This would be the reason why fremen stilsuits would be impossible, right? Even as a kid it struck me that someone was trying to have a free lunch.
The part that kills the stillsuit is there is an inherent minimum energy requirement to separate drinkable water from uh, bodily output, and there is also an inherent minimum energy requirement to condense water out of the air. Unfortunately, to generate that energy, the human body requires MORE water than would be produced by either process... Healthy human kidneys already do a pretty near optimal job of "recycling water".
Human powered camping filters only work because only a small fraction of the water is filtered, most bypasses into the waste outlet. Getting "all the H2O" would be way too hard. Hence the lack of commercially available human powered distillation apparatus. As for condensation, human powered bicycle air conditioners are not commercially viable, nor are human powered dehumidifiers... The navy would probably find a human powered exercisebike/dehumidifier to be useful, but it just doesn't work, you'll exhale/excrete more water than you could realistically condense.
This might make a weird mythbusters episode... can someone boil away a quart of water using an exercise bike hooked up to a generator without eating/drinking/sweating/excreting more than a quart of water? Answer appears to not only be "no" for boiling, but "no" for condensing too.
Also, it may be cheap to you, but that doesn't mean it's cheap to, say, the environment. Having the population of the UK charge their devices off of coal-fired power plants instead of human generated heat isn't exactly optimal.
Its a "well known fact" that it takes about 10 kcal of petroleum products to make about 1 kcal of food, on average. Natgas turned into fertilizer, diesel powered everything, processing plants, shipping, etc. And the efficiency of the conversion device is probably not too good. And the efficiency of the human body at turning food into heat is not too good.
So, ignoring capital costs, unless the UK power system is substantially below 1% efficient, you'll end up environmentally ahead using wall outlet power. On the other hand, environmentalism has replaced the old catholic church system of feeling guilty and being inconvenienced, and this tech might work for that, in which case it could be extremely "environmentally optimal" in a sociological sense.
To argue that "conventional" reactors can not be used to produce weapons grade fuel is incorrect. While most reactors used to do so are not power reactors, they are also not particularly unconventional in any way that makes them more difficult to build.
But, they are unconventional in their design compared to a classic electrical generation PWR/BWR, so "art" made using a PWR is pretty useless for designing a Pu production reactor.
Since you're not going all Rankine cycle on it, delta-temperature thru the reactor is irrelevant, may as well make it as low as possible since you're limited by pellet core and surface temps, so keeping the top and bottom at about the same temp means you can run the overall core at the highest level (a high delta-T would mean you'd have to run, overall, at a lower power level or the rods would melt at the hot end even if "on average" the rods are well below their limits).
Also a Pu reactor needs to be built for nearly continuous servicing... the Pu-240 ratio gets all icky if you leave Pu-239 sitting in there too long. This is fairly public knowledge now... Even wikipedia mentions it. Back during WWII they screwed around for two years before giving up after realizing that reactor generated Pu is no walk in the park for a simple U style gun design.
Finally there is a desire to run the Pu reactor at a low power density, so the substances at reprocessing time are less icky and there is less post-run cooldown time required before reprocessing. If you get the power density low enough, you don't even need a decay heat cool down interval before reprocessing. And its no major problem, since you're not running at high pressure for steam production so the reactor wall thickness is no issue. And you're under no illusions that a Pu generator is going to "make money" so you don't have to minimize reactor wall thickness to save money anyway.
So, compared to an electrical generation reactor, a Pu reactor is going to have freaking huge coolant pumps, is going to be built for servicing/fuel cycling to the detriment of fluid dynamics, is going to be huge or at least have a really low power density, and frankly will probably not cut any corners on optimized minimum wall thickness etc because there is no illusion that its going to generate profitable electricity. So, a pix of a PWR is fairly useless to help design a Pu generator.
Not to say you can't produce SOME bomb grade Pu from a perfectly innocent electrical generation plant, but a real engineer would not do it.
There's no reason why you couldn't eliminate VPNs altogether if you ran every service over SSL and verified the client certificate before granting access.
And add two factor authentication (pretty much required for a SERIOUS vpn)
but I had to hide those talents as employers didn't like me having them and I had to take them off my resume to get hired.
I've noticed this is a peculiarity of the technical field. Hiring managers only want to hire people with precisely 2 years experience, nothing more, nothing less. If you thought the newbies had trouble with zero experience, trust me, its no better for the old timers, we have a nightmare of a time figuring out what to hide or delete so they won't either "have the wrong qualifications" or be "overqualified". If I slip up and include the wrong experiences, my resume is trashed.
Also as per the above poster there is a certain list of permitted hobbies, stuff like ham radio is OK, but you'll have a very difficult time being hired if you admit you do artsy or athletic things, which seems very strange. It would be like never hiring a doctor unless their ONLY hobby was dissecting the neighborhood pets or never hiring a graphics artist unless their ONLY hobby was doodling on a notepad.
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements.
On the other hand, they don't like foreign languages, shop class, literature classes, or home ec class, so we dumped them.
Whats the difference between computing class, and German class? I don't think "computing classes" are, by and large, needed.
The biggest problem is the demand that kids learn something old, so that decades later they'll have amazing 'puter skills. Nothing could possibly be more useless than the time I spent in 1st grade learning "bank street writer" on a C64. Or my amazing "Winders fer Workgroups" sysadmin skills.
There is a willful blind spot preventing people from understanding how the hiring managers of future decades will view their amazing firefox 3.5 talents. If MS Office completely redesigns their UI every two years, then "training" usually solely based on memorizing the UI is useless within two years.
At least if you learn German, you can visit oktoberfest 40 years from now, in theory.
An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it.
Emulators, EMACS, GNOME and KDE are operating systems?
The beauty of DOS was that one application owned the entire computer but unfortunately, modern hardware has made it beyond the ability of most programmers to really do everything and you genuinely need an operating system to manage all of it, and part of that is that I think even modern hardware is probably not real time itself. I mean, is a PC-Express bus real time guaranteed for different combinations of peripherals? I think everything is interrupt driven these days, and that's good. DOS was really often about programs that polled and did stupid stuff.
I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.
As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong, as one of the primary forms of entertainment before PnP was assigning various devices to various IRQs and changing config.sys to match. You have to go really far back, the Altair 8800 circa 1975, source of the S100 bus, had a rather elaborate interrupt structure. You have to go back to 1930s IBM tabulation machine / unit record gear to find something popular that was programmable without interrupts.. (not counting one offs like eniac circa WWII era)
But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?
90+% of PCs are never upgraded. "needs 2 gigs of ram" is marketing speak, for "most computers sold with 2 gigs of ram will probably have a fancy enough graphic card to have acceptable performance".
The other interpretation is any game will run faster if its cached into ram instead of reading off the DVD... Reduces stuttering and pauses.
Skipping all of those steps may be a good idea for things where physical testing etc isn't needed.
I'm curious what medical condition that is, perhaps a bad case of acute hypochondria ?
Seriously though... as I think back on my admittedly short lifetime list of dr visits, I can't think of even one that could have been avoided. Same w/ my wife and kids.
1) a car accident - verify everything bends that should bend, and doesn't bend if it shouldn't bend, plenty of mental tests.
2) pneumonia - listening to lungs as I breathe, then some test to verify it was bacterial pneumonia, which it was.
3) temporary back pain - some xrays and stuff, needed a controlled substance prescription for about a week so it wouldn't be possible with this system.
4) huge laceration on my thumb with a pint to quart of blood loss (yes, thats a heck of alot of blood) - couldn't stitch it for some reason, I guess I should have stayed home w/ bandaid since thats pretty much what I got. Can still see the scar more than a decade later, but then again, no infection and I didn't bleed to death so I guess they did good.
5) Some ear infections when I was a kid - they look in my ear w/ that annoying flashlight microscope thingy.
6) a couple physicals - all kinds of blood tests and stuff.
If you had hired one of the two, he probably would have advised you to form an LLC rather than an S-Corp. But since you decided you knew better, you made a LOT more work for yourself.
Its possible he had good reasons that didn't make it into the article. No idea what they could possibly be, but...
The real value of a wiki or form collection website, is building vocabulary and knowledge BEFORE meeting with the pros. It is possible the original poster had never heard of anything but a S-Corp, therefore he walks in saying he's getting an S-Corp, end of story. A glance at a "forms collection" for an LLC vs an S-Corp could have been very educational...
Professional meetings are much more productive when you can evaluate the professionals advice and actions. If you can't, then don't waste time meeting, just hand them barrels of money and hope they do the right thing for you, which is not exactly a recipe for business success.
but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials.
How did this get +5?
Look at the old fashioned ink on paper industry... I searched amazon.com for "tax" and it claims 510242 books found (no kidding). Most comments in the article seem to be oriented around something like a free wiki version of JK Lasser's seemingly infinite series of tax books, or maybe NoLo's legal books. Does not sound impossible at all.
Also w/ regard to specialization making a general book useless, that is like saying the existence of Knuth makes all other possible future C.S. books impossible, because specialized ultra high level books are also necessary. I'm sure there's a car analogy involving Ferraris also.
Probably the most important thing a "general book or website" could provide would be advice on what to do before you talk to the professionals and enough vocabulary to intelligently talk to the professionals.
I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources.
Little do you know, you are looking for the "Nolo" series of books at your local library, you know, the library, the place where homeless people go for internet access... Your local library, unless its total ghetto, probably has the entire nolo series available to read and/or borrow.
Nolo has a website with a lot of marketing, yet also some information, at:
Your best strategy is to skim thru, maybe even check out, the books that look interesting at the library, then purchase the most recent version from nolo for daily use.
I think, based on your description, you want their book "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business"
I have absolutely no connection to Nolo other than reading their educational books at the library when I was a kid, convinced me that the profession of lawyer-ing or whatever was not quite as interesting as it appeared on TV.
I really, really, doubt that anyone would be excommunicated for using the Pope's image without permission.
I laughed out loud at that one. Give the 4chan, fark, or slashdot guys a pope pic, a goatse pic, and some playground pics, and within minutes we'll all be scarred for life... Or the ever popular 2g1c theme applied to communion wine. All kinds of fun ways to get excommunicated.
he was a network admin and the passwords were for switches and routers. sure you can reinstall the Cisco IOS, but then you have to set up the VLAN's, BGP and other crap that will result in massive downtime for things like traffic lights and mass transit which is networked these days.
No problem, log into the web based change management system (probably RANCID) cut and paste the most recent config into a spare switch/router/whatever (inserting your own password of course), then forklift upgrade, downtime a minute tops. Then wipe the old device and swap it into the next unlocked device. No need to "break into" a device like this unless you actually need to change something, or an old device breaks and needs replacement.
What, you say they have no backups, no change management system?
stores look to increase the revenue per customer, and the easiest way to do that it to pressure sales associates to sell more warranties. It's an emotional decision... the conversation takes place at the checkout counter, and rarely in a context where the shopper can take time to make a reasoned, fact-based decision.
One of the MANY reasons shopping online is better than brick and mortar. I no longer buy "technology items" at B+M stores for this reason, I'm simply tired of arguing with minimum wage clowns about not paying $30 for an extended warranty on a $5 mouse.
Re:The review needs ... google
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 1
The review needs to list, what the book has, that a google search will not find for free.
Off the top of my head, I'd go with coherency, structure, and a lack of insults.
Sounds just like a FAQ... which google will find for free
Good coherency, although it was not, it looks like it was written in one sitting by one guy, or at least edited to look that way.
Good structure, its an outline, and the outline even looks well designed.
Lack of insults, well, its no mailing list. And for $20 or whatever the book costs, I'll glance over a mailing list post calling some dude a noob, or whatever.
Consumers 'tend to be more risk-averse and are less willing to absorb the cost of an unexpected product repair or replacement,' says Timothy Meenan, the council's executive director.
Sounds pretty bogus to me. My logic in buying an extended warranty is its an option on low quality. Has the quality of the product dropped enough to now make the warranty a good deal? In the past, sure, it was a ripoff, but now the papers are full of stories about junk from china, inedible food, lead paint on everything, etc. And everyone has the experience of buying something from China-Mart that instantly falls apart or is simply unsuitable for any purpose.
Would I buy an extended warranty on a Milwaukee Tools Inc genuine made in America Sawzall, from perhaps the 1980s? No, that would have been a waste, that saw will run until my great grandkids use it. Note, Milw Tool website declares they're now a "globalized" company so I would assume (perhaps incorrectly) that they only ship Chinese trash now, I'm referring to the products from the good old days. Would I buy an extended warranty on a generic sun-moon-star Inc reciprocating saw from china that doesn't even have instructions in English nor a genuine UL listing? Heck Yeah, that thing probably won't even last thru one complete job!
So the real focus of the story isn't some "adsorbing cost" BS, it is a story about downscaling quality because of lack of spending money. Store brand, or generic, instead of the real deal. And even the real deal is all outsourced to the point of uselessness.
The review needs ... google
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The review needs to list, what the book has, that a google search will not find for free.
The disadvantage of the book, is the review makes it sound like an edited, slightly out of date collection of FAQ printouts, and it costs money.
The advantage of the book, is... Come on, give me a reason to buy the book. I got money burning a hole in my pocket here.
Here are reasons why I'd buy a book that covers a "google-y" topic. First of all, if the $$$ went to a foundation that paid the program authors, or some charity (EFF?). Maybe if it had diagrams and flowcharts or other graphical aids you can't find via google. Maybe if it had interesting exclusive content, behind the scenes interviews with the authors, candid explanations of why and how it was designed the way it was, that simply cannot be found on the internet. Maybe if it had workbook like qualities, like planning worksheets to plan and organize your deployment. Maybe if it had textbook like qualities like questions at the end of each chapter with an answer key at the end. Maybe if it was an artistically beautiful collection of "stuff" like XKCD cartoons, FAQs, stories, pictures, poems, all tied to a common theme in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
Thats what I want to see in a slashdot review of a "google-y" topic.
The CO2's a side-effect of energy production, which is a consequence of our energy consumption. Remove electricity, and you impose a bottleneck on our ability to consume, and as with other energy-rationing measures, you reduce CO2 output at the cost of giving up your way of life.
Note the original poster didn't say "less carbon emitted" but "less carbon emitted from power plants".
In the third world, without big plants and universal distribution systems, they have stinking polluting noisy small generators everywhere... Overall, much more pollution.
I use my butler Jeeves for everything. He arranges my travel, does my bills, and picks up anything I need from the store. He is fast, courteous and usually reliable. At the same time I know that he is aware of everything I do; I can see it in the way he can often provide suggestions which tend to match my interests. Do to some misplaced comments of his, I am now suspicious that he may not respect my privacy. How do I remain anonymous from my butler while still having him provide all the personal services that I am accustomed to?
You need a RAIB, often redundantly described as a RAIB array.
"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Butlers"
The worst privacy problem is cross correlating otherwise innocent isolated activities. Using multiple butlers prevents them from cross correlating. Of course, they may collude behind your back.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be the reason why fremen stilsuits would be impossible, right? Even as a kid it struck me that someone was trying to have a free lunch.
The part that kills the stillsuit is there is an inherent minimum energy requirement to separate drinkable water from uh, bodily output, and there is also an inherent minimum energy requirement to condense water out of the air. Unfortunately, to generate that energy, the human body requires MORE water than would be produced by either process... Healthy human kidneys already do a pretty near optimal job of "recycling water".
Human powered camping filters only work because only a small fraction of the water is filtered, most bypasses into the waste outlet. Getting "all the H2O" would be way too hard. Hence the lack of commercially available human powered distillation apparatus. As for condensation, human powered bicycle air conditioners are not commercially viable, nor are human powered dehumidifiers... The navy would probably find a human powered exercisebike/dehumidifier to be useful, but it just doesn't work, you'll exhale/excrete more water than you could realistically condense.
This might make a weird mythbusters episode... can someone boil away a quart of water using an exercise bike hooked up to a generator without eating/drinking/sweating/excreting more than a quart of water? Answer appears to not only be "no" for boiling, but "no" for condensing too.
Also, it may be cheap to you, but that doesn't mean it's cheap to, say, the environment. Having the population of the UK charge their devices off of coal-fired power plants instead of human generated heat isn't exactly optimal.
Its a "well known fact" that it takes about 10 kcal of petroleum products to make about 1 kcal of food, on average. Natgas turned into fertilizer, diesel powered everything, processing plants, shipping, etc. And the efficiency of the conversion device is probably not too good. And the efficiency of the human body at turning food into heat is not too good.
So, ignoring capital costs, unless the UK power system is substantially below 1% efficient, you'll end up environmentally ahead using wall outlet power. On the other hand, environmentalism has replaced the old catholic church system of feeling guilty and being inconvenienced, and this tech might work for that, in which case it could be extremely "environmentally optimal" in a sociological sense.
To argue that "conventional" reactors can not be used to produce weapons grade fuel is incorrect. While most reactors used to do so are not power reactors, they are also not particularly unconventional in any way that makes them more difficult to build.
But, they are unconventional in their design compared to a classic electrical generation PWR/BWR, so "art" made using a PWR is pretty useless for designing a Pu production reactor.
Since you're not going all Rankine cycle on it, delta-temperature thru the reactor is irrelevant, may as well make it as low as possible since you're limited by pellet core and surface temps, so keeping the top and bottom at about the same temp means you can run the overall core at the highest level (a high delta-T would mean you'd have to run, overall, at a lower power level or the rods would melt at the hot end even if "on average" the rods are well below their limits).
Also a Pu reactor needs to be built for nearly continuous servicing... the Pu-240 ratio gets all icky if you leave Pu-239 sitting in there too long. This is fairly public knowledge now... Even wikipedia mentions it. Back during WWII they screwed around for two years before giving up after realizing that reactor generated Pu is no walk in the park for a simple U style gun design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Production_during_the_Manhattan_Project
Finally there is a desire to run the Pu reactor at a low power density, so the substances at reprocessing time are less icky and there is less post-run cooldown time required before reprocessing. If you get the power density low enough, you don't even need a decay heat cool down interval before reprocessing. And its no major problem, since you're not running at high pressure for steam production so the reactor wall thickness is no issue. And you're under no illusions that a Pu generator is going to "make money" so you don't have to minimize reactor wall thickness to save money anyway.
So, compared to an electrical generation reactor, a Pu reactor is going to have freaking huge coolant pumps, is going to be built for servicing/fuel cycling to the detriment of fluid dynamics, is going to be huge or at least have a really low power density, and frankly will probably not cut any corners on optimized minimum wall thickness etc because there is no illusion that its going to generate profitable electricity. So, a pix of a PWR is fairly useless to help design a Pu generator.
Not to say you can't produce SOME bomb grade Pu from a perfectly innocent electrical generation plant, but a real engineer would not do it.
Uhh... 3 letters for you. D.N.S.
I've been involved long enough to remember people saying DNS A6 records were the wave of the future, and look where they are today.
(Yes I know, use AAAA now, I'm just pointing out the turmoil)
There's no reason why you couldn't eliminate VPNs altogether if you ran every service over SSL and verified the client certificate before granting access.
And add two factor authentication (pretty much required for a SERIOUS vpn)
but I had to hide those talents as employers didn't like me having them and I had to take them off my resume to get hired.
I've noticed this is a peculiarity of the technical field. Hiring managers only want to hire people with precisely 2 years experience, nothing more, nothing less. If you thought the newbies had trouble with zero experience, trust me, its no better for the old timers, we have a nightmare of a time figuring out what to hide or delete so they won't either "have the wrong qualifications" or be "overqualified". If I slip up and include the wrong experiences, my resume is trashed.
Also as per the above poster there is a certain list of permitted hobbies, stuff like ham radio is OK, but you'll have a very difficult time being hired if you admit you do artsy or athletic things, which seems very strange. It would be like never hiring a doctor unless their ONLY hobby was dissecting the neighborhood pets or never hiring a graphics artist unless their ONLY hobby was doodling on a notepad.
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements.
On the other hand, they don't like foreign languages, shop class, literature classes, or home ec class, so we dumped them.
Whats the difference between computing class, and German class? I don't think "computing classes" are, by and large, needed.
The biggest problem is the demand that kids learn something old, so that decades later they'll have amazing 'puter skills. Nothing could possibly be more useless than the time I spent in 1st grade learning "bank street writer" on a C64. Or my amazing "Winders fer Workgroups" sysadmin skills.
There is a willful blind spot preventing people from understanding how the hiring managers of future decades will view their amazing firefox 3.5 talents. If MS Office completely redesigns their UI every two years, then "training" usually solely based on memorizing the UI is useless within two years.
At least if you learn German, you can visit oktoberfest 40 years from now, in theory.
An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it.
Emulators, EMACS, GNOME and KDE are operating systems?
The beauty of DOS was that one application owned the entire computer but unfortunately, modern hardware has made it beyond the ability of most programmers to really do everything and you genuinely need an operating system to manage all of it, and part of that is that I think even modern hardware is probably not real time itself. I mean, is a PC-Express bus real time guaranteed for different combinations of peripherals? I think everything is interrupt driven these days, and that's good. DOS was really often about programs that polled and did stupid stuff.
I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.
As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong, as one of the primary forms of entertainment before PnP was assigning various devices to various IRQs and changing config.sys to match. You have to go really far back, the Altair 8800 circa 1975, source of the S100 bus, had a rather elaborate interrupt structure. You have to go back to 1930s IBM tabulation machine / unit record gear to find something popular that was programmable without interrupts.. (not counting one offs like eniac circa WWII era)
But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?
90+% of PCs are never upgraded. "needs 2 gigs of ram" is marketing speak, for "most computers sold with 2 gigs of ram will probably have a fancy enough graphic card to have acceptable performance".
The other interpretation is any game will run faster if its cached into ram instead of reading off the DVD... Reduces stuttering and pauses.
Skipping all of those steps may be a good idea for things where physical testing etc isn't needed.
I'm curious what medical condition that is, perhaps a bad case of acute hypochondria ?
Seriously though... as I think back on my admittedly short lifetime list of dr visits, I can't think of even one that could have been avoided. Same w/ my wife and kids.
1) a car accident - verify everything bends that should bend, and doesn't bend if it shouldn't bend, plenty of mental tests.
2) pneumonia - listening to lungs as I breathe, then some test to verify it was bacterial pneumonia, which it was.
3) temporary back pain - some xrays and stuff, needed a controlled substance prescription for about a week so it wouldn't be possible with this system.
4) huge laceration on my thumb with a pint to quart of blood loss (yes, thats a heck of alot of blood) - couldn't stitch it for some reason, I guess I should have stayed home w/ bandaid since thats pretty much what I got. Can still see the scar more than a decade later, but then again, no infection and I didn't bleed to death so I guess they did good.
5) Some ear infections when I was a kid - they look in my ear w/ that annoying flashlight microscope thingy.
6) a couple physicals - all kinds of blood tests and stuff.
If you had hired one of the two, he probably would have advised you to form an LLC rather than an S-Corp. But since you decided you knew better, you made a LOT more work for yourself.
Its possible he had good reasons that didn't make it into the article. No idea what they could possibly be, but ...
The real value of a wiki or form collection website, is building vocabulary and knowledge BEFORE meeting with the pros. It is possible the original poster had never heard of anything but a S-Corp, therefore he walks in saying he's getting an S-Corp, end of story. A glance at a "forms collection" for an LLC vs an S-Corp could have been very educational...
Professional meetings are much more productive when you can evaluate the professionals advice and actions. If you can't, then don't waste time meeting, just hand them barrels of money and hope they do the right thing for you, which is not exactly a recipe for business success.
but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials.
How did this get +5?
Look at the old fashioned ink on paper industry... I searched amazon.com for "tax" and it claims 510242 books found (no kidding). Most comments in the article seem to be oriented around something like a free wiki version of JK Lasser's seemingly infinite series of tax books, or maybe NoLo's legal books. Does not sound impossible at all.
Also w/ regard to specialization making a general book useless, that is like saying the existence of Knuth makes all other possible future C.S. books impossible, because specialized ultra high level books are also necessary. I'm sure there's a car analogy involving Ferraris also.
Probably the most important thing a "general book or website" could provide would be advice on what to do before you talk to the professionals and enough vocabulary to intelligently talk to the professionals.
I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources.
Little do you know, you are looking for the "Nolo" series of books at your local library, you know, the library, the place where homeless people go for internet access... Your local library, unless its total ghetto, probably has the entire nolo series available to read and/or borrow.
Nolo has a website with a lot of marketing, yet also some information, at:
http://www.nolo.com/
Your best strategy is to skim thru, maybe even check out, the books that look interesting at the library, then purchase the most recent version from nolo for daily use.
I think, based on your description, you want their book "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business"
I have absolutely no connection to Nolo other than reading their educational books at the library when I was a kid, convinced me that the profession of lawyer-ing or whatever was not quite as interesting as it appeared on TV.
I really, really, doubt that anyone would be excommunicated for using the Pope's image without permission.
I laughed out loud at that one. Give the 4chan, fark, or slashdot guys a pope pic, a goatse pic, and some playground pics, and within minutes we'll all be scarred for life... Or the ever popular 2g1c theme applied to communion wine. All kinds of fun ways to get excommunicated.
he was a network admin and the passwords were for switches and routers. sure you can reinstall the Cisco IOS, but then you have to set up the VLAN's, BGP and other crap that will result in massive downtime for things like traffic lights and mass transit which is networked these days.
No problem, log into the web based change management system (probably RANCID) cut and paste the most recent config into a spare switch/router/whatever (inserting your own password of course), then forklift upgrade, downtime a minute tops. Then wipe the old device and swap it into the next unlocked device. No need to "break into" a device like this unless you actually need to change something, or an old device breaks and needs replacement.
What, you say they have no backups, no change management system?
stores look to increase the revenue per customer, and the easiest way to do that it to pressure sales associates to sell more warranties. It's an emotional decision ... the conversation takes place at the checkout counter, and rarely in a context where the shopper can take time to make a reasoned, fact-based decision.
One of the MANY reasons shopping online is better than brick and mortar. I no longer buy "technology items" at B+M stores for this reason, I'm simply tired of arguing with minimum wage clowns about not paying $30 for an extended warranty on a $5 mouse.
The review needs to list, what the book has, that a google search will not find for free.
Off the top of my head, I'd go with coherency, structure, and a lack of insults.
Sounds just like a FAQ... which google will find for free
Google Xen FAQ first link for me was
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq
Good coherency, although it was not, it looks like it was written in one sitting by one guy, or at least edited to look that way.
Good structure, its an outline, and the outline even looks well designed.
Lack of insults, well, its no mailing list. And for $20 or whatever the book costs, I'll glance over a mailing list post calling some dude a noob, or whatever.
Consumers 'tend to be more risk-averse and are less willing to absorb the cost of an unexpected product repair or replacement,' says Timothy Meenan, the council's executive director.
Sounds pretty bogus to me. My logic in buying an extended warranty is its an option on low quality. Has the quality of the product dropped enough to now make the warranty a good deal? In the past, sure, it was a ripoff, but now the papers are full of stories about junk from china, inedible food, lead paint on everything, etc. And everyone has the experience of buying something from China-Mart that instantly falls apart or is simply unsuitable for any purpose.
Would I buy an extended warranty on a Milwaukee Tools Inc genuine made in America Sawzall, from perhaps the 1980s? No, that would have been a waste, that saw will run until my great grandkids use it. Note, Milw Tool website declares they're now a "globalized" company so I would assume (perhaps incorrectly) that they only ship Chinese trash now, I'm referring to the products from the good old days. Would I buy an extended warranty on a generic sun-moon-star Inc reciprocating saw from china that doesn't even have instructions in English nor a genuine UL listing? Heck Yeah, that thing probably won't even last thru one complete job!
So the real focus of the story isn't some "adsorbing cost" BS, it is a story about downscaling quality because of lack of spending money. Store brand, or generic, instead of the real deal. And even the real deal is all outsourced to the point of uselessness.
The review needs to list, what the book has, that a google search will not find for free.
The disadvantage of the book, is the review makes it sound like an edited, slightly out of date collection of FAQ printouts, and it costs money.
The advantage of the book, is ... Come on, give me a reason to buy the book. I got money burning a hole in my pocket here.
Here are reasons why I'd buy a book that covers a "google-y" topic. First of all, if the $$$ went to a foundation that paid the program authors, or some charity (EFF?). Maybe if it had diagrams and flowcharts or other graphical aids you can't find via google. Maybe if it had interesting exclusive content, behind the scenes interviews with the authors, candid explanations of why and how it was designed the way it was, that simply cannot be found on the internet. Maybe if it had workbook like qualities, like planning worksheets to plan and organize your deployment. Maybe if it had textbook like qualities like questions at the end of each chapter with an answer key at the end. Maybe if it was an artistically beautiful collection of "stuff" like XKCD cartoons, FAQs, stories, pictures, poems, all tied to a common theme in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
Thats what I want to see in a slashdot review of a "google-y" topic.
I am only interested in the coolest, most popular, stars.
... combined with the well known ability of IR cameras to "see thru" clothing ...
The CO2's a side-effect of energy production, which is a consequence of our energy consumption. Remove electricity, and you impose a bottleneck on our ability to consume, and as with other energy-rationing measures, you reduce CO2 output at the cost of giving up your way of life.
Note the original poster didn't say "less carbon emitted" but "less carbon emitted from power plants".
In the third world, without big plants and universal distribution systems, they have stinking polluting noisy small generators everywhere... Overall, much more pollution.
Corporations should be forced to compete with government.
In the USA, they've merged. So, how is "competition" going to occur?
I was hoping for pictures of Mark drunk with writing or Mark doing a keg stand or something.
There's always photoshop.
I use my butler Jeeves for everything. He arranges my travel, does my bills, and picks up anything I need from the store. He is fast, courteous and usually reliable. At the same time I know that he is aware of everything I do; I can see it in the way he can often provide suggestions which tend to match my interests. Do to some misplaced comments of his, I am now suspicious that he may not respect my privacy. How do I remain anonymous from my butler while still having him provide all the personal services that I am accustomed to?
You need a RAIB, often redundantly described as a RAIB array.
"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Butlers"
The worst privacy problem is cross correlating otherwise innocent isolated activities. Using multiple butlers prevents them from cross correlating. Of course, they may collude behind your back.