to get the response reported
Acording to the last election there are at least 48% idiots in america. As an european, i would round that up to 96%, 'cause everyone who elects a president based on the color of his tie is an idiot...
It wasn't the color of the tie. It was much more subtle. It was the direction of the stripes diagonally. One is European. One is American. Oddly the only "American" striped tie I own was purchased in Ukraine.
And it is not an inflated price. A good political mailing list can cost upwards of $10 for highly qualified names. This is 170,000 highly qualified names. Well worth the asking price. Worth upwards to 1.7 million. $250K is a bargain. Any politician in this day an age that doesn't control the like named domain is just not being smart enough to vote for. Or has a plain enough name someone else beat them to it. The democratic National Committee should but the domain and mailing list and give the website / domain to Ron minus the mailing list. knowing ones anti-constituents has value too. They can filter what the send them and cause disarray among that particular libertarian group.
QR codes have an edge because they are a free to use standard. and unlike the RF spectrum of the rectennas use, the optical spectrum allows as many QR codes and sensing devices as you can cram together because the optics are simple. The RF equivalent "optics" are a bit more. I also see a problem climbing the side of a building to get to the rectenna's near field range.
Get a proxy or VPN account with a US provider. Hire a remailing service in New Hampshire. (one that gives a street address, not box number address) Get a US based Visa debit card.
Join the Virtual US!
YMMV, and you then must pay the shipping at consumer rates for hard goods, and then customs and import duties as required, and any local regional taxes on purchased materials above customs and duties fees, for example in Washington State we have a "use tax" on goods purchased out of state and brought into the state.
Compare cost to cost purchasing locally. Save? Woo Hoo!!! Lost money, welcome to the free market!
The free market also accounts for cost. If it costs more to sell somewhere, shopping, transit fees, etc. licensing agreements with the content providers included, you add those to the cost to buy in that area. Software comes with support issues as well. It could well be that in order to meet the requirements for service (like the whole one year versus two year current snafus) the cost is higher in another region. It is not because Apple or some other seller decided they don't like Australia (or some other region). They have actual cost differentials they add to the same base price to determine cost for a given market. And "free market" is more of a J.P. Morgan thing of "you charge what the market will bear"; suggested reading on this is "The Octopus". Free markets are about government controls, not financial decisions by the seller. Restricting the seller through legal means to a "level playing field" means lower cost to sell markets pay for selling in higher cost to sell markets, quite the opposite of a "free market".
Or since they burn natural gas in turbines to drive generators to generate the electricity to drive the motors to drive the compressors ... which will drive turbines to drive generators to generate electricity can't we eliminate everything after the first "to generate electricity" and if not because of peak demand issues store the natural gas instead and still short circuit a lot of this. I think thermodynamics is being monkeyed with here ...
If you are looking at colonization, send 4 women and redundant cryopaks of semen. Women have less weight burden on average so cheaper on resources, and women stand high g flight better so less complications there. And to maximize diversity you'll need 30 people on average to become stable without in breeding issues. So also consider some frozen embryos.
But this expedition is likely not focused on colonization... That alone would change the cost and weight balance unfavorably. The only way these folks would likely see more people is if earth sends more people. So I was surprised no one asked if all the developed hardware and software and plans, etc. would be open sourced to encourage more people to follow in their footsteps and improve along the way without the need for reinvention!
Or the Unicode emoticons #1F494 #1F46E #1F434...
After the initial period of software problem support of months additional support is at our customary hourly rate of $$$ adjusted annually by no more than 10% from the acceptance date of the contracted work. A prepaid retainer of $$$2 may be paid for a yearly support contract. The $$$2 amount may be adjusted downwards annually to reflect past performance and upwards for inflation.
Then make $$$2 be about 20% of the contracts value.
I have been nickel and dime'd to death by major industry players who feel they are entitled to infinite support and even "small changes" for free. Sometimes a small enough matter (or occasionally a big one time one) is done as "good will", but don't get sucked into free support forever unless you build that into your contracts price. As in for contracts under a years duration quote a price at least 20 times your cost if you are so foolish as to include lifetime support for no additional cost.
Lower your import duties and maybe the price will be closer to a real parity. And wait for the middle of the night to call all the support calls in. Stuff a hundred million more users into Oz then get back to me about the strength of the Aussie dollar being something important in Adobe's pricing model. Alternately we subsidize worse economies than ours, so while yours is going stronger you can subsidize ours ...
... So that shipping thing goes both ways. I got a package from Kazakhstan faster than any from Australia. So ... Buy from Amazon us. Get yourself a US credit card and buy it with that. Send it as a gift to yourself. Use the bank as the US remitter address. It will cost you a little bit each month for the account and a bit each time you fund it but _might_ work out to be a bargain in some cases.
... You might also download the demo versions, then pay by US credit card (above) to get the registration code ... No shipping involved.
Regards shipping products, I can't get half the eBay Aussies to ship to the US at all, and when they do it takes 3-4 weeks
Just make sure inland revenue or whatever the Oz tax agents are, get their due, that way you get to pay the import taxes directly! I wonder which Adobe CS6 package he was talking about
In a different world view, and one that is equally valid, is Comcast provides multiple products over the same pipe. The "Internet connection" is capped per the subscriber agreement (which by the way, pay approximately $50 more a month for a business Internet connection and caps go away and you can get static IPs to host your own services). The Comcast Xfinity App is provided under a different access arrangement. That they happen to use the same pipe is not meaningful. The Comcast Xfinity user is paying for an additional service bundled into their cable TV service. Likely Comcast VOIP service does not count towards the cap while Vonage likely does.
I have a solution for Netflix, as Comcast makes profit from the Cable subscription supporting use of the Xfinity App, Netflix could pay Comcast a portion of their profit to move Netflix into an additional service branded as Comcast Netflix... So it is not like Comcast is "giving away" the bandwidth for Xfinity usage. It is part of the bundled cost of cable tv service.
Now you can reach the data cap in under a minute ...
Man is not to blame. See the effect of solar output here. The nay sayers that attempt to put done the solar effect look at sunspot activity not total solar output. Man is a speck on the surface of the planet.
The earth's rotation will continue to slow down more and more. Dino-days were shorter. And eventually we will lose more and more atmosphere to space. And the radioactive material that keeps the earths interior molten will all graceful move towards iron, and the lower magnetic field will mean even more atmosphere erosion. The surface will be very very hot. No life as we know it will live there as the temperature will be over that of boiling water, our atmosphere will be much less dense and unbreathable, and the solar radiation will not be deflected because our magnetic field will have weakened and collapsed to far. Depending on your science this is 500 million to 1 billion years off. Earth will be a lifeless rocky planet.
Generally warmer climates predicted by the global warming fanatics are in the range of normal variation, the last warming period allowed the renaissance by longer growing seasons and thus more plentiful food in Europe.
We are "overdue for an ice age" (well and a eruption of the super volcano in west central US but that's another paranoid's dream). If and it is a horrendously HUGE if, mankind is contributing to global warming, then hurrah. Just learn when to stop. Worldwide food production will increase, and contrary to intuition the desert areas will actually subside because the alterations to the weather patterns will allow for more rainfall. We owe it to mankind (and Canada) to help stop the next ice age. Not likely we can, any more than we cause global warming.
The fundamental question is not is global warming happening (as in in the 1970s the next ice age was coming, same science behind both). The question is, "Is man causing global warming?"; the answer to that is no. To many facts show the effects of man are minor in comparison to natural events, like volcanos, slides of methane hydrates under water (don't tell the doomsday makers, but the North Atlantic has enough methane in seabed ice/methane hydrates to _really_ cause global warming). We don't as a species even try to track things like the effects of undersea earthquakes as they relate to global warming. There is a lot going on. Look for the strongest correlation. Occam's razor says solar output is the biggest contributor by far to global warming. Studies that dismiss it only look at selected portions of solar activity that support their hypothesis.
Recall that even Sauron did not have the power to make the palantiri show false images, but rather could force selective showing of truthful images to lead to deceit. The best lies are based in truth.
One big thing is when a program ends the contractors are no longer on the payroll. The US Government hiring direct, those employees would be assigned some other task and never fired or laid off. It just doesn't happen. We actually need to go in the opposite direction and hire more contractors. It behooves managers in the government to never fire employees. It reflects poorly on them, and possibly reduces their budget the next year. If they keep bad employees and assign them do nothing work, they still get periodic raises.
... (don't think this is an issue, ask the IRS that has scrapped more than 1 over a billion dollar project to revamp the tax records system). So there is a demonstrated need to hire very qualified talent. Now after the 6 months to a year project is over, put that same guy on payroll forever at his pay scale with increases while he reads Dilbert and writes tech journal articles all day since he has very very little to do. Or as a contractor the job is done, let him go.
Consider if you need to hire a database analyst to set up a system that will accept some information from data entry folks, process it and then spit back some results in reports. If you are in the private sector the DBA can be a just OK level in his field and still cost twice or more what a normal programmer costs. A really good DBA can cost 4 to 5 times a normal programmer. If you are a corporation dealing with a few million records in the database the DBA can do things in the clearest most easy to maintain, non-optimal way to get the job done quickly. For dealing with potentially billions of records you need to have the most optimized ability to generate this reports or the next set will be due while you process the current set. So you need to hire the best possible talent. And they still need to test and document things so others can maintain them
Smaller government could use more contractors, and then implement better oversight over their actual use and deployments.
The working fluid is often water. Sometimes ammonia but usually not for electronics. It is under lower pressure so that its boiling point is near the working temperature of the device. Boils off or evaporates, condenses in the cold side of the heat exchanger, then capillary action sucks it back faster than it would otherwise travel to the hot side. My favorite heat pipe was a flat grill ... awesomely uniform temperatures. Not sure what the working fluid was. Other ways besides fans are to immerse the cold side heat exchanger into more water at normal pressures and that can have even more surface area to cool the reservoir making an effective heatsink area that is HUGE...
Just as BurgerKIng uses McDonalds site planning and places stores near them, so Microsoft falls into the same seemingly profitable pattern. Hey! Yes Hey! Microsoft! Isn't McDonalds Bigger than Burger King??? Ever hear of first mover advantage? It applies to real estate too. If they liked your location they'd be there.
Try flying with $10,001 on you. They'll pronounce you a drug dealer and take your money, and you'll have to successfully sue the government to get it back. The 4th Amendment has been dead since Nixon declared the War on Drugs.
You can fly with any amount you care to in the US. You are required to declare it on international flights. And it is always a good idea to have the documentation of the source like a withdrawal record from the bank ... that said ... they may still confiscate it. But if you've shown the documentation you'll eventually get it back and have grounds likely for damages (after all you were likely flying somewhere to buy something ... and missed the opportunity ...) You never want to have large sums undocumented as they will do an interesting thing allowed under the US RICO laws. The local police will confiscate it, then hand it over to the FBI. The FBI gives a 10% "kickback" to the local LEOs. You'll recover the amount given the FBI (90%) but the 10% to the LEOs has bureaucratically been laundered out of existence.
Kids will be asking for hulk hands and tall foam cowboy hats ...
A is a member of B does not make B a member of A ... If one were to own a bank and remove its funds that is embezzlement not a Ponzi Scheme.
Transfer their debt to their own countries to offset the loans the US had made over the years for various wars etc. that have never been repaid... If there are grounds at all since it was stolen property ... not like the police can return your stolen cash when they find your empty wallet.
They just conveniently change the rules and force you to play ... OH and that whole separate accounts thing ... That is a lie. It is in the general fund and we "borrow" against it on paper by the government buying its own t-bills ... Pathetic really.
If they are only reporting actual worked hours then 4 per day makes them as productive as an office bound drone. MSFT has a concept they push called "Core Hours" or did some time back. The core hours that can be scheduled in normal expectation is 20 per week. The rest is taken up by the social miscellany of office life.
Personally I work almost all my contracts from home, lately doing either software forensics or Apple iOS development, and I work a pretty solid 8-10 hours each day, sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more for the lawyers who schedule at the last minute. Sometimes less if demand is low. And occasionally I am forced by a job to fly all over the country and my actual work hours plummet. So for me at least, I am much more productive at my home office, though my social life suffers greatly. Well, more than greatly.
The metric the employers should be using is "Are they getting the job done as expected?" and if not change the situation, either pull them into the office a few days a week, or fire them. Do let them know they are below expectations and allow them to fix the behavior! Also I find a daily scheduled audio chat helps keep expectations aligned. My company has not had an office downtown for several years now and we are pretty much pure cottage industry with an on demand office for clients visiting us. And I dress for work, same as I would for an office, I am pretty casual though, jeans, tee shirts and slip on shoes.
YOU LAZY A$$ BUMS LOAFING OUT THERE, GET TO WORK, YOU'RE SPOILING IT FOR THE OTHERS