They do warn, but the wholesellers decide whether to pass on the communication or not. UPS store and the Customer Service Centers will tell you. The risk of not keeping TnT (Time In Transit) is always there. There are frequent surges, depending on where you are... conventions, rodeos, tech shows, college students ordering books at large unis in small towns, bad weather, fires (like the ones we have every summer in many states in the west), and general accidents such as train derailments and hub fires. There's something going on every month to delay your package somewhere. It's just easier to hide if it just a few hubs. The unions jack up a lot too. They determine how much you get paid (yes, they do). There is a negotiated pool of regular salary, then the union decides who gets what portion. The unloaders, sorters, and loaders in the hubs are crapped on majorly. Drivers get a much better wage, but still not amazing. The haulers (big rigs, trailer runners (to and from the rail yard)) get the lion's share. Teamsters considers these lower class employees. The big truckers are well respected. If the pay was better, they'd get more people to show up and we wouldn't have this problem. I worked at UPS for many years. They hire 100% of people who apply and can show up every day. The training lasts weeks too. It's really not easy to take an ordinary person and get them into shape, learn to use the equipment well enough, and get them to learn the sort (sorting is nearly always by memory, zip -> binX). Holliday temps are a joke. They don't know how to use the equipment and they don't know ANY of the sorts. So they become okay temporary muscle, usually not lasting the entire peak season (Thanksgiving to Christmas). During peak, always add a day or two to your TnT and be suprised when it arrives early. And by the way, package priority is: Early AM > Next Day Air > 2nd day > air freight > 3rd / ground.

I am a traffic shaping expert for an ISP. The vendors all lie. They all claim they can classify anything with magical accuracy. In reality, they classify maybe 80-90% of traffic correctly and it's always a moving target. Anything special that needs to be classified has to be home brewed in house for the traffic shapers to classify the traffic correctly. It will never work. Maybe the UK can pass a law that all computers must be monitored by cameras, then they can 'create jobs' by paying people to watch people use the internet. The funding can come from more taxes, maybe a 1 pound per megahertz per year tax on all electronic devices, which is also never a problem because most people roll over and give away their money, since they don't need so much anyway.

Does this sound corrupt or what? They created the problem and now they have a solution, but at a cost. Sounds like double dipping into the customer's wallet.

The quality of those photos is terrible. What'd they do, send up a cheap digital camera made in chi...

When will the clods learn... need to share something big to a lot of people? TORRENT!

Earth to Sat is about 100ms. Round trip (plane to sat to earth dish to server to dish to sat to plane) with internet and server latency adds up to about 500-600ms. Communications are half that (time for your data to get to your friend), which is not bad since 200ms is when humans start to notice delay. No gaming, but websites and streaming will be fine.

Ever since they started pulling this crap, i just Netflix or torrent (if no reasonable channels exist) everything i watch. I refuse to be annoyed in such a way. Fix your model or never get any business from me. Commercials on Pandora, Hulu, and YouTube don't pull this crap and as such, i don't mind them.

He says it's all C or nothing. C++ if you're weak but want to look cool. I can't believe how hard core he is. I had no idea 5 year olds could form such hard ideals about programming. He says at school, all the kids who use Java are picked on. Some of the teachers tried to front Ruby, but they just got all up in her grill.

Something automated with no gui will work and will boot in less than 5 sec on an ssd. I've done this. Not hard. Start up scripts are your friend.

Are you aware that you are one of the most hated persons in the software community?

... then made him less human.

MythTV has a rating system with password protection depending on rating. You can have Myth grab the MPAA and use that or set it yourself. I don't think xbmc has that, but you could try out Myth. It's a bit more trouble to setup than xbmc, which really 'just works' OOB, but i think it's GUI is way better than xbmc.

This sounds like Atlas Shrugged.

Are you feeling guilty about being racist / sexist / etcetera? This is the only reason i can find for someone trying to be 'diverse'. This is absurd. If there was a quanza conference, would it get cancelled if all the speakers were black? Who cares if all the speakers are white. Try not caring about race / sex. In my experience, that's the best way to attract others outside whatever little socio-group that has been formed, intentional or not. A woman / black with skills would see this as a place to shine and stand out. It's like being a girl in a bar with a bunch of dudes. Everyone sees you and wants to talk to you. Inventing racism then inventing the tearing down of that racism does not make something more 'fair' or better in any way.