I'll preface my comments by saying that I know Robert Ford, the state senator who submitted this bill. Fortunately, I live one block outside of his district so he is NOT my state senator.
As has been noted in the many posts, Ford is an idiot. He's also running for governor next year, so he obviously submitted this bill to try to get support from the bible belters. The bill has been sent to committee, which is about as close to death as a bill can get in the SC Senate. Ford also has a long history of submitting stupid bills that never get passed.
I give it very little chance of even getting to a vote, but I can assure everyone that as a member of the South Carolina Libertarian Party and a member of the Libertarian National Committee I will do everything I can to make sure that this piece of trash isn't passed.
Of course saying that just identified me (30 seconds with google and you can figure out who I am), but who cares!
Where the heck do you live? Two cents per KWH? And only another penny after the first 800KWH? That's about a fifth of the price we pay. I'd put up one of those things (maybe on the roof of the apartment building???) for nine cent power.
I turn off machines in the summer and power everything up in the winter. The cost of running them is too high at nearly ten cents/KWH. You might want to consider renting out space for a server farm...:)
I've been involved in political call centers for a number of years and can agree with just about everything you've said. Unfortunately, there is a change taking place in our society. People are spending more and more time online, wasting time on things (slashdot excluded of course) that are meaningless. They are more and more connected, with hardly anyone failing to carry a cell phone or a PDA. They'll talk for hours about meaningless things that five years ago weren't worth picking up the phone for. They waited until the next time they saw the person.
On the flip-side, people are less interested in what is actually going on in the world and become offended at things that shouldn't offend them. Their immediate reaction is that they have been violated in some way and to think about (or suggest) legal action. Why should someone be offended when they are asked for their opinion? Why would they lie (or propose to others that they lie) about their opinions? Why aren't they glad that they've been reminded to vote, regardless of whether the person who's campaign called them is the one they were planning on voting for?
People used to like to be asked their opinions. People used to like to be reminded to vote. They actually wanted to vote and believed it was important. Now very few people vote and many that vote consider it to be a "chore" and not something important.
To those that say you can take legal action: you can't (at least not in the US). Political organizations are exempt from the do not call laws, but if you ask them to take you off their list they usually will -- assuming that the person calling you bothers to report that information back to the party. What you need to do is ask them if they are calling from the political party or a campaign. Campaigns never bother to report do not call requests back to the party. A party volunteer might.
The problem is that many campaigns pay for automated calling services. While this may get their message out in a very short period of time, there is no feedback. The "old fashioned" method of having volunteers call is still used and is still effective. Unfortunately in many areas of the country the campaigns do not coordinate calling so you get a call from candidate A running for congress, followed by candidate B (same party) running for the statehouse, then candidate C running for city council, ad-nauseum.
By that time, another volunteer who has a duplicate sheet with your name on it calls back for candidate A, but this time the person calling you is from the local party and not the campaign. Then the first campaign volunteer fails to return his or her sheet, so the campaign gives another person the same list and you get yet another call. And then right before election day the campaign decides to have everyone called one more time by an automated system.
The candidate really doesn't want to get you upset. Where they fail is in not making sure that the person calling you knows what he or she is doing. Someone who just reads the script and doesn't listen to you can be hurting the campaign without knowing it.
I agree, it is far too late. I've worked a bit in radio, both from behind the mic and at the tower. There are several important facts about this concept that the article is failing to focus on.
My biggest issue is with the licensing fees that iBiquity charges. The FCC has given approval to a patented system, which requires very expensive annual fees from every station that uses the technology. While the station does gain "side bands" that can be used for content, they are also required to pay a very hefty percentage of gross revenue (not net profits) for the use.
The setup is also expensive. The average cost for an AM station to switch to this system is around 65 thousand, plus the ongoing annual fees that range upwards of 10 thousand a year/station. (I'll just reference AM, since being in talk-radio I've never worked FM. The cost for FM to convert and license is even higher) Less than.001% (I don't care what anyone favoring digital says, it is less than 1/1000th of a percent) of the radios that exist have the ability to pick up a digital signal.
Only some new automobiles have radios that pick up digital, and the estimated time to reach a 10% market penetration acording to the digital radio pundits is 2015. That estimate assumes that Americans will suddenly start buying a new car every year and torching the old one so that it gets off the road. Detroit has wanted us to do that for years, but we never seem to follow their instructions about replacing our vehicles every new model year. (My Honda Prelude SI4WS will be 18 this fall and still gets close to 30MPG avg. Of course the FM side of the radio broke years ago, but who listens to FM?)
And who is going to go buy a new digital radio for their car? They are more expensive (again, patent royalties), and if you're going to buy a new one you're more likely to decide to pay a monthly fee to tap into one of the birds in the sky since you'll no longer have to worry about signal dropout between cities and at night.
Oh, and did I mention that while Clear Channel has committed to moving their stations to digital they are ALSO ONE OF THE LARGEST INVESTORS IN THE COMPANY HOLDING THE PATENTS?
The article does not mention this fact. The ten ton gorilla of radio controls the technology that the FCC requires all stations to move to. Think about it.
Small local stations -- the true source of local radio -- aren't going to bite on this. They'll eventually be forced to, but they'll just sell out and make the ten ton gorilla gain some weight. I've spent a good deal of time investigating and following this for the past few years and am positive that this is a pig-in-a-poke.
This is too little, too late. The costs are way too high to redeploy new transmitters, there is a complete replacement of station to tower communications systems (again, more licensing fees to iBiquity), and a rewiring of most AM studios since no engineer ever wires an AM station in stereo unless the station owner is rich. FM might switch, but their costs are even higher and the pay-off after the 20% royalties ON ALL COMMERCIALS SOLD makes it actually decrease their current profitability.
Clear Channel doesn't care about royalties, primarily because the licensing fee schedule from iBiquity favors the large station groups. Besides, they get part of the profits back in dividends...
If you don't believe any of this then you can easily verify it, including Clear Channel's investment which is public record.
I remember trying this with a friend almost 30 years ago. I can't remember where we read about the idea and a concept circuit (probably Popular Electronics), but we built a two way half-duplex syncronous ciruit that worked anywhere in the neighborhood -- as long as you were on the same side of the step-down transformer.
I can't remember exactly how fast it could go, but I seem to recall running it at 1/4 wave, which would have been 15bps. I think that was the fastest we could go without having interference from vacuums and other household appliances.
And yes, in those days 15bps was fast enough.
Another S-100 user!!! I'm amazed how quickly everyone forgot about THE first REAL standardized bus that hobbyists used.
I can't recall which brands of parts I had -- after all it was almost 30 years ago -- but I remember that I had a 20 slot S-100 chassis with a 6MHz 8085 I/O processor, a dual processor 5MHz 8085/8MHz 8088, 256MB of memory, a 26MB (14 inch) shugart fixed drive, an 8 port serial interface, a DEC VT52 compatible terminal and a 1200 baud modem.
The first thing I did was throw out the CP/M that came installed on the drive and wrote a relocatable assembler/linker in DIBOL on a RSTS/E system, then wrote a small multi-processor OS (I called it REX -- resident executive), which I downloaded updates to over the modem. (Of course it took me several weekends to write it at the expense of whatever social life I had at the time.
I bought the parts instead of a new car, but it made remote management of three PDP-11's and an Eclipse M-600 very easy and kept me from having to ride the train from Philly to NYC several days a week.
Those were the days when you could still have fun writing code at home, even if you got paid to write it at work.:)
It sounds like you are having the same problems that we had back in the 70s and 80s when companies who's product wasn't IT related (we called it MIS back then) couldn't accept the concept of why a good IT infrastructure was important.
I went through several companies back then where I was either the first or one of the first people on staff when the IT department was created. The problem really isn't that you need an IT staff but that since you came up through the ranks you aren't really being respected. This is a problem that is not unique to our industry.
Unfortunately, I found several times that the only way to deal with the problem of respect for your skills was to leave. At your next job, your background is that you formed the IT department at your previous company (even though it was only you), and you built their network from nothing to roughly 100 users. True, jobs aren't as plentiful as they have been at other times, but the industry is not as bad as it has been and you might need to consider this option.
If it is safe to make the assumption that you are also not being paid a salary equal to the work you are doing start with that. Tell them that you are doing three jobs and that you want to be paid for at least two of them. They will either a) give you a raise, b) laugh off your comments or c) fire you. If they fire you then you've got a valid case against them for wrongful termination -- especially since they work with government contracts and have to adhere to higher employment standards than other companies.
If they laugh off your comments then they obviously don't have the ability to ever learn to respect you. That when you take the resume that you updated TODAY and start sending out copies.
But if they do offer to give you a raise, ask the followup question: and when does my assistant start so that someone is doing the third job now that you are paying me for the first two?
Believe it or not, that actually worked for me once. Unfortunately, five years later when there were ten people in the department they decided to replace me with two kids fresh out of college that they could get for half of what they were paying me. I was closing in on 30, which even in the 1980s was starting to be considered over the hill as a programmer. ARGH!!!!!!
And don't rip up the resume if they give you a raise and an assistant. I learned that lesson the hard way back in 1981 when I got the raise and then was squeezed out a few months later after they thought that my newly appointed assistant knew enough to do the job. He didn't, but he did do something that I didn't do when I left. When he was fired three months later he wiped out all the source code from the production system libraries and erased the backup system disks (this was on a Data General M600 with the old 20lb zebra drives). They had to call me and pay a ton of money for me to come in and restore everything.
No, I think there are at least four of us...no, make that five!
Seriously though, having spent most of the past 3+ decades writing code -- exclusive of coffe breaks of course -- I would think that I'd immediately think of intellectual property. Guess I've been on the Internet at this same IP address just a bit too long...
At least it didn't take as long as Lucas took to complete *wars!
It loaded perfectly this afternoon. Oh wait...was that a windoze machine I wiped for a customer and installed Sarge on? World-wide Debian install base +1; Windoze exP install base -1.
Woody was, Sarge is, Etch will be...but sometimes I still miss the 70s and RT-11 on the old PDP 11/34...
Protected computers...protected computers...
Unless you work for Uncle Sam or a bank, you're pretty much out of luck. This bill excludes more than 90% [no, I don't know the exact number] of computers in the US since they are either personal computers or business computers not covered.
Wouldn't a simpler definition and law have been:
A protected computer is a computer that is present on US territory or owned by the US Government and stationed outside of the US or in the possession of a US citizen while outside of US territory.
Any attempt to deceive, in any manner, the owner or operator of a protected computer is illegal. Any modification or addition to the software or hardware of the computer with the intent to add, alter or remove information, copy information to remote sources, or otherwise deceive the computer user or owner of the computer is illegal.
These idiots in Congress are defining web browser settings and cookies in the law! Things change, technology moves on. What about RFID chips? Eh? What about...oh heck. Make the penalty death by public flogging upon arrest (no trial) and after the first few are dealt with the rest will start to...no...I was just about to say think. Spyware authors don't think -- and they certainly don't have a concience.
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I'll preface my comments by saying that I know Robert Ford, the state senator who submitted this bill. Fortunately, I live one block outside of his district so he is NOT my state senator.
As has been noted in the many posts, Ford is an idiot. He's also running for governor next year, so he obviously submitted this bill to try to get support from the bible belters. The bill has been sent to committee, which is about as close to death as a bill can get in the SC Senate. Ford also has a long history of submitting stupid bills that never get passed.
I give it very little chance of even getting to a vote, but I can assure everyone that as a member of the South Carolina Libertarian Party and a member of the Libertarian National Committee I will do everything I can to make sure that this piece of trash isn't passed.
Of course saying that just identified me (30 seconds with google and you can figure out who I am), but who cares!
PDP1134
Where the heck do you live? Two cents per KWH? And only another penny after the first 800KWH? That's about a fifth of the price we pay. I'd put up one of those things (maybe on the roof of the apartment building???) for nine cent power. I turn off machines in the summer and power everything up in the winter. The cost of running them is too high at nearly ten cents/KWH. You might want to consider renting out space for a server farm... :)
On the flip-side, people are less interested in what is actually going on in the world and become offended at things that shouldn't offend them. Their immediate reaction is that they have been violated in some way and to think about (or suggest) legal action. Why should someone be offended when they are asked for their opinion? Why would they lie (or propose to others that they lie) about their opinions? Why aren't they glad that they've been reminded to vote, regardless of whether the person who's campaign called them is the one they were planning on voting for?
People used to like to be asked their opinions. People used to like to be reminded to vote. They actually wanted to vote and believed it was important. Now very few people vote and many that vote consider it to be a "chore" and not something important.
To those that say you can take legal action: you can't (at least not in the US). Political organizations are exempt from the do not call laws, but if you ask them to take you off their list they usually will -- assuming that the person calling you bothers to report that information back to the party. What you need to do is ask them if they are calling from the political party or a campaign. Campaigns never bother to report do not call requests back to the party. A party volunteer might.
The problem is that many campaigns pay for automated calling services. While this may get their message out in a very short period of time, there is no feedback. The "old fashioned" method of having volunteers call is still used and is still effective. Unfortunately in many areas of the country the campaigns do not coordinate calling so you get a call from candidate A running for congress, followed by candidate B (same party) running for the statehouse, then candidate C running for city council, ad-nauseum.
By that time, another volunteer who has a duplicate sheet with your name on it calls back for candidate A, but this time the person calling you is from the local party and not the campaign. Then the first campaign volunteer fails to return his or her sheet, so the campaign gives another person the same list and you get yet another call. And then right before election day the campaign decides to have everyone called one more time by an automated system.
The candidate really doesn't want to get you upset. Where they fail is in not making sure that the person calling you knows what he or she is doing. Someone who just reads the script and doesn't listen to you can be hurting the campaign without knowing it.
My biggest issue is with the licensing fees that iBiquity charges. The FCC has given approval to a patented system, which requires very expensive annual fees from every station that uses the technology. While the station does gain "side bands" that can be used for content, they are also required to pay a very hefty percentage of gross revenue (not net profits) for the use.
The setup is also expensive. The average cost for an AM station to switch to this system is around 65 thousand, plus the ongoing annual fees that range upwards of 10 thousand a year/station. (I'll just reference AM, since being in talk-radio I've never worked FM. The cost for FM to convert and license is even higher) Less than .001% (I don't care what anyone favoring digital says, it is less than 1/1000th of a percent) of the radios that exist have the ability to pick up a digital signal.
Only some new automobiles have radios that pick up digital, and the estimated time to reach a 10% market penetration acording to the digital radio pundits is 2015. That estimate assumes that Americans will suddenly start buying a new car every year and torching the old one so that it gets off the road. Detroit has wanted us to do that for years, but we never seem to follow their instructions about replacing our vehicles every new model year. (My Honda Prelude SI4WS will be 18 this fall and still gets close to 30MPG avg. Of course the FM side of the radio broke years ago, but who listens to FM?)
And who is going to go buy a new digital radio for their car? They are more expensive (again, patent royalties), and if you're going to buy a new one you're more likely to decide to pay a monthly fee to tap into one of the birds in the sky since you'll no longer have to worry about signal dropout between cities and at night.
Oh, and did I mention that while Clear Channel has committed to moving their stations to digital they are ALSO ONE OF THE LARGEST INVESTORS IN THE COMPANY HOLDING THE PATENTS?
The article does not mention this fact. The ten ton gorilla of radio controls the technology that the FCC requires all stations to move to. Think about it.
Small local stations -- the true source of local radio -- aren't going to bite on this. They'll eventually be forced to, but they'll just sell out and make the ten ton gorilla gain some weight. I've spent a good deal of time investigating and following this for the past few years and am positive that this is a pig-in-a-poke.
This is too little, too late. The costs are way too high to redeploy new transmitters, there is a complete replacement of station to tower communications systems (again, more licensing fees to iBiquity), and a rewiring of most AM studios since no engineer ever wires an AM station in stereo unless the station owner is rich. FM might switch, but their costs are even higher and the pay-off after the 20% royalties ON ALL COMMERCIALS SOLD makes it actually decrease their current profitability.
Clear Channel doesn't care about royalties, primarily because the licensing fee schedule from iBiquity favors the large station groups. Besides, they get part of the profits back in dividends...
If you don't believe any of this then you can easily verify it, including Clear Channel's investment which is public record.
I remember trying this with a friend almost 30 years ago. I can't remember where we read about the idea and a concept circuit (probably Popular Electronics), but we built a two way half-duplex syncronous ciruit that worked anywhere in the neighborhood -- as long as you were on the same side of the step-down transformer. I can't remember exactly how fast it could go, but I seem to recall running it at 1/4 wave, which would have been 15bps. I think that was the fastest we could go without having interference from vacuums and other household appliances. And yes, in those days 15bps was fast enough.
Another S-100 user!!! I'm amazed how quickly everyone forgot about THE first REAL standardized bus that hobbyists used.
:)
I can't recall which brands of parts I had -- after all it was almost 30 years ago -- but I remember that I had a 20 slot S-100 chassis with a 6MHz 8085 I/O processor, a dual processor 5MHz 8085/8MHz 8088, 256MB of memory, a 26MB (14 inch) shugart fixed drive, an 8 port serial interface, a DEC VT52 compatible terminal and a 1200 baud modem.
The first thing I did was throw out the CP/M that came installed on the drive and wrote a relocatable assembler/linker in DIBOL on a RSTS/E system, then wrote a small multi-processor OS (I called it REX -- resident executive), which I downloaded updates to over the modem. (Of course it took me several weekends to write it at the expense of whatever social life I had at the time.
I bought the parts instead of a new car, but it made remote management of three PDP-11's and an Eclipse M-600 very easy and kept me from having to ride the train from Philly to NYC several days a week.
Those were the days when you could still have fun writing code at home, even if you got paid to write it at work.
It sounds like you are having the same problems that we had back in the 70s and 80s when companies who's product wasn't IT related (we called it MIS back then) couldn't accept the concept of why a good IT infrastructure was important.
I went through several companies back then where I was either the first or one of the first people on staff when the IT department was created. The problem really isn't that you need an IT staff but that since you came up through the ranks you aren't really being respected. This is a problem that is not unique to our industry.
Unfortunately, I found several times that the only way to deal with the problem of respect for your skills was to leave. At your next job, your background is that you formed the IT department at your previous company (even though it was only you), and you built their network from nothing to roughly 100 users. True, jobs aren't as plentiful as they have been at other times, but the industry is not as bad as it has been and you might need to consider this option.
If it is safe to make the assumption that you are also not being paid a salary equal to the work you are doing start with that. Tell them that you are doing three jobs and that you want to be paid for at least two of them. They will either a) give you a raise, b) laugh off your comments or c) fire you. If they fire you then you've got a valid case against them for wrongful termination -- especially since they work with government contracts and have to adhere to higher employment standards than other companies.
If they laugh off your comments then they obviously don't have the ability to ever learn to respect you. That when you take the resume that you updated TODAY and start sending out copies.
But if they do offer to give you a raise, ask the followup question: and when does my assistant start so that someone is doing the third job now that you are paying me for the first two?
Believe it or not, that actually worked for me once. Unfortunately, five years later when there were ten people in the department they decided to replace me with two kids fresh out of college that they could get for half of what they were paying me. I was closing in on 30, which even in the 1980s was starting to be considered over the hill as a programmer. ARGH!!!!!!
And don't rip up the resume if they give you a raise and an assistant. I learned that lesson the hard way back in 1981 when I got the raise and then was squeezed out a few months later after they thought that my newly appointed assistant knew enough to do the job. He didn't, but he did do something that I didn't do when I left. When he was fired three months later he wiped out all the source code from the production system libraries and erased the backup system disks (this was on a Data General M600 with the old 20lb zebra drives). They had to call me and pay a ton of money for me to come in and restore everything.
No, I think there are at least four of us...no, make that five! Seriously though, having spent most of the past 3+ decades writing code -- exclusive of coffe breaks of course -- I would think that I'd immediately think of intellectual property. Guess I've been on the Internet at this same IP address just a bit too long...
At least it didn't take as long as Lucas took to complete *wars! It loaded perfectly this afternoon. Oh wait...was that a windoze machine I wiped for a customer and installed Sarge on? World-wide Debian install base +1; Windoze exP install base -1. Woody was, Sarge is, Etch will be...but sometimes I still miss the 70s and RT-11 on the old PDP 11/34...
Protected computers...protected computers... Unless you work for Uncle Sam or a bank, you're pretty much out of luck. This bill excludes more than 90% [no, I don't know the exact number] of computers in the US since they are either personal computers or business computers not covered. Wouldn't a simpler definition and law have been: A protected computer is a computer that is present on US territory or owned by the US Government and stationed outside of the US or in the possession of a US citizen while outside of US territory. Any attempt to deceive, in any manner, the owner or operator of a protected computer is illegal. Any modification or addition to the software or hardware of the computer with the intent to add, alter or remove information, copy information to remote sources, or otherwise deceive the computer user or owner of the computer is illegal. These idiots in Congress are defining web browser settings and cookies in the law! Things change, technology moves on. What about RFID chips? Eh? What about...oh heck. Make the penalty death by public flogging upon arrest (no trial) and after the first few are dealt with the rest will start to...no...I was just about to say think. Spyware authors don't think -- and they certainly don't have a concience.