So who will buy Microsoft? Facebook? AOL? Taco Bell?

Too cheap.

It is correct but not politic. I don't know who thought it was a good idea. It sets the ground for an "us vs them" mentality which is probably not a bad idea from the employees point of view (many of whom have a fantasy-land vision of the employee/employer relationship and are frequently the most shocked when it comes to the rude awakening) but not from the company's point of view which has an interest in nurturing such delusions.

Concern for you employees is like sincerity. Once you can fake it, you have it made.

There was nothing wrong with "Personnel".

But you move your routes around and suddenly there are people who have lost service. Your service is now known as something that can't be relied on so people have to obtain their own vehicles "just in case" and so your service becomes even less popular.

Buses are a losing game and most only really survive through subsidies.

I actually ran across this in one of GRR Martin's books the other day. Very sloppy proofreading. He sometimes writes the accents but this wasn't one of those cases.

Last I saw, he has the check from Microsoft hanging on his wall.

Because domain guy is responsible for the domain names and mail guy is responsible for the mail stuff. Trust me, no company neglects email and it turns a one-person requirement for failure into a two-person requirement for failure.

Not to mention if you have a specific address for such things, you can do all sorts of tricks like having the address forward to both your domain manager *and* inserting a ticket into your ticketing system.

The best way is to scrape (or API) the domain registrar. Sometimes takes a bit of work but you have a 100% up-to-the-minute completely accurate list.

Such emails should never go directly to a person but rather to an alias, preferably one which goes to a group of people.

One of my tasks for one company I worked for was domain name manager. We were in an aggressive acquisition phase so I was dealing with new integrating new companies with their own domain names (which we kept) constantly. Gaining control of those was often somewhat crazy with the companies not knowing who was responsible or the person having left/dead or just a a-hole about getting back to me. We even had one domain snatched up by a squatter (not my fault) that cost $5000 to get back. Damn right you manage these things properly. I would check the folder those emails went to regularly and we had monitoring processes in place to ramp things up as domain expiry drew near if for some reason I missed something. This isn't rocket science.

Also what would be nice was a thermostat that took account of changing external conditions. Don't run the cooling when the sun has set and it's got cold outside and the inside temperature would be dropping soon anyway.

Part of the problem is *everywhere* has AC so it's hard for your body to adapt. There are limits of course but there's a fairly wide range where our bodies can adapt but a fairly narrow range that are set on thermostats.

I think one of the biggest things that would get people to adjust their thermostats would be an indicator that showed how much it was actually costing to run right there on the display. I also have considered the idea of a thermostat where you set a budget for the month and it does its best to maintain the temperature you set within that budget.

The crazy thing is, a lot of that stuff *could* make use of an off switch. There's no need for my stove or microwave to be drawing power just to run a display that is simply not needed probably 98% of the time.

I missed a decimal point. So 0.3 units is around 6c

Well, if you decide to go with a phone that can't run anything at all (Motofone f3 for example), I guess that's the choice you make. Point is that there are options that don't require a smartphone and don't need a bundled data plan (though yes, data on such plans is costly, more costly than justified but cheaper than a full data plan for occasional usage)

And yes, texts are far too expensive. Though on Tracfone they cost 0.3 of a minute which if my quick mental calculations are correct comes out somewhere under 1c which seems low so there's something up there.

http://tracfonereviewer.blogsp...

But possibly something could be done along the lines of the Amazon Kindle's whispernet where the data is included in the cost of the unit when purchased.