A friend of mine just bought a Tesla. As far as I know it maybe the only one in the St. Louis area. I recently bought a Chevy Volt. We were at an event and the topic came up. One of the people there asked me why I went with the volt. And the answer was fairly simple:
My wife's commute is 15 miles round trip a day. Maybe 20 if she does some afterwork shopping. So the vast majority of the time it's running on electric. But my Dad lives ~ 70 mile round trip from us. He's older and I'm usually out there once a week to check up on him or help him clean out gutters or whatever needs to be done around his house. I have farms that are 300 mile round trip that need seen after. That is certainly a problem with a Tesla.
Also my budget for a new car was between $25,000 - $30,000. With lower base price for 2014, tax credits, and GM card earnings the Volt fit in the price range and was a little bit smaller of a car than the Malibu Eco, which meant it fit in the garage better. (I really wish we had a 3 car garage, but...)
Finally, there are a dozen Chevy and GM dealers around the city. I'm not even sure there is somewhere here that can do work on a Tesla.
Um, actually the Chinese and NSA go back a long ways as the NSA and China have run a series of listening posts long the former/current Soviet border since the 1970's...
It would be interesting because if this were to go onto an actual court battle I'm not sure the kid would win. There is a legal concept in common law called: In loco parentis. In a nutshell it gives institutions such a schools quite a bit of leeway as long as it doesn't "Infringe Civil Liberties" and in the United States we've ended up with the Tinker Doctrine. But that covers more of the limitation of Freedom of Speech in a school than other items.
But In loco parentis has longed been used to allow justification of locker searches. The argument being a parent is allowed to search the room of their child, therefore the school is allowed to the right to search the locker of a student. None of those cases have actually reached the Supreme court to really have a final ruling on where the lines are actually are as far as schools are concerned with In loco parentis. I don't think any schools want this court to make a ruling and set precedence about the limits of In loco parentis because Clarence Thomas has been a critic of the Tinker Doctrine in the past and school may lose a lot of their legal power over students if it ended up there.
I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.
And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.
Would the electric car still work? Could you easily find a place to charge up in that event? A car for the president has some different considerations than me in Suburbia who works from home 3 days a week and doesn't drive much. (For the record I'm a Chevy Volt owner)
We ended up Amazon Prime after me or the wife forgot to uncheck the box and were billed for it during the christmas holidays. We were ordering a lot during that period and it wasn't until a month later when we got the credit card statement that we realized it. Well we looked and quickly found Amazon Prime had everything we were watching on Netflix plus a few shows no longer available on netflix. So we cancelled Netflix and kept prime.
The biggest reason why we've kept it now is because my wife and I are both busy professionals now with young kids. We don't have a lot of time to shop and the two day shipping makes it convenient for a lot of things.
So for $99 a year we'll take the expedited shipping and as far as I'm concerned the streaming is just a nice bonus.
Seriously this. Before I owned my company, had a start up which we turned into a successful company and sold for enough that I now can live comfortably.
After about a year off, I had spent the last 5 working 70 hours a week or more at times, a new start up approached me. They had all the technical talent they ever needed, but wanted some help on the business side. I had been in their shoes and I worked about 30 - 40 hours a week for the first 5 months developing and getting their sales/marketing implemented.
Well here we are a year later and I really only do about 15 hours a week of work if that. Things have been successful. We are meeting sales goals, now have 3 sales people plus one trainer on staff. Literally I got to sales meetings on Tuesdays & Thursdays and then spend a couple hours making sure emails are being sent and going over numbers. And I get paid salary for 40 hours a week. The other 30 hours a week really are "In case something comes up". That may happen once or twice a month where I spend 20 hours actually doing work instead of 15.
This. For the past 6 years I've paid for my own health insurance or had a HSA depending on the state I was living in. Past four years I had a plan that worked for me. Cost was a little under $100 a month for health insurance plus dental. And I used the dental coverage more than the medical side. I was in my late 20's early 30's and pretty healthy. I spent more on dental work during that time than medical. Other than my annual check up, provided free under my plan, I think I had one other doctors visit for a sinus infection. Medication was $4 for generics and I don't think they even billed my insurance. Deductible was $2500 with max out of pocket of $11,000. While that maybe "high" to some people, it was an amount that if I really needed it I could afford to pay out of pocket and it wasn't going to bankrupt me.
Well last October I got a notice stating my plan was "Catastrophic only" and I no longer qualified for it under the ACA because I was over 30. So I go shopping and the "Plan closest to mine" was 3x the cost. The deducible was $5500 and max out of pocket $21,000. When I bring this up in conversations I get told by ACA supporters, "Well that's because before you had a crap Catastrophic only plan and now you'll have a better plan". Well I compared point for point and as far as I can tell, at least on the things that really matter to me, the two plans are nearly identical on what they cover. This new plan appears to be Catastrophic Only, only now if I actually have to use it it's going to hurt my pocket book even more. Typically I only kept around $25,000 in cash on hand in my money market and another $5,000 in checking/savings. Now I'm going to have to look into doubling that over the next few years.
Sorta. The largest direct recipient of "Farm Subsidies" a few years ago was Riceland. Which is a coop technically. When people who own farms like me and my family sell Riceland our rice or soybeans or wheat they cut us a check including the subsidy from the government. That is how we get any subsidy payments for crops. The check doesn't come directly from the government to us. It goes to Riceland first (or ConAgra or Bunge, etc..)
But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)
If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.
That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.
I'm starting to car shop. Mine is 10 years old, 150k miles and hers is 5 years old and 50k miles. Currently I drive a Chevy and she has a Nissan. Her daily commute is about 35 miles round trip. Could be less if she takes a new job closer to the house. And I work from home 3 days a week, but I can travel upwards of 60 miles for meetings or if I need to go help my Dad with something (40 miles one way).
We are seriously looking at the Volt. With the current tax credits, the price of the Volt is in line with say a Cruse Eco or Malibu Eco. Plus most days we probably wouldn't need to use the gas engine, but if we did it would go the extra distance no problem.
We really missed the boat with not having local governments at the city/county level build the infrastructure. Where I grew up we had an electric coop. My Dad still lives there. Other than the main lines, it was all buried cables. Power outages were extreme rarities. His rates have been between $.08 -.11 per kilowatt hour. Hell a few years ago the rates went DOWN after the coop paid off some debt. In the city our rates are about.145 per kilowatt hour and increasing to.16 per kilowatt hour here soon. Last state I lived in started to force Utilities to open up their lines to competitors. My electric rates there went down from $0.18 per KW/hr to $.12 when that happened.
When I moved into the city, it was a major utility company, overhead wires, and if we got some ice or wind the power would go out.
Where my Dad lives, water & sewer is maintained by the city, and now contracts out with the county for water. His bill is about 1/3rd less than what our bill is closer to the city and our water is owned by a private utility.
Where it made sense we should have had cities or counties putting in fibre and allowed rural areas to form wireless coops. Then lease out service to whomever at a fixed cost per line.
What about places like where my family farms are located? The costs to lay fibre down all those roads would be prohibitive since you maybe would serve.5 homes per mile. Maybe even less. Hell my grandmother didn't have a private line until 1991. I remember going down there in the 1980's and she had a party line still.
Microsoft used to sell "points" to buy stuff over Xbox Live. Interestingly enough last year they stopped and went to a currency based system. So instead of "rent a movie on demand for 600 points" it became "Rent Movie for $2.99" or whatever the real dollars equivalent were. And I much prefer the new system.
Well, be sure to turn out the lights then. Because once the "Just Another Wordpress" site theme is launched and the comments section, the unique feature that makes Slashdot, as we know it is gone. At that point I'll wait and see where the community migrates to and follow suite. Maybe someone will download Slashcode and attempt to launch a new site. Hell it was a good run. But all good things...
Actually, at least in the United States, all the rivers that can be used for hydro electric are being used for hydro power.
What we need to do is get over "proliferation" and rewrite some of the damn treaties to allow the reprocessing of spent fuel as well as change our reactor designs over to ones that will burn the spent fuel. I know the Thorium cycle reactors are a lifetime away, for me anyway, from being commercially ready. But you burn up all those bombs and spent fuel rods already created over the next 500 years and what's left is only hot for a few hundred years, not 10,000 years.
An Intelligence Officer is a criminal with a badge that makes it "ok". Seriously, it is their job to go into other countries and break their laws in order to gain information.
Here locally we had a judge who actually tossed out every single red-light camera ticket if you went before him and requested to face your accuser. The city promptly changed the law making running a red light a civil infraction (fine).
Last two companies most of the dev staffs have worked from home. Some have been in other states. But it was software and we could track things like did we make milestones, how often and what did they check into the repository, etc.. They were, however, all salaried. Frankly I never cared if it took them 4 hours or 8 hours to solve a problem or add feature so long as it was delivered on time according to what the project needed.
The other rule was quite simple: If the phone rings between 9AM and 5PM office time you'd better damn well answer it. I'm not calling you to chat I'm calling you because something is broke and needs to be urgently fixed. And I stuck to that. if I wanted a status update I'd send an email.
Wife and I are shopping for a new carrier and new phones. I'm getting another iPhone. I've had one since the 3G and like other Apple products I own, it stays out of my way and lets me get work done.
But she has Samsung devices, Tablet & Phone, but every time we went in to ask questions there was someone in front of us returning a Samsung S4. Well we noticed something. We've gone to 6 different stores and every time we waited the person in front of us was returning a Samsung device, less than 30 days old, and requesting a swap for something different. Some seemed to get a HTC phone, other elected to dump Android and go to Apple.
When we asked sales people about it, more than one told us right now to get the HTC or even Motorola over Samsung at the moment. Apparently while Samsung has a since marketing campaign, their quality control has suffered. As result they are seeing a lot of returns because the phones don't work.
The other thing with the S3 and S4 is that the phones are frankly larger than what she wants to carry. They have an S4 Mini, but she is afraid it will be like her SII and suffer from lack of updates.
I believe she had an early HTC and had problems with it before her Samsung. It's enough that she's now debating switching to an iPhone 5S.
As someone who has been using PhoneGAP/Cordova for about 3 years now it really depends on what the app has to do.
There was a rush a few years ago that a lot of my clients "wanted an app". Oftentimes all this app had to do was pull RSS feeds + add push notifications. For simple apps like that HTML5/JS/CSS/Cordova works great.
However when you start getting beyond simple "Feed & Form" Apps and need to more complex things. For instance, I had a client that wanted an app that needed a decibel meter. That had to be written in native code. While I could access the microphone I couldn't get more information beyond that.
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Battery held up fine over the winter, even on the cold days she wasn't burning any gas. I think we've filled up twice since the first of the year.
We did have the 220v charger installed.
If it's ad based, then getting in front of more eyeballs via Android and derivatives is the way to go.
If it's depending upon purchases or in-app purchases then iOS is the platform to concentrate on first.
A friend of mine just bought a Tesla. As far as I know it maybe the only one in the St. Louis area. I recently bought a Chevy Volt. We were at an event and the topic came up. One of the people there asked me why I went with the volt. And the answer was fairly simple:
My wife's commute is 15 miles round trip a day. Maybe 20 if she does some afterwork shopping. So the vast majority of the time it's running on electric. But my Dad lives ~ 70 mile round trip from us. He's older and I'm usually out there once a week to check up on him or help him clean out gutters or whatever needs to be done around his house. I have farms that are 300 mile round trip that need seen after. That is certainly a problem with a Tesla.
Also my budget for a new car was between $25,000 - $30,000. With lower base price for 2014, tax credits, and GM card earnings the Volt fit in the price range and was a little bit smaller of a car than the Malibu Eco, which meant it fit in the garage better. (I really wish we had a 3 car garage, but...)
Finally, there are a dozen Chevy and GM dealers around the city. I'm not even sure there is somewhere here that can do work on a Tesla.
Um, actually the Chinese and NSA go back a long ways as the NSA and China have run a series of listening posts long the former/current Soviet border since the 1970's...
It would be interesting because if this were to go onto an actual court battle I'm not sure the kid would win. There is a legal concept in common law called: In loco parentis. In a nutshell it gives institutions such a schools quite a bit of leeway as long as it doesn't "Infringe Civil Liberties" and in the United States we've ended up with the Tinker Doctrine. But that covers more of the limitation of Freedom of Speech in a school than other items.
But In loco parentis has longed been used to allow justification of locker searches. The argument being a parent is allowed to search the room of their child, therefore the school is allowed to the right to search the locker of a student. None of those cases have actually reached the Supreme court to really have a final ruling on where the lines are actually are as far as schools are concerned with In loco parentis. I don't think any schools want this court to make a ruling and set precedence about the limits of In loco parentis because Clarence Thomas has been a critic of the Tinker Doctrine in the past and school may lose a lot of their legal power over students if it ended up there.
I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.
And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.
Would the electric car still work? Could you easily find a place to charge up in that event? A car for the president has some different considerations than me in Suburbia who works from home 3 days a week and doesn't drive much. (For the record I'm a Chevy Volt owner)
We ended up Amazon Prime after me or the wife forgot to uncheck the box and were billed for it during the christmas holidays. We were ordering a lot during that period and it wasn't until a month later when we got the credit card statement that we realized it. Well we looked and quickly found Amazon Prime had everything we were watching on Netflix plus a few shows no longer available on netflix. So we cancelled Netflix and kept prime.
The biggest reason why we've kept it now is because my wife and I are both busy professionals now with young kids. We don't have a lot of time to shop and the two day shipping makes it convenient for a lot of things.
So for $99 a year we'll take the expedited shipping and as far as I'm concerned the streaming is just a nice bonus.
Seriously this. Before I owned my company, had a start up which we turned into a successful company and sold for enough that I now can live comfortably.
After about a year off, I had spent the last 5 working 70 hours a week or more at times, a new start up approached me. They had all the technical talent they ever needed, but wanted some help on the business side. I had been in their shoes and I worked about 30 - 40 hours a week for the first 5 months developing and getting their sales/marketing implemented.
Well here we are a year later and I really only do about 15 hours a week of work if that. Things have been successful. We are meeting sales goals, now have 3 sales people plus one trainer on staff. Literally I got to sales meetings on Tuesdays & Thursdays and then spend a couple hours making sure emails are being sent and going over numbers. And I get paid salary for 40 hours a week. The other 30 hours a week really are "In case something comes up". That may happen once or twice a month where I spend 20 hours actually doing work instead of 15.
This. For the past 6 years I've paid for my own health insurance or had a HSA depending on the state I was living in. Past four years I had a plan that worked for me. Cost was a little under $100 a month for health insurance plus dental. And I used the dental coverage more than the medical side. I was in my late 20's early 30's and pretty healthy. I spent more on dental work during that time than medical. Other than my annual check up, provided free under my plan, I think I had one other doctors visit for a sinus infection. Medication was $4 for generics and I don't think they even billed my insurance. Deductible was $2500 with max out of pocket of $11,000. While that maybe "high" to some people, it was an amount that if I really needed it I could afford to pay out of pocket and it wasn't going to bankrupt me.
Well last October I got a notice stating my plan was "Catastrophic only" and I no longer qualified for it under the ACA because I was over 30. So I go shopping and the "Plan closest to mine" was 3x the cost. The deducible was $5500 and max out of pocket $21,000. When I bring this up in conversations I get told by ACA supporters, "Well that's because before you had a crap Catastrophic only plan and now you'll have a better plan". Well I compared point for point and as far as I can tell, at least on the things that really matter to me, the two plans are nearly identical on what they cover. This new plan appears to be Catastrophic Only, only now if I actually have to use it it's going to hurt my pocket book even more. Typically I only kept around $25,000 in cash on hand in my money market and another $5,000 in checking/savings. Now I'm going to have to look into doubling that over the next few years.
I'll end up going on the plan offered through my fiancé's job when we get married in a few weeks, but there is a big question of whether that will be available next year. So far indications are it's going to be far cheaper for her company to pay the fine and push everyone to the exchange than continue to provide health coverage.
Sorta. The largest direct recipient of "Farm Subsidies" a few years ago was Riceland. Which is a coop technically. When people who own farms like me and my family sell Riceland our rice or soybeans or wheat they cut us a check including the subsidy from the government. That is how we get any subsidy payments for crops. The check doesn't come directly from the government to us. It goes to Riceland first (or ConAgra or Bunge, etc..)
But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)
If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.
That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.
I'm starting to car shop. Mine is 10 years old, 150k miles and hers is 5 years old and 50k miles. Currently I drive a Chevy and she has a Nissan. Her daily commute is about 35 miles round trip. Could be less if she takes a new job closer to the house. And I work from home 3 days a week, but I can travel upwards of 60 miles for meetings or if I need to go help my Dad with something (40 miles one way).
We are seriously looking at the Volt. With the current tax credits, the price of the Volt is in line with say a Cruse Eco or Malibu Eco. Plus most days we probably wouldn't need to use the gas engine, but if we did it would go the extra distance no problem.
We really missed the boat with not having local governments at the city/county level build the infrastructure. Where I grew up we had an electric coop. My Dad still lives there. Other than the main lines, it was all buried cables. Power outages were extreme rarities. His rates have been between $.08 - .11 per kilowatt hour. Hell a few years ago the rates went DOWN after the coop paid off some debt. In the city our rates are about .145 per kilowatt hour and increasing to .16 per kilowatt hour here soon. Last state I lived in started to force Utilities to open up their lines to competitors. My electric rates there went down from $0.18 per KW/hr to $.12 when that happened.
When I moved into the city, it was a major utility company, overhead wires, and if we got some ice or wind the power would go out.
Where my Dad lives, water & sewer is maintained by the city, and now contracts out with the county for water. His bill is about 1/3rd less than what our bill is closer to the city and our water is owned by a private utility.
Where it made sense we should have had cities or counties putting in fibre and allowed rural areas to form wireless coops. Then lease out service to whomever at a fixed cost per line.
What about places like where my family farms are located? The costs to lay fibre down all those roads would be prohibitive since you maybe would serve .5 homes per mile. Maybe even less. Hell my grandmother didn't have a private line until 1991. I remember going down there in the 1980's and she had a party line still.
Microsoft used to sell "points" to buy stuff over Xbox Live. Interestingly enough last year they stopped and went to a currency based system. So instead of "rent a movie on demand for 600 points" it became "Rent Movie for $2.99" or whatever the real dollars equivalent were. And I much prefer the new system.
Well, be sure to turn out the lights then. Because once the "Just Another Wordpress" site theme is launched and the comments section, the unique feature that makes Slashdot, as we know it is gone. At that point I'll wait and see where the community migrates to and follow suite. Maybe someone will download Slashcode and attempt to launch a new site. Hell it was a good run. But all good things...
Honestly. That's what I think when I see the new beta is "What the fuck? Did they just replace Slashcode with wordpress?"
Actually, at least in the United States, all the rivers that can be used for hydro electric are being used for hydro power.
What we need to do is get over "proliferation" and rewrite some of the damn treaties to allow the reprocessing of spent fuel as well as change our reactor designs over to ones that will burn the spent fuel. I know the Thorium cycle reactors are a lifetime away, for me anyway, from being commercially ready. But you burn up all those bombs and spent fuel rods already created over the next 500 years and what's left is only hot for a few hundred years, not 10,000 years.
An Intelligence Officer is a criminal with a badge that makes it "ok". Seriously, it is their job to go into other countries and break their laws in order to gain information.
Here locally we had a judge who actually tossed out every single red-light camera ticket if you went before him and requested to face your accuser. The city promptly changed the law making running a red light a civil infraction (fine).
I just recently bought it again for $1.99 from GOG.
Last two companies most of the dev staffs have worked from home. Some have been in other states. But it was software and we could track things like did we make milestones, how often and what did they check into the repository, etc.. They were, however, all salaried. Frankly I never cared if it took them 4 hours or 8 hours to solve a problem or add feature so long as it was delivered on time according to what the project needed.
The other rule was quite simple: If the phone rings between 9AM and 5PM office time you'd better damn well answer it. I'm not calling you to chat I'm calling you because something is broke and needs to be urgently fixed. And I stuck to that. if I wanted a status update I'd send an email.
Wife and I are shopping for a new carrier and new phones. I'm getting another iPhone. I've had one since the 3G and like other Apple products I own, it stays out of my way and lets me get work done.
But she has Samsung devices, Tablet & Phone, but every time we went in to ask questions there was someone in front of us returning a Samsung S4. Well we noticed something. We've gone to 6 different stores and every time we waited the person in front of us was returning a Samsung device, less than 30 days old, and requesting a swap for something different. Some seemed to get a HTC phone, other elected to dump Android and go to Apple.
When we asked sales people about it, more than one told us right now to get the HTC or even Motorola over Samsung at the moment. Apparently while Samsung has a since marketing campaign, their quality control has suffered. As result they are seeing a lot of returns because the phones don't work.
The other thing with the S3 and S4 is that the phones are frankly larger than what she wants to carry. They have an S4 Mini, but she is afraid it will be like her SII and suffer from lack of updates.
I believe she had an early HTC and had problems with it before her Samsung. It's enough that she's now debating switching to an iPhone 5S.
As someone who has been using PhoneGAP/Cordova for about 3 years now it really depends on what the app has to do.
There was a rush a few years ago that a lot of my clients "wanted an app". Oftentimes all this app had to do was pull RSS feeds + add push notifications. For simple apps like that HTML5/JS/CSS/Cordova works great.
However when you start getting beyond simple "Feed & Form" Apps and need to more complex things. For instance, I had a client that wanted an app that needed a decibel meter. That had to be written in native code. While I could access the microphone I couldn't get more information beyond that.