If the questioner is an independent contractor, it's up to him to negotiate compensation with his employer. And that includes how to handle time spent on-call. There is nobody to police whether or not businesses treat their independent contractors fairly, whatever your concept of "fair" may be. In fact, one of the items on the IRS's 20 factor test to determine if a worker is an employee or a contractor is that a contractor should be able to lose money on the deal, whereas an employee cannot.
Of course, that is a convenient segue into whether or not this guy is actually an independent contractor. I've seen these arrangements before, and it is exceedingly rare to find one that would actually pass muster with the IRS. Typically, the "contractor" works full time for the company, can't set his own hours, doesn't use his own equipment, can't decide how the work is performed, can't hire subs, and doesn't offer his services to the general public. Companies who convert this type of employee to independent contractor status are opening themselves up to exposure that the IRS might reclassify (read: correctly classify) this contractor as an employee and demand back payroll taxes. The contractor could then take the employer to court, with that IRS ruling in hand, and argue that he is entitled to full benefits and to compensation for the time he was wrongfully denied benefits.
So now that the contractor is really an employee, we can talk about the subject at hand. I think anyone would agree that the effort expended for an hour worked is greater than the effort expended for an hour on call, and that the effort expended for an hour on-call is greater than the effort expended for an hour of leisure time. Therefore, it seems fair to me that time spent on-call should be compensated, but at a lower level than time spent on-duty.
Sasha Grey has contracted both chlamydia and gonorrhea. Or so she claimed in her appearance on the Tyra Banks Show.
I realize that both are easily treatable, but I'm not quite sure you can claim that "STD's are actually fairly uncommon in the mainstream porn industry".
I think there is a limitation to how much you can trust those maps. They can't possibly account for what type of structure you're in, either.
For instance, I am currently in an office building in the middle of a major city. AT&T's map says I am currently in their "best" coverage, but please let me assure you that there is no AT&T service in my building. And it's not like I work inside a bank vault, because my Palm Pre on Sprint gets full signal, and my old Verizon phone got full signal as well.
The same is true at my house, which is in a first-ring suburb of the same major city. Perfect Verizon and Sprint coverage (my wife has Verizon) and no AT&T (but T-Mo works fine.)
Smarter people than me could debate the accuracy of the "There's a map for that" commercials, but my real world observation is that AT&T's coverage simply sucks.
EVDO revA is what Verizon is advertizing. HSDPA is what ATT has. Edge is also technically in the '3G' spec, and well should be shown in the Verizon ads. But honestly 3G doesn't mean shit.
If it were possible, I'd love to see the map showing real-world AT&T coverage.
Seems the usual state of affairs for iPhone users is that they have no signal at all, let alone 3G. And we're talking in major metro areas, here.
As far as I can tell, in the real world, AT&T has the worst network.
I've had less than an hour of downtime over the last year. I don't know how reliable dreamhost is, but I'd say this system is certainly reliable enough for the application you describe.
I'm very happy for you, but as we like to say in business, "Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results". Even bytemark will tell you this. Look at this from their SLA:
It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure that the consequences of any such failure are foreseen, and a suitable backup plan in place where there may be financial consequences of a failure. Bytemark will always advise the customer on contingencies to the best of our abilities.
What that says to me is that Bytemark will do their best to keep your services up and running, and by your review, they do a good job of it, but Bytemark does not have any failover procedure in place if their datacenter goes offline.
Think a datacenter can't go offline? A reasonably well-respected US host had a fire last year that brought their Houston datacenter offline for 2 days. Thousands of servers and god knows how many websites were brought down.
What would happen to your $25/mo VPS if Bytemark were to experience a similar situation? Do you really think you'd be back up and running in an hour? If I read their SLA correctly, the most you can expect from Bytemark if such an emergency happened would be 1 month's hosting fees. Would £15 be enough for you to cover the damage caused by 2 days' downtime?
For my application, I am perfectly fine with 5 minutes' downtime. 2 days, however, is not acceptable. I won't dispute that Bytemark is infinitely more reliable than Dreamhost. However, you should realize that you are at risk for a protracted outage and you don't appear to have a contingency plan.
If that is OK for your application, then the above shouldn't pose a problem for you. For my application, it is not acceptable, so I have a failover procedure in place.
Because of FM-modulation, this technique is not hi-fi. But a decent transmitter does an admirable job in retaining audio quality.
Which transmitter do you consider to be "decent" and/or "admirable"?
I ask, because I have a Motorokr T505 for my car, and while it's incredibly convenient, I'd rate the audio quality somewhere between "blows goats" and "licks monkey balls".
All they have to do to get back on the high horse is come up with a better pricing plan than Verizon's and have the service available in the next couple of months.
Of course AT&T should cost less than Verizon. It's inferior service.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I think you'll find that the price is basically the same for the iPhone. Maybe check out HTC Hero or Palm Pre on Sprint.
You be patient for a few months and competition will drive it all down and you'll have the luxury of a choice.
I know you have your tongue firmly implanted in your cheek, but there has been some downward pressure on price lately. T-Mobile's new unlimited plans now start from $50/mo. Boost has an all-you-can eat plan for $50/mo (but really crappy phones). Sprint is certainly cheaper than att/verizon.
Seems like we are, at last, starting to see some price competition. My Sprint family plan of 4 Palm Pres works out to $31.87/mo/line, and that includes 5GB data/line, unlimited SMS/MMS/GPS/music/tv, unlimited calls to any mobile on any network, etc.
So, yeah, I think we're starting to see some reasonable prices... at least when you compare with how bad att gouges you with iPhone.
EC2 is rather expensive for most applications. It really only pays off if you may need a lot of power on short notice (but usually need none). The article describes one of the very few general applications.
I think most people don't realize just how often they need a lot (or even a little) computing power on short notice. Once you get used to that way of thinking, it's a little addictive. By way of example:
I host one of my company's websites on Dreamhost. Am I insane? Dreamhost experiences an outage every few months or so. Incompatible with a business application, right?
Wrong. I have an EC2 bundle with a startup script that automatically configures the instance and fails the IP address over. If my company's website is ever down for more than 2 minutes, a failover is triggered. The website on EC2 takes about 2 minutes to come up, so my maximum downtime is 5 minutes or so. That's an acceptable amount of downtime for my application, a brochureware site that displays vacant apartments and accepts rental applications (several hours, naturally, would be unacceptable).
EC2 as a cold spare saves me money. If I had to use a reliable webhost, it would cost me, what, $50/mo? Dreamhost costs $5, and I probably use about $5-$10/yr in EC2 charges for the cost spare. Based on the above assumptions (I have no idea what a reliable webhost costs these days), EC2 saves me roughly $530/yr.
What another example? A client of mine has a deployment process where they first deploy to a staging environment before production. Because the production environment has a clustered DB and clustered app server, their staging environment has 2 DB nodes and 2 web nodes. That's 4 machines that see roughly 50 hours of use per year. Not efficient at all.
We considered VMware, but they didn't have the admin expertise in-house, and I forget what the license cost was, but that was an issue, too. In addition, they could not do load testing because they didn't have enough boxes to replicate the production system architecture. Enter EC2.
Now, they spin up as many EC2 instances as they need for whatever testing scenario they need. 4 instances for application staging, and 15 for load testing, at a cost of a fraction of one of their staging boxes that sat idle 99.9% of the time.
Like I said, the concept that you can have a virtual box whenever you need it and then throw it away when you're done is very addicting. I find it to be extremely convenient.
Don't forget other cosets: cooling, system administration, datacenter space, backups, racks, switches, KVMs, UPSs, network administration, maintenance, etc.
No question EC2 is expensive if you plan on fully-utilizing that hardware. But that's why it's called the Elastic Compute Cloud, not the Static Compute Cloud. If your computational needs are static, EC2 is most definitely the wrong tool for the job.
3. You normally keep an ear out for someone calling you in the radio, but sometimes you just might miss it. I concede that 30m without listening to air traffic control is too much... 4. Their timing was all wrong... Near top of descent turning on their laptops?? Come on...... It's one of the only 2 situations were you really must have full attention, Takeoff until Top of Climb and from Top of Descent to Landing....
You say termination was excessive. I disagree.
If I was on-duty, and in one of those situations where I "really must have full attention", and instead, I totally blew off and ignored my boss at that critical time (and an additional 30 minutes or 78 minutes or however long)... if I didn't have a really darn good reason for acting so unprofessionally, I would expect to be terminated. And I don't even fly around big, expensive machines with hundreds of people on-board depending on me.
Will restoring that data be slow and sketchy? Sure.
So what is supposed to happen while "slow and sketchy" is taking place? All business stops?
And what is meant by "sketchy"? "Sketchy" is not the adjective I like to hear used to describe the accuracy and consistency of my data.
Even if you're just backing up a bunch of flat files, how do you know that your backup is a consistent snapshot? Or are you OK with your data just being invalid in unpredictable ways?
Where are your backups located? On-site? I sure hope not. Fires happen. Floods happen.
Backups and restores are tricky to get right, and I don't think it's possible to overstate this.
For what it's worth, you did not need to organize an LLC to receive a 1099. In fact, companies don't receive 1099s at all. 1099s are only for individuals.
disclaimer: i am ‘self-employed’, have been for 7+ years. i can’t put any money into unemployment insurance, which saves me a bit, but i will never get a dime out either no matter how unemployed i might be i will never be part of the statistics. i’m considered employed, no matter how much money i bleed, until i get a W-2 job and get laid off from it.
It didn't save you much money, FYI. I own my own company and I am required to pay unemployment insurance on my salary (well, the first $8,000.00 of it, anyhow). If memory serves, it runs about $100/year. And yes, I am entitled to collect unemployment if my business goes under.
Business owners are exempt from unemployment pay. This lawyer's $1 a month income could be considered a poorly-run business but still a business.
This is not true, or at the very least, not true in every state. I pay unemployment insurance premiums on (a tiny fraction of) my salary, and if I ever shutter my business, I am legally entitled to collect unemployment.
Back in 2000 I was denied unemployment benefits because I made the mistake of telling the interviewer I had tried to get some contract positions. Never mind that I DIDN'T GET THEM, simply the fact I was now "an independent contractor" meant I was employed.
You weren't denied because you were an independent contractor--you were denied because you were an independent contractor who wasn't paying unemployment insurance premiums.
I know independent contractors who have successfully collected unemployment; but they were set up as companies and paid for the insurance. From what I understand, it took a little bit of "educating" their case-workers, but they eventually collected what they were owed..
If your enjoyment of gambling is tied to the winning of money, then you will never enjoy gambling; as if you knew beforehand that you were guaranteed to win, it would cease to be gambling (by the dictionary definition of the word).
Some people do enjoy it as a form of entertainment--clearly you do not. But that is just a personal preference, in the same way that I do not enjoy golf or knitting or croquet as forms of entertainment. That does not entitle me to say that golf and knitting are not fun, as plenty of people do enjoy those activities.
There is one and only one way of winning in gamling. Luck. Don't laugh. I know lucky people, and I'm not one of them. The people I know have gambled a lot their whole life, with quite a profit. Not horse racing or anything where guessing is possible. If you know your math, you'll know that's very very improbalble without luck. Plain luck.
That doesn't make any sense. Nobody has better luck than anybody else. Some people are better at capitalizing on their luck than others, however.
In the case of your friends, I'm willing to bet that the "lucky" ones suffer from "selective memory". In other words, you are probably hearing only the tales of glory and are not hearing the tales of woe.
Slashdot Mirror
If the questioner is an independent contractor, it's up to him to negotiate compensation with his employer. And that includes how to handle time spent on-call. There is nobody to police whether or not businesses treat their independent contractors fairly, whatever your concept of "fair" may be. In fact, one of the items on the IRS's 20 factor test to determine if a worker is an employee or a contractor is that a contractor should be able to lose money on the deal, whereas an employee cannot.
Of course, that is a convenient segue into whether or not this guy is actually an independent contractor. I've seen these arrangements before, and it is exceedingly rare to find one that would actually pass muster with the IRS. Typically, the "contractor" works full time for the company, can't set his own hours, doesn't use his own equipment, can't decide how the work is performed, can't hire subs, and doesn't offer his services to the general public. Companies who convert this type of employee to independent contractor status are opening themselves up to exposure that the IRS might reclassify (read: correctly classify) this contractor as an employee and demand back payroll taxes. The contractor could then take the employer to court, with that IRS ruling in hand, and argue that he is entitled to full benefits and to compensation for the time he was wrongfully denied benefits.
So now that the contractor is really an employee, we can talk about the subject at hand. I think anyone would agree that the effort expended for an hour worked is greater than the effort expended for an hour on call, and that the effort expended for an hour on-call is greater than the effort expended for an hour of leisure time. Therefore, it seems fair to me that time spent on-call should be compensated, but at a lower level than time spent on-duty.
Sasha Grey has contracted both chlamydia and gonorrhea. Or so she claimed in her appearance on the Tyra Banks Show.
I realize that both are easily treatable, but I'm not quite sure you can claim that "STD's are actually fairly uncommon in the mainstream porn industry".
I guess my main point is that while the map comparison may be spurious, in the real world, Verizon still has way better coverage than AT&T.
So the point of the commercials remains.
If you never travel, why not simply purchase a regional plan? It'll save you some $$.
Personally, I do travel, and I pay for a nationwide plan, and I expect my nationwide plan to work nationwide.
I think there is a limitation to how much you can trust those maps. They can't possibly account for what type of structure you're in, either.
For instance, I am currently in an office building in the middle of a major city. AT&T's map says I am currently in their "best" coverage, but please let me assure you that there is no AT&T service in my building. And it's not like I work inside a bank vault, because my Palm Pre on Sprint gets full signal, and my old Verizon phone got full signal as well.
The same is true at my house, which is in a first-ring suburb of the same major city. Perfect Verizon and Sprint coverage (my wife has Verizon) and no AT&T (but T-Mo works fine.)
Smarter people than me could debate the accuracy of the "There's a map for that" commercials, but my real world observation is that AT&T's coverage simply sucks.
EVDO revA is what Verizon is advertizing. HSDPA is what ATT has. Edge is also technically in the '3G' spec, and well should be shown in the Verizon ads. But honestly 3G doesn't mean shit.
If it were possible, I'd love to see the map showing real-world AT&T coverage.
Seems the usual state of affairs for iPhone users is that they have no signal at all, let alone 3G. And we're talking in major metro areas, here.
As far as I can tell, in the real world, AT&T has the worst network.
I've had less than an hour of downtime over the last year. I don't know how reliable dreamhost is, but I'd say this system is certainly reliable enough for the application you describe.
I'm very happy for you, but as we like to say in business, "Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results". Even bytemark will tell you this. Look at this from their SLA:
It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure that the consequences of any such failure are foreseen, and a suitable backup plan in place where there may be financial consequences of a failure. Bytemark will always advise the customer on contingencies to the best of our abilities.
What that says to me is that Bytemark will do their best to keep your services up and running, and by your review, they do a good job of it, but Bytemark does not have any failover procedure in place if their datacenter goes offline.
Think a datacenter can't go offline? A reasonably well-respected US host had a fire last year that brought their Houston datacenter offline for 2 days. Thousands of servers and god knows how many websites were brought down.
What would happen to your $25/mo VPS if Bytemark were to experience a similar situation? Do you really think you'd be back up and running in an hour? If I read their SLA correctly, the most you can expect from Bytemark if such an emergency happened would be 1 month's hosting fees. Would £15 be enough for you to cover the damage caused by 2 days' downtime?
For my application, I am perfectly fine with 5 minutes' downtime. 2 days, however, is not acceptable. I won't dispute that Bytemark is infinitely more reliable than Dreamhost. However, you should realize that you are at risk for a protracted outage and you don't appear to have a contingency plan.
If that is OK for your application, then the above shouldn't pose a problem for you. For my application, it is not acceptable, so I have a failover procedure in place.
Do you know if there is an easy way to synchronize playback of multiple soundbridge devices using mt-daapd (a.k.a. Firefly Media Server)?
Because of FM-modulation, this technique is not hi-fi. But a decent transmitter does an admirable job in retaining audio quality.
Which transmitter do you consider to be "decent" and/or "admirable"?
I ask, because I have a Motorokr T505 for my car, and while it's incredibly convenient, I'd rate the audio quality somewhere between "blows goats" and "licks monkey balls".
All they have to do to get back on the high horse is come up with a better pricing plan than Verizon's and have the service available in the next couple of months.
Of course AT&T should cost less than Verizon. It's inferior service.
If somehow someone manages to hit 5GB without tethering, good luck proving it.
Pandora
Guess it'll be the iPhone after all.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I think you'll find that the price is basically the same for the iPhone. Maybe check out HTC Hero or Palm Pre on Sprint.
You be patient for a few months and competition will drive it all down and you'll have the luxury of a choice.
I know you have your tongue firmly implanted in your cheek, but there has been some downward pressure on price lately. T-Mobile's new unlimited plans now start from $50/mo. Boost has an all-you-can eat plan for $50/mo (but really crappy phones). Sprint is certainly cheaper than att/verizon.
Seems like we are, at last, starting to see some price competition. My Sprint family plan of 4 Palm Pres works out to $31.87/mo/line, and that includes 5GB data/line, unlimited SMS/MMS/GPS/music/tv, unlimited calls to any mobile on any network, etc.
So, yeah, I think we're starting to see some reasonable prices... at least when you compare with how bad att gouges you with iPhone.
It is unlimited data. Verizon isn't going to limit your data usage.
Oh sure, they're gonna charge you if you go beyond 5GB, but nobody claimed it was "unlimited free" data usage! ;)
EC2 is rather expensive for most applications. It really only pays off if you may need a lot of power on short notice (but usually need none). The article describes one of the very few general applications.
I think most people don't realize just how often they need a lot (or even a little) computing power on short notice. Once you get used to that way of thinking, it's a little addictive. By way of example:
I host one of my company's websites on Dreamhost. Am I insane? Dreamhost experiences an outage every few months or so. Incompatible with a business application, right?
Wrong. I have an EC2 bundle with a startup script that automatically configures the instance and fails the IP address over. If my company's website is ever down for more than 2 minutes, a failover is triggered. The website on EC2 takes about 2 minutes to come up, so my maximum downtime is 5 minutes or so. That's an acceptable amount of downtime for my application, a brochureware site that displays vacant apartments and accepts rental applications (several hours, naturally, would be unacceptable).
EC2 as a cold spare saves me money. If I had to use a reliable webhost, it would cost me, what, $50/mo? Dreamhost costs $5, and I probably use about $5-$10/yr in EC2 charges for the cost spare. Based on the above assumptions (I have no idea what a reliable webhost costs these days), EC2 saves me roughly $530/yr.
What another example? A client of mine has a deployment process where they first deploy to a staging environment before production. Because the production environment has a clustered DB and clustered app server, their staging environment has 2 DB nodes and 2 web nodes. That's 4 machines that see roughly 50 hours of use per year. Not efficient at all.
We considered VMware, but they didn't have the admin expertise in-house, and I forget what the license cost was, but that was an issue, too. In addition, they could not do load testing because they didn't have enough boxes to replicate the production system architecture. Enter EC2.
Now, they spin up as many EC2 instances as they need for whatever testing scenario they need. 4 instances for application staging, and 15 for load testing, at a cost of a fraction of one of their staging boxes that sat idle 99.9% of the time.
Like I said, the concept that you can have a virtual box whenever you need it and then throw it away when you're done is very addicting. I find it to be extremely convenient.
Don't forget other cosets: cooling, system administration, datacenter space, backups, racks, switches, KVMs, UPSs, network administration, maintenance, etc.
No question EC2 is expensive if you plan on fully-utilizing that hardware. But that's why it's called the Elastic Compute Cloud, not the Static Compute Cloud. If your computational needs are static, EC2 is most definitely the wrong tool for the job.
Look at these two of your points together:
3. You normally keep an ear out for someone calling you in the radio, but sometimes you just might miss it. I concede that 30m without listening to air traffic control is too much...
4. Their timing was all wrong... Near top of descent turning on their laptops?? Come on...... It's one of the only 2 situations were you really must have full attention, Takeoff until Top of Climb and from Top of Descent to Landing....
You say termination was excessive. I disagree.
If I was on-duty, and in one of those situations where I "really must have full attention", and instead, I totally blew off and ignored my boss at that critical time (and an additional 30 minutes or 78 minutes or however long)... if I didn't have a really darn good reason for acting so unprofessionally, I would expect to be terminated. And I don't even fly around big, expensive machines with hundreds of people on-board depending on me.
Will restoring that data be slow and sketchy? Sure.
So what is supposed to happen while "slow and sketchy" is taking place? All business stops?
And what is meant by "sketchy"? "Sketchy" is not the adjective I like to hear used to describe the accuracy and consistency of my data.
Even if you're just backing up a bunch of flat files, how do you know that your backup is a consistent snapshot? Or are you OK with your data just being invalid in unpredictable ways?
Where are your backups located? On-site? I sure hope not. Fires happen. Floods happen.
Backups and restores are tricky to get right, and I don't think it's possible to overstate this.
For what it's worth, you did not need to organize an LLC to receive a 1099. In fact, companies don't receive 1099s at all. 1099s are only for individuals.
Good luck in your job search!
Maybe it was business income?
disclaimer: i am ‘self-employed’, have been for 7+ years. i can’t put any money into unemployment insurance, which saves me a bit, but i will never get a dime out either no matter how unemployed i might be i will never be part of the statistics. i’m considered employed, no matter how much money i bleed, until i get a W-2 job and get laid off from it.
It didn't save you much money, FYI. I own my own company and I am required to pay unemployment insurance on my salary (well, the first $8,000.00 of it, anyhow). If memory serves, it runs about $100/year. And yes, I am entitled to collect unemployment if my business goes under.
Business owners are exempt from unemployment pay. This lawyer's $1 a month income could be considered a poorly-run business but still a business.
This is not true, or at the very least, not true in every state. I pay unemployment insurance premiums on (a tiny fraction of) my salary, and if I ever shutter my business, I am legally entitled to collect unemployment.
Back in 2000 I was denied unemployment benefits because I made the mistake of telling the interviewer I had tried to get some contract positions. Never mind that I DIDN'T GET THEM, simply the fact I was now "an independent contractor" meant I was employed.
You weren't denied because you were an independent contractor--you were denied because you were an independent contractor who wasn't paying unemployment insurance premiums.
I know independent contractors who have successfully collected unemployment; but they were set up as companies and paid for the insurance. From what I understand, it took a little bit of "educating" their case-workers, but they eventually collected what they were owed..
If your enjoyment of gambling is tied to the winning of money, then you will never enjoy gambling; as if you knew beforehand that you were guaranteed to win, it would cease to be gambling (by the dictionary definition of the word).
Some people do enjoy it as a form of entertainment--clearly you do not. But that is just a personal preference, in the same way that I do not enjoy golf or knitting or croquet as forms of entertainment. That does not entitle me to say that golf and knitting are not fun, as plenty of people do enjoy those activities.
There is one and only one way of winning in gamling. Luck.
Don't laugh. I know lucky people, and I'm not one of them.
The people I know have gambled a lot their whole life, with quite a profit. Not horse racing or anything where guessing is possible. If you know your math, you'll know that's very very improbalble without luck. Plain luck.
That doesn't make any sense. Nobody has better luck than anybody else. Some people are better at capitalizing on their luck than others, however.
In the case of your friends, I'm willing to bet that the "lucky" ones suffer from "selective memory". In other words, you are probably hearing only the tales of glory and are not hearing the tales of woe.