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Comment Re:Navy? Warships? (Score 1) 101

Remedy: Consumers should immediately stop using the product and contact L G Sourcing to receive free replacement burners and, depending on the model of the grill owned, a free replacement lid.

Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact the firm toll-free at (888) 840-9590 anytime

Just curious, but: If you liked the grill, and did the homework, why didn't you just -- you know -- fix it? For free, even?

Comment Re:It was an app on a WORK-Issued Phone! (Score 1) 776

I've got a few potential bosses to work for, and I know of zero qualified local replacements. The company I still work for (now as a contractor) has hired a few potentials, but always lost money on them, and none remain.

It doesn't seem to be a Californian race-to-the-bottom here in the technical fields. YMMV.

If I could find 50 people who know what I know and are capable of implementing their knowledge as effectively as I'm told that I do, I'd start a regional business tomorrow...and take my (awesome) boss with me as a partner.

Comment Re:It was an app on a WORK-Issued Phone! (Score 1) 776

Is that the "free world" as in actually free, or "freedom" as prescribed by the laws of the People's Republic of California?

Because here, I live and work in an at-will employment state: I can be fired because I looked at someone sideways, or for no reason at all. I can also quit because someone looked at me sideways, or for no reason at all.

The end game is that they lose the help, and I lose the money. Both I and my employer have freedom to fire eachother at any instant, for any reason (or none at all), without retribution (excluding ADA, race, and etc. issues).

*shrug*

Comment Re:It was an app on a WORK-Issued Phone! (Score 3, Interesting) 776

Meh; the type of signal does not matter. Until all of cell phone/GPS/Wifi-geolocation coverage is actually 100%, including inside of every building, down in every valley, and inside of every tunnel, there can be no expectation of continuous signal.

Meanwhile, being on call 24/7, 365.25 (this includes every fucking weekend, and every fucking holiday, and every fucking vacation -- no matter how remote) is a recipe for employees (me) finding ways to avoid it.

Realistically, I usually left the phone out of the Faraday bag: Mine had two compartments, one shielded and one not, and I used it as a continuous-duty cell-phone case. When I decided it was *my* time, I put the phone into the shielded side, and I'd periodically check for messages.

I really didn't care about what my boss thought of where I went, or how fast I got there on my own time (he got a speed alert on his own phone one day. His jovial SMS response: "134MPH. Niiiiice!").

It was more a matter of: If I want to take time off and go down in the holler in Kentucky, get drunk, eat lots of bacon and shoot guns, then I'm NOT going to be working, nor am I going to continuously cater to a cell phone. (And yes, I always let them know in advance when I'd be leaving for such a jaunt.)

A better solution is to have rotating on-call duty, with allowance for being absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work, and turning off tracking when one is absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work. Despite being a 9-5 shop supporting 24/7 systems, we had plenty of qualified techs to make things work, and it was an unreasonable expectation that all of them be absolutely on call at all times.

Especially for hourly employees with no stake in the company.

Meanwhile, leaving my phone on my desk would be such a slap in the face that I wouldn't have a job when I came back from Kentucky, and there would be no way for me to help during the time that I was gone if my counterparts really needed me.

Comment Re:It was an app on a WORK-Issued Phone! (Score 4, Interesting) 776

I personally would probably get one of those signal shielding bags and drop it in there when I wasn't to be on-call. Then you could carry it with you even. Then it also appears just as if it lost power for a while, so it would be hard to get in trouble over it...

I used to have a phone with the problem described in TFA, along with me allegedly being "on-call" at all hours.

Such a shielding bag (really just a Faraday cage) generally worked just fine.

It is important to note, however, that putting the phone in the Faraday bag emulated loss of signal, instead of loss of power, since the program in the phone reported these conditions differently, and so also were the interpretations of these conditions by management.

Comment Re:5 billion web pages in 4MB!? Impressive! (Score 1) 56

No.

I'm suggesting that it route.

Nowhere did I suggest that Google not have their own (hard-wired, or otherwise out-of-band) connection to that router; indeed, I expect that they would. They've already got server farms; all they need are geographically-diverse mesh nodes.

And you're making the logical error that others seem to be making: That every purpose in having any network is to get free and fast access to the greater Internet, and anything that fails at this promise is utterly useless.

Following this misguided tangent, mesh is and must be a failure, because we don't (and can never) have enough unlicensed spectral bandwidth to make this happen.

Comment Re: I'd like to see the environmental nightmare di (Score 1) 369

I had a decent burr grinder. It died, I fixed it, it died, I fixed it, and then I roached the motor.

I replaced it with a whizzy-blade grinder, which seems to do almost as well with good technique.

Regarding espresso, I did have one of those machines. If it were the hard plumbed push a button and pull a shot type that the barista at my local coffee sanctuary uses, I'd still have one.

Instead, I donated it to the thrift store and someone else paid five bucks for it. Good for them for owning such a hated kit.

So I've got my thermal carafe drip brew machine, a big percolator, and a French press. I want an alcohol or butane fuelled vacuum brewer, but.....

And I'm totally not interested in spending my own dime on anything Kuereg.

Comment Re:Inspections eventually become a boondoggle (Score 1) 395

In (most of?) Ohio, that's still the fix for a plugged catalytic converter. One can even be extra-sneaky, gut the cat, and trick an ODB-II computer into thinking that the catalyst is still there by putting an appropriate "spark plug anti-fouler" on the post-cat O2 sensor.

And then there's the other side of the coin. In my F-body days, I remember some of the net.folks in California with LT1 small block V8s that were so finely tuned that they sailed through the smog check even without catalytic converters: Their biggest issue, IIRC, was passing visual inspection.

Comment Re:I'd like to see the environmental nightmare die (Score 2) 369

My boss has a Keurig machine, and he keeps stock of my favorite coffee pods (he is a good boss).

So to me, it's not about waste (the dumpster empties itself every Monday, and costs him the same whether full or empty), and it's not about the expense (I offered to give him money once, and it insulted him so I stopped doing that).

There is a science to coffee brewing, and the first part of that is starting with fresh beans and much of the rest is consistent temperature and brewing time and good water.

The Keurig system does a pretty good job on freshness (they keep ambient oxygen out), and does an excellent job on temperature and brewing time, and the filter on the faucet in the shop kitchen does a decent job making tap water tasty.

This all conspires to mean that every cup of Newman's Own Medium Roast Breakfast Blend tastes just like the one I had earlier today. Or last week. Or last year. Or two years ago, when he had a completely different Keurig machine.

To me, the taste of the end result is the advantage of pre-filled, disposable pods: It always produces an excellent cup of coffee. Nevermind the convenience: I can walk in the back door of the shop, start a cup of coffee in about 20 seconds, say Hi to the boss and go get my to-go cup in a couple of minutes later.

Of course, my situation is unique since I have no material or waste expense with the boss's Keurig. At home, we go through a few 10-cup drip-brewed thermal carafes of coffee a day. Sometimes if we expect company during the day we fire up the antique 60-cup percolator. We seldom feel that we've wasted any coffee. But the stuff I make at home, though very tasty and much, much cheaper is never as consistent as the boss's Keurig.

Comment Re:Brand? (Score 1) 227

I have a stout outdoor clothesline. It doesn't work in the wintertime, or any of early spring or late fall. It also doesn't work in the rain.

I don't hang clothes to dry in the house in the wintertime, for the same reason I don't route my (electric) drier's exhaust into the house: All that water wants to condense on a cold surface (of which there are plenty) turn that surface into a happy little mold farm. The same thing happens during the humid summer, except the mold is actually on the clothes instead of hidden in a cool corner somewhere.

Also: Evaporation of water is always an endothermic process, which is also to say that it's never free-of-cost to dry clothes inside of a heated dwelling.

But hey, don't let truth get in the way of a good and senseless argument about a someone's misplaced sense of frugality!

Comment Re:99.9999% of sites have 1-3 servers per continen (Score 1) 56

There are about ten web sites in the world that could actually have servers in thousands of locations without going bankrupt.

You don't need a server. You need a COTS router running OpenWRT and OpenVPN (with hardware acceleration), a couple of well-placed antennas, and a commercial- (not carrier-) grade symmetric DSL, cable, or wireless connection.

In other words: You don't need a million spinning-disks server with its own abilities to serve content, you need a a million low-power NAPs with a gateway to your own content.

How much traffic does google.com see from my small Ohio town of ~45k citizens? Answer: Not enough to swamp a well-proportioned 802.11a link. Or a 45Mbps T3. Or a 75Mbps symmetric DOCSIS connection from TWC...all of which are cheaper than hosting actual servers on a mesh.

An existing Internet service that wants to be on a local mesh doesn't need a server, per se, but just a point of access to their existing servers.

And I'm sure I won't be the first to volunteer my resources (land, electricity) in exchange for them to do just this, as long as I get fast Internet and a mesh node in exchange. If I get a fueled and maintained standby generator to use, too, I might even pay them to let them use my resources...but either way, it's win-win.

(What if a node fails because COTS routers are shit, or power is out, or TWC has fucked up that branch? Who cares. There will be other nodes, they'll just be a few more hops away than usual. Yay, redundancy.)

(Oh, you're a small website? Akamai has a theoretical mesh package for you! And I'll gladly use an Akamai mesh node as a warm footstool, after I build the tower, string the cable, and align the antennae while I bask in the warm glow of fast and free Interwebs for myself.)

Comment Re:Brand? (Score 1) 227

I had a fancy-ish Panasonic for about 13 years, including a variable-speed magnetron (which is a hell of a neat trick). I recently gave it to a friend when the SO downsized it; I expect it to live at least another 4 years of regular use.

It was neither particularly cheap, nor alarmingly expensive when I bought it. Other than some of the superficial silkscreening being being rubbed off from cleaning, it looks and performs like new with zero maintenance over the years.

Aren't they all like this? I don't think I've ever seen a microwave oven retired simply because it suddenly stopped working.

My grandparents' 1975-ish Amana RadarRange was still working fine when she died a couple of years ago.

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