"It's actually illegal to drive above the speed limit or below the speed limit in the US"
This is incorrect for two reasons. 1. The US doesn't have uniform driving laws 2. I don't know of any state with such a law.
I'll give you point 1, but point 2 means you must live under a rock. Given that limits can be upper and lower, you must never have seen a minimum speed sign. Let me provide one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/2727717062/
I don't know how wide spread these are, but they definately have them across the river from me in Minnesota.
Also worth noting that this can easily affect a decently sized business for internal communication unless worked around. To quote that same page:
Note For distribution groups stored in the shared address book, the group is counted as one recipient. For distribution groups stored in the Contacts folder of a mailbox, the members of the group are counted individually.
For example, we have 60ish branches, each has it's own group. Often when we send out company wide stuff, or 'everybody but the corporate office' notices, the message will get sent to 60+ internal groups. Granted we should have an 'all' group, with tight restrictions, but we don't. Imagine if our helpdesk has a critical system they're notifying everyone about or like happens today, branch down notifications... or if HR gets busy some day, that's 10 job posting notices and/or anything else that person sends out. Yes there are better ways to do this, but that's how it is done today on 'not the cloud.' If we move to the MS cloud somebody's going to get a nasty surprise on message 10 and have to re-think their workflow.
Again, I know we're doing it wrong, but I guarantee we're not the only ones
Separately, the court clearly noted the "non-practicing entity" part of the business in pointing out that, "As a non-practicing entity, Eon-Net was generally immune to counterclaims for patent infringement, antitrust, or unfair competition because it did not engage in business activities that would potentially give rise to those claims."
By this ruling, It would seem that all companies that are just patent holding companies are not allowed to do anything with them unless they produce a product. That would appear to be too good to be true, so going to just file this article away in the "yeah right, that's a good one" file.
Depending on your jurisdiction and the implementation of $myShotgun->magazine, your while loop may lead to a condition where fire() fails due to insufficient resources in $myShotgun->ammo. To be proper you probably want there to be either a break (which is usually frowned upon) or another conditional on the while loop. Alternatively, or also, a call to $myShotgun->loadAmmo(); if $myShotgun->ammo == 0 wouldn't be a bad idea.
Just sayin... you need to be complete with your intentions.
There are several cars on my street that have wi-fi. Whenever they go buy, it impacts the signal. now it's just a couple of cars, but what about when its 30 cars, most of which will be on the same channel? Or hundreds of cars going buy n the free way?
Cars that have wifi?
In what capacity, pray tell? I'm honestly curious. Wifi syncing for music (can't be that bad, just another client on the periphery of your network)? Or do they take your cell phone and make it a wifi network? If so, wouldn't that need to be turned on?
Dodge and I think it was BMW made lots of noise about this being a built-in option a few years ago. I know I could get a module in my Ram that made it a wifi hotspot for a cell phone on data, just like my Thunderbolt does today. I'm sure others have quitely added it as well since then.
This was a big deal for people that had too much expendable income a few years ago, but now you can just do it with your own Droid/iPhone probably for less than the car data option. Add in the Verizon MiFi (and if anyone else makes something similar... I don't know) and this is now a product searching for a market.
I'm curious to see what their SnS cost is now. If you've ever seen year 2 of licensing you know that it's nowhere near the purchase cost for that year of support. Honestly though, they had to do something even though this is waaaaay off the deep end.
Compared to capacity 3 years ago, we could have dropped 30%CPU lics around this year after a major blade hardware refresh from many mixed dual socket 2-4 core, 16-48GB blades to a few dual socket 6 core 96GB blades. Increased capacity and cpu on new sockets is ridiculous and a lot of places probably dropped their support contracts by insane margins. VMWare was going to take it in the shorts due to reduced license needs (CPU) this way they'll get eaten due to walking customers. Maybe they could have found a middle ground... maybe the discounts start off at anything over the old 2CPU threshold and go up steeply after that, after all nobody pays list price;)
We didn't drop our support at all simply because if we had to re-buy a blade or two of license for any random huge project (which were on the verge of getting approved, and all of them did) it would have stolen all the benefit of dropping those lics for a year. That decision would look to be paying off in spades now since our memory footprint is going to expand HUGE but we're still over-licensed.
I wonder how MS(Sync) and Google will coexist in the same car. Will Sync go ahead and call AAA for you in an attempt to smear the Google provided route? Will Google go ahead and terminate your Bluetooth connection for you because it thinks you shouldn't be on the phone? Will they both attempt to buy out the ECU for the marketshare of the computer network in the car?
Who knows if he (patient 1) got the disease from a mosquito as he claims or another way, but it wasn't his PhD grad students he was screwing around with, it was the paper's co-author (patient 3) as his wife (patient 2) now knows.
Lets put 1 and 2's illnesses together, with this statement in mind:
and moreover, the virus has to complete a 2-week life cycle within the insect before it can infect the next human; Foy's wife fell ill just 9 days after his return
So given that both 1 and 2 became ill in roughly the same time, 5 days after their return, it's unlikely that one became infected and then infected the other that close to the 'bite'.
letting gays serve openly is just one lever to alleviate pressure before having to reinstitute the draft, something which would instantly invert popular support for the wars.
Invert eh? So there would someone supporting for the wars? I think you mistake supporting the troops for supporting the wars. We support the people doing their job, even if the job sucks and we can't get enough elected officials to stop it.
The responsibility absolutely is VMWare's. Large software companies generally have access to early releases of the Microsoft patches, specifically so they can perform whatever testing they need.
Sounds like in this case, VMWare didn't bother doing their testing (or that testing was too costly), and is now trying to blame Microsoft for their fuckup.
Lets try to RTFA before assuming...
However, Lee said the Patch Tuesday security updates included the "early release of updates anticipated in" the Service Pack, which is due out Feb. 22. Lee said VMware provided its own VMware View update to customers "within 24 hours of the Microsoft security patch, in an effort to minimize customer impact."
Sounds like MS did an early release of things VMWare knew was coming, but not expected until later. You're right that they were testing, hence the speedy update. Sounds like MS just released early and didn't communicate the release, so shift that blame back to MS.
Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.
Is it really? Usually the best way to get the pulse of the public is to see what comedians are joking about. They can rip people a new arsehole from behind the guise of comedy, and nobody really gives a crap. Now if $yourFavoriteTalkingHead does the same thing, they in turn get ripped a new arsehole by $theOpposingViewTalkingHead and it goes into a shouting match on the Today Show.
I'm all for level headed comedian policy makers. I would have moved across the river to Minnesota to vote for Frankin, I had to watch all his ads anyway;)
If the vehicles only go in for maintenance once every few years, the tanks ought to be fine.
I don't know where you live, but here where I am, there are cars out on the road that look like they haven't been in for maintenance in decades. And that's just the nature of the car culture we live in. It won't change easily, though I suppose with a sufficiently authoritarian political structure it will work just fine.
Isn't that what they do in states that care about smog? Something on the order of 'you have to pass the sniffer to get your registration.'* So unless you like driving unregistered cars and risk getting ticketed/towed by any cop that cares to check your tags... yes I'd say it's pretty easy to deal with.
*disclaimer - my state doesn't have these laws, so I'm guessing. I'm pretty sure your car doesn't even have to run here.
It would be considered engineering if you designed it to meet a set of specifications, such as perform with a given failure rate under an expected set of environmental parameters.
Exactly. The notion that "An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it." is flawed. That person is creative, a tinkerer, an inventor, an architect and many other nice names. An Engineer (with a capital E) is someone who has science to back them up as to why *this* is the right way to do/make something and not *this other way that also works but may start on fire spontaneously*, or *this way that may fall down when the wind blows*.
The guy that created the first skid steer loader out of tractor parts was a farmer who liked to tinker. The people that make Bobcats are Engineers.
That alone should be reason enough to not support cubicles.
No, it should be reason to support cubicles with ceilings... That being said, you should at least be comfortable enough of your coworkers that you can ask them to stop it.
I also had a craptacular situation like this, but the people were too stupid to care. I worked in a semi-open cube arrangement, where 5 of the 8 people in the pod were on conference calls at once. In fact it was the same conference call, to a room 100 feet away. We openly mocked these people when asking politely didn't work. Then the other 3 of us all got different jobs because this was the norm of personal and professional intelligence at the company.
Moral of the story? I don't know, but there are a lot of badly behaved professionals out there.
> Why? Do rear-view window brakelights alert the drivers behind you better...
Yes, they do. In particular, the so-called "cyclops" does not come on with the headlights, only with the brakes, with the result that "car ahead has lights on" and "car ahead is braking" give different configurations of lights, not just different brightnesses. The change in configuration is more attention-grabbing than just brightening an already-existing light configuration.
Also, it never blinks. If you are in a car with a combo blinke/brake light, are turning and have the *other* taillight out, your CHMSL is steady on. I see that setup at least once a day... a lot of people have no idea about the state of their bulbs.
Maybe I'm getting old too, but it seems like oncoming headlights have gotten way too bright when I'm driving.
There are a LOT of idiots out there that put in aftermarket HID kits into reflectors that were not designed for them. Nearly all of your ricers with those purple lights fall into that category. Also, 99% of pickups with really blue lights do too. I only know of Caddys and maybe Lincolns that have proper HID lights. Things like Silverstar halogens are still halogens, with the right shape bulb, so they project just the way the engineer wanted your car to do it, just brighter. Next time you have some a**hole behind you in a jacked up 1996 Chevy Silverado blaring ice blue light into your rear view and you almost go blind, thank them for their HID kit. I had that happen through the 20% rear window tint (or is it 80? super dark anyway) and completely overpowering the chromatic tinting of the rearview mirror.
The funny thing is that they're all technically illegal. You aren't supposed to put HIDs on anything that didn't have them in the factory because there's a very low chance you have the knowhow to re-shape the beam to not blind somebody. I'm not talking about positioning it vertically/horizontally, more like making sure that the super-bright beam isn't going way outside of your point of aiming way too high and/or to the left.
In addition, I've noticed that some newer HID headlights seem to be more focused, which can make a car behind you going over speed bumps / potholes appear to be flashing its brights at you (with a more diffuse beam, this isn't an issue). This can certainly be distracting, especially driving an old car (when someone could very well be flashing their lights at you to let you know you've lost your running lights / your engine's billowing smoke / etc.).
The fantastic thing is that almost always when somebody is flashing you there is a physical shift in the point of origin. Quad-bulb cars either add a bulb or swap between the two on each side. Factory HIDs rarely have Xenon for the... high I think, so it has to be a different bulb. My Maxima is one of the few that have something called Bi-Xenon where there is actually another arc for the high beam, I think in the same bulb, so both levels come out of the same projector. Of course you can have non-hid projectors, but I think they usually only use the projector for the lows. Also, depending on how they flash (actually highs on/of vs. flash-to-pass) and if they have fogs or not, you will see their fog lights blink too since your fogs shut off with the high beams (except flash-to-pass AFAIK).
There was something like this going on with hybrid Altimas too. The 'Synergy drive' models were using Toyota's technology and they had to pay them each time they sold a vehicle. There was a dealer that told me that they were losing money every time they sold one, but they did it anyway to get credit for making a LEV in places like California where there's some rules about that stuff... ask a Californian what they are, I don't know exactly. They wouldn't let you order them in places that didn't care, like N. Dakota or Minnesota, the only way they get here is used.
I'm guessing there's some sort of regulatory shenanigans like that going on here too, aside from saying HEY! We made an electric car!
Plenty of times it's not even HR. My 'former' employer's head of IT put together a job posting once that *required* a CCIE for a normal grade network admin job and then offered to pay like $70k (top end), which in my locale is respectable money, but definately not for a CCIE . Anybody that would have fit either end of that spectrum would have been scared off by the other.
*disclaimer - everyone 'in' IT knew that the upper managers were in the good ol' boys club with the owner, and couldn't IT their way out of a wet paper bag, they were just in it for the ego. Just illustrating the "hr isn't the only bastion of suck" point.
Maybe they're assuming that if you go to the dump you're:
A. driving a garbage truck B. driving something of your own that carries a large mass of 'stuff' there, like a diesel powered pickup. C. dropping your 30 yr old VW Rabbit off there, and then taking a CNG city bus home:-P
The agency that was causing them pain was the Washington (I presume) department of Ecology (http://www.ecy.wa.gov perhaps) for their pilot plant in Pasco, Washington. The EPA finally told them they could get back to whatever they're doing there, probably showing the place off to investors and prospective clients.
As for the 'where are they going' question: "Spitzauer, says that GPI has over $2 billion dollars in signed contracts for GPI plants, including in Vietnam, Spain, France, Yugoslavia, and a very large installation in South America to be launched in April."
I guess that's not GPS coordinates or anything, but it is more than generalities like 'we have some contracts'. Since the S.A. one is apparently well into contstruction and presumably nearly ready to go live, maybe there's more about it on their website... or something.
And OnStar is... a cellphone. Ok, maybe it's a VoIP device you're using to act like a cell phone at the core, since that's probably how they get the telemetry data in, but it's still a cell signal.
Disclaimer: I worked on part of a similar system for a large German auto manufacturer and there was SIP going on there with some custom header crap, that's where I get my information. On the call center side it was actually Asterisk:-P
One would think that credit analysis would be done by generally accepted rules, like credit score. I like to use Firefox, but I have a score over 800. Should I pay a high rate because of my browser choice when I've 'done it right' in every other way? Someone will tell you if your credit is bad and THAT is why your rate sucks, but when you base that decision on (seemingly) unrelated data and not telling you about that, it's fishy.
I would guess, being October, that he also 'forgot' several reminders and a sternly worded note about his house burning down w/o coverage.
That being said, this is a nasty intersection of insurance style payments and municipal services. No, you shouldn't be allowed to opt out of those services, for the public good, but read the first modded up post, and you see the anti-tax culture that prevails in the 'south'.
Here's an alternative: Since this is an outreach coverage, the fire dept is guaranteed to be 'staffed' by the city, even though they don't get to opt out. After dousing his house, they should have presented him an clinic style bill... if you walk into the hospital uninsured, assuming they'll treat you, you pay the list cost. He probably would have paid less than the gap in his coverage, and it would have been a good 'memory jog' for everyone else that 'forgot'. Of course this only works if you have a group (the city residents) paying the upkeep for the deadbeat arsonists in the country.
Who gives a flip if it's a dealer accessory or installed at the factory? The fact remains this is nothing new.
It has been trivial to get internet access in a vehicle for years and years.
My (second owner) Tundra had a 'dealer installed option' for XM radio which is the alternative to ordering it that way from the factory. It still uses the factory harness and puts the receiver under the driver seat like the factory install. The difference is the antenna for the dealer kit is mounted ON THE DASH... where you lose reception in about 90 of the 360 degrees you can drive instead of on the roof, where my aftermarket kit loses signal only behind tall buildings. The factory kit for other Toyotas is similar.
Cellular is of course different, but there's always that chance that something can be half-assed when a local 'mechanic' has to install something in your brand new car. The morons that put my kit in smashed a panel clip so the driver's kick panel didn't sit quite right. I'd hate for somebody to do that to my new A8. Factory is probably also factory warrantable, where the kit might only be warrantable at your dealer (no source to back that up, just suspicion).
Slashdot Mirror
"It's actually illegal to drive above the speed limit or below the speed limit in the US"
This is incorrect for two reasons.
1. The US doesn't have uniform driving laws
2. I don't know of any state with such a law.
I'll give you point 1, but point 2 means you must live under a rock. Given that limits can be upper and lower, you must never have seen a minimum speed sign. Let me provide one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/2727717062/
I don't know how wide spread these are, but they definately have them across the river from me in Minnesota.
Mod parent up!!!
Also worth noting that this can easily affect a decently sized business for internal communication unless worked around. To quote that same page:
Note For distribution groups stored in the shared address book, the group is counted as one recipient. For distribution groups stored in the Contacts folder of a mailbox, the members of the group are counted individually.
For example, we have 60ish branches, each has it's own group. Often when we send out company wide stuff, or 'everybody but the corporate office' notices, the message will get sent to 60+ internal groups. Granted we should have an 'all' group, with tight restrictions, but we don't. Imagine if our helpdesk has a critical system they're notifying everyone about or like happens today, branch down notifications... or if HR gets busy some day, that's 10 job posting notices and/or anything else that person sends out. Yes there are better ways to do this, but that's how it is done today on 'not the cloud.' If we move to the MS cloud somebody's going to get a nasty surprise on message 10 and have to re-think their workflow.
Again, I know we're doing it wrong, but I guarantee we're not the only ones
From TFA
Separately, the court clearly noted the "non-practicing entity" part of the business in pointing out that, "As a non-practicing entity, Eon-Net was generally immune to counterclaims for patent infringement, antitrust, or unfair competition because it did not engage in business activities that would potentially give rise to those claims."
By this ruling, It would seem that all companies that are just patent holding companies are not allowed to do anything with them unless they produce a product. That would appear to be too good to be true, so going to just file this article away in the "yeah right, that's a good one" file.
Depending on your jurisdiction and the implementation of $myShotgun->magazine, your while loop may lead to a condition where fire() fails due to insufficient resources in $myShotgun->ammo. To be proper you probably want there to be either a break (which is usually frowned upon) or another conditional on the while loop. Alternatively, or also, a call to $myShotgun->loadAmmo(); if $myShotgun->ammo == 0 wouldn't be a bad idea.
Just sayin... you need to be complete with your intentions.
There are several cars on my street that have wi-fi. Whenever they go buy, it impacts the signal. now it's just a couple of cars, but what about when its 30 cars, most of which will be on the same channel? Or hundreds of cars going buy n the free way?
Cars that have wifi?
In what capacity, pray tell? I'm honestly curious. Wifi syncing for music (can't be that bad, just another client on the periphery of your network)? Or do they take your cell phone and make it a wifi network? If so, wouldn't that need to be turned on?
Dodge and I think it was BMW made lots of noise about this being a built-in option a few years ago. I know I could get a module in my Ram that made it a wifi hotspot for a cell phone on data, just like my Thunderbolt does today. I'm sure others have quitely added it as well since then.
This was a big deal for people that had too much expendable income a few years ago, but now you can just do it with your own Droid/iPhone probably for less than the car data option. Add in the Verizon MiFi (and if anyone else makes something similar... I don't know) and this is now a product searching for a market.
I'm curious to see what their SnS cost is now. If you've ever seen year 2 of licensing you know that it's nowhere near the purchase cost for that year of support. Honestly though, they had to do something even though this is waaaaay off the deep end.
Compared to capacity 3 years ago, we could have dropped 30%CPU lics around this year after a major blade hardware refresh from many mixed dual socket 2-4 core, 16-48GB blades to a few dual socket 6 core 96GB blades. Increased capacity and cpu on new sockets is ridiculous and a lot of places probably dropped their support contracts by insane margins. VMWare was going to take it in the shorts due to reduced license needs (CPU) this way they'll get eaten due to walking customers. Maybe they could have found a middle ground... maybe the discounts start off at anything over the old 2CPU threshold and go up steeply after that, after all nobody pays list price ;)
We didn't drop our support at all simply because if we had to re-buy a blade or two of license for any random huge project (which were on the verge of getting approved, and all of them did) it would have stolen all the benefit of dropping those lics for a year. That decision would look to be paying off in spades now since our memory footprint is going to expand HUGE but we're still over-licensed.
I wonder how MS(Sync) and Google will coexist in the same car. Will Sync go ahead and call AAA for you in an attempt to smear the Google provided route? Will Google go ahead and terminate your Bluetooth connection for you because it thinks you shouldn't be on the phone? Will they both attempt to buy out the ECU for the marketshare of the computer network in the car?
Could be fun, to watch, not to drive.
Who knows if he (patient 1) got the disease from a mosquito as he claims or another way, but it wasn't his PhD grad students he was screwing around with, it was the paper's co-author (patient 3) as his wife (patient 2) now knows.
Lets put 1 and 2's illnesses together, with this statement in mind:
and moreover, the virus has to complete a 2-week life cycle within the insect before it can infect the next human; Foy's wife fell ill just 9 days after his return
So given that both 1 and 2 became ill in roughly the same time, 5 days after their return, it's unlikely that one became infected and then infected the other that close to the 'bite'.
letting gays serve openly is just one lever to alleviate pressure before having to reinstitute the draft, something which would instantly invert popular support for the wars.
Invert eh? So there would someone supporting for the wars? I think you mistake supporting the troops for supporting the wars. We support the people doing their job, even if the job sucks and we can't get enough elected officials to stop it.
The responsibility absolutely is VMWare's. Large software companies generally have access to early releases of the Microsoft patches, specifically so they can perform whatever testing they need.
Sounds like in this case, VMWare didn't bother doing their testing (or that testing was too costly), and is now trying to blame Microsoft for their fuckup.
Lets try to RTFA before assuming...
However, Lee said the Patch Tuesday security updates included the "early release of updates anticipated in" the Service Pack, which is due out Feb. 22. Lee said VMware provided its own VMware View update to customers "within 24 hours of the Microsoft security patch, in an effort to minimize customer impact."
Sounds like MS did an early release of things VMWare knew was coming, but not expected until later. You're right that they were testing, hence the speedy update. Sounds like MS just released early and didn't communicate the release, so shift that blame back to MS.
Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.
Is it really? Usually the best way to get the pulse of the public is to see what comedians are joking about. They can rip people a new arsehole from behind the guise of comedy, and nobody really gives a crap. Now if $yourFavoriteTalkingHead does the same thing, they in turn get ripped a new arsehole by $theOpposingViewTalkingHead and it goes into a shouting match on the Today Show.
I'm all for level headed comedian policy makers. I would have moved across the river to Minnesota to vote for Frankin, I had to watch all his ads anyway ;)
If the vehicles only go in for maintenance once every few years, the tanks ought to be fine.
I don't know where you live, but here where I am, there are cars out on the road that look like they haven't been in for maintenance in decades. And that's just the nature of the car culture we live in. It won't change easily, though I suppose with a sufficiently authoritarian political structure it will work just fine.
Isn't that what they do in states that care about smog? Something on the order of 'you have to pass the sniffer to get your registration.'* So unless you like driving unregistered cars and risk getting ticketed/towed by any cop that cares to check your tags... yes I'd say it's pretty easy to deal with.
*disclaimer - my state doesn't have these laws, so I'm guessing. I'm pretty sure your car doesn't even have to run here.
It would be considered engineering if you designed it to meet a set of specifications, such as perform with a given failure rate under an expected set of environmental parameters.
Exactly. The notion that "An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it." is flawed. That person is creative, a tinkerer, an inventor, an architect and many other nice names. An Engineer (with a capital E) is someone who has science to back them up as to why *this* is the right way to do/make something and not *this other way that also works but may start on fire spontaneously*, or *this way that may fall down when the wind blows*.
The guy that created the first skid steer loader out of tractor parts was a farmer who liked to tinker. The people that make Bobcats are Engineers.
That alone should be reason enough to not support cubicles.
No, it should be reason to support cubicles with ceilings... That being said, you should at least be comfortable enough of your coworkers that you can ask them to stop it.
I also had a craptacular situation like this, but the people were too stupid to care. I worked in a semi-open cube arrangement, where 5 of the 8 people in the pod were on conference calls at once. In fact it was the same conference call, to a room 100 feet away. We openly mocked these people when asking politely didn't work. Then the other 3 of us all got different jobs because this was the norm of personal and professional intelligence at the company.
Moral of the story? I don't know, but there are a lot of badly behaved professionals out there.
> Why? Do rear-view window brakelights alert the drivers behind you better...
Yes, they do. In particular, the so-called "cyclops" does not come on with the headlights, only with the brakes, with the result that "car ahead has lights on" and "car ahead is braking" give different configurations of lights, not just different brightnesses. The change in configuration is more attention-grabbing than just brightening an already-existing light configuration.
Also, it never blinks. If you are in a car with a combo blinke/brake light, are turning and have the *other* taillight out, your CHMSL is steady on. I see that setup at least once a day... a lot of people have no idea about the state of their bulbs.
Maybe I'm getting old too, but it seems like oncoming headlights have gotten way too bright when I'm driving.
There are a LOT of idiots out there that put in aftermarket HID kits into reflectors that were not designed for them. Nearly all of your ricers with those purple lights fall into that category. Also, 99% of pickups with really blue lights do too. I only know of Caddys and maybe Lincolns that have proper HID lights. Things like Silverstar halogens are still halogens, with the right shape bulb, so they project just the way the engineer wanted your car to do it, just brighter. Next time you have some a**hole behind you in a jacked up 1996 Chevy Silverado blaring ice blue light into your rear view and you almost go blind, thank them for their HID kit. I had that happen through the 20% rear window tint (or is it 80? super dark anyway) and completely overpowering the chromatic tinting of the rearview mirror.
The funny thing is that they're all technically illegal. You aren't supposed to put HIDs on anything that didn't have them in the factory because there's a very low chance you have the knowhow to re-shape the beam to not blind somebody. I'm not talking about positioning it vertically/horizontally, more like making sure that the super-bright beam isn't going way outside of your point of aiming way too high and/or to the left.
In addition, I've noticed that some newer HID headlights seem to be more focused, which can make a car behind you going over speed bumps / potholes appear to be flashing its brights at you (with a more diffuse beam, this isn't an issue). This can certainly be distracting, especially driving an old car (when someone could very well be flashing their lights at you to let you know you've lost your running lights / your engine's billowing smoke / etc.).
The fantastic thing is that almost always when somebody is flashing you there is a physical shift in the point of origin. Quad-bulb cars either add a bulb or swap between the two on each side. Factory HIDs rarely have Xenon for the... high I think, so it has to be a different bulb. My Maxima is one of the few that have something called Bi-Xenon where there is actually another arc for the high beam, I think in the same bulb, so both levels come out of the same projector. Of course you can have non-hid projectors, but I think they usually only use the projector for the lows. Also, depending on how they flash (actually highs on/of vs. flash-to-pass) and if they have fogs or not, you will see their fog lights blink too since your fogs shut off with the high beams (except flash-to-pass AFAIK).
There was something like this going on with hybrid Altimas too. The 'Synergy drive' models were using Toyota's technology and they had to pay them each time they sold a vehicle. There was a dealer that told me that they were losing money every time they sold one, but they did it anyway to get credit for making a LEV in places like California where there's some rules about that stuff... ask a Californian what they are, I don't know exactly. They wouldn't let you order them in places that didn't care, like N. Dakota or Minnesota, the only way they get here is used.
I'm guessing there's some sort of regulatory shenanigans like that going on here too, aside from saying HEY! We made an electric car!
Plenty of times it's not even HR. My 'former' employer's head of IT put together a job posting once that *required* a CCIE for a normal grade network admin job and then offered to pay like $70k (top end), which in my locale is respectable money, but definately not for a CCIE . Anybody that would have fit either end of that spectrum would have been scared off by the other.
*disclaimer - everyone 'in' IT knew that the upper managers were in the good ol' boys club with the owner, and couldn't IT their way out of a wet paper bag, they were just in it for the ego. Just illustrating the "hr isn't the only bastion of suck" point.
Maybe they're assuming that if you go to the dump you're:
A. driving a garbage truck :-P
B. driving something of your own that carries a large mass of 'stuff' there, like a diesel powered pickup.
C. dropping your 30 yr old VW Rabbit off there, and then taking a CNG city bus home
Reading comprension is good...
The agency that was causing them pain was the Washington (I presume) department of Ecology (http://www.ecy.wa.gov perhaps) for their pilot plant in Pasco, Washington. The EPA finally told them they could get back to whatever they're doing there, probably showing the place off to investors and prospective clients.
As for the 'where are they going' question:
"Spitzauer, says that GPI has over $2 billion dollars in signed contracts for GPI plants, including in Vietnam, Spain, France, Yugoslavia, and a very large installation in South America to be launched in April."
I guess that's not GPS coordinates or anything, but it is more than generalities like 'we have some contracts'. Since the S.A. one is apparently well into contstruction and presumably nearly ready to go live, maybe there's more about it on their website... or something.
And OnStar is... a cellphone. Ok, maybe it's a VoIP device you're using to act like a cell phone at the core, since that's probably how they get the telemetry data in, but it's still a cell signal.
Disclaimer: I worked on part of a similar system for a large German auto manufacturer and there was SIP going on there with some custom header crap, that's where I get my information. On the call center side it was actually Asterisk :-P
Meanwhile on the flip side we have had about that many Dell servers and the fuckers break at least 5x as much as the XServes.
I think the moral of that story isn't Apple makes fine servers, it's that Dell doesn't.
One would think that credit analysis would be done by generally accepted rules, like credit score. I like to use Firefox, but I have a score over 800. Should I pay a high rate because of my browser choice when I've 'done it right' in every other way? Someone will tell you if your credit is bad and THAT is why your rate sucks, but when you base that decision on (seemingly) unrelated data and not telling you about that, it's fishy.
I would guess, being October, that he also 'forgot' several reminders and a sternly worded note about his house burning down w/o coverage.
That being said, this is a nasty intersection of insurance style payments and municipal services. No, you shouldn't be allowed to opt out of those services, for the public good, but read the first modded up post, and you see the anti-tax culture that prevails in the 'south'.
Here's an alternative: Since this is an outreach coverage, the fire dept is guaranteed to be 'staffed' by the city, even though they don't get to opt out. After dousing his house, they should have presented him an clinic style bill... if you walk into the hospital uninsured, assuming they'll treat you, you pay the list cost. He probably would have paid less than the gap in his coverage, and it would have been a good 'memory jog' for everyone else that 'forgot'. Of course this only works if you have a group (the city residents) paying the upkeep for the deadbeat arsonists in the country.
Who gives a flip if it's a dealer accessory or installed at the factory? The fact remains this is nothing new.
It has been trivial to get internet access in a vehicle for years and years.
My (second owner) Tundra had a 'dealer installed option' for XM radio which is the alternative to ordering it that way from the factory. It still uses the factory harness and puts the receiver under the driver seat like the factory install. The difference is the antenna for the dealer kit is mounted ON THE DASH... where you lose reception in about 90 of the 360 degrees you can drive instead of on the roof, where my aftermarket kit loses signal only behind tall buildings. The factory kit for other Toyotas is similar.
Cellular is of course different, but there's always that chance that something can be half-assed when a local 'mechanic' has to install something in your brand new car. The morons that put my kit in smashed a panel clip so the driver's kick panel didn't sit quite right. I'd hate for somebody to do that to my new A8. Factory is probably also factory warrantable, where the kit might only be warrantable at your dealer (no source to back that up, just suspicion).