Trouble is, this thermostat is both a user interface and a control device, so it needs to be robust. If it isn't, there are 5+2 day and 7 day thermostats from Honeywell that can be programmed to expected occupancy schedules and can even be programmed to reverse the heatpump when the seasons change (basically if temp below low-setting, apply heat, if temp above high-setting, apply cool) and these only need a pair of AA batteries to run for more than a year.
I've had to deal with EMS controller woes in the past- the HVAC people programmed the EMS controllers to basically require a network connection back to their HQ in order to function, else they went into an error-state. When it was pointed-out that there were innumerable points of failure including the LAN at the facility, the WAN, and worst of all, their own HQ's LAN or WAN that could take the entire organization down, only then did it dawn on them that it was a bad idea to so centrally-control the EMS, and they've migrated back to a more sane policy where EMS just runs its set programming until interrupted by the HQ controller.
We've seen a lot of failure-mode problems lately, to me this points to a lack of quality assurance testing. The trend in having the programmer QA their own code is obviously not providing us with the results that we need and should be stopped.
I have to admit, I bought a Cisco Meraki switch because I needed PoE and gigabit speed and cheap, so getting a little 8-port manageable switch with VLAN tagging cheaply was not in of itself a bad thing, but I really don't like how I have to go through a web page on someone else's server in order to configure the device. The web interface itself is pretty good, but it really should be on the switch itself. There is no way to perform any advanced configuration directly on the switch, just set the IP and remove any existing VLAN restrictions to let it reach the Internet and the cloud management.
I have a feeling that once surplus Catalyst equipment with gigabit speeds and PoE gets cheap, this Meraki is going bye-bye.
...a person whose principal businesses seem to be geared around fairly short-term returns. Gambling businesses are all about the house making revenue immediately, and his real estate holdings seem to be based on building as big and as gaudy and filling that space as quickly as possible.
The Space Program is not an instant-return kind of thing. It took the better part of a decade, spanning three presidential administrations, before the announced goal of putting a man on the Moon was realized. It took a similar amount of time to work the kinks out of the Shuttle, such that Skylab was lost when needed missions to service it didn't come to fruition.
Even the nature of commercial space now is not a fast process. No commercial launch companies are man-rated yet, and I'd bet that while SpaceX wants to be, they're smart enough to not rush it too fast lest they have a setback-inducing failure that destroys confidence in the company.
There's a certain something, I don't have a word for it, that I think an in-tune audience can appreciate and the artist feeds off of it. Certain artists, fewer than we might hope, have that capacity and they give you their all - and you give them your undivided attention and enjoy the moment. It's not easily put to words, at least not by me, but it's there and all the more palpable if you've been fortunate enough to be on both sides. (I'm not very good but I've played and sung in front of some reasonably large groups of people, sometimes even for money. The largest would be about 12,500 at a very overcrowded Hemp Fest, it was fun.) I don't know how to describe it but it's not just a connection, it's a willingness to push that to the limits, to push yourself to the limits (I presume - I'm not that good), and to really make everything work as best as one can.
I was in a major professional choir for a time, I know what you mean. That connection with the audience is the difference between them feeling you're playing to them and them feeling that they're a part of it emotionally. It really is an emotional connection too, and it seems to work irrespective of the genre or key or chord or instrument. The time I felt it strongest as a performer was at a concert featuring songs of the Civil War, closing with, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." There was something in that moment that if I could bottle and sell it I'd be rich. As a member of the audience I almost got there when Bobby Hatfield sang, "Unchained Melody," but Bill Medley came back out on stage right as the tune ended and cracked a joke that just broke the moment. The joke was funny, but I'd have rather had the moment than the joke.
I wish I'd gotten to see Queen with Freddy Mercury live; I'm a little too young. Even his recorded performances exude that feeling though, for what it's worth.
I wish that Adele would stop trying to sing out of her natural range. On, "Rolling in the Deep," she nails it, but on "Someone Like You" her high notes just feel forced and uncomfortable, and that's on the best take of a studio version. They're not quite nails-on-chalkboard but they do make me wince just a little. She seems best as a Mezzo-Soprano or an Alto.
I don't think we'll see it change until the model for the ownership of broadcasting changes.
There have been portable mass-market personal media technologies for music since the 8-track (even earlier if you consider the vehicle-based record players from cars from the 1950s) but radio is still a very common way to listen to music and is a very common way to learn about new music. Radio's most modern weakness is that consolidation has made it a lot easier for very few people to decide what new music we get exposed-to through the easiest medium in which to do it. With only a few companies owning so many stations and only a few companies controlling the majority of significant aspects of music production, distribution, and most importantly, publicity, it's difficult for those that wish to avoid these models to 'make it' if they're new upstarts. Sure, Moby was able to record a successful album at home, but in no small part due to his name recognition and his previous financial successes he could afford to have a quality home studio that he could use whenever he felt like.
Let's face it- there are times when we want to choose what we want to listen to and times when the music is nice to have playing but we don't want to take the time to design a playlist. In those latter circumstances we are dependent on someone else's choice, and their 'fee' for the privilege is getting to pick that which makes them money.
That's how government works. Oh FBI/NSA/CIA/EPA/FDA/NBA couldn't detect the baddies? Then they need more funding!
Which is also why false flags are so popular amongst governments.
That's the thing of it, we need to see that it's actually working before we even continue to use it, let alone add more.
There have been several domestic incidents where there might have been some kind of Internet-based evidence that it was in the works, most not even based on Islamic terrorism. There was a shooter at a historically-Black church. There was a movie theatre shooting. There was an elementary school shooting. There was a congresswoman and people that came to see her speak that were shot. Hell, those wackos from Nevada that are in armed-standoff in Oregon that previously were in armed-standoff in Nevada are operating, and none of those are even Islamic in nature.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but one would think that in at least some case of domestic surveillance, authorities would react to communications or online rambling to actually go find the preparation for an attack. If not, then what's the benefit? Prosecuting some schmuck after-the-fact because he supplied rifles to someone else when it's not clear that he knew what they were to be used for?
When John Allen Muhammed an Lee Malvo were caught, it was because of their missteps along with some evidence that Malvo had not realized he left behind in an armed robbery well prior to their shooting spree that they referenced in their communications with authorities. In short, good old-fashioned, labor-intensive detective work. When the government has infiltrated groups that have domestically tried to commit acts, it has been because people tipped them off to the plots, and that infiltration again required labor-intensive work. To me, that makes it look like the labor-intensive work, not the technology, is what ultimately rules the day.
I'm wondering if that AC was actually trying to make a joke. To get two things wrong about the acting roles as the only two things cited would almost require intent.
We thought that about e-books too, but those are still under the control of the publishers for the most part and are still ridiculously expensive.
Both generally require a fairly large amount of editing. Books may go through editors and even advance-copies to get reader feedback before a final text is set. Music, depending on how it's produced, could require a fairly extensive studio with multitrack recording and mixing and a sound engineer that knows how to get the mix right, sometimes despite the musician's feelings on the matter. And for both, that's well before accounting for promotion.
If you or I have talent in either arena, we could write the best book or make the best music, but we probably won't achieve sales even if we didn't have to compete with existing structures. As much as I dislike it, marketing is much more important, and most people that create content aren't necessarily good at promoting themselves or that content.
Could be. Linda Ronstadt was hugely popular in the late seventies but is virtually forgotten today. The Manhattan Transfer won multiple Grammys and used to sell-out auditoriums like rock groups but is down to 2,000 seat auditoriums.
Bowie had staying power because he continually reinvented himself and managed to keep up with what the public wanted in addition to giving them something new to consider. He was willing to vary his look- Bowie in the Ziggy Stardust era versus The Man Who Fell To Earth era vs Labyrinth are basically completely different acts.
I still think that's incorrect. The majority of modern acts that record labels push are, to an extent, puppets of the record labels, but mostly because, like how Hollywood wants every movie to be a blockbuster, these are the acts that they're convinced will knock it out of the park. Why would a label spend a moderate amount of money to get a simple equal return, when they can spend a bit more and get an order of magnitude more?
These acts getting arrested for doing stupid things also helps with their sales, so long as the things they do to get arrested are that which we all point and laugh at rather than being truly revolted by. Young, dumb singers whose teen angst bullshit is highly public are great targets. Nearly all of us had our share of it, but we lacked the financial means to get into real trouble or to be so highly visible while doing it. These singers and musicians that the record labels are using have that means and thus when they do the same kinds of dumb shit that we all did, they get busted but also increase their profiles.
Muse has picked up that mantle lately. The Art of Noise (The Seduction of Claude DeBussy), Spacehog (the Chinese Album), Styx (Kilroy Was Here) and many, many others have released concept albums that are best listened-to whole.
Whether you like his music or not, there is no denying that David Bowie was a true artist, a real entertainer. There was nothing fake about him. Nowadays, we don't see real artists like him very often.
I suspect that you're seeing history through rose-tinted glasses. There were plenty of pop-acts in every era that Bowie overlapped with, we simply don't remember many of them. People don't remember acts like Elastica or Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen that charted and were popular for a short time. Hell, look at Weird Al's parodies throughout the years, there are some artists he parodied whose specific work is unknown now that were popular enough at the time to justify parody, like Tiffany and George Harrison's solo work.
Bowie was special, but he isn't unique. As far as musicians that have gone through several iterations of their personas, Kylie Minogue comes to mind, and when it comes to production and stagecraft along with actually crafting musically-clever songs, I like Spacehog and Muse. Absoutely modern techniques like Autotune are frustratingly common even with singers that can actually sing, but there are still acts worth following in popular music even if their albums are not immune to some of those tools.
Based on the number of people with working Laserdisc players that still have actual interest, probably not much.
That said, as someone with a working Laserdisc player and actual interest, if it turns out you just misplaced it and if you find it, I'll give you $5.00 for it...
The IT director, CIO, CTO, Network Supervisor, Director of Business Services, or any other of a number of people should be in-charge of things like that. That's the difference between the administrative contact and the technical contact, the network engineer might be the technical contact and be in a position to perform the technical changes needed for DNS, but the boss' job should be to pay for the domain and handle business-related queries and functions.
Arguably that same person should be responsible for the calendar for the certificates too. That stuff is too important to leave to a low-level functionary, even if that low-level functionary ultimately uses the certs technically once they're obtained.
It'd still be quite interesting to have a look at that missile. Even really basic things like hinges and reinforcement hull struts might give you ideas how to improve other missiles.
Not that they necessarily are better but being able to look at how other people solved problems and compare them with your own solution has always been one of my favorite ways to gain knowledge.
If all it's lacking are the warhead and the guidance system, depending on what guidance system means, they might have everything short of the electronics necessary for function enough to fly. Is the guidance system partially dependent on the warhead? If a specialized warhead necessitates a particular way to control the device then this would make sense.
While the guidance system is a very, very important component, having a known-functional design including all of the concealed mechanical underpinnings takes a reverse-engineer process a large portion of the way there, and even if a lot of new R&D has to be done to develop a guidance system, efforts can be focused primarily there as opposed to having to develop both the physical, and the software, through trial-and-error.
Part of the problem with this discussion is the nature of the way people participate in the discussion. Because firearms enthusiasts that not only advocate no additional controls at all while enthusiasts that can see room for reasonable restrictions in particular circumstances are drowned-out, it means that no ideas are introduced from the firearms-enthusiast side to craft regulation that works to both the enthusiast's good and the public good. This takes a discussion that should have room for compromise and turns it into a black-and-white argument. For the last several years the firearms enthusiasts have been successful, but inevitably when success reverts to those that advocate restrictions on firearms, those restrictions will probably be onerous to firearms owners because they themselves were unwilling to work to make for a reasonable stance.
When the Second Amendment of the Constitution was written, firearms were single-shot, muzzle-load, loose-powder, and smooth-bore. Integrated cartridges hadn't even been invented, breech-loaded firearms were excessively rare. The technology meant that it was difficult for someone to engage in individual violence because the weapons themselves were too cumbersome to be used in a spree-shooting or mass-shooting fashion. Even the introduction of the mass-produced revolver in the 1850s originally had significant restrictions on its use for mass-shootings as the first rifles didn't use integrated cartridge rounds, so the operator was essentially limited to the capacity of the weapon itself; reloading would not have been a terribly good option, and even those revolvers were single-action, so one couldn't just keep pulling the trigger in order to fire them.
Now you have commercially-available pistols with integrated metal cartridges with high capacity magazines (20 for small rounds, 15 for large rounds) that can be reloaded very quickly and chamber the next round automatically so the next pull of the trigger is all that's needed to keep firing. The natural limits on the technology that existed when the Second Amendment existed that served to curtail most firearms violence are flat-out gone, and a lot of people are getting very tired of listening to the same arguments against taking action to stop firearms violence without any reasonable or realistic proposed counter-solution other than more guns. I don't think that it's impossible for bans that are much, much stronger than the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban to be drafted if this stonewalling continues.
The firearms enthusiast community needs to figure out what it's willing to live with, damn the noisy 10% that currently drive the argument, before the hobby is assaulted by insurance regulation, ammunition taxation or regulation, ammunition quantity regulation, firearms transfer-tax regulation, magazine capacity regulation, and all other manner of things that could come down to really smash the hobby into something unrecognizable.
If criminals didn't frequently obtain their firearms by stealing them from legitimate users I might buy your argument a little more.
There's an insurance classification for swimming pools and other things that attract outside attention, it's called "attractive nuisance." Homeowners with swimming pools are forced to pay extra for their insurance because of the insurance companies' position that a property with a swimming pool will attract unauthorized use, and that this unauthorized use will open-up the property owner to liability, and thus the insurance premium needs to cover that liability. The homeowner can do things like install fences and covers, or if wealthy, to have an indoor pool, as means to reduce the attractiveness of the pool and to reduce liability, but they cannot completely get rid of that liability so long as there's a pool.
I would not be surprised if, some day, liability for firearms had an attractive-nuisance provision associated with it, and that the legitimate owner of the firearm would have to maintain insurance on that firearm that covered the liability of that firearm's misuse until that firearm were legally transferred to a new owner or until that firearm were documented as destroyed. Firearms owners could reduce the liability by having a proper safe and by taking firearms safety courses, but they could never absolve themselves of it. And worse for the firearm owner, if that firearm is stolen, unlike vehicles that are generally stolen to be disassembled for parts, the liability of the firearm would probably never go away and if they discontinued insurance then they would still have a degree of liability for what transpired for a firearm that they let get out of their possession.
The biggest problem is the lack of personal responsibiltiy at every stage of the process, right up to the legitimate owner. Absoutely there are owners that are quite responsible, but on the other hand we routinely hear of incidents where children have shot people, be it a young friend, young sibling, a parent, or in extreme cases a firearms instructor with an UZI, because firearms have been left out where people too young to understand their usage manage to get ahold of them. We routinely hear of people's homes being broken into and their firearms stolen. We routinuely hear of spousal shootings. We routinely hear of gun-cleaning accidents where someone didn't clear the chamber after removing the magazine. That we have all of these incidents among legal firearms owners is shameful, and that's before we even get to the issue of firearms used publicly for violence.
A good first start to this would be to add a federal tax of 5 cents per bullet or shell
Completed or parts?
I ask because I've some reloading friends in Seattle who are chucking at the bullet tax there and how it won't affect them.
And the big bonus is if a gun was used in a crime and they didn't have a federal tax stamp for their bullets they could be charged with a federal crime
So you want to... put a serial number and/or tax stamp on each and every bullet? Riiight.
There's already a precedent for declaring regulations on a particular component of a firearm, so it's not a stretch to imagine regulations or taxes on a particular component of a round of ammunition. If I understand correctly, a conventional cartridge round consists of the bullet, the powder, the primer, and the cartridge casing. Since most reloaders attempt to reuse the cartridge casing that would be out, and since there are a fairly large number of enthusiasts that cast their own bullets that's probably out too. That leaves either the powder or the primer, and given the relatively fine manufacturing that goes in to making a primer, such that it's more likely that one could grind one's own powder than make one's own primer, the primer would be the component that would be taxed. It has the added advantage, from a tax and regulation perspective, to be common across nearly all cartridge rounds, and where it's not a unique part like on rimfire cartridges, the assembly containing the primer (le, the cartridge case) would be subject to the same regulation as the bare primer.
What's interesting about the idea of taxing ammunition is that it has a fairly small effect on those that are somewhat casual owners, but has a very large effect on those that desire to own large numbers of disparate firearms and lots of ammunition for each weapon. A person with a single 9mm pistol for self-defense that puts a couple of magazines' ammunition through every month to keep in-practice won't feel it very much, but a person that wants to purchase thousands of rounds of ammunition and dozens of guns would be fairly greatly impacted.
Without the context of where this was at we can only take your word as to the nature of mopeds being associated with DUIs. Given the lack of expensive vehicle registration and the lack of required insurance I've known a couple of people that didn't drive cars and instead either bicycled or used electric-assist bikes to get around. No DUI associated with either.
The first place I did field-service for was owned by a guy who, when he was starting out, had used a 200cc motorcycle to get around. He only had to bill about eight hours a week to make a living because his expenses had been so low at that point. Obviously by the time he had five techs working for him he was used to a much higher standard of living, but it had been workable.
As to this instance of customer data, I would expect it wasn't an end service company that the data was exposed-through, but rather an entity that provided telephone or online support to customers. The end field-service contractor probably only gets customer data for those customers they're dispatched to assist, after a phone-in request has been made. Those that do phone support could be contacted by any customer at any time, so would need access to far more records, and the means for that might be how it got out. I would hope that Dell would rate-limit the access to records so that the contractor couldn't just poll the DB for the entire customer base, and I would also hope that Dell wouldn't simply mirror the DB to the contractor either, but somehow these records go pulled and got out, so somewhere Dell probably screwed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Trouble is, this thermostat is both a user interface and a control device, so it needs to be robust. If it isn't, there are 5+2 day and 7 day thermostats from Honeywell that can be programmed to expected occupancy schedules and can even be programmed to reverse the heatpump when the seasons change (basically if temp below low-setting, apply heat, if temp above high-setting, apply cool) and these only need a pair of AA batteries to run for more than a year.
I've had to deal with EMS controller woes in the past- the HVAC people programmed the EMS controllers to basically require a network connection back to their HQ in order to function, else they went into an error-state. When it was pointed-out that there were innumerable points of failure including the LAN at the facility, the WAN, and worst of all, their own HQ's LAN or WAN that could take the entire organization down, only then did it dawn on them that it was a bad idea to so centrally-control the EMS, and they've migrated back to a more sane policy where EMS just runs its set programming until interrupted by the HQ controller.
We've seen a lot of failure-mode problems lately, to me this points to a lack of quality assurance testing. The trend in having the programmer QA their own code is obviously not providing us with the results that we need and should be stopped.
I have to admit, I bought a Cisco Meraki switch because I needed PoE and gigabit speed and cheap, so getting a little 8-port manageable switch with VLAN tagging cheaply was not in of itself a bad thing, but I really don't like how I have to go through a web page on someone else's server in order to configure the device. The web interface itself is pretty good, but it really should be on the switch itself. There is no way to perform any advanced configuration directly on the switch, just set the IP and remove any existing VLAN restrictions to let it reach the Internet and the cloud management.
I have a feeling that once surplus Catalyst equipment with gigabit speeds and PoE gets cheap, this Meraki is going bye-bye.
...a person whose principal businesses seem to be geared around fairly short-term returns. Gambling businesses are all about the house making revenue immediately, and his real estate holdings seem to be based on building as big and as gaudy and filling that space as quickly as possible.
The Space Program is not an instant-return kind of thing. It took the better part of a decade, spanning three presidential administrations, before the announced goal of putting a man on the Moon was realized. It took a similar amount of time to work the kinks out of the Shuttle, such that Skylab was lost when needed missions to service it didn't come to fruition.
Even the nature of commercial space now is not a fast process. No commercial launch companies are man-rated yet, and I'd bet that while SpaceX wants to be, they're smart enough to not rush it too fast lest they have a setback-inducing failure that destroys confidence in the company.
There's a certain something, I don't have a word for it, that I think an in-tune audience can appreciate and the artist feeds off of it. Certain artists, fewer than we might hope, have that capacity and they give you their all - and you give them your undivided attention and enjoy the moment. It's not easily put to words, at least not by me, but it's there and all the more palpable if you've been fortunate enough to be on both sides. (I'm not very good but I've played and sung in front of some reasonably large groups of people, sometimes even for money. The largest would be about 12,500 at a very overcrowded Hemp Fest, it was fun.) I don't know how to describe it but it's not just a connection, it's a willingness to push that to the limits, to push yourself to the limits (I presume - I'm not that good), and to really make everything work as best as one can.
I was in a major professional choir for a time, I know what you mean. That connection with the audience is the difference between them feeling you're playing to them and them feeling that they're a part of it emotionally. It really is an emotional connection too, and it seems to work irrespective of the genre or key or chord or instrument. The time I felt it strongest as a performer was at a concert featuring songs of the Civil War, closing with, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." There was something in that moment that if I could bottle and sell it I'd be rich. As a member of the audience I almost got there when Bobby Hatfield sang, "Unchained Melody," but Bill Medley came back out on stage right as the tune ended and cracked a joke that just broke the moment. The joke was funny, but I'd have rather had the moment than the joke.
I wish I'd gotten to see Queen with Freddy Mercury live; I'm a little too young. Even his recorded performances exude that feeling though, for what it's worth.
I wish that Adele would stop trying to sing out of her natural range. On, "Rolling in the Deep," she nails it, but on "Someone Like You" her high notes just feel forced and uncomfortable, and that's on the best take of a studio version. They're not quite nails-on-chalkboard but they do make me wince just a little. She seems best as a Mezzo-Soprano or an Alto.
I don't think we'll see it change until the model for the ownership of broadcasting changes.
There have been portable mass-market personal media technologies for music since the 8-track (even earlier if you consider the vehicle-based record players from cars from the 1950s) but radio is still a very common way to listen to music and is a very common way to learn about new music. Radio's most modern weakness is that consolidation has made it a lot easier for very few people to decide what new music we get exposed-to through the easiest medium in which to do it. With only a few companies owning so many stations and only a few companies controlling the majority of significant aspects of music production, distribution, and most importantly, publicity, it's difficult for those that wish to avoid these models to 'make it' if they're new upstarts. Sure, Moby was able to record a successful album at home, but in no small part due to his name recognition and his previous financial successes he could afford to have a quality home studio that he could use whenever he felt like.
Let's face it- there are times when we want to choose what we want to listen to and times when the music is nice to have playing but we don't want to take the time to design a playlist. In those latter circumstances we are dependent on someone else's choice, and their 'fee' for the privilege is getting to pick that which makes them money.
That's how government works. Oh FBI/NSA/CIA/EPA/FDA/NBA couldn't detect the baddies? Then they need more funding!
Which is also why false flags are so popular amongst governments.
That's the thing of it, we need to see that it's actually working before we even continue to use it, let alone add more.
There have been several domestic incidents where there might have been some kind of Internet-based evidence that it was in the works, most not even based on Islamic terrorism. There was a shooter at a historically-Black church. There was a movie theatre shooting. There was an elementary school shooting. There was a congresswoman and people that came to see her speak that were shot. Hell, those wackos from Nevada that are in armed-standoff in Oregon that previously were in armed-standoff in Nevada are operating, and none of those are even Islamic in nature.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but one would think that in at least some case of domestic surveillance, authorities would react to communications or online rambling to actually go find the preparation for an attack. If not, then what's the benefit? Prosecuting some schmuck after-the-fact because he supplied rifles to someone else when it's not clear that he knew what they were to be used for?
When John Allen Muhammed an Lee Malvo were caught, it was because of their missteps along with some evidence that Malvo had not realized he left behind in an armed robbery well prior to their shooting spree that they referenced in their communications with authorities. In short, good old-fashioned, labor-intensive detective work. When the government has infiltrated groups that have domestically tried to commit acts, it has been because people tipped them off to the plots, and that infiltration again required labor-intensive work. To me, that makes it look like the labor-intensive work, not the technology, is what ultimately rules the day.
No, The Spanish Inquisition.
I guess really nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition...
I'm wondering if that AC was actually trying to make a joke. To get two things wrong about the acting roles as the only two things cited would almost require intent.
We thought that about e-books too, but those are still under the control of the publishers for the most part and are still ridiculously expensive.
Both generally require a fairly large amount of editing. Books may go through editors and even advance-copies to get reader feedback before a final text is set. Music, depending on how it's produced, could require a fairly extensive studio with multitrack recording and mixing and a sound engineer that knows how to get the mix right, sometimes despite the musician's feelings on the matter. And for both, that's well before accounting for promotion.
If you or I have talent in either arena, we could write the best book or make the best music, but we probably won't achieve sales even if we didn't have to compete with existing structures. As much as I dislike it, marketing is much more important, and most people that create content aren't necessarily good at promoting themselves or that content.
Could be. Linda Ronstadt was hugely popular in the late seventies but is virtually forgotten today. The Manhattan Transfer won multiple Grammys and used to sell-out auditoriums like rock groups but is down to 2,000 seat auditoriums.
Bowie had staying power because he continually reinvented himself and managed to keep up with what the public wanted in addition to giving them something new to consider. He was willing to vary his look- Bowie in the Ziggy Stardust era versus The Man Who Fell To Earth era vs Labyrinth are basically completely different acts.
I still think that's incorrect. The majority of modern acts that record labels push are, to an extent, puppets of the record labels, but mostly because, like how Hollywood wants every movie to be a blockbuster, these are the acts that they're convinced will knock it out of the park. Why would a label spend a moderate amount of money to get a simple equal return, when they can spend a bit more and get an order of magnitude more?
These acts getting arrested for doing stupid things also helps with their sales, so long as the things they do to get arrested are that which we all point and laugh at rather than being truly revolted by. Young, dumb singers whose teen angst bullshit is highly public are great targets. Nearly all of us had our share of it, but we lacked the financial means to get into real trouble or to be so highly visible while doing it. These singers and musicians that the record labels are using have that means and thus when they do the same kinds of dumb shit that we all did, they get busted but also increase their profiles.
Muse has picked up that mantle lately. The Art of Noise (The Seduction of Claude DeBussy), Spacehog (the Chinese Album), Styx (Kilroy Was Here) and many, many others have released concept albums that are best listened-to whole.
This is sounding increasingly like a Monty Python sketch...
Let me sit down in this comfy chair and pray continue...
Or, I donno, we can break-out the vinyl that we've had for the past couple of decades and hear ol' Ziggy Stardust in its original glory...
When they come visit they don't like the effects of spider bites either. QED.
Whether you like his music or not, there is no denying that David Bowie was a true artist, a real entertainer. There was nothing fake about him. Nowadays, we don't see real artists like him very often.
I suspect that you're seeing history through rose-tinted glasses. There were plenty of pop-acts in every era that Bowie overlapped with, we simply don't remember many of them. People don't remember acts like Elastica or Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen that charted and were popular for a short time. Hell, look at Weird Al's parodies throughout the years, there are some artists he parodied whose specific work is unknown now that were popular enough at the time to justify parody, like Tiffany and George Harrison's solo work.
Bowie was special, but he isn't unique. As far as musicians that have gone through several iterations of their personas, Kylie Minogue comes to mind, and when it comes to production and stagecraft along with actually crafting musically-clever songs, I like Spacehog and Muse. Absoutely modern techniques like Autotune are frustratingly common even with singers that can actually sing, but there are still acts worth following in popular music even if their albums are not immune to some of those tools.
Based on the number of people with working Laserdisc players that still have actual interest, probably not much.
That said, as someone with a working Laserdisc player and actual interest, if it turns out you just misplaced it and if you find it, I'll give you $5.00 for it...
The IT director, CIO, CTO, Network Supervisor, Director of Business Services, or any other of a number of people should be in-charge of things like that. That's the difference between the administrative contact and the technical contact, the network engineer might be the technical contact and be in a position to perform the technical changes needed for DNS, but the boss' job should be to pay for the domain and handle business-related queries and functions.
Arguably that same person should be responsible for the calendar for the certificates too. That stuff is too important to leave to a low-level functionary, even if that low-level functionary ultimately uses the certs technically once they're obtained.
It'd still be quite interesting to have a look at that missile. Even really basic things like hinges and reinforcement hull struts might give you ideas how to improve other missiles. Not that they necessarily are better but being able to look at how other people solved problems and compare them with your own solution has always been one of my favorite ways to gain knowledge.
If all it's lacking are the warhead and the guidance system, depending on what guidance system means, they might have everything short of the electronics necessary for function enough to fly. Is the guidance system partially dependent on the warhead? If a specialized warhead necessitates a particular way to control the device then this would make sense.
While the guidance system is a very, very important component, having a known-functional design including all of the concealed mechanical underpinnings takes a reverse-engineer process a large portion of the way there, and even if a lot of new R&D has to be done to develop a guidance system, efforts can be focused primarily there as opposed to having to develop both the physical, and the software, through trial-and-error.
I'm merely playing devil's-advocate.
Part of the problem with this discussion is the nature of the way people participate in the discussion. Because firearms enthusiasts that not only advocate no additional controls at all while enthusiasts that can see room for reasonable restrictions in particular circumstances are drowned-out, it means that no ideas are introduced from the firearms-enthusiast side to craft regulation that works to both the enthusiast's good and the public good. This takes a discussion that should have room for compromise and turns it into a black-and-white argument. For the last several years the firearms enthusiasts have been successful, but inevitably when success reverts to those that advocate restrictions on firearms, those restrictions will probably be onerous to firearms owners because they themselves were unwilling to work to make for a reasonable stance.
When the Second Amendment of the Constitution was written, firearms were single-shot, muzzle-load, loose-powder, and smooth-bore. Integrated cartridges hadn't even been invented, breech-loaded firearms were excessively rare. The technology meant that it was difficult for someone to engage in individual violence because the weapons themselves were too cumbersome to be used in a spree-shooting or mass-shooting fashion. Even the introduction of the mass-produced revolver in the 1850s originally had significant restrictions on its use for mass-shootings as the first rifles didn't use integrated cartridge rounds, so the operator was essentially limited to the capacity of the weapon itself; reloading would not have been a terribly good option, and even those revolvers were single-action, so one couldn't just keep pulling the trigger in order to fire them.
Now you have commercially-available pistols with integrated metal cartridges with high capacity magazines (20 for small rounds, 15 for large rounds) that can be reloaded very quickly and chamber the next round automatically so the next pull of the trigger is all that's needed to keep firing. The natural limits on the technology that existed when the Second Amendment existed that served to curtail most firearms violence are flat-out gone, and a lot of people are getting very tired of listening to the same arguments against taking action to stop firearms violence without any reasonable or realistic proposed counter-solution other than more guns. I don't think that it's impossible for bans that are much, much stronger than the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban to be drafted if this stonewalling continues.
The firearms enthusiast community needs to figure out what it's willing to live with, damn the noisy 10% that currently drive the argument, before the hobby is assaulted by insurance regulation, ammunition taxation or regulation, ammunition quantity regulation, firearms transfer-tax regulation, magazine capacity regulation, and all other manner of things that could come down to really smash the hobby into something unrecognizable.
If criminals didn't frequently obtain their firearms by stealing them from legitimate users I might buy your argument a little more.
There's an insurance classification for swimming pools and other things that attract outside attention, it's called "attractive nuisance." Homeowners with swimming pools are forced to pay extra for their insurance because of the insurance companies' position that a property with a swimming pool will attract unauthorized use, and that this unauthorized use will open-up the property owner to liability, and thus the insurance premium needs to cover that liability. The homeowner can do things like install fences and covers, or if wealthy, to have an indoor pool, as means to reduce the attractiveness of the pool and to reduce liability, but they cannot completely get rid of that liability so long as there's a pool.
I would not be surprised if, some day, liability for firearms had an attractive-nuisance provision associated with it, and that the legitimate owner of the firearm would have to maintain insurance on that firearm that covered the liability of that firearm's misuse until that firearm were legally transferred to a new owner or until that firearm were documented as destroyed. Firearms owners could reduce the liability by having a proper safe and by taking firearms safety courses, but they could never absolve themselves of it. And worse for the firearm owner, if that firearm is stolen, unlike vehicles that are generally stolen to be disassembled for parts, the liability of the firearm would probably never go away and if they discontinued insurance then they would still have a degree of liability for what transpired for a firearm that they let get out of their possession.
The biggest problem is the lack of personal responsibiltiy at every stage of the process, right up to the legitimate owner. Absoutely there are owners that are quite responsible, but on the other hand we routinely hear of incidents where children have shot people, be it a young friend, young sibling, a parent, or in extreme cases a firearms instructor with an UZI, because firearms have been left out where people too young to understand their usage manage to get ahold of them. We routinely hear of people's homes being broken into and their firearms stolen. We routinuely hear of spousal shootings. We routinely hear of gun-cleaning accidents where someone didn't clear the chamber after removing the magazine. That we have all of these incidents among legal firearms owners is shameful, and that's before we even get to the issue of firearms used publicly for violence.
Completed or parts?
I ask because I've some reloading friends in Seattle who are chucking at the bullet tax there and how it won't affect them.
So you want to... put a serial number and/or tax stamp on each and every bullet? Riiight.
There's already a precedent for declaring regulations on a particular component of a firearm, so it's not a stretch to imagine regulations or taxes on a particular component of a round of ammunition. If I understand correctly, a conventional cartridge round consists of the bullet, the powder, the primer, and the cartridge casing. Since most reloaders attempt to reuse the cartridge casing that would be out, and since there are a fairly large number of enthusiasts that cast their own bullets that's probably out too. That leaves either the powder or the primer, and given the relatively fine manufacturing that goes in to making a primer, such that it's more likely that one could grind one's own powder than make one's own primer, the primer would be the component that would be taxed. It has the added advantage, from a tax and regulation perspective, to be common across nearly all cartridge rounds, and where it's not a unique part like on rimfire cartridges, the assembly containing the primer (le, the cartridge case) would be subject to the same regulation as the bare primer.
What's interesting about the idea of taxing ammunition is that it has a fairly small effect on those that are somewhat casual owners, but has a very large effect on those that desire to own large numbers of disparate firearms and lots of ammunition for each weapon. A person with a single 9mm pistol for self-defense that puts a couple of magazines' ammunition through every month to keep in-practice won't feel it very much, but a person that wants to purchase thousands of rounds of ammunition and dozens of guns would be fairly greatly impacted.
Without the context of where this was at we can only take your word as to the nature of mopeds being associated with DUIs. Given the lack of expensive vehicle registration and the lack of required insurance I've known a couple of people that didn't drive cars and instead either bicycled or used electric-assist bikes to get around. No DUI associated with either.
The first place I did field-service for was owned by a guy who, when he was starting out, had used a 200cc motorcycle to get around. He only had to bill about eight hours a week to make a living because his expenses had been so low at that point. Obviously by the time he had five techs working for him he was used to a much higher standard of living, but it had been workable.
As to this instance of customer data, I would expect it wasn't an end service company that the data was exposed-through, but rather an entity that provided telephone or online support to customers. The end field-service contractor probably only gets customer data for those customers they're dispatched to assist, after a phone-in request has been made. Those that do phone support could be contacted by any customer at any time, so would need access to far more records, and the means for that might be how it got out. I would hope that Dell would rate-limit the access to records so that the contractor couldn't just poll the DB for the entire customer base, and I would also hope that Dell wouldn't simply mirror the DB to the contractor either, but somehow these records go pulled and got out, so somewhere Dell probably screwed up.
I guess "RTFM" wasn't considered an acceptable name...