It is ALSO illegal to do so in the US. But amazingly these companies choose to break the law because, for years, they were able to get away with it. Because of the design of the core infrastructure of VOIP and our telephone system, the call originators were able to spoof the source of the calls, and typically sourced them from a jurisdiction in which the US agencies have trouble investigating and/or prosecuting.
* 85% (and growing) of beverage containers sold in state are returned to be recycled * 100% of collected materials are recycled (almost exclusively aluminum, plastic 1,2,5 and glass) * $0 in government / tax funding
Yes, there are externalities (people have to be mindful, and take the time to return to a retailer or drop location), but the only better option is to not drink from single use containers. Try passing THAT law...
Don't diss the NYT for spending real money on real journalists to do fact-checked real reporting. This real activities cost real money, and they are entitled to collect it any which way they want. I don't have a subscription, but I do admire them for their choices, when most of the "news" these days are half-assed bloggers, junk-ad filled "You won't believe what happened next" image click lists, or other time-wasting drivel.
How is NYT paywalling any different than charging $0.35 for the daily paper?
I'd love to leave Facebook. But I'm a member of multiple groups whose only "social" presence is on FB. Like my neighborhood HOA and kids' school. For better or worse, FB is their main mechanism for communicating relevant information to me. Now, for me to quit Facebook, I need to either decide that I don't want to know about these goings on, or convince both the organizers and the bulk of the other members to move to other methods.
News flash: when the government wants something to happen, one lever they use is tax breaks. The government would like to see electric cars happen sooner, so they gave tax breaks. To everyone. Equally.
Yes. Sort-of. The original tax credit of $7500 was (is? been a few years since I looked it up) based on the capacity of the battery. Basically, there is a credit per kWh of rated capacity and it phases out to a minimum threshold.
Amazingly coincidence, but the first generation of the Chevy Volt had a 16 kWh battery, which just so happened to allow you to claim the maximum credit. The floor was set to be exactly at the capacity of the Toyota Prius. So - buy foreign then you get a token $2500 credit. Buy American and get the whopping $7500. Go crazy and get a Nissan Leaf, like I did at the time, and all that extra battery got you bubkis with respect to federal tax credits.
If the NTSB investigates a Nissan Leaf crash, will you rail against Nissan, or is Tesla just special?
Tesla is special. Managed to wreck that Nissan Leaf 3 times. Luckily it was almost all cosmetic damage, but no NTSB rep ever contacted me... *shrug*
I just want a bigger screen and a hook up to my phone. Give me an Android and iPhone app that'll broadcast my phone screen to the vehicle screen. Now, my maps are always updated (via phone), and I don't have to do squat with the car. The car screen can still play the radio or backup cam, etc.
I'm in the same boat again now as I was about a decade ago. Both times I moved with my family to a place far and yon, but came to an arrangement with my employer to work remotely from a home office. Both times I travel back about 20-25% of the time (roughly once every 4-6 weeks), mostly to maintain social contacts. And that's the key if your larger project time is 25 or so people. After a certain size, and with the general workplace turnover, people in other groups with whom you interact are just cogs. I've worked on-premise at one software firm and never personally met the DBAs, even though they were a floor down. Wouldn't have mattered if I were next door or in Timbuktu.
But with the smaller companies / organizational units, where jobs are primarily "other duties as assigned", the importance of having person-to-person contact & socialization is immense. Especially if you're the odd duck who is primarily remote, and everyone else is in-office. It allows you to stay abreast of relevant business "gossip" that isn't always officially communicated, and to understand both the working style & unofficial responsibilities of your coworkers.
Of course all the nonsense about increased collaboration (and thus productivity) around open floor plans has been debunked. The reason upper management keeps doing it is because it is cheaper. Office floor space is expensive per sq ft. Most businesses lease office space, and do it in multi-year blocks. That's a nice hard, fixed expense every month and one you that can be difficult to change.
Personal offices, even shared ones, are expensive per square foot. You have more wasted square footage with passageways, doorways, etc. Walls are expensive to build, electrical lines to run, etc. It also takes time to build those walls in a new office space, which is time you're often paying the lease but not getting to use it.
Hell, even high-walled cubes are more expensive that the more "modern" low-wall, more "open" floor plans.
Offices are plain expensive, and not flexible if your business needs or organization change. It is much easier to justify the hard dollar savings of moving to an open floor plan than to acquire & build walls in a space, especially since you can get more (1.5x - 3x is my raw guess) more people shoved in the same fixed cost floor plan. And it is really hard to show hard dollar lost productivity from distracted workforce in an open floor plan.
Seriously? So a few researchers make the move from germanium to silicon that is (directly) used by approximately 2 people. 70 years later a team of researchers make a design change to reduce battery consumption 2% - for 100M iPhones. Which had more direct economic impact?
To measure by "economic impact" is complete blarney. You can claim it takes more people/time/money/resources, but to weigh it against the economic impact by saying "it takes 18 people to do [double density] where it used to take 1" is crap.
I am pretty disappointed by this, actually. I really like listening to EDM mixes by a handful of DJs while I work or workout. I'm not much into the whole "social" bit, but its fantastic for an easy way to access quality music on a predictable schedule - weekly or monthly depending on the artist.
Now I might have to waste some time to find another $10/month service that has what I want.:(
A piece of custom industrial equipment had a barcode scanner that malfunctioned due to an employee cleaning the wrong thing with the a steam wand. At the end of the day the barcode scanner was just a generic off the shelf one with a custom cable based on RS-232, but where 24V power was run along one of the lines. I used a cheap-o USB Motorola point-of-sale scanner, a mini-PC with 20 lines of code, and two XBee test units (one RS-232, one USB) to build a temporary replacement.
The kicker is how the replacement got to us, in Portland, OR. The new barcode unit was manufactured by MetroLogic, headquartered in Eugene, OR, about 2 hours south. The country of origin was the Philippines, and it was sent to Denmark for the after-market custom cable assembly, before being send to us. That one part had to be designed, manufactured, and modified in a literal around-the-world trip. Thank you Friedman.
Visual Studio Express has been free to download and to use to develop products with for nearly a decade. That series is a fully usable IDE for developing.NET applications. Yes, the Standard, Professional, etc. line added more features like extensions and ALM integration, but they were definitely market features.
This is just the next step in the race to the bottom. Microsoft intends to make money via the Azure path, but it'll be through ease-of-use or ease-of-transition to use Azure features in Visual Studio for the whole world of.Net developers out there. I very very very much doubt they'd do it via the explicit extortion scheme you're talking about.
Anecdotal evidence, not scientifically controlled. A company seeks & the FDA has approve a chemical for the treatment of a specific condition. If they find additional uses, there is a whole additional battery of analysis on dosing, side-effects, etc. that needs to be done. 8mg of asprin a day to help improve heart health for some folks, but 400mg every 4 hours to treat clotting conditions. Same drug, very different uses, separately validated & approved.
I know this is flame-bait, but I'd love to get a headless / CLI-only version of Windows 9 for a discounted price. My company has a very small IT department and the whole company is Windows-based. We literally don't have the resources to learn & maintain Linux, especially since most of our vendors' hardware is also based on various flavors of Windows. Easily 30-40% of our Windows licenses are for headless devices controlling various bits of machinery, and it pains me to pay $100+ on a $500 computer for something we'll never hook a monitor to after the first day.
The concept is to set up a painful BATNA - best alternative to negotiated agreement - so that if the parties *fail* to come to a compromise, then this ugly thing will happen. It builds a common ground and an incentive for all parties to NOT let negotiation fall through. The idea is that you'll all put your big boy pants on and it will never come to pass. But because of the myopic needs and wants of the electorate who put these jarheads in power, the Congress is playing chicken to serve primarily the needs of the few that elected them and not for the betterment of the entire country. Hell, we still manufacture bayonets for the army because it is some stupid pork for a congressman to placate his district with "jobs".
Nuclear energy was supposed to usher in an era where electricity was too cheap to meter based on per capita consumption at the time. Not quite what happened, but use has exploded (http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/). Probably the same thing will happen if this approach ever takes off - people will continue to consume, either at home or via proxy in industry, transportation, and commerce, more and more energy to support 1st world lifestyles.
Financial aid is "need-based" If you can't pay the tuition, they kick in to help you. This is NOT a factor of just household income - more of disposable income.
Point and case, I attended the 10 year reunion at my alma matter. The chancellor had a slide in his presentation showing the total $ of financial aid (vertical) by reported income (typically parents, on the horizontal). I was flabbergasted to see families making $300k+ annually getting aid, but.... if they are sending 5 kids to college and have a mortgage that breaks them, then yeah, they have "need" too. Doesn't mean the rich get a free ride, but not everyone needs to be dirt poor to need a helping hand.
I live in Oregon and registered voters were mailed ballots about two weeks ago, along with a nice booklet with candidate-, party-, and interested-party-provided information. I was able to read and research in depth each of the candidates and measures and make an informed decision for each of my choices. Best and easiest ballot experience of my life. I could have mailed it in, but decided to drop it off at the local library instead. No lines, no muss, no fuss, no hanging chads or mis-calibrated touch screens. No pressure to vote quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
It is ALSO illegal to do so in the US. But amazingly these companies choose to break the law because, for years, they were able to get away with it. Because of the design of the core infrastructure of VOIP and our telephone system, the call originators were able to spoof the source of the calls, and typically sourced them from a jurisdiction in which the US agencies have trouble investigating and/or prosecuting.
You can make the argument that Oregon's BottleBill is a pretty big success: https://www.obrc.com/Content/R...
* 85% (and growing) of beverage containers sold in state are returned to be recycled
* 100% of collected materials are recycled (almost exclusively aluminum, plastic 1,2,5 and glass)
* $0 in government / tax funding
Yes, there are externalities (people have to be mindful, and take the time to return to a retailer or drop location), but the only better option is to not drink from single use containers. Try passing THAT law...
Time to get a new bank.
Don't diss the NYT for spending real money on real journalists to do fact-checked real reporting. This real activities cost real money, and they are entitled to collect it any which way they want. I don't have a subscription, but I do admire them for their choices, when most of the "news" these days are half-assed bloggers, junk-ad filled "You won't believe what happened next" image click lists, or other time-wasting drivel.
How is NYT paywalling any different than charging $0.35 for the daily paper?
I'd love to leave Facebook. But I'm a member of multiple groups whose only "social" presence is on FB. Like my neighborhood HOA and kids' school. For better or worse, FB is their main mechanism for communicating relevant information to me. Now, for me to quit Facebook, I need to either decide that I don't want to know about these goings on, or convince both the organizers and the bulk of the other members to move to other methods.
News flash: when the government wants something to happen, one lever they use is tax breaks. The government would like to see electric cars happen sooner, so they gave tax breaks. To everyone. Equally.
Yes. Sort-of. The original tax credit of $7500 was (is? been a few years since I looked it up) based on the capacity of the battery. Basically, there is a credit per kWh of rated capacity and it phases out to a minimum threshold.
Amazingly coincidence, but the first generation of the Chevy Volt had a 16 kWh battery, which just so happened to allow you to claim the maximum credit. The floor was set to be exactly at the capacity of the Toyota Prius. So - buy foreign then you get a token $2500 credit. Buy American and get the whopping $7500. Go crazy and get a Nissan Leaf, like I did at the time, and all that extra battery got you bubkis with respect to federal tax credits.
If the NTSB investigates a Nissan Leaf crash, will you rail against Nissan, or is Tesla just special?
Tesla is special. Managed to wreck that Nissan Leaf 3 times. Luckily it was almost all cosmetic damage, but no NTSB rep ever contacted me... *shrug*
Oh, you must live in Portland, OR.
I just want a bigger screen and a hook up to my phone. Give me an Android and iPhone app that'll broadcast my phone screen to the vehicle screen. Now, my maps are always updated (via phone), and I don't have to do squat with the car. The car screen can still play the radio or backup cam, etc.
How is this NOT a thing already?
I'm in the same boat again now as I was about a decade ago. Both times I moved with my family to a place far and yon, but came to an arrangement with my employer to work remotely from a home office. Both times I travel back about 20-25% of the time (roughly once every 4-6 weeks), mostly to maintain social contacts. And that's the key if your larger project time is 25 or so people. After a certain size, and with the general workplace turnover, people in other groups with whom you interact are just cogs. I've worked on-premise at one software firm and never personally met the DBAs, even though they were a floor down. Wouldn't have mattered if I were next door or in Timbuktu.
But with the smaller companies / organizational units, where jobs are primarily "other duties as assigned", the importance of having person-to-person contact & socialization is immense. Especially if you're the odd duck who is primarily remote, and everyone else is in-office. It allows you to stay abreast of relevant business "gossip" that isn't always officially communicated, and to understand both the working style & unofficial responsibilities of your coworkers.
Johann
Of course all the nonsense about increased collaboration (and thus productivity) around open floor plans has been debunked. The reason upper management keeps doing it is because it is cheaper. Office floor space is expensive per sq ft. Most businesses lease office space, and do it in multi-year blocks. That's a nice hard, fixed expense every month and one you that can be difficult to change.
Personal offices, even shared ones, are expensive per square foot. You have more wasted square footage with passageways, doorways, etc. Walls are expensive to build, electrical lines to run, etc. It also takes time to build those walls in a new office space, which is time you're often paying the lease but not getting to use it.
Hell, even high-walled cubes are more expensive that the more "modern" low-wall, more "open" floor plans.
Offices are plain expensive, and not flexible if your business needs or organization change. It is much easier to justify the hard dollar savings of moving to an open floor plan than to acquire & build walls in a space, especially since you can get more (1.5x - 3x is my raw guess) more people shoved in the same fixed cost floor plan. And it is really hard to show hard dollar lost productivity from distracted workforce in an open floor plan.
Seriously? So a few researchers make the move from germanium to silicon that is (directly) used by approximately 2 people. 70 years later a team of researchers make a design change to reduce battery consumption 2% - for 100M iPhones. Which had more direct economic impact?
To measure by "economic impact" is complete blarney. You can claim it takes more people/time/money/resources, but to weigh it against the economic impact by saying "it takes 18 people to do [double density] where it used to take 1" is crap.
I am pretty disappointed by this, actually. I really like listening to EDM mixes by a handful of DJs while I work or workout. I'm not much into the whole "social" bit, but its fantastic for an easy way to access quality music on a predictable schedule - weekly or monthly depending on the artist.
Now I might have to waste some time to find another $10/month service that has what I want. :(
Not to mention that brass.table.pen isn't even legit in the system.
http://w3w.co/brass.table.pen
Oblig link:
https://www.google.com/search?...
Oh man - the "blame" tool just took on a whole new meaning!
A piece of custom industrial equipment had a barcode scanner that malfunctioned due to an employee cleaning the wrong thing with the a steam wand. At the end of the day the barcode scanner was just a generic off the shelf one with a custom cable based on RS-232, but where 24V power was run along one of the lines. I used a cheap-o USB Motorola point-of-sale scanner, a mini-PC with 20 lines of code, and two XBee test units (one RS-232, one USB) to build a temporary replacement.
The kicker is how the replacement got to us, in Portland, OR. The new barcode unit was manufactured by MetroLogic, headquartered in Eugene, OR, about 2 hours south. The country of origin was the Philippines, and it was sent to Denmark for the after-market custom cable assembly, before being send to us. That one part had to be designed, manufactured, and modified in a literal around-the-world trip. Thank you Friedman.
Visual Studio Express has been free to download and to use to develop products with for nearly a decade. That series is a fully usable IDE for developing .NET applications. Yes, the Standard, Professional, etc. line added more features like extensions and ALM integration, but they were definitely market features.
This is just the next step in the race to the bottom. Microsoft intends to make money via the Azure path, but it'll be through ease-of-use or ease-of-transition to use Azure features in Visual Studio for the whole world of .Net developers out there. I very very very much doubt they'd do it via the explicit extortion scheme you're talking about.
Anecdotal evidence, not scientifically controlled. A company seeks & the FDA has approve a chemical for the treatment of a specific condition. If they find additional uses, there is a whole additional battery of analysis on dosing, side-effects, etc. that needs to be done. 8mg of asprin a day to help improve heart health for some folks, but 400mg every 4 hours to treat clotting conditions. Same drug, very different uses, separately validated & approved.
I know this is flame-bait, but I'd love to get a headless / CLI-only version of Windows 9 for a discounted price. My company has a very small IT department and the whole company is Windows-based. We literally don't have the resources to learn & maintain Linux, especially since most of our vendors' hardware is also based on various flavors of Windows. Easily 30-40% of our Windows licenses are for headless devices controlling various bits of machinery, and it pains me to pay $100+ on a $500 computer for something we'll never hook a monitor to after the first day.
So when can I get these at digikey?
Wait, like EA and their free-to-play games + in-game micro-transactions?
The concept is to set up a painful BATNA - best alternative to negotiated agreement - so that if the parties *fail* to come to a compromise, then this ugly thing will happen. It builds a common ground and an incentive for all parties to NOT let negotiation fall through. The idea is that you'll all put your big boy pants on and it will never come to pass. But because of the myopic needs and wants of the electorate who put these jarheads in power, the Congress is playing chicken to serve primarily the needs of the few that elected them and not for the betterment of the entire country. Hell, we still manufacture bayonets for the army because it is some stupid pork for a congressman to placate his district with "jobs".
Nuclear energy was supposed to usher in an era where electricity was too cheap to meter based on per capita consumption at the time. Not quite what happened, but use has exploded (http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/). Probably the same thing will happen if this approach ever takes off - people will continue to consume, either at home or via proxy in industry, transportation, and commerce, more and more energy to support 1st world lifestyles.
Financial aid is "need-based" If you can't pay the tuition, they kick in to help you. This is NOT a factor of just household income - more of disposable income.
Point and case, I attended the 10 year reunion at my alma matter. The chancellor had a slide in his presentation showing the total $ of financial aid (vertical) by reported income (typically parents, on the horizontal). I was flabbergasted to see families making $300k+ annually getting aid, but .... if they are sending 5 kids to college and have a mortgage that breaks them, then yeah, they have "need" too. Doesn't mean the rich get a free ride, but not everyone needs to be dirt poor to need a helping hand.
I live in Oregon and registered voters were mailed ballots about two weeks ago, along with a nice booklet with candidate-, party-, and interested-party-provided information. I was able to read and research in depth each of the candidates and measures and make an informed decision for each of my choices. Best and easiest ballot experience of my life. I could have mailed it in, but decided to drop it off at the local library instead. No lines, no muss, no fuss, no hanging chads or mis-calibrated touch screens. No pressure to vote quickly.