It states that special deals may have different rules regarding cancellation. It also states that both parties agree to binding arbitration for resolving disputes, so there won't be any criminal charges.
Welcome to the United States of Corporations, where contract law is the law of the land.
Well, your plan will mean that you will replace "incompetent" IT people with "inexperienced" IT people. Better to use the FAA model of accident investigation, where liability is limited and the true cause is determined (and published). That way, engineers aren't worried about being sued for a simple mistake and the entire population benefits by learning from other's mistakes.
This story smacks of a slow news cycle and nuclear fear mongering.
Apple asked that other documents such as diagrams, a schematic of the radio, the radio bill of materials and operational descriptions remain private indefinitely. The FCC agreed to the requests.
Anyone else miss the old days when every radio came with a schematic? They were usually under the battery cover or in the manuals. It really helped spark an interest in electronics, at least for me.
That's all well and good, we keep hearing the same thing... An area the size of (insert badlands state here) will power all the homes in the world. Last I heard, other than a few key locations (Las Vegas, Phoenix), there really aren't too many people in these areas. That means a lot of distribution needs to be installed. Sure, there's a lot there already due to the big dams, but efficiencies go way down once you start to push power on the grid. It is much better to generate power close to where it is consumed. Much lower line losses. Less equipment means greater reliability. And fewer hand-offs between grid operators means lower accounting/regulatory/operating costs.
Power generation should follow what works best in an area. Solar* might work well in the south and southwest. Wind and water in the Rockies and west. Nuclear in the northeast.
*Overbuild solar plants by 60%. Use excess power to pump water out of abandoned wells, quaries and mines during the day. At night, let the water back into the wells and mines, generating power.
"Our growth supplements have more vitamin D than anyone else's, so you can achieve a thicker, fuller member and be confident that you'll not have to worry about cancer."
Wireless phones use electromagnetic waves to transmit information Magnets cured my carpel tunnel/bercitus/sore back (even though there's no scientific evidence) Cell phone users annoy me, and are controlled by evil corporations. Therefore, magnetic fields (a side effect of the electro- part of the wave), are killing honeybees.
Also, honey is used for many holistic and "natural" cures, so the evil drug companies are in on it as well....We're through the looking glass, people.
Didn't ethanol enter our fuel supply when they baned MTBE? Wasn't MTBE introduced as a way to reduce knock? Isn't knock due to gasoline engines "diseling" because the octane is too high? Therefore, it should be clear that ethanol is an inferior fuel.
US higher education has some fantastic examples of greatness (MIT, Harvard, etc), but for every one of these there are hundreds of diploma mills, jock colleges, and party schools that basically teach networking skills and how to drink beer.
But, the much larger problem in the US is now that the public K-12 system is hopelessly mired in bureaucracy and political thinking (come on... a cabinet level post for education?), so the feedstock for the higher education system is drying up. Schools are able to attract smart, rich, foreign kids for a generation or so, but only until they begin teaching at home. It only takes a one shift in thinking (such as changing the imagration system) to keep the smart foreign kids home, and that's it. Professors will go into industry instead of teaching when there's no challenge, or kids who are capable of great things (because they lack the base knowledge). I think I will see the day when US kids go to the far east to get an education.
Celsius 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level, and boiling point is 100 @ sea level. How many of us live at sea level? How many of us could find a point on Earth that is sea level?
Fahrenheit is actually more accurate than celsius scale. I'm in favor of using the Kalvin scale, myself. Much warmer.
I really can't figure out why the cable companies are so against this. Most people who use DVR functions don't like the DVRs from the cable companies (or the dish companies for that matter), there is a lot of equipment that has to be warehoused and maintained, and there's no indication that there will be rampant theft of service if boxes are sold at Best Buy (there is not much evidence of people stealing Internet service, for example, and the one big example was due to a security hole that should have been plugged long before the cable modems were released anyway). Typically, about 50% of the subscriber base has at least one set top box. The long term for cable companies is that 100% of the televisions connected to a cable system will have a set top box (all digital service). That is an enourmous amount of equipment that has to be bought by the cable company, inventoried by the cable company, installed by the cable company (or fixed when the subscriber doesn't install it correctly), recovered by the cable company, and warehoused by the cable company. 10,000 set top boxes take up a lot of room in the warehouse.
Now compare that to the cable card: you buy a set top box. You take it home and call the cable company. They come out and make sure the signal is OK (at least they should), install a PCMCIA-like card in the back, show you what channels you get, and if it doesn't work, well, that's your problem. Or, if you are feeling adventurous, you stop by the cable company office on the way home with your new box and pick up a cable card.
The cable cards are kept in a large safe in the back of the office. The office manager and GM get bigger offices. The extra warehouse guys start doing installs. Live, while not good, is getting better.
All this is possible now with one way cards. When the second part of OpenCable is implemented (2 way cards, DOCSIS communications) you will see set tops in the stores. Hopefully it will be very soon. Comcast is fighting this because the back office stuff isn't ready... In fact I don't know that any equipment is certified for Opencable at this time. The TiVO box might be, but I'm not sure, and I think might not be due to the fact that there's no equipment to test it on. And don't forget the billing systems...
I get your point, but don't think for a second that the US is not funding R&D for Boeing. And they are using money confiscated from me to remain the "world's policemen," even though most of the world didn't ask us in the first place.
People with second homes usually have alarm systems. They are starting to get somewhat sophisticated, including webcams and remote tempature sensors that can be accessed from the web. almost all of them use proprietary software and comms protocols internally, but will usually interface with web browsers.
Most of us in the first world are aging. Combine that with children living farther away and you have 2 choices: Hire an imagrant/slave to take care of you, or develop automated homes. Japan is going for the automation, and I think that's a great thing. I just wish they'd spend more time developing systems that work instead of walking robots that don't seem to do much else. For how much they are spending on humanoid walking robot research they could retrofit apartments for rolling 'bots.
Here in the US (and to an extent, Europe), we are going the other route, importing workers from the third world, and then complaining that they are here "taking away jobs from 'mericans." I don't know about you, but I realllly don't want to spend my days cleaning up after, and fixing food for my elders. It's bad enough I have to be their tech support.:) Too bad the debate has become a shouting match (at least here in the US), but that's the way of politics these days.
All the mental and psychotic kids won't be able to become successful and become utter failures because they can't hold a job... And die off making the world a better place.
Then only children who can adapt to the gadgets will be able to get successful jobs in engineering and science!
Well, I think you have that backwards... The kids who are mental will get the sales and marketing jobs, make millions creating nothing, and the kids who know math and science will starve, since they won't have anything to do (or maybe become high tech plumbers).
Here's how to get paid like a CEO: 1) Get yourself an agent. 2) Put yourself in the public by getting a few articles in a trade magazine. Better yet, get on CNBC or Marketwatch. 3) Have a lawyer and your agent negotiate your... 4) Contract. If you have professionals negotiate your salary for you, you will get more money.
Think about your current job. If you are like most of us in the USA, you were offered a position, then they told you how much it paid, and after a few days on the job, you found out what you'd be doing. All of this was decided by a professional human resources person. Hopefully they had some idea what you are worth (doubtful), and if your skills matched up with the position (unlikely, but you're flexable). Most people really don't know how to barter in the US. Part of HR's job is to make you feel like they are doing you a favor by "giving" you a job, so you'll be happy right off the bat. And since most HR folks are shielded from the work, they have to fall back to personalities (which weigh huge), training (which is useless in most positions, white or blue), and how soon you can be available (so they can stop dealing with filling this opening).
Perhaps you'd like to see China end up like the former USSR, with the mafia running the show, no accounting for weapons of mass distruction, and no economy? Bad enough with 300 million... how about 1.5 billion?
Actually, Unions came into the picutre after the pay scale in factories went up. We really have Henry Ford to thank for high pay in factories, mostly because he couldn't keep people in his factories until he raised the pay scale... although one could argue that the high turnover was more due to the lousy working conditions than the low pay, but the pay seemed to work. It should be pointed out that most of his employees were sons of farmers (who weren't used to factory work), and craftsmen who put a much higher emphasis on quality workmanship over production output. Ford management was much more interested in output and price. In fact, Ford (the company) wanted a poorly built vehicle so to encourage more purchases (one of the first cases of planned obsolescence).
We have Unions to thank for 8 hour work day (although it seems to have dissapeared over the past few years), bathroom breaks, and realistic expectations on production (at least in factories). Once the pay scale went up in Ford's factories, the output jumped up, since there was a better pool available. However, Ford and Wall St. expected the output to continue to increase year over year, and so the line was sped up. At one point the workers were not permitted to leave the line for any reason. This led to the famous piss cans, and ultimately to a strike, a union, and some really disturbing communist artwork.
I'm really not suprised that people look at China and see "sweatshops" while totally ignoring the poverty level in the countryside. Perhaps they would like to see China have a second revolution to democracy, just like the former USSR? Yep, that would be much better than a measured attempt to introduce capitalist reforms to a broken system. At least Mexico might be better off.
I spent the last few days attending the SCTE Tech Expo. I was really looking forward to seeing a TiVO booth, hopefully showing off their new interface for Motorola set top boxes and maybe the dual tuner Hidef box they had at CES. They were a no show (However, Moxi was there... I didn't even know they were still in business).
Motorola's big push is to get all of their product lines interacting. They had working demos of a "whole home DVR" that will let you pause on one TV and pick up right where you leave off on another, view any content on any set top, and (if DRM allows it) send video to PCs and cell phones. The box that will allow transfers to cell phones was just a cardboard box, but with a lot of handwaving, we got the idea.
I'm thinking that TiVO is going to become the Apple of the set top industry. One can only hope they will continue to be innovative. In this case, I think it is a no brainer to come up with an easy to use way to get video to handheld devices, but someone needs to just do it. A mini-SD card reader on the USB port would be a simple way to get video on my phone, although the series 2 boxes were only USB1.1, so something in the background would make more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Ms. Scarlett in the conservatory with the candlestick.
"Those people" signed an agreement for a subscription.
n t.xmc
http://xmradio.com/about/customer-service-agreeme
It states that special deals may have different rules regarding cancellation. It also states that both parties agree to binding arbitration for resolving disputes, so there won't be any criminal charges.
Welcome to the United States of Corporations, where contract law is the law of the land.
Well, your plan will mean that you will replace "incompetent" IT people with "inexperienced" IT people. Better to use the FAA model of accident investigation, where liability is limited and the true cause is determined (and published). That way, engineers aren't worried about being sued for a simple mistake and the entire population benefits by learning from other's mistakes.
This story smacks of a slow news cycle and nuclear fear mongering.
They didn't do a very good job cremating the body.
Yea, I know, but at least if it were available somewhere...
The main reason the FCC doesn't require the print to be on the radio anymore is because most of them were impossible to read anyway.
Apple asked that other documents such as diagrams, a schematic of the radio, the radio bill of materials and operational descriptions remain private indefinitely. The FCC agreed to the requests.
Anyone else miss the old days when every radio came with a schematic? They were usually under the battery cover or in the manuals. It really helped spark an interest in electronics, at least for me.
like maiming and crippling a person for petty crime, which was common in several societies during the middle ages.
= article&node=&contentId=A49478-2001Dec15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename
That's all well and good, we keep hearing the same thing... An area the size of (insert badlands state here) will power all the homes in the world. Last I heard, other than a few key locations (Las Vegas, Phoenix), there really aren't too many people in these areas. That means a lot of distribution needs to be installed. Sure, there's a lot there already due to the big dams, but efficiencies go way down once you start to push power on the grid. It is much better to generate power close to where it is consumed. Much lower line losses. Less equipment means greater reliability. And fewer hand-offs between grid operators means lower accounting/regulatory/operating costs.
Power generation should follow what works best in an area. Solar* might work well in the south and southwest. Wind and water in the Rockies and west. Nuclear in the northeast.
*Overbuild solar plants by 60%. Use excess power to pump water out of abandoned wells, quaries and mines during the day. At night, let the water back into the wells and mines, generating power.
Don't forget spam...
"Our growth supplements have more vitamin D than anyone else's, so you can achieve a thicker, fuller member and be confident that you'll not have to worry about cancer."
Wireless phones use electromagnetic waves to transmit information
...We're through the looking glass, people.
Magnets cured my carpel tunnel/bercitus/sore back (even though there's no scientific evidence)
Cell phone users annoy me, and are controlled by evil corporations.
Therefore, magnetic fields (a side effect of the electro- part of the wave), are killing honeybees.
Also, honey is used for many holistic and "natural" cures, so the evil drug companies are in on it as well.
Didn't ethanol enter our fuel supply when they baned MTBE? Wasn't MTBE introduced as a way to reduce knock? Isn't knock due to gasoline engines "diseling" because the octane is too high? Therefore, it should be clear that ethanol is an inferior fuel.
Corn wiskey should power parties, not cars!
http://www.paconserve.org/index-fw1.asp - Falling Water, just outside Pittsburgh. Designed by Frank Lloyd Right.
Pitt gets as much rain as Seattle and is usually colder. I'd have no problem moving in next week, if given the chance.
US higher education has some fantastic examples of greatness (MIT, Harvard, etc), but for every one of these there are hundreds of diploma mills, jock colleges, and party schools that basically teach networking skills and how to drink beer.
But, the much larger problem in the US is now that the public K-12 system is hopelessly mired in bureaucracy and political thinking (come on... a cabinet level post for education?), so the feedstock for the higher education system is drying up. Schools are able to attract smart, rich, foreign kids for a generation or so, but only until they begin teaching at home. It only takes a one shift in thinking (such as changing the imagration system) to keep the smart foreign kids home, and that's it. Professors will go into industry instead of teaching when there's no challenge, or kids who are capable of great things (because they lack the base knowledge). I think I will see the day when US kids go to the far east to get an education.
Yep. And they're just laying in a hole in the ground, too.
h tm
http://www.americantechsupply.com/alcoaloosetube.
Celsius 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level, and boiling point is 100 @ sea level. How many of us live at sea level? How many of us could find a point on Earth that is sea level?
Fahrenheit is actually more accurate than celsius scale. I'm in favor of using the Kalvin scale, myself. Much warmer.
I really can't figure out why the cable companies are so against this. Most people who use DVR functions don't like the DVRs from the cable companies (or the dish companies for that matter), there is a lot of equipment that has to be warehoused and maintained, and there's no indication that there will be rampant theft of service if boxes are sold at Best Buy (there is not much evidence of people stealing Internet service, for example, and the one big example was due to a security hole that should have been plugged long before the cable modems were released anyway). Typically, about 50% of the subscriber base has at least one set top box. The long term for cable companies is that 100% of the televisions connected to a cable system will have a set top box (all digital service). That is an enourmous amount of equipment that has to be bought by the cable company, inventoried by the cable company, installed by the cable company (or fixed when the subscriber doesn't install it correctly), recovered by the cable company, and warehoused by the cable company. 10,000 set top boxes take up a lot of room in the warehouse.
Now compare that to the cable card: you buy a set top box. You take it home and call the cable company. They come out and make sure the signal is OK (at least they should), install a PCMCIA-like card in the back, show you what channels you get, and if it doesn't work, well, that's your problem. Or, if you are feeling adventurous, you stop by the cable company office on the way home with your new box and pick up a cable card.
The cable cards are kept in a large safe in the back of the office. The office manager and GM get bigger offices. The extra warehouse guys start doing installs. Live, while not good, is getting better.
All this is possible now with one way cards. When the second part of OpenCable is implemented (2 way cards, DOCSIS communications) you will see set tops in the stores. Hopefully it will be very soon. Comcast is fighting this because the back office stuff isn't ready... In fact I don't know that any equipment is certified for Opencable at this time. The TiVO box might be, but I'm not sure, and I think might not be due to the fact that there's no equipment to test it on. And don't forget the billing systems...
Perhaps you've heard of this little place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon.
http://www.boeing.com/ids/a_to_z.html looks like a lot of pork (IE government subsidies) to me.
I get your point, but don't think for a second that the US is not funding R&D for Boeing. And they are using money confiscated from me to remain the "world's policemen," even though most of the world didn't ask us in the first place.
So why don't you do it? You have the vision already, just need a day or so to shoot it.
People with second homes usually have alarm systems. They are starting to get somewhat sophisticated, including webcams and remote tempature sensors that can be accessed from the web. almost all of them use proprietary software and comms protocols internally, but will usually interface with web browsers.
:) Too bad the debate has become a shouting match (at least here in the US), but that's the way of politics these days.
Most of us in the first world are aging. Combine that with children living farther away and you have 2 choices: Hire an imagrant/slave to take care of you, or develop automated homes. Japan is going for the automation, and I think that's a great thing. I just wish they'd spend more time developing systems that work instead of walking robots that don't seem to do much else. For how much they are spending on humanoid walking robot research they could retrofit apartments for rolling 'bots.
Here in the US (and to an extent, Europe), we are going the other route, importing workers from the third world, and then complaining that they are here "taking away jobs from 'mericans." I don't know about you, but I realllly don't want to spend my days cleaning up after, and fixing food for my elders. It's bad enough I have to be their tech support.
Then only children who can adapt to the gadgets will be able to get successful jobs in engineering and science!
Well, I think you have that backwards... The kids who are mental will get the sales and marketing jobs, make millions creating nothing, and the kids who know math and science will starve, since they won't have anything to do (or maybe become high tech plumbers).
Here's how to get paid like a CEO: 1) Get yourself an agent. 2) Put yourself in the public by getting a few articles in a trade magazine. Better yet, get on CNBC or Marketwatch. 3) Have a lawyer and your agent negotiate your... 4) Contract. If you have professionals negotiate your salary for you, you will get more money.
Think about your current job. If you are like most of us in the USA, you were offered a position, then they told you how much it paid, and after a few days on the job, you found out what you'd be doing. All of this was decided by a professional human resources person. Hopefully they had some idea what you are worth (doubtful), and if your skills matched up with the position (unlikely, but you're flexable). Most people really don't know how to barter in the US. Part of HR's job is to make you feel like they are doing you a favor by "giving" you a job, so you'll be happy right off the bat. And since most HR folks are shielded from the work, they have to fall back to personalities (which weigh huge), training (which is useless in most positions, white or blue), and how soon you can be available (so they can stop dealing with filling this opening).
"Well, we're running an experiment to see the effects of gravity on these little screws."
Perhaps you'd like to see China end up like the former USSR, with the mafia running the show, no accounting for weapons of mass distruction, and no economy? Bad enough with 300 million... how about 1.5 billion?
Actually, Unions came into the picutre after the pay scale in factories went up. We really have Henry Ford to thank for high pay in factories, mostly because he couldn't keep people in his factories until he raised the pay scale... although one could argue that the high turnover was more due to the lousy working conditions than the low pay, but the pay seemed to work. It should be pointed out that most of his employees were sons of farmers (who weren't used to factory work), and craftsmen who put a much higher emphasis on quality workmanship over production output. Ford management was much more interested in output and price. In fact, Ford (the company) wanted a poorly built vehicle so to encourage more purchases (one of the first cases of planned obsolescence).
We have Unions to thank for 8 hour work day (although it seems to have dissapeared over the past few years), bathroom breaks, and realistic expectations on production (at least in factories). Once the pay scale went up in Ford's factories, the output jumped up, since there was a better pool available. However, Ford and Wall St. expected the output to continue to increase year over year, and so the line was sped up. At one point the workers were not permitted to leave the line for any reason. This led to the famous piss cans, and ultimately to a strike, a union, and some really disturbing communist artwork.
I'm really not suprised that people look at China and see "sweatshops" while totally ignoring the poverty level in the countryside. Perhaps they would like to see China have a second revolution to democracy, just like the former USSR? Yep, that would be much better than a measured attempt to introduce capitalist reforms to a broken system. At least Mexico might be better off.
I spent the last few days attending the SCTE Tech Expo. I was really looking forward to seeing a TiVO booth, hopefully showing off their new interface for Motorola set top boxes and maybe the dual tuner Hidef box they had at CES. They were a no show (However, Moxi was there... I didn't even know they were still in business).
Motorola's big push is to get all of their product lines interacting. They had working demos of a "whole home DVR" that will let you pause on one TV and pick up right where you leave off on another, view any content on any set top, and (if DRM allows it) send video to PCs and cell phones. The box that will allow transfers to cell phones was just a cardboard box, but with a lot of handwaving, we got the idea.
I'm thinking that TiVO is going to become the Apple of the set top industry. One can only hope they will continue to be innovative. In this case, I think it is a no brainer to come up with an easy to use way to get video to handheld devices, but someone needs to just do it. A mini-SD card reader on the USB port would be a simple way to get video on my phone, although the series 2 boxes were only USB1.1, so something in the background would make more sense.