Apologies, it is not automatic. But a resolution is passed every year, and is often done so before the budget is even produced by the President. For 2007, see H.J. Res. 20 (link to 110th congress H.J. Res. 20). The resolution generally funds single-year programs at equivalent levels of the 2006 budget. The House Rules Glossary lists these continuations under "Continuing Resolution", defined thus:
Continuing Resolution (CR) - A joint resolution that provides funds to continue the operation of federal agencies and programs at the beginning of a new fiscal year if their annual appropriation bills have not yet been enacted; also called continuing appropriations. Enacted shortly before or after the new fiscal year begins, the first continuing resolution usually makes funds available for a specified period; additional resolutions are often needed after the first expires. Some CRs have provided appropriations for an entire fiscal year. Continuing resolutions for specific periods customarily fix a rate at which agencies may incur obligations based either on the prior year's appropriations, the President's budget request, or the amount in the agency's regular annual appropriation bill that has already been passed by one or both houses. In the House, continuing resolutions are privileged after September 15.
Naturally for the government agencies involved this is kind of a headache, and requires money-shuffling so that the projects that need funding get funding.
I don't think an employer really wants this. It may open them to an interesting liability avenue.
Imaginary scenario:
John Smith is sitting at his desk, typing away at the report for tomorrow's deadline. His blood pressure and heart rate spike momentarily, then calm down. His left arm becomes slightly numb, but he thinks nothing of this. About 20 minutes later, he drops dead.
His family turns and sues Megacorp. Megacorp had access to his vital statistics, and should have noticed the warning signs that he was having a heart attack. Had the company acted upon these all-too-obvious signs, it would have saved John's life. The courts rule with Ms. Smith, and award damages of US$40M. Megacorp goes bankrupt.
Nope. Using a budget veto means that last year's budget applies. It's one of those wacky rules that the government made so that it wouldn't stop itself from running just because the Congress and the President have a disagreement.
If anything, this is a start to a goverment for the corporations. Did you notice that everyone in the article listed as unhappy are megacorps upset they can't screw consumers anymore? "Traffic shaping" means colluding to make internet access more profitiable for them, and costly to us. Exclusive contracts are a means of keeping a monopoly on cable, when what's really benefical is more than one unit being able to provide cable services (which include TV, internet and phone).
In the article, the megacorps quotation is written quite separately from the pending Congressional action. There is no indication in the news story exactly why the congresscritters are upset with the FCC.
The Reuter's and AP wire stories (Reuter's story here: link)detailing the letter hint that Congress is displeased with the FCC because the FCC is not allowing the public enough to comment on decisions, and that they are concerned with FCC DEREGULATION over big media. Still, this reasoning is speculative on Reuter's part and we can't really know why the letter is sent and why the Congress wants to meet with the FCC. My point is this: the letter says nothing about letting Comcast off the hook, nothing about deregulating cable, or any other such conspiracy theory that everyone is dreaming up. That big media, even, is complaining about the FCC is purely speculative vis-a-vis the reasoning behind the letter being sent out. Big media may very well be complaining more when this is all over.
That said, there is a strong current that this Congress is upset about things like short public notice and loosening grip on big media (from the Reuter's article above). I'll hope for the best for now, and will try not to add to political distrust when it is unfounded...I think we've had enough of that over the years...
The difference here is that the Congress controls the FCC's budget, whereas it has essentially no control over Microsoft or the oil industry. Only the FTC can really do anything to Microsoft/Big Oil directly, so there is a dilution of congressional oversight. Yes, congress having a hearing with oil execs or with microsoft is more for show. If they wanted to achieve anything in those two arenas, they would haul FTC folks in and say, "Why are you letting oil/microsoft fleece the public?"
With government agencies, though, Congress really does wield power. That power is called the budget. The Congress can, and hopefully will, fund portions of the FCC that are more to its liking, and not approve portions of the FCC's budget that it does not agree with (for example, budget line item 1643: Chairman's Salary? Yeah, we don't like how high that's gotten, we'll only approve this much).
Some day, I hope that democracy starts working again...let's see if this is a start?
I think that universities should create separate degree programs. I'm sure that Computer Science would nearly empty out. Perhaps it would move to the Math department. I'd still be in it, though.
Programming is a neat tool, but the fun stuff is discrete mathematics, set theory, process/security calculus, and most importantly computability. Design patterns and computer architecture are interesting to some, but often they're the types that groan at discrete math and 'classical computer science,' (of which there is a decent amount of development these days).
I guess I have two questions. 1) will our devices report what we're watching to our cable companies now, making us all unwitting Nielsen Raters? 2) Will this just serve to lock consumers into a model like cell phones in the future?
In the 1980s, my dad worked on a project for the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation. It was called the PA-97 Helistat. There are some pictures and info about it on the Piasecki Aircraft website. It was designed to lift heavy objects using a derigible and a few helicopters. Unfortunately, the helicopters motor frequency became resonant with the flimsy frame structure and it fell apart, killing one pilot. One thing that has always intrigued me is that the German version of wikipedia has a lot more info about the Helistat than can be found anywhere else: link.
...if we live in the simulation, I doubt we'd be able to find out. We'd have to find the simulation's Godel statement...inside the simulation...and that would be impossible.
Hear, Hear. The last time I watched TV was a certain day in September of 2001. Afterwards, I took my television into the woods, hooked it up to a UPS, turned it on to Peter Jennings, and shot it with a 22-caliber rifle from a safe distance. Be wary. News has never been, and likely never will be, without an agenda.
I also wonder if this passport thing could be used for marketing purposes, e.g. track where people move in an airport for more effective billboard placement, etc. A lot of money could be made with it, as well...
As a matter of principle, why should I have to lie? It just seems like bad policy to require it if you know it will provide bad data/wasted money on flyers.
I worked at Radio Shack for a few months when I was in high school. This was in the mid-90s when we were required to ask for everybody's name/address/phone number. I almost never did, and got chewed out by my manager for it. I still never asked customers, but Yeoman Smith of 14/16/18/20/22/etc Tabernacle Rd, Medford, NJ 08055 bought about $100k of merchandise from our store each month. I guess I don't make a very good sales-drone. None of those addresses were valid, but I'm sure the company printed up and tried to mail flyers to them. I noticed when I went to RS for the first time in years just a few weeks ago that they no longer ask for my info (I did inquire about it when I checked out). I'd like to think that I helped...
No kidding. I worked at two DoD research labs between 2005 and 2007, and both were using GNU/Linux and *BSD quite extensively, both for research projects and for general IT stuff. I'd say that they use more Windows/Solaris than Linux/BSD, but commercially-supported and NIAP-Lab-vetted linux distros are relatively new in comparison to their commercial counterparts.
In my experience Frys is bar none the best techie store I have ever been in. I have never been somewhere with as wide a selection. They carry apple products and a ton of other stuff too. I don't know how big the largest apple store is but you could probably drop it into the average frys.
I've got to say that Fry's is the thing that I miss most about living in California (I moved out a few months ago). Any store that sells oscilloscopes, refrigerators, motherboards, and computer cases (as well as the aforementioned energy drinks and porn) has got my vote.
Fry's has its faults though. I once tried to buy some flash memory there, and they demanded my address and phone number in order to get it in my grubby little paws. I wouldn't give it to them, and they wouldn't sell me the product (just a 2 gig/$40 miniSD card, which comes in a gigantic protective plastic case with alarm chip and all that). I had cash in hand. I just didn't want to get added to their junkmail list. Flyers in my mailbox are something that I just can't stand...so, that ended up being my last time shopping there.
How much did Sony/et al. pay for this thing to be made? I wonder if the author is getting a bonus for getting it included on Slashdot?
The Star Trek one looks like an ad for Creston as well. Where oh where did that *good* Star Trek Apartment go? The one that the autistic fellow in the UK made by hand?
I own a DNS-323 too. I loaded it up with two 500gb hard disks. It sucks. I still use it, but it sucks. The standard firmware only lets you update the device with D-Link digitally signed firmware. The D-Link firmware is buggy as hell, still, even after the thing has been out commercially for over a year.
- It has a bad version of Samba on it that will cause your files to magically disappear if you decide to copy files larger than about 20 gigs, or if you copy large numbers of files at the same time. - It uses the ext2 filesystem, which not only lacks journalling, but has no nice way to fun fsck (only option is to enable telnet via a fun_plug and run fsck on your mounted filesystem...blech!). - It *still* has piss-poor unicode support. - The current firmware does funny things if one of your drives dies and you have a RAID-1 array, such as not rebuilding the array. Some users have reported that it won't even detect a drive failure in raid-1. - Its user/group and volume management simply doesn't work. You can't set up multiple shares and give different users different permissions to the shares. User/group management is a mess.
All of these problems exist in the 1.03 firmware, which is the latest version. My unit has also been blessed with a common hardware problem -- one of the "drive okay" blue led's died. Quite a few folks are reporting this (probably cheap leds).
About the only way to make the 323 usable and safe is to solder a serial port on it so that you can use redboot and overwrite the stock firmware. IMHO, if you're going to take the trouble to solder and manage the thing via the command-line, you may as well just plunk down a bit of extra cash and have an actual warranty. Or save the money and put two hard drives in an old computer/install linux distro of your choice. It certainly shouldn't be considered a reliable nas, and I certainly wouldn't be saving copies of anything important on it (unless you're backing the data up somewhere else).
There have been dozens Linux-based NASs for years now. Infrant sells bare-bones ones, Buffalo Technology sells them, heck, D-Link sells a (crappy) little NAS with a linux kernel. How is this news? Or was this ad sponsored?:).
I would rank the mechanic profession as requiring much more in the way of investment. As you might expect, a mechanic provides their own tools, and not the cheap ones you or I buy, brands like Snap-On. Buying the manuals isn't cheep either, there are often libraries on CD-ROM/DVD to handle most every symptom. On top of that emission requirements.
This I didn't know. I sort of figured that whatever shop a mechanic ends up working for would provide the tools. My brother is a carpenter, though, so I guess I should know better (I've been buying him good tools for christmas just about every year while he "makes ends meet," -- I wonder if carpenters ever do that these days;-)). Got to love the programming business -- pretty much the only tool I've had to buy is my laptop, the development environment is free for home use for putzing around, and my employer pays for my tools at work. Well, that, and the pay and the hours are better. I guess I'll stick to my day job...
For sure the Subaru is easy. The one I have is from 1994. My first real mechanical experience with the car was several weeks prior to the brake job -- I changed out the alternator and it was an equally easy job (twenty minutes or so...forty if you count the fact that I had to go to a hardware store to buy some sockets). I also worked on my dad's a bit (his is an Outback from 1999) and it is still quite easy to work on. As for 'having a knack,' I beg to differ:). My girlfriend owns an '04 Honda and it is not nearly so easy to work on (changing the oil requires putting the car on a lift, as the ground clearance is too low, and the jack points are too small and low for a standard jack, for example). I bought an oil sucking pump and tried changing her oil that way a few weeks ago -- the pump's hose broke off and fell into the oil pan, and I ended up taking it to a mechanic (he had to pull the motor up in order to drop the oil pan off).
My guess is that if a mechanic is skilled, trained, and has a lot of equipment, doing a brake job on most cars would be pretty easy -- comparable to replacing a hard drive for a computer geek (pull apart case, plug in, boot up, format disk, reinstall os/mirror old disk onto new disk).
You're probably thinking of a macbook pro, which I agree has a PITA installation procedure (hence it's definitely worth the $160 to replace the drive, even for geeks like us). The original author said that he had a 'black macbook', and I can only assume that this means a non-pro model (which has the very easy and straighforward removal process linked to above).
I did it myself a few years ago on my Subaru, and it took me maybe a half hour for both front brakes. This with only the tools that came with the car (crappy jack plus standard issue box wrench/screwdriver), no lift, no a priori knowledge of how to replace pads (Haynes manual in hand). Here's a blog entry from when I did it: link.
I found it to be incredibly easy, though perhaps Subies are easier-than-your-average-car. It took me about 25-30 minutes plus driving down the road/washing my hands with orange cleaner time. I didn't bleed the brakes at the time (I ended up doing that a few months later, more for learning than because anything was wrong). I simply unbolted one of the caliper bolts, swung the caliper up, used a c-clamp to squeeze the piston down, removed pads, replaced, swung caliper down, rebolted, and went on a test drive. It's been a few years, and the brakes are still happy. Next time it won't take me so long, as I'll remember to mark which way the shims go in:).
This Macbook was not under warranty, or the hard disk replacement would have been free. The $160 that the author is scoffing at isn't that outrageous if you consider that he paid for a hard disk and the labor to install it (though if his generation of macbook is anything like mine, replacing the hard drive is a snap. Still, using his auto analogy, mechanics get to charge you $100 labor to install your brake pads, even though it takes them only a few minutes). If he had demanded the old disk and made a scene, he probably could have gotten it back.
I agree that saying that the old hard disk is theirs is lame as hell, and he's rightfully angry about that. It's probably the only point of the author's that holds water. There are alternatives to the Apple Store for repair, though. CompUSA was one (though it's now going out of business). There are other Apple Authorized Service Shops, like Ikon Solutions, and the old-skool Apple stores (privately owned ones, of which many still exist).
I once decided to have an old iBook's hard disk upgraded. I took it to CompUSA (please don't snicker, the iBook was under warranty, CompUSA is/was apple authorized so it meant saving my warranty, and this was around the year 2000, before Apple Stores were everywhere). When I took it in, I simply asked to keep the old drive and they were happy to put it in a static bag for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies, it is not automatic. But a resolution is passed every year, and is often done so before the budget is even produced by the President. For 2007, see H.J. Res. 20 (link to 110th congress H.J. Res. 20). The resolution generally funds single-year programs at equivalent levels of the 2006 budget. The House Rules Glossary lists these continuations under "Continuing Resolution", defined thus:
Continuing Resolution (CR) - A joint resolution that provides funds to continue the operation of federal agencies and programs at the beginning of a new fiscal year if their annual appropriation bills have not yet been enacted; also called continuing appropriations. Enacted shortly before or after the new fiscal year begins, the first continuing resolution usually makes funds available for a specified period; additional resolutions are often needed after the first expires. Some CRs have provided appropriations for an entire fiscal year. Continuing resolutions for specific periods customarily fix a rate at which agencies may incur obligations based either on the prior year's appropriations, the President's budget request, or the amount in the agency's regular annual appropriation bill that has already been passed by one or both houses. In the House, continuing resolutions are privileged after September 15.
Naturally for the government agencies involved this is kind of a headache, and requires money-shuffling so that the projects that need funding get funding.
Reid
I don't think an employer really wants this. It may open them to an interesting liability avenue.
Imaginary scenario:
John Smith is sitting at his desk, typing away at the report for tomorrow's deadline. His blood pressure and heart rate spike momentarily, then calm down. His left arm becomes slightly numb, but he thinks nothing of this. About 20 minutes later, he drops dead.
His family turns and sues Megacorp. Megacorp had access to his vital statistics, and should have noticed the warning signs that he was having a heart attack. Had the company acted upon these all-too-obvious signs, it would have saved John's life. The courts rule with Ms. Smith, and award damages of US$40M. Megacorp goes bankrupt.
Reid.out
Nope. Using a budget veto means that last year's budget applies. It's one of those wacky rules that the government made so that it wouldn't stop itself from running just because the Congress and the President have a disagreement.
Congress' primary power over the whitehouse is the budget, as well. Look at how that is working out.
Right, but the white house can veto a budget. The FCC does not have that luxury...
Look up the word representative republic.
:).
I did, and the definition started with,
"A representative republic is a form of democracy..."
Nice troll, though
Reid.out
If anything, this is a start to a goverment for the corporations. Did you notice that everyone in the article listed as unhappy are megacorps upset they can't screw consumers anymore? "Traffic shaping" means colluding to make internet access more profitiable for them, and costly to us. Exclusive contracts are a means of keeping a monopoly on cable, when what's really benefical is more than one unit being able to provide cable services (which include TV, internet and phone).
In the article, the megacorps quotation is written quite separately from the pending Congressional action. There is no indication in the news story exactly why the congresscritters are upset with the FCC.
The Reuter's and AP wire stories (Reuter's story here: link)detailing the letter hint that Congress is displeased with the FCC because the FCC is not allowing the public enough to comment on decisions, and that they are concerned with FCC DEREGULATION over big media. Still, this reasoning is speculative on Reuter's part and we can't really know why the letter is sent and why the Congress wants to meet with the FCC. My point is this: the letter says nothing about letting Comcast off the hook, nothing about deregulating cable, or any other such conspiracy theory that everyone is dreaming up. That big media, even, is complaining about the FCC is purely speculative vis-a-vis the reasoning behind the letter being sent out. Big media may very well be complaining more when this is all over.
That said, there is a strong current that this Congress is upset about things like short public notice and loosening grip on big media (from the Reuter's article above). I'll hope for the best for now, and will try not to add to political distrust when it is unfounded...I think we've had enough of that over the years...
Reid.out
Is anything ever done about it? Not really.
The difference here is that the Congress controls the FCC's budget, whereas it has essentially no control over Microsoft or the oil industry. Only the FTC can really do anything to Microsoft/Big Oil directly, so there is a dilution of congressional oversight. Yes, congress having a hearing with oil execs or with microsoft is more for show. If they wanted to achieve anything in those two arenas, they would haul FTC folks in and say, "Why are you letting oil/microsoft fleece the public?"
With government agencies, though, Congress really does wield power. That power is called the budget. The Congress can, and hopefully will, fund portions of the FCC that are more to its liking, and not approve portions of the FCC's budget that it does not agree with (for example, budget line item 1643: Chairman's Salary? Yeah, we don't like how high that's gotten, we'll only approve this much).
Some day, I hope that democracy starts working again...let's see if this is a start?
Reid.out
I think that universities should create separate degree programs. I'm sure that Computer Science would nearly empty out. Perhaps it would move to the Math department. I'd still be in it, though.
Programming is a neat tool, but the fun stuff is discrete mathematics, set theory, process/security calculus, and most importantly computability. Design patterns and computer architecture are interesting to some, but often they're the types that groan at discrete math and 'classical computer science,' (of which there is a decent amount of development these days).
Reid
I guess I have two questions. 1) will our devices report what we're watching to our cable companies now, making us all unwitting Nielsen Raters? 2) Will this just serve to lock consumers into a model like cell phones in the future?
That is all.
In the 1980s, my dad worked on a project for the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation. It was called the PA-97 Helistat. There are some pictures and info about it on the Piasecki Aircraft website. It was designed to lift heavy objects using a derigible and a few helicopters. Unfortunately, the helicopters motor frequency became resonant with the flimsy frame structure and it fell apart, killing one pilot. One thing that has always intrigued me is that the German version of wikipedia has a lot more info about the Helistat than can be found anywhere else: link.
...if we live in the simulation, I doubt we'd be able to find out. We'd have to find the simulation's Godel statement...inside the simulation...and that would be impossible.
That is all.
Reid
Hear, Hear. The last time I watched TV was a certain day in September of 2001. Afterwards, I took my television into the woods, hooked it up to a UPS, turned it on to Peter Jennings, and shot it with a 22-caliber rifle from a safe distance. Be wary. News has never been, and likely never will be, without an agenda.
Thanks for scaring me.
I'm in the security business, it's my job(tm).
Reid
I also wonder if this passport thing could be used for marketing purposes, e.g. track where people move in an airport for more effective billboard placement, etc. A lot of money could be made with it, as well...
Coming soon to a bomb near you:
while(1){
count = poll_rfid_country_of_origin(USA);
if(count > 5)
detonate();
sleep(5);
}
As a matter of principle, why should I have to lie? It just seems like bad policy to require it if you know it will provide bad data/wasted money on flyers.
I worked at Radio Shack for a few months when I was in high school. This was in the mid-90s when we were required to ask for everybody's name/address/phone number. I almost never did, and got chewed out by my manager for it. I still never asked customers, but Yeoman Smith of 14/16/18/20/22/etc Tabernacle Rd, Medford, NJ 08055 bought about $100k of merchandise from our store each month. I guess I don't make a very good sales-drone. None of those addresses were valid, but I'm sure the company printed up and tried to mail flyers to them. I noticed when I went to RS for the first time in years just a few weeks ago that they no longer ask for my info (I did inquire about it when I checked out). I'd like to think that I helped...
No kidding. I worked at two DoD research labs between 2005 and 2007, and both were using GNU/Linux and *BSD quite extensively, both for research projects and for general IT stuff. I'd say that they use more Windows/Solaris than Linux/BSD, but commercially-supported and NIAP-Lab-vetted linux distros are relatively new in comparison to their commercial counterparts.
In my experience Frys is bar none the best techie store I have ever been in. I have never been somewhere with as wide a selection. They carry apple products and a ton of other stuff too. I don't know how big the largest apple store is but you could probably drop it into the average frys.
I've got to say that Fry's is the thing that I miss most about living in California (I moved out a few months ago). Any store that sells oscilloscopes, refrigerators, motherboards, and computer cases (as well as the aforementioned energy drinks and porn) has got my vote.
Fry's has its faults though. I once tried to buy some flash memory there, and they demanded my address and phone number in order to get it in my grubby little paws. I wouldn't give it to them, and they wouldn't sell me the product (just a 2 gig/$40 miniSD card, which comes in a gigantic protective plastic case with alarm chip and all that). I had cash in hand. I just didn't want to get added to their junkmail list. Flyers in my mailbox are something that I just can't stand...so, that ended up being my last time shopping there.
Reid
How much did Sony/et al. pay for this thing to be made? I wonder if the author is getting a bonus for getting it included on Slashdot?
The Star Trek one looks like an ad for Creston as well. Where oh where did that *good* Star Trek Apartment go? The one that the autistic fellow in the UK made by hand?
Reid
I own a DNS-323 too. I loaded it up with two 500gb hard disks. It sucks. I still use it, but it sucks. The standard firmware only lets you update the device with D-Link digitally signed firmware. The D-Link firmware is buggy as hell, still, even after the thing has been out commercially for over a year.
- It has a bad version of Samba on it that will cause your files to magically disappear if you decide to copy files larger than about 20 gigs, or if you copy large numbers of files at the same time.
- It uses the ext2 filesystem, which not only lacks journalling, but has no nice way to fun fsck (only option is to enable telnet via a fun_plug and run fsck on your mounted filesystem...blech!).
- It *still* has piss-poor unicode support.
- The current firmware does funny things if one of your drives dies and you have a RAID-1 array, such as not rebuilding the array. Some users have reported that it won't even detect a drive failure in raid-1.
- Its user/group and volume management simply doesn't work. You can't set up multiple shares and give different users different permissions to the shares. User/group management is a mess.
All of these problems exist in the 1.03 firmware, which is the latest version. My unit has also been blessed with a common hardware problem -- one of the "drive okay" blue led's died. Quite a few folks are reporting this (probably cheap leds).
About the only way to make the 323 usable and safe is to solder a serial port on it so that you can use redboot and overwrite the stock firmware. IMHO, if you're going to take the trouble to solder and manage the thing via the command-line, you may as well just plunk down a bit of extra cash and have an actual warranty. Or save the money and put two hard drives in an old computer/install linux distro of your choice. It certainly shouldn't be considered a reliable nas, and I certainly wouldn't be saving copies of anything important on it (unless you're backing the data up somewhere else).
There have been dozens Linux-based NASs for years now. Infrant sells bare-bones ones, Buffalo Technology sells them, heck, D-Link sells a (crappy) little NAS with a linux kernel. How is this news? Or was this ad sponsored? :).
Reid
I would rank the mechanic profession as requiring much more in the way of investment. As you might expect, a mechanic provides their own tools, and not the cheap ones you or I buy, brands like Snap-On. Buying the manuals isn't cheep either, there are often libraries on CD-ROM/DVD to handle most every symptom. On top of that emission requirements.
;-)). Got to love the programming business -- pretty much the only tool I've had to buy is my laptop, the development environment is free for home use for putzing around, and my employer pays for my tools at work. Well, that, and the pay and the hours are better. I guess I'll stick to my day job...
This I didn't know. I sort of figured that whatever shop a mechanic ends up working for would provide the tools. My brother is a carpenter, though, so I guess I should know better (I've been buying him good tools for christmas just about every year while he "makes ends meet," -- I wonder if carpenters ever do that these days
For sure the Subaru is easy. The one I have is from 1994. My first real mechanical experience with the car was several weeks prior to the brake job -- I changed out the alternator and it was an equally easy job (twenty minutes or so...forty if you count the fact that I had to go to a hardware store to buy some sockets). I also worked on my dad's a bit (his is an Outback from 1999) and it is still quite easy to work on. As for 'having a knack,' I beg to differ :). My girlfriend owns an '04 Honda and it is not nearly so easy to work on (changing the oil requires putting the car on a lift, as the ground clearance is too low, and the jack points are too small and low for a standard jack, for example). I bought an oil sucking pump and tried changing her oil that way a few weeks ago -- the pump's hose broke off and fell into the oil pan, and I ended up taking it to a mechanic (he had to pull the motor up in order to drop the oil pan off).
My guess is that if a mechanic is skilled, trained, and has a lot of equipment, doing a brake job on most cars would be pretty easy -- comparable to replacing a hard drive for a computer geek (pull apart case, plug in, boot up, format disk, reinstall os/mirror old disk onto new disk).
From the website you sent, here are the instructions, which back up what I've stated:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/MacBook-Core-Duo/Hard-Drive-Replacement/86/5/Page-1/Battery
You're probably thinking of a macbook pro, which I agree has a PITA installation procedure (hence it's definitely worth the $160 to replace the drive, even for geeks like us). The original author said that he had a 'black macbook', and I can only assume that this means a non-pro model (which has the very easy and straighforward removal process linked to above).
Reid
I did it myself a few years ago on my Subaru, and it took me maybe a half hour for both front brakes. This with only the tools that came with the car (crappy jack plus standard issue box wrench/screwdriver), no lift, no a priori knowledge of how to replace pads (Haynes manual in hand). Here's a blog entry from when I did it: link.
:).
I found it to be incredibly easy, though perhaps Subies are easier-than-your-average-car. It took me about 25-30 minutes plus driving down the road/washing my hands with orange cleaner time. I didn't bleed the brakes at the time (I ended up doing that a few months later, more for learning than because anything was wrong). I simply unbolted one of the caliper bolts, swung the caliper up, used a c-clamp to squeeze the piston down, removed pads, replaced, swung caliper down, rebolted, and went on a test drive. It's been a few years, and the brakes are still happy. Next time it won't take me so long, as I'll remember to mark which way the shims go in
From the story, a few things appear evident:
This Macbook was not under warranty, or the hard disk replacement would have been free.
The $160 that the author is scoffing at isn't that outrageous if you consider that he paid for a hard disk and the labor to install it (though if his generation of macbook is anything like mine, replacing the hard drive is a snap. Still, using his auto analogy, mechanics get to charge you $100 labor to install your brake pads, even though it takes them only a few minutes).
If he had demanded the old disk and made a scene, he probably could have gotten it back.
I agree that saying that the old hard disk is theirs is lame as hell, and he's rightfully angry about that. It's probably the only point of the author's that holds water. There are alternatives to the Apple Store for repair, though. CompUSA was one (though it's now going out of business). There are other Apple Authorized Service Shops, like Ikon Solutions, and the old-skool Apple stores (privately owned ones, of which many still exist).
I once decided to have an old iBook's hard disk upgraded. I took it to CompUSA (please don't snicker, the iBook was under warranty, CompUSA is/was apple authorized so it meant saving my warranty, and this was around the year 2000, before Apple Stores were everywhere). When I took it in, I simply asked to keep the old drive and they were happy to put it in a static bag for me.