I appreciate the sentiment of your post, though I think the economics may not bear out. That box _IS_ a pc, and a formidable unit, at that price point. It is also quite interesting from an economic standpoint to see Microsft taking such a bath on a product to penetrate an evolving market. Fun to pour some oil on that fire, no?
Other posts have pointed out the fact that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. At ~$200 it is quite the temptation to redirect the ends of the original means.
Though I know I and a large portion of this audience would have a fit, I imagine a good number of the general browsing public in many circumstances would find such gimmicks endearing and may not be put off by their use. The problem is that I don't know if the general population of users would see the implied threat by making such auto-redesigning of their user interface: not all designers are benevolent.
It could display "utilitarian" tools in the browser toolbar, such as a currency exchange-rate calculator on a financial Web site, Entel said I think it is fair to compare this example of breaking the user interface to other nefarious schemes such as designing borderless pop-up browser windows with what appear to alert dialogs that people by their previous experience will choose to click, thereby redirecting their browser to a site that they most likely had no intention of visiting. In this case, re-designing a UI beyond easy repair for most end users, replete with click dialogs to any number of undesired "features" like a link bar full of cheap drugs and bargain toner.
If you interrupt the consumer for no good reason, it's not effective advertising, Iaffaldano said. The majority of the advertising I receive interrupts what I am doing and is not effective. Why would this "enhancement" be applied differently?
My reading of the article indicated that customizations would carry from site to site, with no indication of it being an opt-in feature, though at that point in the article their was not clarification as to what browser to which they refer. It would be a strong step forward for browser writers to make such customization completely at the will of the end user and by default, turned off.
I read an interesting perspective on wave power from Dr. Peter M. Duesing regarding the exploitation of wave and tidal power here that basically says that its prospects of being a major contributor to large scale production are slight. On a small scale there are severalcases that support localised usage.
Regarding Ocean POwer Delivery, there is a pdf regarding their funding package available here.
If their site goes down or if you don't want to click, here is the text clipped from the pdf:
Press release
Wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery secures £6m funding package
Edinburgh-based wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery Ltd (OPD) today announced that is has secured £6m (EUR 9.8m) funding from an international consortium of venture capital companies led by Norsk Hydro Technology Ventures (NTV), the venture capital arm of Norway's largest industrial company and including 3i, Europe's leading venture capital company and Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). Each organisation provided an equal level of funding to produce the largest investment of its kind in a wave power company.
The investment success builds on OPD's steady rise to prominence in the field and clears the way for the company to become the leading force in the sector.
"This investment is the culmination of OPD's intensive four-year programme to develop the Pelamis concept, the funds secured today will allow us to demonstrate and commercialise the system," says Richard Yemm, Managing Director of OPD. "Wave energy represents a major commercial opportunity and we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this."
The Pelamis is a long, thin, semi-submerged articulated structure composed of four cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints, the complete system is oriented head-on to incoming waves. The wave-induced motion of the joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, these pump fluid through hydraulic motors to drive electrical generators. A 750kW machine with a similar output to a modern wind turbine will be 150metres long and 3.5metres in diameter. An array of 40 Pelamis machines would provide enough power to supply the energy needs of 20,000 homes.
OPD aims to have a working prototype producing electricity to the grid within the next two years.
Many previous wave energy concepts have failed as they lack the inherent survivability of the Pelamis. The system uses the unique combination of a streamlined, low-profile form and proven technology from the offshore oil and gas sector to provide the required load-shedding and reliability to withstand the rigours of the marine environment.
OPD has recently demonstrated the system at intermediate scale in the Firth of Forth as part of a UK DTI supported programme to address all key aspects of technical risk. Further DTI support in conjunction with today's investment will allow all elements of the full-scale system to be thoroughly tested this summer before being installed in the first full-scale demonstrator next year.
In 1999 the company won a contract to install a pair of Pelamis machines off Islay within the Scottish Renewables Obligation and recently beat off stiff international competition to secure an agreement with BC Hydro, the Canadian West Coast utility, to carry out a full feasibility study for a 2MW scheme for installation off Vancouver Island during 2003.
Graeme Sword, 3i director commented: "OPD has developed a leading renewable energy technology which positions the business to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the rapidly developing renewable energy market. The combination of this unique technology and strong management makes OPD an ideal fit for 3i in the development of our support for alternative energy technologies."
"NTV's role is to seek exciting investments with venture capital financial returns, in arapidly evolving new energy economy." says Jørgen Rostrup, NTV's Managing Director. "We screened several wave energy machines around the world before finding Pelamis, and are delighted to work with OPD and our co-investors in commercialising this concept."
"SAM is proud to be part of this exciting project in what we have identified as a highly promising new opportunity in the renewable energy space. Dr Richard Yemm has managed to gather an impressive group of talented people who have produced a design that stands out for successfully marrying robustness with efficiency," says Gianni Operto, principal of SAM Private Equity.
Anyway, here is more on Mr. Bemer for others who do not follow the link:
At Lockheed, he devised the first computerized 3-D dynamic perspective,
prelude to today's computer animation.
At IBM, he developed
PRINT I (the first load-and-go computer method),
FORTRANSIT (the first major proof of intercomputer portability,
and the second FORTRAN compiler),
Commercial Translator (a COBOL input), and
XTRAN (an ALGOL predecessor).
In 1957 March he was the first to describe commercial timesharing,
which you now see as the Worldwide Web.
In 1959 his internal IBM memo proposed word processing.
The Identification and Environment Divisions of COBOL are due to him,
as is the Picture Clause, which could have avoided the Year 2000 problem
if used correctly.
He coined the terms "COBOL", "CODASYL", and "Software Factory".
He was the major force in developing ASCII (contributing 6 characters --
ESCape (see that key), FS, GS, RS, US, and the backslash). He invented the
escape sequence and registry concept, and is called the "Father of ASCII".
He wrote the original scope and program of work for international and
national computer standards, and chaired the international committee for
programming language standards for eleven years.
He was Program Chairman for ACM 70, promoter of National Computer
Year (when the Y2K problem should have been solved), and edited the
proceedings as the book "Computers and Crisis".
Three Pioneer Days have honored him -- SHARE, COBOL, and FORTRAN.
As editor of the Honeywell Computer Journal (the first A4-size publication
[1971] in the U.S.) he innovated fiche-of-the-issue and multimedia publishing.
He has published more than 110 articles in technical journals.
In 1995 he received the Albion College Distinguished Alumnus Award.
In 2000 he was named in the Delta Tau Delta "Rainbow" as one of the "100
Most Influential Delts of the 20th Century".
He is recognized as the first person in the world to publish warnings of the
Year 2000 problem -- first in 1971, and again in 1979.
Not really expensive, but there is one gotcha in that the Thunder uses a proprietary power suply connector; there are, as far as I have read, only three suppliers with the appropriate connector available on the market.
connections? I wonder how long before opening a secure (or any) connection to an address that contains copyright material will be considered sufficiently egregious for an ISP to castrate your service.
I've sometimes speculated that Shockley didn't like my Shoran slide rule and therefore went back to Bell Labs to invent the transistor that put us out of business.
I do not work in and have had very little exposure to research science. I have read many stories, fiction and non, of competition providing motivation, even the base fuel to researchers in their endeavor to innovate. My grandfather, who was an optical engineer, related to me some stories of his time working in the optics research division of a very large and respected corporation during the fifties and sixties. Though they were on the same "team", the level of competition at that facility was as high as any he had ever seen in any of his experiences, including his time in the military and as an amateur and professional boxer.
I would be interested to hear from people that are directly exposed to research sciences what role competition plays.
In a galaxy very, very, very, very, far away, there lived a ruthless race of beings known as . . . Spaceballs.
The evil leaders of Planet Spaceball, having foolishly squandered their precious atmosphere, have devised a secret plan to take every breath of air away from their peace-loving neighbor, Planet Druidia.
when I was moving one of my domain names to an alternate registrar from NetSol. I received invoicing from NetSol for a domain that would expire within 30 days. I decided to switch my registar to my ISP (who uses OpenSRS). I paid the transfer fee to the new registrar. NetSol received the request for the transfer prior to the expiration date of my contract, did not act on the order though they had it in their possession, then denied the order based on the fact that is was then in unpaid status after it expired, admitted to me over the phone that they did so, and asked for me to ask the new registrar to resubmit the change order.
After complying (by resubmitting and repaying the transfer fee to the new registrar; the original fee was refunded post-rejection) they again rejected the request for the same reason.
Rather than waste anymore time/labor, I paid their one year renwal fee to make sure nothing untoward happened to that domain name, then resubmitted the change request, which has yet to be answered.
In a previous life I worked for an independent environmental impact study company whose primary focus was/is traffic analysis.
Nutshell: Somebody wants to develop/build/install something in someones neighborhood. One part of the process is to justify to agencies with jurisdiction over their permit(s) and other interested parties such as adjacent businesses, municipalities, neighborhood groups, etc. that their development wont screw up their commute/get their schoolchildren run over/cut off reasonable access to their burger joint, and if it does, what will it take to mitigate those factors to an agreeable level.
So, they hire somebody like the company for which I worked to tell them the story about what traffic (most likely/more accurately motor vehicle traffic) was like awhile ago, what it is like now, and what it will be like down the road, so to speak. There are standard indices of road conditions. This includes the physical condition of the road, roadway Level Of Service, (graded from A to F, meaning approximately what you think it would), speeds, what kind of parking is available, delays due to congestion, and crash rates. The effort was to get a grip on an objective way of representing the quality of travel, not just stats/spin/lies. I personally found it to be a rather interesting field of study, when you consider time/quantity effects of traffic and the fluid nature of said same. In fact, an expert in the field once said (rather poetically for an engineer), traffic flows like water. Maybe he was a plumber, too.
Anyway, my small part in the picture was site survey and analysis. Site survey data is gathered by a variety of means, some of which are:
Historical analysis
Rip from other peoples prior work. Sometimes survey data for less studied areas was a decade out of date with only one or two samples, making trend analyses more sketchy.
Automatic gathering devices
This includes those rubber snakes on the road. By the way, those measure speed as well as volume (in answer to the people concerned it might give away their favorite spots to speed: they already know), and can determine axle separation so semis are tallied more accurately. Your states DOT often owns those.
Organic gathering devices
Surveyors would sit in a car and actually count vehicles, inventory the intersection entrance/egress paths, time usable merge gaps, and more. This led to several interesting encounters with law enforcement personnel when I tried to explain what a SWM was doing, alone in a vehicle near a grade school.
This information would prove valuable to businesses and municipalities, if those entities choose to/have the power to act upon the information. Close to real-time, continuously updated data sets, from arterials to back streets. Prevent the design of severe congestion by having better information. I realize this sidesteps the issues raised by the anti-gattaca crowd, but this data waiting to be harvested has the potential of improving the quality of life for many people.
How much of your life would you get back if you shaved 15 minutes off your commute, each way, for the next 20 years? If you work a standard week, it would save you over 104 continuous days of sitting in traffic. Multiply that out over a populace and see why this might be a good thing.
It has been brought up to management if only being paid when an issue occurs is legal
Your HR and Payroll department will certainly have documentation of company policy. Reconcile this against what you actually are getting paid. Talk to your payroll department since you said your company is willing to work with you and gather all such documentation. Reference your research against what information you can glean from resources available from your state government, whether online or if you have to solicit it via facsimile or snail mail, or maybe walk on down to the closest state office and ask. The Legal Information Institute will get you started. That will help resolve the issue of legality, though it will involve more effort than just asking.
If you are not happy with the terms and conditions of your employment once you have determined its legal merits, the question becomes more muddy. Labor organization and talk thereof can polarize labor/management as well as workers themselves; be sure of your footing and your intentions if you would choose to engage that dialog.
I am disappointed that my service will now probably die.
History
I signed up with Phoenix Networks in April of 2000. They are/were a St. Louis-based ISP contracting with Northpoint for SDSL circuits with a static IP for reasonable prices. I received 768/384 for $40/mo., and the throughput on my circuit was always satisfactory.
Delivery of the circuit required USWest (now QWest) to do their part and bring me a new pair to my house and they did dawdle, but after that, the install was seamless and my circuit met my expectations.
Northpoint offered a rebate program at the time of sign-up. I never received that rebate, though I am not too concerned about that. What bothered me was a few months after becoming a PhoenixDSL/Northpoint customer, I found out that Phoneix went under. Their service was maintained/acquired by Megapath, who retained the business clients and spun the residential customers to Telocity. Several months later, Telocity has yet to send me the hardware they say I "need" to use to access their service, and billing seems to be up in the air. I thought about leaving their stable for Megapath or QWest but decided to wait things out since Telocity has recently been made a subsidiary of Hughes Corporation, the muscle behind DirecTV/PC and I am intrigued by potential bundled packages.
Through all this, my service has been reliable. I marvel that any industry can maintain viability with such turmoil, let alone leave my connection solid and intact. I am happy my service still works (knock^2), yet realize what has been a good ride shall now come to its close and I must begin shopping.
recently discovered a 6-inch disk-shaped piece of chipped flint on which was an approximately 10,000-year-old painting of a figure representing what appears to be a hunter chasing a gazelle, waving a sharp stick. Indentations for thumb and forefinger lead experts to believe the design was for easy flinging, perhaps the first example of instant messaging, as it was found in what appears to be a Homosapien skull. Nearby, another skeleton was found with a gourd donned atop its skull, perhaps the first known implementation of a spam filter.
Such restriction of access seems to indicate a bias towards non-compliance or thwarting of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Forbidding audible rendition of the material, whether performed by human or machine, to someone incapable of accessing the material in the sole manner provided and allowed appears to me as mean-spirited at best.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the sentiment of your post, though I think the economics may not bear out. That box _IS_ a pc, and a formidable unit, at that price point. It is also quite interesting from an economic standpoint to see Microsft taking such a bath on a product to penetrate an evolving market. Fun to pour some oil on that fire, no?
Other posts have pointed out the fact that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. At ~$200 it is quite the temptation to redirect the ends of the original means.
Though I know I and a large portion of this audience would have a fit, I imagine a good number of the general browsing public in many circumstances would find such gimmicks endearing and may not be put off by their use. The problem is that I don't know if the general population of users would see the implied threat by making such auto-redesigning of their user interface: not all designers are benevolent.
It could display "utilitarian" tools in the browser toolbar, such as a currency exchange-rate calculator on a financial Web site, Entel said I think it is fair to compare this example of breaking the user interface to other nefarious schemes such as designing borderless pop-up browser windows with what appear to alert dialogs that people by their previous experience will choose to click, thereby redirecting their browser to a site that they most likely had no intention of visiting. In this case, re-designing a UI beyond easy repair for most end users, replete with click dialogs to any number of undesired "features" like a link bar full of cheap drugs and bargain toner.
If you interrupt the consumer for no good reason, it's not effective advertising, Iaffaldano said. The majority of the advertising I receive interrupts what I am doing and is not effective. Why would this "enhancement" be applied differently?
My reading of the article indicated that customizations would carry from site to site, with no indication of it being an opt-in feature, though at that point in the article their was not clarification as to what browser to which they refer. It would be a strong step forward for browser writers to make such customization completely at the will of the end user and by default, turned off.
What are they gonna do now remove the One ring from LOTR?
No, just the Orcs.
I read an interesting perspective on wave power from Dr. Peter M. Duesing regarding the exploitation of wave and tidal power here that basically says that its prospects of being a major contributor to large scale production are slight. On a small scale there are several cases that support localised usage.
Regarding Ocean POwer Delivery, there is a pdf regarding their funding package available here.
If their site goes down or if you don't want to click, here is the text clipped from the pdf:
Press release
Wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery secures £6m funding package
Edinburgh-based wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery Ltd (OPD) today announced that is has secured £6m (EUR 9.8m) funding from an international consortium of venture capital companies led by Norsk Hydro Technology Ventures (NTV), the venture capital arm of Norway's largest industrial company and including 3i, Europe's leading venture capital company and Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). Each organisation provided an equal level of funding to produce the largest investment of its kind in a wave power company.
The investment success builds on OPD's steady rise to prominence in the field and clears the way for the company to become the leading force in the sector.
"This investment is the culmination of OPD's intensive four-year programme to develop the Pelamis concept, the funds secured today will allow us to demonstrate and commercialise the system," says Richard Yemm, Managing Director of OPD. "Wave energy represents a major commercial opportunity and we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this."
The Pelamis is a long, thin, semi-submerged articulated structure composed of four cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints, the complete system is oriented head-on to incoming waves. The wave-induced motion of the joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, these pump fluid through hydraulic motors to drive electrical generators. A 750kW machine with a similar output to a modern wind turbine will be 150metres long and 3.5metres in diameter. An array of 40 Pelamis machines would provide enough power to supply the energy needs of 20,000 homes.
OPD aims to have a working prototype producing electricity to the grid within the next two years.
Many previous wave energy concepts have failed as they lack the inherent survivability of the Pelamis. The system uses the unique combination of a streamlined, low-profile form and proven technology from the offshore oil and gas sector to provide the required load-shedding and reliability to withstand the rigours of the marine environment.
OPD has recently demonstrated the system at intermediate scale in the Firth of Forth as part of a UK DTI supported programme to address all key aspects of technical risk. Further DTI support in conjunction with today's investment will allow all elements of the full-scale system to be thoroughly tested this summer before being installed in the first full-scale demonstrator next year.
In 1999 the company won a contract to install a pair of Pelamis machines off Islay within the Scottish Renewables Obligation and recently beat off stiff international competition to secure an agreement with BC Hydro, the Canadian West Coast utility, to carry out a full feasibility study for a 2MW scheme for installation off Vancouver Island during 2003.
Graeme Sword, 3i director commented: "OPD has developed a leading renewable energy technology which positions the business to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the rapidly developing renewable energy market. The combination of this unique technology and strong management makes OPD an ideal fit for 3i in the development of our support for alternative energy technologies."
"NTV's role is to seek exciting investments with venture capital financial returns, in arapidly evolving new energy economy." says Jørgen Rostrup, NTV's Managing Director. "We screened several wave energy machines around the world before finding Pelamis, and are delighted to work with OPD and our co-investors in commercialising this concept."
"SAM is proud to be part of this exciting project in what we have identified as a highly promising new opportunity in the renewable energy space. Dr Richard Yemm has managed to gather an impressive group of talented people who have produced a design that stands out for successfully marrying robustness with efficiency," says Gianni Operto, principal of SAM Private Equity.
ends 20 March 2002
For further information please contact:
Ocean Power Delivery Ltd
Richard Yemm or Max Carcas
Tel: +44 131 554 8444
Email: enquiries@oceanpd.com
Web: www.oceanpd.com
You can. The SS40 answers your question.
Off-topic? Moderator, follow the link.
Anyway, here is more on Mr. Bemer for others who do not follow the link:
At Lockheed, he devised the first computerized 3-D dynamic perspective,
prelude to today's computer animation.
At IBM, he developed
PRINT I (the first load-and-go computer method),
FORTRANSIT (the first major proof of intercomputer portability,
and the second FORTRAN compiler),
Commercial Translator (a COBOL input), and
XTRAN (an ALGOL predecessor).
In 1957 March he was the first to describe commercial timesharing,
which you now see as the Worldwide Web.
In 1959 his internal IBM memo proposed word processing.
The Identification and Environment Divisions of COBOL are due to him,
as is the Picture Clause, which could have avoided the Year 2000 problem
if used correctly.
He coined the terms "COBOL", "CODASYL", and "Software Factory".
He was the major force in developing ASCII (contributing 6 characters --
ESCape (see that key), FS, GS, RS, US, and the backslash). He invented the
escape sequence and registry concept, and is called the "Father of ASCII".
He wrote the original scope and program of work for international and
national computer standards, and chaired the international committee for
programming language standards for eleven years.
He was Program Chairman for ACM 70, promoter of National Computer
Year (when the Y2K problem should have been solved), and edited the
proceedings as the book "Computers and Crisis".
Three Pioneer Days have honored him -- SHARE, COBOL, and FORTRAN.
As editor of the Honeywell Computer Journal (the first A4-size publication
[1971] in the U.S.) he innovated fiche-of-the-issue and multimedia publishing.
He has published more than 110 articles in technical journals.
In 1995 he received the Albion College Distinguished Alumnus Award.
In 2000 he was named in the Delta Tau Delta "Rainbow" as one of the "100
Most Influential Delts of the 20th Century".
He is recognized as the first person in the world to publish warnings of the
Year 2000 problem -- first in 1971, and again in 1979.
I was referring to Grandpa Simpson. That line was from an episode.
I can imagine grandpa's voice.. The fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached..
But...
Mr. Bemer really does have a fascinating background. Read a bit about him here.
though I would likely be a little more cautious about overclocking my pants.
Not really expensive, but there is one gotcha in that the Thunder uses a proprietary power suply connector; there are, as far as I have read, only three suppliers with the appropriate connector available on the market.
The Tiger uses a standard ATX power supply.
connections? I wonder how long before opening a secure (or any) connection to an address that contains copyright material will be considered sufficiently egregious for an ISP to castrate your service.
I've sometimes speculated that Shockley didn't like my Shoran slide rule and therefore went back to Bell Labs to invent the transistor that put us out of business.
I do not work in and have had very little exposure to research science. I have read many stories, fiction and non, of competition providing motivation, even the base fuel to researchers in their endeavor to innovate. My grandfather, who was an optical engineer, related to me some stories of his time working in the optics research division of a very large and respected corporation during the fifties and sixties. Though they were on the same "team", the level of competition at that facility was as high as any he had ever seen in any of his experiences, including his time in the military and as an amateur and professional boxer.
I would be interested to hear from people that are directly exposed to research sciences what role competition plays.
Once upon a time warp. . . .
.
In a galaxy very, very, very, very, far away, there lived a ruthless race of beings known as . . . Spaceballs.
The evil leaders of Planet Spaceball, having foolishly squandered their precious atmosphere, have devised a secret plan to take every breath of air away from their peace-loving neighbor, Planet Druidia.
and, just because this is too much fun . .
Spaceballs?
Oh shit, there goes the planet.
this search at the USPTO, and found:
Searching 1996-2001...
Results of Search in 1996-2001 db for:
AN/"intel corporation": 3598 patents.
Hits 1 through 50 out of 3598
and wondered how I would find the time to burn both ends of that candle.
when I was moving one of my domain names to an alternate registrar from NetSol. I received invoicing from NetSol for a domain that would expire within 30 days. I decided to switch my registar to my ISP (who uses OpenSRS). I paid the transfer fee to the new registrar. NetSol received the request for the transfer prior to the expiration date of my contract, did not act on the order though they had it in their possession, then denied the order based on the fact that is was then in unpaid status after it expired, admitted to me over the phone that they did so, and asked for me to ask the new registrar to resubmit the change order.
After complying (by resubmitting and repaying the transfer fee to the new registrar; the original fee was refunded post-rejection) they again rejected the request for the same reason.
Rather than waste anymore time/labor, I paid their one year renwal fee to make sure nothing untoward happened to that domain name, then resubmitted the change request, which has yet to be answered.
I have been shaken down.
Nutshell: Somebody wants to develop/build/install something in someones neighborhood. One part of the process is to justify to agencies with jurisdiction over their permit(s) and other interested parties such as adjacent businesses, municipalities, neighborhood groups, etc. that their development wont screw up their commute/get their schoolchildren run over/cut off reasonable access to their burger joint, and if it does, what will it take to mitigate those factors to an agreeable level.
So, they hire somebody like the company for which I worked to tell them the story about what traffic (most likely/more accurately motor vehicle traffic) was like awhile ago, what it is like now, and what it will be like down the road, so to speak. There are standard indices of road conditions. This includes the physical condition of the road, roadway Level Of Service, (graded from A to F, meaning approximately what you think it would), speeds, what kind of parking is available, delays due to congestion, and crash rates. The effort was to get a grip on an objective way of representing the quality of travel, not just stats/spin/lies. I personally found it to be a rather interesting field of study, when you consider time/quantity effects of traffic and the fluid nature of said same. In fact, an expert in the field once said (rather poetically for an engineer), traffic flows like water. Maybe he was a plumber, too.
Anyway, my small part in the picture was site survey and analysis. Site survey data is gathered by a variety of means, some of which are:
Historical analysis
Rip from other peoples prior work. Sometimes survey data for less studied areas was a decade out of date with only one or two samples, making trend analyses more sketchy.
Automatic gathering devices
This includes those rubber snakes on the road. By the way, those measure speed as well as volume (in answer to the people concerned it might give away their favorite spots to speed: they already know), and can determine axle separation so semis are tallied more accurately. Your states DOT often owns those.
Organic gathering devices
Surveyors would sit in a car and actually count vehicles, inventory the intersection entrance/egress paths, time usable merge gaps, and more. This led to several interesting encounters with law enforcement personnel when I tried to explain what a SWM was doing, alone in a vehicle near a grade school.
This information would prove valuable to businesses and municipalities, if those entities choose to/have the power to act upon the information. Close to real-time, continuously updated data sets, from arterials to back streets. Prevent the design of severe congestion by having better information. I realize this sidesteps the issues raised by the anti-gattaca crowd, but this data waiting to be harvested has the potential of improving the quality of life for many people.
How much of your life would you get back if you shaved 15 minutes off your commute, each way, for the next 20 years? If you work a standard week, it would save you over 104 continuous days of sitting in traffic. Multiply that out over a populace and see why this might be a good thing.
would be at your own HR department.
It has been brought up to management if only being paid when an issue occurs is legal
Your HR and Payroll department will certainly have documentation of company policy. Reconcile this against what you actually are getting paid. Talk to your payroll department since you said your company is willing to work with you and gather all such documentation. Reference your research against what information you can glean from resources available from your state government, whether online or if you have to solicit it via facsimile or snail mail, or maybe walk on down to the closest state office and ask. The Legal Information Institute will get you started. That will help resolve the issue of legality, though it will involve more effort than just asking.
If you are not happy with the terms and conditions of your employment once you have determined its legal merits, the question becomes more muddy. Labor organization and talk thereof can polarize labor/management as well as workers themselves; be sure of your footing and your intentions if you would choose to engage that dialog.
This story, also at CNN, (briefly) covers some of the hard/software used on ISS.
I am disappointed that my service will now probably die.
History
I signed up with Phoenix Networks in April of 2000. They are/were a St. Louis-based ISP contracting with Northpoint for SDSL circuits with a static IP for reasonable prices. I received 768/384 for $40/mo., and the throughput on my circuit was always satisfactory.
Delivery of the circuit required USWest (now QWest) to do their part and bring me a new pair to my house and they did dawdle, but after that, the install was seamless and my circuit met my expectations.
Northpoint offered a rebate program at the time of sign-up. I never received that rebate, though I am not too concerned about that. What bothered me was a few months after becoming a PhoenixDSL/Northpoint customer, I found out that Phoneix went under. Their service was maintained/acquired by Megapath, who retained the business clients and spun the residential customers to Telocity. Several months later, Telocity has yet to send me the hardware they say I "need" to use to access their service, and billing seems to be up in the air. I thought about leaving their stable for Megapath or QWest but decided to wait things out since Telocity has recently been made a subsidiary of Hughes Corporation, the muscle behind DirecTV/PC and I am intrigued by potential bundled packages.
Through all this, my service has been reliable. I marvel that any industry can maintain viability with such turmoil, let alone leave my connection solid and intact. I am happy my service still works (knock^2), yet realize what has been a good ride shall now come to its close and I must begin shopping.
Both are properties of internet.com.
recently discovered a 6-inch disk-shaped piece of chipped flint on which was an approximately 10,000-year-old painting of a figure representing what appears to be a hunter chasing a gazelle, waving a sharp stick. Indentations for thumb and forefinger lead experts to believe the design was for easy flinging, perhaps the first example of instant messaging, as it was found in what appears to be a Homosapien skull. Nearby, another skeleton was found with a gourd donned atop its skull, perhaps the first known implementation of a spam filter.
that consoles are coming up ahead running a Microsoft OS...
Such restriction of access seems to indicate a bias towards non-compliance or thwarting of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Forbidding audible rendition of the material, whether performed by human or machine, to someone incapable of accessing the material in the sole manner provided and allowed appears to me as mean-spirited at best.