How do we build highways? You know how. Well, we're going to have to do something like that to get these new highways built. It has to be treated like any other kind of infrastructure. High speed access bears more resemblance to road than it does to railroads. On the railroad, only a few comapnies can be running trains. On a road, anyone can be driving a car. Toll roads suck ass. It is better to have a public roadway. I just can't see the difference between that and bandwidth. No company is going to do all that because the financial incentive isn't there. We've all got to go in together on this or it's unlikely to get done.
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
Yeah, I read Future Shock too and even got fired up about that. Then I did it some. I've had several careers and done well in them. I've made some mistakes along the way but I never deserved to be laid off. I picked myself up, dusted myself off and got back on the horse. I think I might be able to do it one more time but I don't think I can do it 3 more times. Why? Each time took alot outta me. I'm not getting any younger and neither are you. Since I became a developer, I work longer hours than I did as an engineer. Retraining sounds good in the saying but when you go do it, it gets old fast and employers will not hire you on the basis of having taken refresher courses. They want actual work experience. I have done what you describe twice. You're right. It CAN be done. But the cost deserves discussion. I will contend that most people I have worked with over the last 25 years could not have done what I have done to stay afloat in some kind of technical field. They were forced out into non-technical jobs paying much less. So I'm not saying your way won't work. It did work for me. I'm saying it is not a viable approach for many if not most people who find themselves in similar circumstances. They will not land on both feet and start running. They will fall flat on their faces and get hurt. Is that how it ought to be? 15 years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I'm not so sure.
It's lack of knowlege on the part of legislators. Wise and meaningful legislation can not be expected to come from ill-informed and less than technically astute legislators.
You think they pass laws like UCITA because they're ignorant?
What incentive do they have to make informed decisions rather than sell our rights down the river?
I think about people like my uncle who buy something, figure they own it and if it quits working, they take it back. I didn't read the TiVO contract but it certainly does not sound like they make it abundantly clear that you would be forced to buy the expensive service later and that they would cripple the product if you didn't. Even if he couldn't return it, my uncle would put the damn thing back in it's box and stuff it up in the attic. Having been burnt, he wouldn't consider similar products in the future. I'm with him. I won't consider buying something like this and I'll be real quick to point out to others why they shouldn't either. Legal or not, it's dishonest.
Big bands ruled until Les Paul made it possible for four teenagers with part-time jobs to make the same "bigness" of sound as thirty professional musicians.
Leo Fender played a bigger role in this than Les Paul. Fender's 1951 introduction of the Precision Bass was a landmark event. At last, you could HEAR the bass. It's first deployment was in Lionel Hampton's band, in the hands of Monk Montgomery, Wes's brother.
Cable has disadvantages compared with DSL but where I live DSL is not available. The phone comapny is not savvy in such matters either. Installations in areas where it is available have been problematic for many people. By contrast, Road Runner ain't bad. It's alot faster than dialup. It's affordable, always on and it's been very reliable. The install was easy. Having had this experience, there's no going back to dial-up and unless my needs change drastically, I won't bother with DSL.
would be a big jewel bezel indicator light like the kind they use on Fender amplifiers. Let's see, the Diallight 51 series would do. It uses a GE CJ7 bulb. That will give it the Ingersal-Rand look.
The top ould be dressed up with a flower vase sitting on a doilly.Politenessman sez, "Always use a doilly daily."
Also, one general caveat for anyone who has stock options (at least in the U.S.): Learn about tax implications before you do anything. It's very easy to get screwed if you're not careful with the timing of your exercise and sale. Be particularly careful of the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), which can be assessed on the paper gain that you "earn" when you exercise the options, even if their value drops later. Also, even if you are fortunate to have lots of in-the-money options, I strongly recommend not living large until you've converted them into cash in your bank accounts. I know folks who have gotten close to overextending on the basis of their paper wealth, then got hammered by the AMT and/or the decline in the market.
Amen. For this reason, it's best not to exercise until you can sell, even if it means losing options. Exercise them, sell them and pay the tax man right there and then. That way you won't get burned. The cases I've heard of where people ended up a million dollars in arears with the IRS happened in part because of their ignorance. It's not like this stuff is common knowledge. They weren't getting good advice because MOST people were ignorant of this. Then came tax time. Wham! It hit these poor bastards like a freight train. Now hindsight is 20-20 and you see write-ups in financial magazines. They probably felt that they needed to exercise when they saw the price max out. But for reasons I stated in my earlier post, THEY WERE NOT ABLE TO SELL. So they sat on it and then the market tanked. They got double screwed. First, they have worthless stock and second, the tax is calculated on the price they exercised at minus the strike price. Those affected have filed for protection but there's no telling how that will play. I think the AMT should be repealed. Particulrly since options are exercise or lose but then you can't sell at your discretion.
Lump sum bonuses are subject to a horrendous tax rate and no, you don't get it back at the end of the year.
Stock options are a soggy deal for most rank and file employees for a variety of reasons.
1. Only the people in the inner circle get the lowest strike price and large number of shares.
2. There are usually a variety of restrictions placed on the exercise of these options which tend to minimize the profits the employee can make.
Usually, employees are compelled to use a broker stipulated by the company. This allows the company to control the rate at which the shares are sold. One phone call can halt a sell off. In general, the use of a single broker will delay transactions if for no other reason than you can't get anyone to answer the phone.
There are often self-imposed "blackout periods" in which employees are prohibited from selling their shares. These usually occur during the end of the quarter when the quarterly profits are being announced. The ostensible reason given for the blackout periods is to avoid the appearance of insider trading.
3. By now, everyone is familiar with what happens to stock options when companies go under or the stock market crashes but those are not the only things which can exert large downward forces on the price of the stock. A company I worked for was sued because it's officers had stolen source code from a competitor they had previously worked for. The stock value was depressed for 6 years because of this. There are other surprises which can erase paper fortunes.
By all accounts, I was lucky. I sold all the stock I had in my previous employer in '98 and got out while the gittin' was good. I bagged upper 4 figures after taxes, enough to put down on a good car. But I didn't get rich and considering the overtime I put in, this was chump change. Stock options are like a blow job; they look alot better than they actually feel. I definitely believe stock options are a gimmick to hold down salaries.
I'm sorry for honest, hard working people who have been screwed by the market downturn. I feel their pain. But at least this downturn has forced a hugh reality check about all the stock option business. I grew weary of listening to braggarts gloating about their paper fortunes. This downturn has shut them up.
I wonder how these "bumps in the road" will be received. Most of the people in my company still use NT4.0 with service pack 6. We haven't deployed Windows 2000 yet, although a few developers run it. It's going to be expensive to upgrade. Think home users are going to go for that? If your home machine needs to have it's OS reloaded, it's going to be a big hassle. I suspect these "bumps in the road" will translate into gouges in the eye.
When you reduce math to a sequence of key presses on the calculator, you don't teach any sort of problem solving.
Besides the example I mentioned about kids not being able to do arithmetic in their heads to make change, young people who have only done their calculations with calculators do not have a good feel for the decimal point in a scientific calculation. If they make a key punch error in their computation will it not look right to them or will they blindly accept it? Using a slide rule, the operator was responsible for the decimal point.
As for the calculator being a time saver, old electrical engineering texts used nice round numbers to simplify the calculations so that students could complete more problems and get more practice using their slide rules.
Mathematics and science students would be better served by concentrating on the process by which one arrives at the answer. Your anecdote about points being taken off because a student showed her work is a prime example of the convoluted reasoning at work here. The problem solving methodology is the crux of the matter. We should be teaching them how to fish instead of tossing them a fish.
There are fewer people who can do simple arithmetic in their heads as a result of the availability of cheap calculators. Is that a problem? You be the judge. I can quickly make change for dollar in my head. A surprizing number of young cashiers don't seem to be able to do that.
There are fewer good, fast typists around due to computers.
Children are getting fatter. They play less outside. They do less hands-on stuff. Are kids today more intelligent? It all depends on how intelligence is defined and measured. By not doing the hands-on activities, they will not be exposed to many enriching experiences. For example, when I was a kid, we played with fire. We made super 8 movies where we squirted flaming gasoline on battalions plastic army men with green avenger water pistols. It was dangerous as hell but we learned things about flaming gasoline. I'll bet that kid who burned himself imitating the Jaskass stunt had little experience playing with fire. He probably figured his buddy could extinguish the fire on his legs before it burned him. Had he played with flaming gasoline prior to doing this, he would have known better. Instead, I'm betting he had spent all his time playing video games. Yeah, we could have ended up on fire but not deliberately because we knew better. We had learned by watching other stuff burn; he had not. Computers divert kids from first hand experience which is often more enteraining than any video game. Yessir.
"It's hard to see the benefit to the customer," Andren said.
That's because there ain't no benefit to the customer. It ain't nothing but a java driven shell game. I know a bunch of people who are put off from online shopping. This will slow acceptance further. I ain't shoppin' there. Where I come from people who do this are described as crooked. I hope they had the same experience Amazon did.
They already rough up machines without something like this. Somewhere I read that 2 people are killed in the US each year by vending machines falling on them.
Yeah boy. If you liked what happened with Napster, you're gonna love this. I don't care whether you think present analog TV is piracy or not, this is one of the most blatantly anti-consumer policies I've ever heard tell of. My parents generation fought WWII and couldn't care less about the Napster flap but they will care about this. So will my generation. I've little doubt there will be a hue and cry once people can no longer receive analog signals. The FCC is out of touch with the citizenry on this issue. This pay-per-view, limited life license crap ain't gonna fly, particularly in light of the content they have to offer. To reiterate the point, Napster is esoteric to older Americans but TV ain't and I just can't see them settling for what the media industry wants.
One of the outfits mentioned in the article is the National Fire Protection Association which publishes the National Electrical Code. This is the basis of the electrical building codes in most ares. They publish a new one every 3 years with changes coming from their committees composed of electricians, engineers, inspectors, insurance company reps, etc. I think I have copies of the 1978 and 1987 NEC somewhere. It is chock full of niggling details. There's an online version at:
I've heard many a story about people having to rip out work because it didn't meet code. Not all of it was obvious or intuitive. These folks either learned what to do to comply or the hired someone who did.
If someone posts the NEC online, I'll bet the NFPA lawyers are on them like stink.
Now, do we really want to remove this activity from the NFPA and put it in the state or federal congress? Most of them don't know their hole from a butt-in-the-ground about electrical work. The proceeds from the sale of the NEC funds the efforts to keep it current. If it's put up for free, do we fund it with tax dollars? Do you really want to go read all that shit anyway? I mean, the only people who need the NEC are people who are building something.
Several posts have pointed out that there's been a trend toward using off the shelf components and playing the numbers game on probes. I'm not so sure that strategy has been accompanied by a lowering of expectations of performance. People seemed agast when the last several probes didn't work as expected. Missions like Pioneer 10 were designed with the mindset that failure was not an option. I used to work for the company that designed and built Pioneer 10's DC-DC power converters. The engineering model is still on display there. Nothing was left to chance in it's design and it has performed flawlessly. No news is good news. This company moved into industiral products where it has had some very modest success in a few niche markets but these guys were never able to crack the market for PC power supplies where you sell for 20 cents per watt. They just don't have the mindset to design and build stuff that way and the market has selected against them. Time after time, they would find that comapanies would pay lip service to quality then buy on price and play the numbers game with components. At $30, nobody thinks twice about swapping out a power supply if they suspect it to be malfunctioning. Then they toss the old one. Expectations of power supply reliability are lower too. If we're going to play the numbers game with space and we're not willing to pay the price for a 99.9999% chnace of success, we can't be too shocked when missions fail.
From the article, "... it would seem that Maryland's UCITA would contradict itself in this case -- by giving Maryland courts jurisdiction over software disputes at the same time it ties the user to an agreement to use courts in King County, Wash."
It certainly didn't take very long for the foolishness of that UCITA law to become glaringly obvious.
If these people win, I'm done with America. I'm moving to Canada.
Pack yer bags.
The legal system here is beyond control when I can sue because I'm an idiot.... but when you are suing because you spilled coffee on yourself... can I sue my parents for getting a divorce when I was a young kid..."
It depends on who you are, who you're suing, who your lawyer is and how deep the defendents pockets are.
Slashdot Mirror
How do we build highways? You know how. Well, we're going to have to do something like that to get these new highways built. It has to be treated like any other kind of infrastructure. High speed access bears more resemblance to road than it does to railroads. On the railroad, only a few comapnies can be running trains. On a road, anyone can be driving a car. Toll roads suck ass. It is better to have a public roadway. I just can't see the difference between that and bandwidth. No company is going to do all that because the financial incentive isn't there. We've all got to go in together on this or it's unlikely to get done.
In essence, Microsoft is trying to do the same thing RCA tried to do but on a bigger scale. May the same fate befall them.
Q: How many Teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 15, you got a problem wid dat?
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
Yeah, I read Future Shock too and even got fired up about that. Then I did it some. I've had several careers and done well in them. I've made some mistakes along the way but I never deserved to be laid off. I picked myself up, dusted myself off and got back on the horse. I think I might be able to do it one more time but I don't think I can do it 3 more times. Why? Each time took alot outta me. I'm not getting any younger and neither are you. Since I became a developer, I work longer hours than I did as an engineer. Retraining sounds good in the saying but when you go do it, it gets old fast and employers will not hire you on the basis of having taken refresher courses. They want actual work experience. I have done what you describe twice. You're right. It CAN be done. But the cost deserves discussion. I will contend that most people I have worked with over the last 25 years could not have done what I have done to stay afloat in some kind of technical field. They were forced out into non-technical jobs paying much less. So I'm not saying your way won't work. It did work for me. I'm saying it is not a viable approach for many if not most people who find themselves in similar circumstances. They will not land on both feet and start running. They will fall flat on their faces and get hurt. Is that how it ought to be? 15 years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I'm not so sure.
I remember when kids would make prank calls to random numbers in the telephone book.
Yeah, we did that. Let's see. "Is your refridgerator running?" "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"
It's lack of knowlege on the part of legislators. Wise and meaningful legislation can not be expected to come from ill-informed and less than technically astute legislators.
You think they pass laws like UCITA because they're ignorant?
What incentive do they have to make informed decisions rather than sell our rights down the river?
I think about people like my uncle who buy something, figure they own it and if it quits working, they take it back. I didn't read the TiVO contract but it certainly does not sound like they make it abundantly clear that you would be forced to buy the expensive service later and that they would cripple the product if you didn't. Even if he couldn't return it, my uncle would put the damn thing back in it's box and stuff it up in the attic. Having been burnt, he wouldn't consider similar products in the future. I'm with him. I won't consider buying something like this and I'll be real quick to point out to others why they shouldn't either. Legal or not, it's dishonest.
Big bands ruled until Les Paul made it possible for four teenagers with part-time jobs to make the same "bigness" of sound as thirty professional musicians.
Leo Fender played a bigger role in this than Les Paul. Fender's 1951 introduction of the Precision Bass was a landmark event. At last, you could HEAR the bass. It's first deployment was in Lionel Hampton's band, in the hands of Monk Montgomery, Wes's brother.
I can see it now. Bill Gates will get a cabinet post as the head of a new federal agency. If you like the EPA, you're gonna love this.
Cable has disadvantages compared with DSL but where I live DSL is not available. The phone comapny is not savvy in such matters either. Installations in areas where it is available have been problematic for many people. By contrast, Road Runner ain't bad. It's alot faster than dialup. It's affordable, always on and it's been very reliable. The install was easy. Having had this experience, there's no going back to dial-up and unless my needs change drastically, I won't bother with DSL.
would be a big jewel bezel indicator light like the kind they use on Fender amplifiers. Let's see, the Diallight 51 series would do. It uses a GE CJ7 bulb. That will give it the Ingersal-Rand look.
The top ould be dressed up with a flower vase sitting on a doilly.Politenessman sez, "Always use a doilly daily."
Also, one general caveat for anyone who has stock options (at least in the U.S.): Learn about tax implications before you do anything. It's very easy to get screwed if you're not careful with the timing of your exercise and sale. Be particularly careful of the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), which can be assessed on the paper gain that you "earn" when you exercise the options, even if their value drops later. Also, even if you are fortunate to have lots of in-the-money options, I strongly recommend not living large until you've converted them into cash in your bank accounts. I know folks who have gotten close to overextending on the basis of their paper wealth, then got hammered by the AMT and/or the decline in the market.
Amen. For this reason, it's best not to exercise until you can sell, even if it means losing options. Exercise them, sell them and pay the tax man right there and then. That way you won't get burned. The cases I've heard of where people ended up a million dollars in arears with the IRS happened in part because of their ignorance. It's not like this stuff is common knowledge. They weren't getting good advice because MOST people were ignorant of this. Then came tax time. Wham! It hit these poor bastards like a freight train. Now hindsight is 20-20 and you see write-ups in financial magazines. They probably felt that they needed to exercise when they saw the price max out. But for reasons I stated in my earlier post, THEY WERE NOT ABLE TO SELL. So they sat on it and then the market tanked. They got double screwed. First, they have worthless stock and second, the tax is calculated on the price they exercised at minus the strike price. Those affected have filed for protection but there's no telling how that will play. I think the AMT should be repealed. Particulrly since options are exercise or lose but then you can't sell at your discretion.
There is no substitute for a good wage. Period.
Lump sum bonuses are subject to a horrendous tax rate and no, you don't get it back at the end of the year.
Stock options are a soggy deal for most rank and file employees for a variety of reasons.
1. Only the people in the inner circle get the lowest strike price and large number of shares.
2. There are usually a variety of restrictions placed on the exercise of these options which tend to minimize the profits the employee can make.
Usually, employees are compelled to use a broker stipulated by the company. This allows the company to control the rate at which the shares are sold. One phone call can halt a sell off. In general, the use of a single broker will delay transactions if for no other reason than you can't get anyone to answer the phone.
There are often self-imposed "blackout periods" in which employees are prohibited from selling their shares. These usually occur during the end of the quarter when the quarterly profits are being announced. The ostensible reason given for the blackout periods is to avoid the appearance of insider trading.
3. By now, everyone is familiar with what happens to stock options when companies go under or the stock market crashes but those are not the only things which can exert large downward forces on the price of the stock. A company I worked for was sued because it's officers had stolen source code from a competitor they had previously worked for. The stock value was depressed for 6 years because of this. There are other surprises which can erase paper fortunes.
By all accounts, I was lucky. I sold all the stock I had in my previous employer in '98 and got out while the gittin' was good. I bagged upper 4 figures after taxes, enough to put down on a good car. But I didn't get rich and considering the overtime I put in, this was chump change. Stock options are like a blow job; they look alot better than they actually feel. I definitely believe stock options are a gimmick to hold down salaries.
I'm sorry for honest, hard working people who have been screwed by the market downturn. I feel their pain. But at least this downturn has forced a hugh reality check about all the stock option business. I grew weary of listening to braggarts gloating about their paper fortunes. This downturn has shut them up.
I wonder how these "bumps in the road" will be received. Most of the people in my company still use NT4.0 with service pack 6. We haven't deployed Windows 2000 yet, although a few developers run it. It's going to be expensive to upgrade. Think home users are going to go for that? If your home machine needs to have it's OS reloaded, it's going to be a big hassle. I suspect these "bumps in the road" will translate into gouges in the eye.
http://www.montypython.net/scripts/spam.php
enjoy, I did
When you reduce math to a sequence of key presses on the calculator, you don't teach any sort of problem solving.
Besides the example I mentioned about kids not being able to do arithmetic in their heads to make change, young people who have only done their calculations with calculators do not have a good feel for the decimal point in a scientific calculation. If they make a key punch error in their computation will it not look right to them or will they blindly accept it? Using a slide rule, the operator was responsible for the decimal point.
As for the calculator being a time saver, old electrical engineering texts used nice round numbers to simplify the calculations so that students could complete more problems and get more practice using their slide rules.
Mathematics and science students would be better served by concentrating on the process by which one arrives at the answer. Your anecdote about points being taken off because a student showed her work is a prime example of the convoluted reasoning at work here. The problem solving methodology is the crux of the matter. We should be teaching them how to fish instead of tossing them a fish.
There are fewer people who can do simple arithmetic in their heads as a result of the availability of cheap calculators. Is that a problem? You be the judge. I can quickly make change for dollar in my head. A surprizing number of young cashiers don't seem to be able to do that.
There are fewer good, fast typists around due to computers.
Children are getting fatter. They play less outside. They do less hands-on stuff. Are kids today more intelligent? It all depends on how intelligence is defined and measured. By not doing the hands-on activities, they will not be exposed to many enriching experiences. For example, when I was a kid, we played with fire. We made super 8 movies where we squirted flaming gasoline on battalions plastic army men with green avenger water pistols. It was dangerous as hell but we learned things about flaming gasoline. I'll bet that kid who burned himself imitating the Jaskass stunt had little experience playing with fire. He probably figured his buddy could extinguish the fire on his legs before it burned him. Had he played with flaming gasoline prior to doing this, he would have known better. Instead, I'm betting he had spent all his time playing video games. Yeah, we could have ended up on fire but not deliberately because we knew better. We had learned by watching other stuff burn; he had not. Computers divert kids from first hand experience which is often more enteraining than any video game. Yessir.
"It's hard to see the benefit to the customer," Andren said.
That's because there ain't no benefit to the customer. It ain't nothing but a java driven shell game. I know a bunch of people who are put off from online shopping. This will slow acceptance further. I ain't shoppin' there. Where I come from people who do this are described as crooked. I hope they had the same experience Amazon did.
People would kick the hell out of those machines.
They already rough up machines without something like this. Somewhere I read that 2 people are killed in the US each year by vending machines falling on them.
Yeah boy. If you liked what happened with Napster, you're gonna love this. I don't care whether you think present analog TV is piracy or not, this is one of the most blatantly anti-consumer policies I've ever heard tell of. My parents generation fought WWII and couldn't care less about the Napster flap but they will care about this. So will my generation. I've little doubt there will be a hue and cry once people can no longer receive analog signals. The FCC is out of touch with the citizenry on this issue. This pay-per-view, limited life license crap ain't gonna fly, particularly in light of the content they have to offer. To reiterate the point, Napster is esoteric to older Americans but TV ain't and I just can't see them settling for what the media industry wants.
One of the outfits mentioned in the article is the National Fire Protection Association which publishes the National Electrical Code. This is the basis of the electrical building codes in most ares. They publish a new one every 3 years with changes coming from their committees composed of electricians, engineers, inspectors, insurance company reps, etc. I think I have copies of the 1978 and 1987 NEC somewhere. It is chock full of niggling details. There's an online version at:
o me .html?E+necnonmembers
http://www.necdirect.org/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/h
I've heard many a story about people having to rip out work because it didn't meet code. Not all of it was obvious or intuitive. These folks either learned what to do to comply or the hired someone who did.
If someone posts the NEC online, I'll bet the NFPA lawyers are on them like stink.
Now, do we really want to remove this activity from the NFPA and put it in the state or federal congress? Most of them don't know their hole from a butt-in-the-ground about electrical work. The proceeds from the sale of the NEC funds the efforts to keep it current. If it's put up for free, do we fund it with tax dollars? Do you really want to go read all that shit anyway? I mean, the only people who need the NEC are people who are building something.
Several posts have pointed out that there's been a trend toward using off the shelf components and playing the numbers game on probes. I'm not so sure that strategy has been accompanied by a lowering of expectations of performance. People seemed agast when the last several probes didn't work as expected. Missions like Pioneer 10 were designed with the mindset that failure was not an option. I used to work for the company that designed and built Pioneer 10's DC-DC power converters. The engineering model is still on display there. Nothing was left to chance in it's design and it has performed flawlessly. No news is good news. This company moved into industiral products where it has had some very modest success in a few niche markets but these guys were never able to crack the market for PC power supplies where you sell for 20 cents per watt. They just don't have the mindset to design and build stuff that way and the market has selected against them. Time after time, they would find that comapanies would pay lip service to quality then buy on price and play the numbers game with components. At $30, nobody thinks twice about swapping out a power supply if they suspect it to be malfunctioning. Then they toss the old one. Expectations of power supply reliability are lower too. If we're going to play the numbers game with space and we're not willing to pay the price for a 99.9999% chnace of success, we can't be too shocked when missions fail.
I wonder how much it costs to get rid of all the heat billowing up from the farm. I imagine that place is popular in January.
From the article, "... it would seem that Maryland's UCITA would contradict itself in this case -- by giving Maryland courts jurisdiction over software disputes at the same time it ties the user to an agreement to use courts in King County, Wash."
It certainly didn't take very long for the foolishness of that UCITA law to become glaringly obvious.
If these people win, I'm done with America. I'm moving to Canada.
... but when you are suing because you spilled coffee on yourself ... can I sue my parents for getting a divorce when I was a young kid ..."
Pack yer bags.
The legal system here is beyond control when I can sue because I'm an idiot.
It depends on who you are, who you're suing, who your lawyer is and how deep the defendents pockets are.