"Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax." Maybe where that lawyer lives, firefighters spend most of their time in the firehouse cooking, sleeping, or whatever, and not getting paid for it. Most of the engine companies I work with spend 3-4 hours per 24 h shift drilling, and run EMS calls in addition to fire, pest (snake/spider/wild animal) relocation, and public assist calls, many of them averaging a total of 10-12 calls per shift (all calls included). They also get paid for the full 24, not a sub-set of it. There is no reason to say that someone who has an on-call status is off the clock just because they are not actively working every second of their on-call time. If you expect someone to be at your beck-and-call 24 hours, you must compensate them for that. Now, if they are at home, with an "oh-shit" pager/cell phone, you can probably compensate them for far less than their normal wage. As an example, I have a friend who works full time as a paramedic with us, and part-time as a blood recovery tech for a local hospital. Certain days he is on 24 hour on-call status as a recovery tech, and gets paid like $1.50/hour on call. If he gets called in to the OR for a job, then he gets his full hourly wage from the time the page goes out until he leaves the hospital again, after which the pay goes back to the lower wage. He can't drink alcohol, he can't leave the city, he can't really plan any long events, and though he does do things like attend his son's various sport events, he could be torn away from them without warning. The compensation, even at a quite low wage, is recognition that although you are not working, you are also not really free to do anything you wish since your employer or client could recall you without warning. I believe that any employer who thinks that on-call is just like being off-duty should probably come out here to a fire station of my choosing. That thinking will change toot-sweet.

Of COURSE Wall Street's math models fail to take human behavior into account. We as a species don't even know what human behavior *is*, let alone what kind of mathematical equations might describe it. Attempting to model any behavior is doomed to failure as long as the model is incomplete. All humans have their own perceptions, interpretations of events, and people will make money decisions based on information that you can't possibly predict algorithmically.

This.

I've thought for a while that if the RIAA &/| MPAA pursue a "download tax" on media, they must also give up their rights to puruse copyright violations: they've already collected for the violations, to do otherwise would constitute double jeopardy.

Here in Tucson we've had (some) LED traffic control lamps for a while, at least a year. I find it terribly hard to believe that we're on the leading edge of this technology. Many of our emergency response code lights are LED, though mostly on newer vehicles (/i.e./, no retrofit code-packages). Again, this can't be new, nor news.

re: 0): The lights don't "pulse" on and off, they are switched on and off by being turned on and off. That is, the power is on (1) and then off (0). So, your rationale that his reasoning is wrong, is flawed: you can turn lights on and off just fine with DC without it being attributable to "flicker" or "pulsing"