You know a legit airbag costs more than $80. I know it. The body shop and/or insurance company knows it. It's the "partly the customers fault" for not requesting and going over the full parts record? Does the average consumer receiving body repairs really go over the invoice line by line (especially since insurance is footing the bill)? And even if they do, do they know how much parts are supposed to cost? Do they know that cheap aftermarket airbags can be deadly?
When you see the doctor and he does a test involving a tissue sample, do you request to see the slides after the pathologist is done with them? Do you request the calibration certificate for the cholesterol tester? No you don't, and you also shouldn't have to be going over the body shop's work with a fine-toothed comb.
And yes, any body shop that even offers to cut corners that much in parts procurement is a lousy shop; even if they've told the customer about the cheap parts. Better to educate the customer, and if that fails, simply refuse the job rather than have the death of the customer on their conscience.
Most of these bags were put in by body shops (and/or insurance companies) goosing their profit margin by using dodgy aftermarket parts. Very few of the people with these bags (save the idiots who bought them on eBay) actually went out and bought those parts; they were just put in as part of body work. It's not unreasonable for a consumer to expect a body shop to put in parts that are not a steaming pile of garbage.
While I feel sorry for those that had counterfeit airbags put in place by a body shop shooting for cheap-ass parts (or insurance companies forcing cheap-ass parts on their policyholders) anybody buying an airbag for $80 on eBay is a complete blithering idiot.
Airbags are the one and only part of my car where I would only purchase new, from the dealer, every time. No junkyard or aftermarket airbags would EVER go on my car.
I'm a big fan of pick-and-pull junkyards, and I've bought plenty of aftermarket parts, but airbags are just too critical, and twitchy, to trust to anything but new, dealer parts.
And yes, they are expensive and overpriced, but you gotta do what you gotta do...
It might be too late for you, but age has nothing to do with it. This is technology... you can't ever stop learning new things, unless you really enjoy maintaining legacy systems. If you want to work on new-project development then yes, your skills are woefully out of date, and you have nobody but yourself (and certainly not your age) to blame for it.
Get yourself onto a stable project with a future, any project. Heck, even a support job as long as it keeps you employed. Once you are there, throw yourself into learning something current, preferably something that can be integrated into your now-new job. Even support teams have a continuous need for little utility programs to make life easier. (Although support may not be a good fit if you aren't a people person...)
As another poster has pointed out, those probably include localized models. Different display languages and power cords can make for a lot of different "models." Really, she should have called them "SKUs", not "models" to differentiate between actual different designs and minor changes to what gets tossed in the box.
Ok; the Tabeo is shaped more-or-less like the Fuhu. But there are only so many ways to package an impact-friendly tablet... they use a similar one. I don't understand why Fuhu has their proverbial panties in a wad about the NDA. Once the design was publicly released, how does the NDA matter any more? One certainly didn't need access to Fuhu's internal design documents once it was sold on the open market for anyone to check out.
And "business strategies"? What exactly would those be? 1) Make a cheap tablet that looks like a toy. 2) Sell a bunch of them for more than they cost. 3) Profit!
And so what if TRU planned to abandon the Fuhu from day one? While this might give future suppliers second thoughts about "partnering" with TRU, and it certainly isn't very nice, I don't see how it's illegal. Certainly Microsoft has gotten away with doing this repeatedly... (and yet they can still find suckers willing to partner.)
I'll agree that for day-to-day driving, an EV will work just fine. But it's more than a bit of an exaggeration to say that cars are not ever driven past EV range. I, and I imagine most car owners, travel some distance with a 3-4 hour round trip on a fairly regular basis. (For me, it's at least once a month...)
And the "rent a gas guzzler" plan for long trips isn't going to work due to variability in demand. The demand for such vehicles, during, say, thanksgiving weekend (or appropriate holiday in other countries), would be beyond insane.
I think "Volt-style" hybrids are the way to go... you get the best of both worlds. If only they can make it cheaper and more like a regular car.
Most optometrists or ophthalmologists that are being honest will tell people that otherwise don't need glasses to just use the drugstore models for a while until their prescription progresses to a point (if ever) that a more customized pair is required. Certainly you can't use them because of your particular problems, but that doesn't mean they are a bad option for people overall.
But your overall point is correct... "nice earbuds, a microphone, and a smartphone interface" are simply not going to cut it, unless the iPhone jammed in a high-quality DSP I'm unaware of.
Obviously the author is a Consumer Electronics analyst, and he's referring to Consumer Electronic Computing Devices, not your mid-range server. In the Grand Tradition of Slashdot Car Analogies, your statement is like the following:
Early 20th Century Auto Industry Analyst: Steam Power is Dead. Early 20th Century Smug Slashdotter!: But my gigantic power generation plant runs on steam!
People mistakenly believe that incorporation is some sort of "magic wand" that reduces your tax liability and limits legal liability. Unless you meet the VERY STRICT rules for keeping the corporation at an appropriate "arms length" it does none of those things. (And it really doesn't do much for your tax liability even if you do incorporate.) Really, if you are just getting started on your own, insurance is a LOT less of a time sink than incorporation, and time is something any new entrepreneur does not have nearly enough of.
You clearly need to turn in your Slashdot commenter license... to REALLY entice editors to post a story, work BitCoins into the mix. Oohh... better yet, work in references to the MPAA, And Ubuntu, and whatever else can be stirred into the pot. References to MAME are old school... (although that can be forgiven, Mr. 4-digit UID.)
How does this sound? "Raspberry Pi used to mine BitCoins to help pay an MPAA Lawsuit Fine. However, due to a security hole in Ubuntu caused by the new Unity interface, the new coins were stolen from the user by someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous. Wil Wheaton offers to sponsor a live D&D game played with Arduino-programmed robotic miniatures to make up for the lost funds."
Of COURSE this process is good for the company. They get an entire week of work for the cost of a beachfront condo they probably usually let executives use for free.
For the applicant, it's a really lousy deal, especially if they are not currently unemployed.
Two people cannot use the same identity at the same time. Attempts to, say obtain two valid Driver's Licenses, Passports, and voter registrations simultaneously doesn't work too well. Not to mention the fun around tax time.
An e-book monopoly? What on earth are you talking about? I'm sure Apple, the most valuable company in history, has more than enough cash to match whatever price Amazon feels like charging. And don't forget B&N, whose Nook is selling pretty well, if not as well as the Kindle.
In addition, a Kindle will easily read books from other online stores; about 2/3rds of the books on my Kindle didn't come from Amazon, and few of those books are available in electronic format through Amazon.
In addition, it's silly to talk about theoretical future harms from a currently non-existent Amazon monopoly, when we have Agency Pricing, which results in artificially inflated consumer pricing right now.
And how is Wal-Mart's pricing power bad for consumers? There has been little evidence to date that Wal-Mart raises their prices after the local competition shutters. Their consistently low prices (and forcing low prices at their competitors) has been really good for consumers, if not so hot for jobs.
Gee, how DARE the "business" side of the company present your pure UNIX world with applications that are only available on Windows!
Windows is a perfectly valid and normal environment within which to run business applications. Running applications needed by the business is, after all, kind of the whole point of the IT department.
Drop the "Oh Bother..." attitude towards the business side of your company dictating your projects (and your funding) or your job will not be long for this world.
While a ITIN (which is NOT an SSN) can be used in place of one in some situations (such as opening a bank account) they are not interchangeable; the IRS, ICE, and SSA know when you've fed them an ITIN instead of a real SSN. (A credit bureau might be fooled, I suppose...) Any eVerify (which is more and more nowadays, unless you want to work in construction or a meatpacking plant) employer won't hire you. And you'll have to do a bit of forgery work just to convince the IRS to issue the number.
There are very few people born in the last 20 years or so either in the US or to an American citizen abroad that don't have an SSN. An application to get one is provided to US parents at birth, and most parents promptly fill it out (or file the appropriate "foreign birth" paperwork) because you cannot be claimed as a dependent without a genuine SSN.
If, for bizarre reason, an American citizen is alive today, has not just been born, and does not have an SSN, the SSA will issue one, but only after a very rigorous process of verifying your identity, confirming that person has not already been issued an SSN, and the SSA obtaining certified birth records and citizenship records direct from the issuing authority. (So any forgery you present in person is worthless.) It makes getting a passport look easy.
When there was a chance that a child might not have yet acquired an SSN, that could work. Since now a record of every death goes to the SSA, that'll kill the SSN of pretty much every citizen upon death. (In fact, there are news stories every once in a while about how hard it is to convince the SSA that you aren't dead when somebody fat-fingers the wrong number or name into the database.)
Getting a birth certificate? No problem. Getting the social for that person? No problem.
Actually using that SSN? Incredibly risky. Part of the process of dying now is the local vital records office sending a record of your death to the Social Security Administration. The second you do anything to get that SSN reported to the feds, (like open a bank account, attempt to acquire credit, or get a paycheck), you are toast. At best, it'll come back that the SSN is invalid, and a normal life can be annoying. At worst, they'll pop you for ID theft.
This decision seems incompatible with the GPS tracking decision, which said a warrant was required for GPS tracking. IIRC, the GPS decision didn't key off the fact that the cops had to plant a transmitter, they based the decision off the idea that it was really creepy. This seems to be an identical level of creepiness.
I looked, and maybe I'm blind, but I don't see any way to access the full paper (without a subscription or special request) and the linked article has no such sentence in it.
12.5 mg/kg! Holy cow! This is ridiculously in excess of any conceivable dose of Triclosan you could get unless you are an utterly unprotected employee of a Triclosan-using factory.
I can certainly dose any given collection of animals with nearly any given chemical in a fashion that will kill them (either quickly or slowly, depending on the particular substance.) I can also dose them with an utterly harmless dose of the most toxic and horrible poisons known to mankind and the animal will live. This applicable to everything from water or oxygen to nasty organic or radiologic stuff.
In the end, it all comes down to the dose. Was the dose these animals were given at all representative of the dosing received by a person using triclosan-based products? (Or animals absorbing triclosan in the environment?) Would have been nice if that press release had mentioned it. Since it didn't, I can guess that the dose is utterly ridiculous.
Unless your application will stream in the file as fast as possible, all the time, this won't work. The tape can only go so slow; when you go below that speed, the tape "shoeshines" which rapidly wears out both the tape and the drive.
Tapes simply were not designed for applications like streaming.
There is no such thing as a "standard" amount of insurance. Any financial adviser that says such a thing is either lazy (because he doesn't want to calculate your actual insurance needs) or lying (if you don't really need ten years of coverage) or both.
How much insurance SHOULD you get? Enough to meet the reasonable financial needs of your heirs that cannot be met because of your missing presence and salary.
A single person with no dependents can get by with minimum coverage; enough to cover his/her funeral and "wrapping up" expenses. $25-50k would almost certainly be more than enough.
A sole-breadwinner with a large, young, family, may need a policy for 20 years or more of income.
(And although you didn't mention them, I won't even get into how ridiculous whole-life policies are for the majority of people, yet they are very popular with many "financial advisers".)
For myself, the 2x pay that my employer provides free of charge is more than enough. My wife is perfectly capable of doing just fine, financially, without me, and vice-versa.
Slashdot Mirror
You know a legit airbag costs more than $80. I know it. The body shop and/or insurance company knows it. It's the "partly the customers fault" for not requesting and going over the full parts record? Does the average consumer receiving body repairs really go over the invoice line by line (especially since insurance is footing the bill)? And even if they do, do they know how much parts are supposed to cost? Do they know that cheap aftermarket airbags can be deadly?
When you see the doctor and he does a test involving a tissue sample, do you request to see the slides after the pathologist is done with them? Do you request the calibration certificate for the cholesterol tester? No you don't, and you also shouldn't have to be going over the body shop's work with a fine-toothed comb.
And yes, any body shop that even offers to cut corners that much in parts procurement is a lousy shop; even if they've told the customer about the cheap parts. Better to educate the customer, and if that fails, simply refuse the job rather than have the death of the customer on their conscience.
Most of these bags were put in by body shops (and/or insurance companies) goosing their profit margin by using dodgy aftermarket parts. Very few of the people with these bags (save the idiots who bought them on eBay) actually went out and bought those parts; they were just put in as part of body work. It's not unreasonable for a consumer to expect a body shop to put in parts that are not a steaming pile of garbage.
While I feel sorry for those that had counterfeit airbags put in place by a body shop shooting for cheap-ass parts (or insurance companies forcing cheap-ass parts on their policyholders) anybody buying an airbag for $80 on eBay is a complete blithering idiot.
Airbags are the one and only part of my car where I would only purchase new, from the dealer, every time. No junkyard or aftermarket airbags would EVER go on my car.
I'm a big fan of pick-and-pull junkyards, and I've bought plenty of aftermarket parts, but airbags are just too critical, and twitchy, to trust to anything but new, dealer parts.
And yes, they are expensive and overpriced, but you gotta do what you gotta do...
It might be too late for you, but age has nothing to do with it. This is technology... you can't ever stop learning new things, unless you really enjoy maintaining legacy systems. If you want to work on new-project development then yes, your skills are woefully out of date, and you have nobody but yourself (and certainly not your age) to blame for it.
Get yourself onto a stable project with a future, any project. Heck, even a support job as long as it keeps you employed. Once you are there, throw yourself into learning something current, preferably something that can be integrated into your now-new job. Even support teams have a continuous need for little utility programs to make life easier. (Although support may not be a good fit if you aren't a people person...)
As another poster has pointed out, those probably include localized models. Different display languages and power cords can make for a lot of different "models." Really, she should have called them "SKUs", not "models" to differentiate between actual different designs and minor changes to what gets tossed in the box.
Ok; the Tabeo is shaped more-or-less like the Fuhu. But there are only so many ways to package an impact-friendly tablet... they use a similar one. I don't understand why Fuhu has their proverbial panties in a wad about the NDA. Once the design was publicly released, how does the NDA matter any more? One certainly didn't need access to Fuhu's internal design documents once it was sold on the open market for anyone to check out.
And "business strategies"? What exactly would those be?
1) Make a cheap tablet that looks like a toy.
2) Sell a bunch of them for more than they cost.
3) Profit!
And so what if TRU planned to abandon the Fuhu from day one? While this might give future suppliers second thoughts about "partnering" with TRU, and it certainly isn't very nice, I don't see how it's illegal. Certainly Microsoft has gotten away with doing this repeatedly... (and yet they can still find suckers willing to partner.)
I'll agree that for day-to-day driving, an EV will work just fine. But it's more than a bit of an exaggeration to say that cars are not ever driven past EV range. I, and I imagine most car owners, travel some distance with a 3-4 hour round trip on a fairly regular basis. (For me, it's at least once a month...)
And the "rent a gas guzzler" plan for long trips isn't going to work due to variability in demand. The demand for such vehicles, during, say, thanksgiving weekend (or appropriate holiday in other countries), would be beyond insane.
I think "Volt-style" hybrids are the way to go... you get the best of both worlds. If only they can make it cheaper and more like a regular car.
Most optometrists or ophthalmologists that are being honest will tell people that otherwise don't need glasses to just use the drugstore models for a while until their prescription progresses to a point (if ever) that a more customized pair is required. Certainly you can't use them because of your particular problems, but that doesn't mean they are a bad option for people overall.
But your overall point is correct... "nice earbuds, a microphone, and a smartphone interface" are simply not going to cut it, unless the iPhone jammed in a high-quality DSP I'm unaware of.
Obviously the author is a Consumer Electronics analyst, and he's referring to Consumer Electronic Computing Devices, not your mid-range server. In the Grand Tradition of Slashdot Car Analogies, your statement is like the following:
Early 20th Century Auto Industry Analyst: Steam Power is Dead.
Early 20th Century Smug Slashdotter!: But my gigantic power generation plant runs on steam!
People mistakenly believe that incorporation is some sort of "magic wand" that reduces your tax liability and limits legal liability. Unless you meet the VERY STRICT rules for keeping the corporation at an appropriate "arms length" it does none of those things. (And it really doesn't do much for your tax liability even if you do incorporate.) Really, if you are just getting started on your own, insurance is a LOT less of a time sink than incorporation, and time is something any new entrepreneur does not have nearly enough of.
You clearly need to turn in your Slashdot commenter license... to REALLY entice editors to post a story, work BitCoins into the mix. Oohh... better yet, work in references to the MPAA, And Ubuntu, and whatever else can be stirred into the pot. References to MAME are old school... (although that can be forgiven, Mr. 4-digit UID.)
How does this sound? "Raspberry Pi used to mine BitCoins to help pay an MPAA Lawsuit Fine. However, due to a security hole in Ubuntu caused by the new Unity interface, the new coins were stolen from the user by someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous. Wil Wheaton offers to sponsor a live D&D game played with Arduino-programmed robotic miniatures to make up for the lost funds."
Did I miss anything?
DRM is optional for Kindle books sold on Amazon. They do not require it's use; it's up to the Author.
Of COURSE this process is good for the company. They get an entire week of work for the cost of a beachfront condo they probably usually let executives use for free.
For the applicant, it's a really lousy deal, especially if they are not currently unemployed.
I hope you were joking.
Two people cannot use the same identity at the same time. Attempts to, say obtain two valid Driver's Licenses, Passports, and voter registrations simultaneously doesn't work too well. Not to mention the fun around tax time.
An e-book monopoly? What on earth are you talking about? I'm sure Apple, the most valuable company in history, has more than enough cash to match whatever price Amazon feels like charging. And don't forget B&N, whose Nook is selling pretty well, if not as well as the Kindle.
In addition, a Kindle will easily read books from other online stores; about 2/3rds of the books on my Kindle didn't come from Amazon, and few of those books are available in electronic format through Amazon.
In addition, it's silly to talk about theoretical future harms from a currently non-existent Amazon monopoly, when we have Agency Pricing, which results in artificially inflated consumer pricing right now.
And how is Wal-Mart's pricing power bad for consumers? There has been little evidence to date that Wal-Mart raises their prices after the local competition shutters. Their consistently low prices (and forcing low prices at their competitors) has been really good for consumers, if not so hot for jobs.
Gee, how DARE the "business" side of the company present your pure UNIX world with applications that are only available on Windows!
Windows is a perfectly valid and normal environment within which to run business applications. Running applications needed by the business is, after all, kind of the whole point of the IT department.
Drop the "Oh Bother..." attitude towards the business side of your company dictating your projects (and your funding) or your job will not be long for this world.
While a ITIN (which is NOT an SSN) can be used in place of one in some situations (such as opening a bank account) they are not interchangeable; the IRS, ICE, and SSA know when you've fed them an ITIN instead of a real SSN. (A credit bureau might be fooled, I suppose...) Any eVerify (which is more and more nowadays, unless you want to work in construction or a meatpacking plant) employer won't hire you. And you'll have to do a bit of forgery work just to convince the IRS to issue the number.
There are very few people born in the last 20 years or so either in the US or to an American citizen abroad that don't have an SSN. An application to get one is provided to US parents at birth, and most parents promptly fill it out (or file the appropriate "foreign birth" paperwork) because you cannot be claimed as a dependent without a genuine SSN.
If, for bizarre reason, an American citizen is alive today, has not just been born, and does not have an SSN, the SSA will issue one, but only after a very rigorous process of verifying your identity, confirming that person has not already been issued an SSN, and the SSA obtaining certified birth records and citizenship records direct from the issuing authority. (So any forgery you present in person is worthless.) It makes getting a passport look easy.
When there was a chance that a child might not have yet acquired an SSN, that could work. Since now a record of every death goes to the SSA, that'll kill the SSN of pretty much every citizen upon death. (In fact, there are news stories every once in a while about how hard it is to convince the SSA that you aren't dead when somebody fat-fingers the wrong number or name into the database.)
Getting a birth certificate? No problem. Getting the social for that person? No problem.
Actually using that SSN? Incredibly risky. Part of the process of dying now is the local vital records office sending a record of your death to the Social Security Administration. The second you do anything to get that SSN reported to the feds, (like open a bank account, attempt to acquire credit, or get a paycheck), you are toast. At best, it'll come back that the SSN is invalid, and a normal life can be annoying. At worst, they'll pop you for ID theft.
This decision seems incompatible with the GPS tracking decision, which said a warrant was required for GPS tracking. IIRC, the GPS decision didn't key off the fact that the cops had to plant a transmitter, they based the decision off the idea that it was really creepy. This seems to be an identical level of creepiness.
I looked, and maybe I'm blind, but I don't see any way to access the full paper (without a subscription or special request) and the linked article has no such sentence in it.
12.5 mg/kg! Holy cow! This is ridiculously in excess of any conceivable dose of Triclosan you could get unless you are an utterly unprotected employee of a Triclosan-using factory.
I can certainly dose any given collection of animals with nearly any given chemical in a fashion that will kill them (either quickly or slowly, depending on the particular substance.) I can also dose them with an utterly harmless dose of the most toxic and horrible poisons known to mankind and the animal will live. This applicable to everything from water or oxygen to nasty organic or radiologic stuff.
In the end, it all comes down to the dose. Was the dose these animals were given at all representative of the dosing received by a person using triclosan-based products? (Or animals absorbing triclosan in the environment?) Would have been nice if that press release had mentioned it. Since it didn't, I can guess that the dose is utterly ridiculous.
Unless your application will stream in the file as fast as possible, all the time, this won't work. The tape can only go so slow; when you go below that speed, the tape "shoeshines" which rapidly wears out both the tape and the drive.
Tapes simply were not designed for applications like streaming.
There is no such thing as a "standard" amount of insurance. Any financial adviser that says such a thing is either lazy (because he doesn't want to calculate your actual insurance needs) or lying (if you don't really need ten years of coverage) or both.
How much insurance SHOULD you get? Enough to meet the reasonable financial needs of your heirs that cannot be met because of your missing presence and salary.
A single person with no dependents can get by with minimum coverage; enough to cover his/her funeral and "wrapping up" expenses. $25-50k would almost certainly be more than enough.
A sole-breadwinner with a large, young, family, may need a policy for 20 years or more of income.
(And although you didn't mention them, I won't even get into how ridiculous whole-life policies are for the majority of people, yet they are very popular with many "financial advisers".)
For myself, the 2x pay that my employer provides free of charge is more than enough. My wife is perfectly capable of doing just fine, financially, without me, and vice-versa.