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Comment Re:Cult of the Church of Climatology (Score 0) 81

Or how much of the volcanic activity in the area is miss-labeled as human activity. Seriously, how much of this is volcamic ash?

Sensational story with the facts totally wrong conclusion is what I see. How much is volcanic? No EDX of the material on the snow was even considered. Is ir carbon from forest fires or silicon dioxode volcanic dust?

Comment Re:Time for Solidarity? (Score 2, Informative) 284

I have 3 options..

1 The affordable health plan under the contract employeer. It consists of a plan that limits the plan's maximum payments. Limits include Max of $20 for a perscripiton. Max of 250 for a hospital stay. and the list goes on. If you have ever stayed in a hospital or are diabetic, you will find your maximum out of pocket is the sky is the limit. The plan protects the insurance, not you against any expensive proceedure such as any surgery, MRI, etc.

2 Cobra, limited in duration.. till you find other insurance. Well over $1500/month for family coverage for a high deductable plan. Maximum out of pocket for the plan, $6000. If you need medical services, your maximum is over 2,000/month. Wife had surgery and cancer treament this year.. This left little expendable or discreciionsary income. The Mortgauge, car insurance, and utilities took the rest. No savings this year.

3 Open market.. Your competitive market for insurance. Full coverage high deductable retiree plans start at $2800/month. I won't be able to afford that until my house is paid off in about 20 years.

This leaves me the reality of No coverage in about a year, or quitting work and selling the house to get on Obama Care.

Comment Re:Time for Solidarity? (Score 4, Informative) 284

This trickles down to the US workers too. Here is how it works.

In a downsize you become unemployed. In looking for work, most openings are either entry level or contract positions with no benifits.

You earn too much to be eligable for Obama Care and the company plan is employee paid. If you have a spouse without employment, a mortguage, and need health care, there is a distinct lack of family wage jobs that isn't sucked dry by insurance in excess of 2K/Month. My COBRA insurance is higher than the mortgauge. This payment pretty much sucks up all expendable income normally used for living expenses.

Many younger workers simply forgo the insurance payments. Older workers don't have this option.

Comment Re:Key or keyless, all the same (Score 4, Interesting) 221

Most of those billions of codes are easly circumvented by a replay attack. The cure is to lock and unlock your car with a physical key to prevent reading of the code. The other step is to add a switch to simply turn off the RF trancievers in the car when parking it in an unsecure location. A replay attack will fail when the RF is OFF.

Comment Re:Wrong strategy (Score 2) 66

Thanks for the info. I haven't switched to Hangouts yet because it only works on Chrome so It requires a browser switch.

For worldwide users another competitor is the open standard SIP. Many manufactures have SIP (VOIP) phones and adapters, and many with free SIP service. Unlike Skype many of the SIP registars permit multiple resistrations (extensions) at the same time, so I can have a phone at home and at work. A call rings both just like Google Voice. Inexpensive calling plans can be added if needed from Free US DID through IPKall or Callcentric, or other providers + trunk lines for outgoing calls. SIP to SIP is always free world wide. Some SIP providers provide video too like Skype if desired.

Comment Re:Wrong strategy (Score 2) 66

They have a way to go. Google Voice to PTSN works great which is a feature Skype lacks. Skype requires fees to use a call in number, and minutes to call out of Skype. These three features leaves it way behind Google Voice. The only thing going for Skype is the size of the user base and you can have it in many countries.

If I need to call phones in the US and Canada and not use an expensive cell plan, Google Voice works great for free unlike Skype. I use Google Voice as a second line to filter salesmen.

Comment Re:Children. (Score 1) 239

Facebook has been loosing active membership because of the threat to privacy and those who will use your ID in ways against you. Law enforcement is often percieved as another threat, not safety. This hits their revenue stream as chat rooms are replaced with Snapchat and alternatives.

A common perception is a chatroom of 13 year old girls is mostly older guys pretending to be 13 year old girls. This reputation is hurting revenue.

Comment Re:Easy to solve - calibrate them to overestimate (Score 2) 398

GPS logs do a great job. An NMEA log showing time stamped location, position, speed, etc of the trip is pretty solid evidence in court. To further question the camera's data,, these are often included in upscale dashcams. GPS log is easly compaired to the video log where speed time distance between known landmarks such as crosswalks is solid evidence.

A judge throwing out evidence to protect revenue risks a youtube and social media revolt when the video is posted online. Anti speed camera folks eat those stories for lunch. This is why very few are posted.

Buy a dashcam with GPS and make shure you were not speeding. It's pretty good proof in court.

Comment Re: Are any of them able to use the Skype network? (Score 4, Informative) 286

Yes, but not in a very graceful fashion. The one I use on occasoion is ippi.com as a SIP provider. You can Google the proceedure to use the Skype/SIP gateway.

In a nutshell, the gateway is like dialing 9 on a PBX and outside callers needing to use an automated attendant to reach an extension, so you need to educate your Skype contacts on how to use it.

The cumbersome interface uses a Skype proxy for outgoing calls where the caller is ippi.com as the caller, and to call in from Skype, you add the poxy as a contact, then when connecting to the proxy, the caller is sent a text that needs to be replyed to with the "SIP extension" you are calling, so it does not support Skype directly. The caller needs two pieces of information to contact you, the Skype to ippi friend, then your sip user ID. For example if I used my slashdot handle, which I don't, my SIP address would be sip:technician@ippi.fr. The Skype caller would need to call the gateway Skype2ippi and then respond to the automated text and enter technician to ring my SIP phone.

Outgoing calls are simpler. I enter the full gateway/skype string into the speed dial settings on IPPI, so to call one of my friends, I just pick up the phone and speed dial them. IPPI speed dialer uses 2 digit speed dialing so you can save 99 contacts.

This works great with either a SIP softphone, or a hardware device such as an ATA and analog phone or an IP phone such as one of the Grandstream models.

The service does not provide video, only an audio connection.

Comment Size vs resolution (Score 2) 213

Like a photo flare or photo of a smoke cloud, this is a single time event sample as far as I can tell. Was there an industrial or transportation accident? Many tests for hydrocarbons are cross sensitive, such as a sensor for Propane will detect gasoline, natural gas, butane, etc. What sensor is used, what is the sample time, what else is it sensitive to, and were there any significant accidents or releases in the area recently? If it was from the soil, soil based sampling should have seen this concentration long ago in gas exploration.

Comment Re:Self check out (Score 1) 236

I found the self check out is used by LOWER priced grocers as a way to cut costs and offer lower prices. Supermarkets without self checkout are often much more expensive to provide that personal touch. Natures, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, etc are examples of upscale markets without self checkout. Walmart appears to be the exception in haveing no self checkout and offering lower prices. Communities have a beef with the low rates they pay their staff, but they do have paid staff instead of self check out.

Comment Outsourced then automated example (Score 1) 236

A good example of first being outsourced and then automated is telemarketing.

The low level lead generation has been replaced by robocalls. This blight on the phone system makes automated calls very inexpensive for the caller and more expensive for the receiver both in call plan time usage (unless unlimited) and resources (time) of the receiver.

If left unchecked, my phone will go to an automated auto attendant instead of being answered for non white list callers.

It's a sad day when you need a spam filter on your phone to sort your calls for you. The cost is real calls are delayed costing everyone time. I hope robocalls are outlawed soon except for op in, such as appointment reminders.

Comment Repairs are often bottlenecks (Score 2) 38

Often the reapair is on smaller lower capacity branches that can not handle the load. On a network, this results in slow connections. On a power grid this results in cascading failures of the alternate routes. This is what blacked out the East Coast of the US some years ago. A major line failed shifting the load to smaller lines unable to sustain the load. This resulted in a large area ripping free of the rest of the grid as none of the smaller route could carry the load.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

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