May depend on the model, I had a WRT54G that I could ignore for months at a time, and typically it only needed attention because the ADSL line it was connected to got flaky.
Heck, I'm still using a WRT54G (1.1 I think) for my home network that I bought in 2001ish. A couple years back, I updated the firmware to support WPA encryption and it still works perfectly - I never have any problems with it, I don't need to reboot it, it just works. (I should note I use it only as a wireless access point, not a router.) I'm watching prices on a dual-band N with gigabit ethernet router to replace it, but so far I haven't gotten around to it, in part because I hear so much that newer routers aren't as reliable.
Then I pay a lot less in rent than I would actually renting, so I'm still coming out ahead. And I have an asset I can sell. And if the gov't decides they want to rezone my neighborhood, they have to pay me fair market value for it. But go ahead and keep claiming owning land is just like paying rent. It's not, but you can claim that.
Meanwhile, I can fill the 37 gallon fuel tank on my truck from empty to full in far less than 15 minutes. Unless recharge times become near competitive with that (they can be a bit slower, but 30 minutes is a non-starter) it's going to be a huge problem. So the other option is to swap the entire battery pack, but as has been pointed out there are issues with that, too.
There are people working on this idea. The issues are that it requires a standard battery pack, which is easily and quickly changeable - within a few minutes at most.
Yep. Since I would have had to replace all of my cables anyway, I investigated switching to an Android phone, and in the end I went with a Samsung S3 (from an iPhone 3GS). Some things are better on the iPhone, other things are better on the Android. I'm happy with my purchase, though - I don't think I would've been as happy with the iPhone 5.
In Maryland, it's 12 mph over when you get a ticket. It's worth noting that the cameras are only in school zones and construction zones "for safety." I'm all for safety, but with the school zones especially, "safety" apparently means people doing 50 mph in a 30 mph zone until they get right next to the camera, then slamming on their brakes to get to 20 mph, then flooring it a few seconds later once they're out of the reach of the camera. Or weaving in and out of traffic that is following the 30 mph rule. Somehow, this is SAFER. I would love to ask our city council for the before-and-after statistics on accidents - how much safer are we, really? How much would you bet that there is no information?
If it's really about safety as they claim, then they should donate all of the profit to some third-party cause...fallen police officers fund or something like that.
Most of the people in your situation does those things so seldom that it would be cheaper for them to own a smaller vehicle and rent a larger vehicle when they need to do work that requires a truck or if they need to carry more than 3 passengers.
First, rental vehicles almost universally suck. I've driven perhaps 25 of them, from probably every major rental brand in the US, and they're almost always missing useful features like cruise control - I don't use it much when commuting, but on longer trips it's very nice to have (and, yes, I've done plenty of longer trips - as much as 600 miles - in cars without it). Second, most rental companies here will not let you tow your own trailer with their truck, and the trucks are usually not equipped with brake controllers to tow trailers with electric brakes - it's frustrating, actually; if you call and ask U-Haul, they'll say yes, but when you show up to pick up the truck the story changes. Third, I know I've used our truck to tow quite a few times in the last few months; the costs of those rentals probably would be far more than it'd be to just own the truck - remember, I need to get to my destination, get around at the destination, then get home again, so I need a vehicle for the entire time. Fourth, if you rent a pickup, you don't generally get a cap, which you may want (we have one on our pickup, and I'm glad we do - it provides some security and protection from rain for the tools, bike, chairs, etc. I carry back there). Fifth, I don't know if they even have 3/4 or full ton pickups available to rent (my towing needs require at least a 3/4 ton) - the pickups I've seen as rentals are half ton models.
All of that said, we usually carpool in a fairly efficient car to work, and I usually drive my second "fun" car to work when we have to drive separately. We don't normally use the truck for commuting because it's expensive to run and much harder to park compared to the cars - we've done it in a couple limited situations, but it's pretty rare.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with flying cars, though. I can say that it'll never happen here in DC because most of the city is in a no-fly zone, with exceptions for College Park Airport, National, and the bases (mainly Andrews); there's an odd cutout in the no-fly zone for Freeway Airport in Bowie. College Park requires an extra preapproved security process to use.
We will probably have one more major storm come through and knock down the remaining trees/branches that were damaged, and then a decade or more of barely any power outages since all the damaged/aged trees have been removed or pruned by either storms or humans over-reacting to the storm damage.
This is what the reliability plan in our city was supposed to do. It doesn't seem to be working very well, but they claimed success.
For comparison, our computers have reset unexpectedly twice (iirc) in the past 12 years. I assume that both times it was due to a short power-blip. No other outages that I recall. I think occasionally about buying a UPS, but I'm not sure the UPS wouldn't actually decrease the reliability.
Yeah, I had a UPS whose battery was dying, and my computer was rebooting randomly. I thought the power supply was going bad, then I realized I probably should check the UPS first - that turned out to be the problem. If your power is that reliable, I wouldn't bother with one either. It's one more link in the chain to go wrong. In my post above I was talking about 24+ hour outages, which no UPS I want to buy can handle, but we used to have a bunch of outages that'd just be a minute or two long, too - the UPS was invaluable for those. The reliability plan I mentioned above seems to have eliminated those almost entirely, so I'll probably replace the UPS, but for the power conditioning and orderly shut down, rather than trying to keep the computer alive through outages.
The difference is exactly what you expect: all power wires here are buried. Heck, our house was built in 1934, and the wires were buried. Why does the US still string them up on poles, almost a century later? Weird...
I think most new developments are required to have them underground. It's the old developments that haven't moved them.
Buried lines isn't an automatic solution. I lost DSL/phone after a major rainstorm flooded the underground pipes. The power stayed on because it was above the water.
I didn't say it was. I get that there will always be problems. But how many times has that happened, compared to how many times you've lost power? In our case the underground utilities have had 100% uptime for over 6 years, while the electricity hasn't.
The breaks in water mains, the boil water notices, and the sewage treatment plant leaking waste into rivers suggests that even underground utilities were effected in this storm.
I get that, but I think you missed my main point - I'm not talking about just this storm. I'm talking about the fact that we've lost power in several storms over the past few years. How often did the water main breaks and other problems happen in those other storms?
As someone who was without power from Friday night to yesterday afternoon in Maryland (served by BG&E), I get that this was bad storm and outages are probably inevitable. My problem is: Why are there so many of these outages?
I moved to my current residence in 2006 and there have been at least 4 outages lasting longer than 24 hours. I think I'm missing one in that count, but I didn't want to put it down without remembering it better. But we've had one of these 24+ hour outages each of the last three years.
When I step outside during an outage, I'm greeted with the sound of generators all around me (including my own, but it's quiet enough that I hear several others over it). Why do we all have generators? Because we need them so frequently! I bet if I did a poll, half the neighbors would either have a generator or have power from someone that does. And a good portion of the rest probably have friends or family far enough that they might have power, but near enough to make staying at their place feasible.
Meanwhile...my water works fine. My natural gas service works fine - we were able to take hot showers throughout the outage. My FiOS worked fine after I hooked it to the generator. All of those things have one thing in common: the lines are buried. It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
BG&E did a "reliability improvement plan" in our city a year or two ago, moving some main wires underground. It seems to have cut down on the shorter power outages, but no such luck for the longer outages. We're tired of it. My wife and I are going to write BG&E a nice letter that basically asks "WTF?" I plan to CC the city council and local papers as well.
Amazon sells stuff in "frustration free packages" - I'm much more likely to buy something when I see that note. It's really weird getting an SD card and holder in a small cardboard envelope, with absolutely nothing else but a sheet of paper (packing list). Weird, but great.
Don't forget the 7 hours of battery life. (At least, that's what my 13" MBP did when it was new. Now that it's 2.5 years old, it's probably only 5-6 hours.)
I would like to gripe about the lack of Blu-Ray drives in them, though. That's just silly. Yes, it's all going digital; I get it. But I don't have digital copies of every movie I own. If the laptop is going to have an optical drive in it anyway, why not make it a Blu-Ray drive?
Quizno's gets around this by making loooonnnnnnngggg rolls, then cutting them off at the appropriate length for the customer. Along with the ends.
I see the GP's point. I used to eat 12" subs every time, but now I've switched to 6" subs to save calories (no, I'm not Jared, but I will happily say I've lost 25 lbs and am now down to ~160 lbs, which is basically the right weight for my height, from 185 or so, by being more careful with portions). If I found that 6" just wasn't enough, then I'd still be tempted to get a 12" sub and I'd probably eat the whole thing, instead of stopping at 8" and tossing 4". Now what I do is eat the 6" sub with ~300 calories, then have a little chocolate/peanut butter snack for another 90 calories or so, and I'm still 210 calories ahead of where I was calorie-wise after eating just a 12" sub. The apple the previous poster mentioned is even better if you aren't going to crave sweets after the apple anyway.
If you think that's bad, you should have tried walking into a Circuit City back in the day. It was like walking into the middle of "28 Days Later" wearing flashing strobe lights.
Oh yes. I used to drive an hour to get to Best Buy instead of 5 minutes to get to Circuit City because of this. CC had that stupid "we have all of the stock in the back, wait 20 minutes while we go find it..." thing. Ugh. I wasn't sorry to see them go. Compared to CC, Best Buy was Shangri-La.
AC has it correct. Even shorter summary : "I personally promise to never allow this specific line of data to ever be released. 72 years later I'm dead, so its public domain now"
Also I'm mystified by the GP hidden assumption that if its a govt law, it can't be corrupt. LOL
Okay, to put it more clearly - your line of logic was fine (they wanted to release certain data and decided 72 years was enough), but then you twisted that into "government employees are all corrupt!!!!!!!!!!!" The AC is fooled by your twisted logic as well.
This could be the most insightful comment so far. The police supposedly use and believe Lojack; what would it take for them to rely on Apple's Find My Phone (or whatever it is) and equivalent similar options for electronic devices?
It has always struck me as such a waste of time and effort to place items in a shopping cart only to have to take them out to scan them, and put them right back in. If we could have them 'pre-scanned' when placed in the cart, leaving only a final review and payment, we could put the items in our own bags from the get go. I can only assume this still hasn't come to pass for the fear of shoplifters and bar code fakery.
We've had it for years at my local grocery store. We usually don't use the system, but we will when the store is incredibly busy. We get a hand scanner to walk around with, and the carts have a holster for it. Just scan the item, put it in a bag in the cart, and then run through the register quickly to actually pay without removing anything from the cart. It also occasionally gives coupons. It works pretty well. My only issue with it is that it's hard to bag things efficiently when they come in one at a time - it's much easier to have all of the boxed items together for bagging, etc. This is somewhat alleviated by having multiple bags open in the cart at once.
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May depend on the model, I had a WRT54G that I could ignore for months at a time, and typically it only needed attention because the ADSL line it was connected to got flaky.
Heck, I'm still using a WRT54G (1.1 I think) for my home network that I bought in 2001ish. A couple years back, I updated the firmware to support WPA encryption and it still works perfectly - I never have any problems with it, I don't need to reboot it, it just works. (I should note I use it only as a wireless access point, not a router.) I'm watching prices on a dual-band N with gigabit ethernet router to replace it, but so far I haven't gotten around to it, in part because I hear so much that newer routers aren't as reliable.
They started it.
If there's impending doom, why does it matter that there's panic?
Why would he? He's in favor of them.
Then I pay a lot less in rent than I would actually renting, so I'm still coming out ahead. And I have an asset I can sell. And if the gov't decides they want to rezone my neighborhood, they have to pay me fair market value for it. But go ahead and keep claiming owning land is just like paying rent. It's not, but you can claim that.
Meanwhile, I can fill the 37 gallon fuel tank on my truck from empty to full in far less than 15 minutes. Unless recharge times become near competitive with that (they can be a bit slower, but 30 minutes is a non-starter) it's going to be a huge problem. So the other option is to swap the entire battery pack, but as has been pointed out there are issues with that, too.
The 360 app did a nice job using an iPad, and from what I've seen in the iPhone 5 commercials, it's as easy if not easier than the built-in app.
There are people working on this idea. The issues are that it requires a standard battery pack, which is easily and quickly changeable - within a few minutes at most.
Yep. Since I would have had to replace all of my cables anyway, I investigated switching to an Android phone, and in the end I went with a Samsung S3 (from an iPhone 3GS). Some things are better on the iPhone, other things are better on the Android. I'm happy with my purchase, though - I don't think I would've been as happy with the iPhone 5.
In Maryland, it's 12 mph over when you get a ticket. It's worth noting that the cameras are only in school zones and construction zones "for safety." I'm all for safety, but with the school zones especially, "safety" apparently means people doing 50 mph in a 30 mph zone until they get right next to the camera, then slamming on their brakes to get to 20 mph, then flooring it a few seconds later once they're out of the reach of the camera. Or weaving in and out of traffic that is following the 30 mph rule. Somehow, this is SAFER. I would love to ask our city council for the before-and-after statistics on accidents - how much safer are we, really? How much would you bet that there is no information?
If it's really about safety as they claim, then they should donate all of the profit to some third-party cause...fallen police officers fund or something like that.
Most of the people in your situation does those things so seldom that it would be cheaper for them to own a smaller vehicle and rent a larger vehicle when they need to do work that requires a truck or if they need to carry more than 3 passengers.
First, rental vehicles almost universally suck. I've driven perhaps 25 of them, from probably every major rental brand in the US, and they're almost always missing useful features like cruise control - I don't use it much when commuting, but on longer trips it's very nice to have (and, yes, I've done plenty of longer trips - as much as 600 miles - in cars without it). Second, most rental companies here will not let you tow your own trailer with their truck, and the trucks are usually not equipped with brake controllers to tow trailers with electric brakes - it's frustrating, actually; if you call and ask U-Haul, they'll say yes, but when you show up to pick up the truck the story changes. Third, I know I've used our truck to tow quite a few times in the last few months; the costs of those rentals probably would be far more than it'd be to just own the truck - remember, I need to get to my destination, get around at the destination, then get home again, so I need a vehicle for the entire time. Fourth, if you rent a pickup, you don't generally get a cap, which you may want (we have one on our pickup, and I'm glad we do - it provides some security and protection from rain for the tools, bike, chairs, etc. I carry back there). Fifth, I don't know if they even have 3/4 or full ton pickups available to rent (my towing needs require at least a 3/4 ton) - the pickups I've seen as rentals are half ton models.
All of that said, we usually carpool in a fairly efficient car to work, and I usually drive my second "fun" car to work when we have to drive separately. We don't normally use the truck for commuting because it's expensive to run and much harder to park compared to the cars - we've done it in a couple limited situations, but it's pretty rare.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with flying cars, though. I can say that it'll never happen here in DC because most of the city is in a no-fly zone, with exceptions for College Park Airport, National, and the bases (mainly Andrews); there's an odd cutout in the no-fly zone for Freeway Airport in Bowie. College Park requires an extra preapproved security process to use.
Read what he said. It's not the voltage, it's the current.
We will probably have one more major storm come through and knock down the remaining trees/branches that were damaged, and then a decade or more of barely any power outages since all the damaged/aged trees have been removed or pruned by either storms or humans over-reacting to the storm damage.
This is what the reliability plan in our city was supposed to do. It doesn't seem to be working very well, but they claimed success.
For comparison, our computers have reset unexpectedly twice (iirc) in the past 12 years. I assume that both times it was due to a short power-blip. No other outages that I recall. I think occasionally about buying a UPS, but I'm not sure the UPS wouldn't actually decrease the reliability.
Yeah, I had a UPS whose battery was dying, and my computer was rebooting randomly. I thought the power supply was going bad, then I realized I probably should check the UPS first - that turned out to be the problem. If your power is that reliable, I wouldn't bother with one either. It's one more link in the chain to go wrong. In my post above I was talking about 24+ hour outages, which no UPS I want to buy can handle, but we used to have a bunch of outages that'd just be a minute or two long, too - the UPS was invaluable for those. The reliability plan I mentioned above seems to have eliminated those almost entirely, so I'll probably replace the UPS, but for the power conditioning and orderly shut down, rather than trying to keep the computer alive through outages.
The difference is exactly what you expect: all power wires here are buried. Heck, our house was built in 1934, and the wires were buried. Why does the US still string them up on poles, almost a century later? Weird...
I think most new developments are required to have them underground. It's the old developments that haven't moved them.
Buried lines isn't an automatic solution. I lost DSL/phone after a major rainstorm flooded the underground pipes. The power stayed on because it was above the water.
I didn't say it was. I get that there will always be problems. But how many times has that happened, compared to how many times you've lost power? In our case the underground utilities have had 100% uptime for over 6 years, while the electricity hasn't.
The breaks in water mains, the boil water notices, and the sewage treatment plant leaking waste into rivers suggests that even underground utilities were effected in this storm.
I get that, but I think you missed my main point - I'm not talking about just this storm. I'm talking about the fact that we've lost power in several storms over the past few years. How often did the water main breaks and other problems happen in those other storms?
As someone who was without power from Friday night to yesterday afternoon in Maryland (served by BG&E), I get that this was bad storm and outages are probably inevitable. My problem is: Why are there so many of these outages?
I moved to my current residence in 2006 and there have been at least 4 outages lasting longer than 24 hours. I think I'm missing one in that count, but I didn't want to put it down without remembering it better. But we've had one of these 24+ hour outages each of the last three years.
When I step outside during an outage, I'm greeted with the sound of generators all around me (including my own, but it's quiet enough that I hear several others over it). Why do we all have generators? Because we need them so frequently! I bet if I did a poll, half the neighbors would either have a generator or have power from someone that does. And a good portion of the rest probably have friends or family far enough that they might have power, but near enough to make staying at their place feasible.
Meanwhile...my water works fine. My natural gas service works fine - we were able to take hot showers throughout the outage. My FiOS worked fine after I hooked it to the generator. All of those things have one thing in common: the lines are buried. It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
BG&E did a "reliability improvement plan" in our city a year or two ago, moving some main wires underground. It seems to have cut down on the shorter power outages, but no such luck for the longer outages. We're tired of it. My wife and I are going to write BG&E a nice letter that basically asks "WTF?" I plan to CC the city council and local papers as well.
Amazon sells stuff in "frustration free packages" - I'm much more likely to buy something when I see that note. It's really weird getting an SD card and holder in a small cardboard envelope, with absolutely nothing else but a sheet of paper (packing list). Weird, but great.
Don't forget the 7 hours of battery life. (At least, that's what my 13" MBP did when it was new. Now that it's 2.5 years old, it's probably only 5-6 hours.)
I would like to gripe about the lack of Blu-Ray drives in them, though. That's just silly. Yes, it's all going digital; I get it. But I don't have digital copies of every movie I own. If the laptop is going to have an optical drive in it anyway, why not make it a Blu-Ray drive?
Quizno's gets around this by making loooonnnnnnngggg rolls, then cutting them off at the appropriate length for the customer. Along with the ends.
I see the GP's point. I used to eat 12" subs every time, but now I've switched to 6" subs to save calories (no, I'm not Jared, but I will happily say I've lost 25 lbs and am now down to ~160 lbs, which is basically the right weight for my height, from 185 or so, by being more careful with portions). If I found that 6" just wasn't enough, then I'd still be tempted to get a 12" sub and I'd probably eat the whole thing, instead of stopping at 8" and tossing 4". Now what I do is eat the 6" sub with ~300 calories, then have a little chocolate/peanut butter snack for another 90 calories or so, and I'm still 210 calories ahead of where I was calorie-wise after eating just a 12" sub. The apple the previous poster mentioned is even better if you aren't going to crave sweets after the apple anyway.
Their sales clerks are trained to be pushy.
If you think that's bad, you should have tried walking into a Circuit City back in the day. It was like walking into the middle of "28 Days Later" wearing flashing strobe lights.
Oh yes. I used to drive an hour to get to Best Buy instead of 5 minutes to get to Circuit City because of this. CC had that stupid "we have all of the stock in the back, wait 20 minutes while we go find it..." thing. Ugh. I wasn't sorry to see them go. Compared to CC, Best Buy was Shangri-La.
AC has it correct. Even shorter summary : "I personally promise to never allow this specific line of data to ever be released. 72 years later I'm dead, so its public domain now"
Also I'm mystified by the GP hidden assumption that if its a govt law, it can't be corrupt. LOL
Okay, to put it more clearly - your line of logic was fine (they wanted to release certain data and decided 72 years was enough), but then you twisted that into "government employees are all corrupt!!!!!!!!!!!" The AC is fooled by your twisted logic as well.
Essentially its your usual govt corruption.
I like how you just equated people following the law with government corruption. No bias here! Good show.
This could be the most insightful comment so far. The police supposedly use and believe Lojack; what would it take for them to rely on Apple's Find My Phone (or whatever it is) and equivalent similar options for electronic devices?
It has always struck me as such a waste of time and effort to place items in a shopping cart only to have to take them out to scan them, and put them right back in. If we could have them 'pre-scanned' when placed in the cart, leaving only a final review and payment, we could put the items in our own bags from the get go. I can only assume this still hasn't come to pass for the fear of shoplifters and bar code fakery.
We've had it for years at my local grocery store. We usually don't use the system, but we will when the store is incredibly busy. We get a hand scanner to walk around with, and the carts have a holster for it. Just scan the item, put it in a bag in the cart, and then run through the register quickly to actually pay without removing anything from the cart. It also occasionally gives coupons. It works pretty well. My only issue with it is that it's hard to bag things efficiently when they come in one at a time - it's much easier to have all of the boxed items together for bagging, etc. This is somewhat alleviated by having multiple bags open in the cart at once.