UPS: $100

Battery: $35

That's more like $65 less, or 35% of the cost. The battery costs about 1/3 as much as the UPS. So your UPS cost $38 and your batteries cost $12?

Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.

Actually, this is all stuff known to project managers.

When a project is initiated, the Project Manager first creates a Project Charter. This is done by identifying stakeholders (people doing the work, people affected by the work, people receiving deliverables... any individual or group who affects, is affected by, or perceives itself to be affected by any activity or outcome of the project) and gathering preliminary project requirements. Essentially, the project manager talks to the stakeholders to roughly determine what we're trying to accomplish, how we're going to accomplish it, how much we want to spend, and how much time we're willing to take. That's written up as the charter.

After this, real requirements are gathered. Work is broken down in a Work Breakdown Structure, a hierarchical decomposition of deliverables in which each level is fully broken out into lower levels. The entire project is level 1; level 2 is the major deliverables (Including project management itself, as well as phases or components, testing, validation, documentation, hand-off, and final project closing); and those are broken out into the deliverables which make them up. The final level of deliverables is the Work Package, a complete unit of work which can be understood and managed. Work Packages are broken out into Tasks and Activities--things to do which can be assigned, and which are required to produce the Work Package.

To do all of this, the Project Manager must consult the Project Team. The Project Team will know what components go into building the deliverable output as requested. The project team will be able to estimate their competency and experience with the various components. The Project Manager will use historical information to come up with rough scheduling and budget numbers for each Work Package and Task; but the Project Team will raise issues such as that the historical information was in a wildly different context, that the people who did the work are not on this project, and so on, which means that the work may take more or less time. These factor into the baseline schedule and into the management and contingency reserves (the extra time allotted based on how likely a task should take--in theory, a programmer can write a decompression module in 4 hours, but it's 90% likely to take less than 5 hours, and a 90% success rate is targeted, so we budget 4h with a contingency reserve of 1h).

In the end, the engineers will inform the project manager of what can and can't be done, what effort goes into it, how long it may take, and so on. The Project Manager will have stakeholders prioritize deliverables, and then have them select which deliverables to cut from the project if they can't make time or budget. If the engineers tell you they simply can't build this in 5 months, you either give them 7 months or you give up enough requirements to shave 2 months off the project. You could also identify underutilization of resources in non-critical paths, and crash or fast-track the schedule by assigning more people to those tasks which may be done in parallel rather than in serial.

That's what managers are for.

Maybe we'll get to see pop-ups with pixelated messages of thanks!

I don't think any woman in history has ever lied about not wearing a female condom... You've never actually seen a female condom, have you? Lying about wearing one would be like an amputee lying about having both legs.

DSK? The guy who was accused of forcing a hotel maid to give him a beej against her will? The guy who said he never met the maid and has no idea what anyone's talking about? The guy who then said yeah, he met her when she cleaned his room, but the door was open and nothing happened? The guy who then said, yeah, the door was closed, but nothing happened? The guy who then said, well, he was naked and the door was closed, but nothing happened? The guy who then said, well, she gave him a beej, but she was totally into it? The guy who then said the torn rotator cuff in her shoulder was because she really liked rough sex? No, he's totally credible. You just have to pick which of his many contradictory stories you believe.

They don't need to, and neither do cable companies. 17 USC 111 provides for compulsory copyright licensing for cable providers, with rates set by the government. Once SCOTUS said Aereo was a cable company, they should have been allowed to take advantage of those licenses. However, the District Court said that they're also NOT a cable company, leaving Aereo in a legal limbo where they can't carry the content, regardless of whether they pay for it or not.

That's incorrect... If they were defined as a cable company, they could pay compulsory royalties and carry the content legally. However, the District Court recently held that no, they are not a cable company, and have no ability to pay those royalties for a license.

So, in essence, you have the Supreme Court saying that they're not NOT a cable company, and the District Court saying that they're NOT a cable company. It leaves them in a position where they are neither a cable company nor NOT a cable company, and therefore can never carry broadcast content, regardless of whether they want to pay for it or not.

Because people are simple, and everything is both simple and complex. I can explain to you how to solve poverty; the solution is simple, but incredibly nuanced. It's a very short list of policy features, but it avoids an incredible number of policy features that would create sub-optimal or even destructive results. It relies on a handful of economic concepts which, when explained, amount to massively complex interconnected systems, which in turn come down to simple human behavioral psychology, which in turn becomes incredibly complex when examined deeper.

People are often keen to take the simplistic--supply and demand versus competition--and claim simple behaviors. Supply of houses? Prices will come down because more houses can be built, more apartments can be offered. This explanation ignores risk, ignores the cost risk of building more housing such that supply exceeds demand, ignores the nuanced scarcity of housing (there's plenty, but you can only get a given apartment or house at a given time, and they're all non-fungible), and ignores that people will routinely pay the common above-cost price even if some other market player has the same good cheaper. Prices don't just continuously drop when competition shows up; prices can even creep upwards in a competitive market, as competitors learn that a $500 good and a $515 good both sell, and then everyone sells it for $515 until some competitors start selling it for $530 and don't take a loss in sales volume.

People don't like this. They say, "No, you would lower your price to attract more business. If one person did it and then had more business than he could handle, and the others didn't drop prices, another competitor would enter the market at the low price." That doesn't fucking work.

They're lawyers; they're concerned with whether they can provide enough annoyance before a legal barratry charge sets in.

First off, get your facts straight. This is not an extradition case. It's a surrender case. Mixing up extradition rules and surrender rules is stupid because they're not the same.

Secondly, if you think Sweden's judicial system is so comparably terrible, you should complain to the peer-reviewers who passed the World Justice Project's methodology for ranking countries' judicial systems. Then you should complain to pre-charges-Assange for talking so highly of the Swedish system based on what he saw in the leaked cables. Then you should talk to the hundreds of US military deserters and other fugitives living in Sweden protected by Sweden's extradition law. For starters.

Concerning questioning, from the sworn statement of the prosecutor to the British courts: "Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."

It's pointless. He can't be åtalad outside of Swedish custody, and the prosecutor is already ready to åtala him, and has the Svea Court of Appeals' formal court findings against Assange of probable cause for rape as backup. So yeah, she could do this little embassy stunt, but why?

Not to mention that the regular prosecutor dismissed all these charges, but they were then reopened by the current prosecutor who works at a national unit for exploring legal boundaries.

Surely you know that about one in 8 cases in Sweden are reopened in exactly the same manner as this one was. It's a very good thing that Sweden has a process for victims to appeal a decision not to prosecute to a higher prosecutor. And are you seriously going to claim that Finne's handling of the case was proper? Heck, I find it bloody hilarious to see Assange's defenders pointing to Finne as a defense of him when in the beginning they were the ones who were bloody furious at Finne, first the info about him being under investigation leaking on her watch, then her issuing a warrant for him when he hadn't yet refused to cooperate. And then just the opposite, she dropped the SW-rape charge (but I should add, the AA charges were *never* dropped) in order to cancel the warrant after the (very justifiable backlash). Not to mention that the victim statement wasn't even in the computer system yet when she did that. Do you really think her handling of the case was appropriate and didn't warrant review? That's a bloody stretch.

Then, a special prosecutor somehow gets wind of the case

This doesn't even remotely resemble the actuality. The case was brought to Ny via an appeal from Borgström.

You do understand the invested money doesn't actually go into the company's coffers, right?

Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams? Sure, let's bulldoze the environment.

It seems to me a local utility can either generate power, mark up over cost, and pay taxes on profits; or import power, mark up over cost, and pay taxes on profits. These are the same. They claim they would lose jobs, but wasteful spending creates economic strain and reduces the total eventual jobs: in 5 years, moving to the cheaper option would provide a stronger and more robust economy.

Their behavior is consistent with an overly-emotional ruling class clique than with sociopathy.