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Comment Re:My local library (Score 2) 165

Amazon covers quite a bit of that.
Books - Yes

Very few books are available under Kindle Unlimited. Those that are not are very expensive.

Magazines - Yes

I do not think any magazine are available under Kindle Unlimited.

Newspapers - Yes/No (maybe not your local paper)

I could not find any newspapers available under Kindle Unlimited

Audio Books - Yes Amazon owns Audible.com

Again, nothing I could find under Kindle Unlimited

DVDs - Yes Amazon does Movie/TV Streams

Again, nothing I could find under Kindle Unlimited

Meeting Rooms - No
Events - No
Internet Access - No
Printers - Go paperless already
Photocopiers - Stop waisting paper

Not all photocopies are a waste of paper.

Somethings you missed
Research Help
Free Day Care (people leave their kids unattended at libraries)
Curated Childrens Section
Table and chairs for studying.

Or did you mean to compare items you can *purchase* on Amazon and its affiliates with items you can loan from the local library. That would be a silly comparison.

Comment Re:Economies of scale (Score 1) 502

Economies of scale have mostly kicked in already.

As of right now, the panels are no longer the biggest part of the cost of a full-scale installation - it's the "putting it on your roof correctly so it doesn't fall off or catch fire" part that costs.

Prices will drop - some - but for anything like the near future, they're going to stay in the $15,000-$20,000 range - without storage.

You can get lower quotes, but for some reason, those quotes always leave things out... the folks who brag about "I got it for half that" haven't dealt with contractors before, for the most part.

I wasn't speaking about economies of scale in the traditional manufacturing sense. As we as a society do something over and over we get better and cheaper at it. There will be more contractors and some of them might come up with better methods. It might not even happen, all I am saying is that don't assume that today's costs will be the same costs if we decide as a society to go whole hog and do orders of magnitude more panel deployments.

Comment Re:Half of Americans rent (Score 1) 502

People who rent can't do anything to their property. Apartment buildings are stuck with whatever they were built with 40 or 50 or more years ago. They're built using the cheapest technology available at construction time.

This is not universally true. The problem is apartment buildings owned by national corporations. A building owned by a reasonable land lord often do get upgrades or do make upgrades or modifications at the request of tenants.

Comment Re:Until we learn how to use less ... (Score 1) 502

Thirty billion dollars?

You're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, at least.

The cost to put solar panels on the roofs of just the houses in California - with "full capacity" standard-issue PV systems (at about $20,000 a pop), on 15,000,000 homes - is about $300 billion. And that doesn't include storage - it's for grid-tied systems.

While geekoid's estimate is likely off, your estimate using current prices is also probably off. If we decided to put more effort into research, development and manufacture on larger scales those numbers would change.

Comment Re: Correction: T-Mobile Android Smartphones (Score 3, Informative) 127

iPhones tend to be identical regardless of what carrier you are on.

Not really. There are nearly as many differences with iPhones as there are with any Android phone that's on multiple carriers,

That's true for hardware differences. Software differences skew this gap far wider. An AT&T iPhone's software is far more similar to a Verizon iPhone's software than a similar comparison for Androids.

Comment Re: Correction: T-Mobile Android Smartphones (Score 1) 127

It could also be that 15% refers to sales marketshare (i.e., new users) instead of subscriber marketshare (i.e., existing userbase). It's completely conceivable that maybe 41% of smartphones being used by people today are iPhones, but 15% of new phones sold are iPhones. (If that were the case, it would imply that lots of people were trading in their iPhones for Androids.)

That implication only holds if iPhone users replace their phone as often as other phones. (That might be true, but the fact that 15% of new sales are iPhone does not imply iPhone users are buying Androids. Androids make a very good first smart phone and might be capturing the non-smartphone or new-to-phone market or children market). We need to look at a lot more data than what you quoted to make your conclusion.

Comment Re:Need to hire more H1b's (Score 1) 108

That link you supply seems to agree that it is an exception that *may* be granted. I speak mostly of the case with no advance notice since with advance notice, it is pretty easy (assuming there are other companies that want the worker) to have an H-1B transferred. The 10-day period after an H-1B expires does not seem to apply in the case of termination before visa expiration.

It goes without saying that this is a complicated area of law and there are a lot of myths and/or misinformation surrounding our visas. As always, talk to a lawyer.

An H-1B nonimmigrant is admitted to be employed by the sponsoring H-1B petitioner. If the employment ends, this condition is no longer satisfied and the individual is no longer in a lawful nonimmigrant status and may be subject to removal proceedings. Therefore, the terminated H-1B nonimmigrant in this scenario may not be able to port to another employer, subject to certain discretionary exceptions.

Comment Re:Need to hire more H1b's (Score 3, Informative) 108

H1b's just do the OT with out makeing a big deal and if they quit or get fired they have to go home if they cannot find a new job and complete the transfer within 30 days after being fired (which is very likely to be the case).

You are correct about not rocking the boat, but I corrected the sentence for you.

The poster you "corrected" appears to be more correct than your correction. According to Klasko (I tried for ten minutes to find the relevant document on dhs.gov), there is no 30-day period. The visa status ends immediately and the employer must arrange travel back to the country of origin. In practice, a new H1-B petition *might* be approved by the government but it appears there is no grace period, it is at the whims of the petition reviewer.

If an employer terminates an H1-B employee before the end of that employee’s period of authorized stay, the employer is liable for the “reasonable costs” of return transportation for the employee to his or her last country of residence.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no “10-day,” “30-day” or other grace period for terminated employees holding H-1B status. Once the employment relationship terminates, the H-1B employee is out of status. While USCIS has proposed a 60-day period within which an H-1B worker may seek new employment, that period remains only a proposal.

From: http://www.klaskolaw.com/artic...

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1) 502

So being a multinational company you have to operate under all the laws simultaneously? So your US business depatment that only does business in the US has to obey all other countries laws, even through it does not do business there?

The discussion here is that if you have a corporation that does business in two countries, but countries' laws apply. You are talking about a corporation that does business in X being subject to laws in Y where they do not do business. That's a different case, and not the one we are discussing.

Comment Re:Very original (Score 1) 182

Name one of the services you're talking about. Any single one.

Cooking. Someone who puts a little effort into feeding themselves can make a good dinner for a family in ten minutes but instead many people re-heat terrible-for-you processed food at much higher costs (which does not even end up saving them much time/effort anyhow).

Comment Re:Fire(wall) and forget (Score 1) 348

Sure, in 99% of scenarios a local firewall makes sense, is a no-brainer, is defense in depth, etc. But one can absolutely deploy a system without one in the right circumstances.

Of course there is no absolute rule one way or the other, but for a vendor to refuse to permit a firewall on their system is a red flag that they did not weight the options but instead opted for the lazy development approach of assume all ports are fair game. That kind of development laziness is the exact scenario where defense in depth makes more sense than not! If the vendor had made a rational argument it would be a different scenario all together.

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