Finally! Someone noticed. Half the state dependent on a single fiber out in the middle of nowhere. What the hell?!?

To make it worse, it sounds like it was all communications. Cell, landline, and internet. Every egg in that one basket.

Surely there should have been at least a second cable somewhere.

And the people they apply that leverage to have been known to put families out in the streets at the drop of a hat, so not all sunshine and roses on that side either.

If you think the teamsters are a problem, just think of them as revolution lite. The concessions unions have gained are a good bit of what kept a worker's revolution from happening in the U.S.

Yeah, they'll have those automated buses ready to go and have state and federal approval in a week or two, tops!

Back here on Earth, it'll be several years before they can get approval for an automated bus on public streets, another few years until they get people to trust them rather than protest them as a safety hazard, and perhaps another year or two to get them to pay for themselves before they break down (driver salary and all), especially for a shuttle bus that isn't running 24/7.

So I guess the Teamsters kids might need to do something different.

And either those drivers join Teamsters before the cutoff date or the next news item is about how Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, eBay and Zynga were shut down for two weeks when their employee buses couldn't get through the picket line. I wonder how much that downtime will cost?

It helps when those poor don't find a gadzillion employers happy to pay them sub-minimum wage for dangerous work off the books.

Those same employers lobby for a lack of immigration reform AND a lack of border control.

Yet you seem more than willing to kick any of the people trying to climb out of the hole they were born in in the teeth to make sure they never get ion an equal footing with you.

You seem, in fact, to enjoy pissing in that hole from time to time to assert your odd sense of innate superiority.

You seem surprised that they aren't happy to be pissed on. Perhaps one day they'll tie you down and piss on you. You'll have it coming so I'll just watch and laugh.

Quit complaining and buy yourself a commercial mower!

Perhaps uneducated, definitely working hard enough that they will accelerate arthritis and other damage to their bodies. They won't be able to keep working until whatever might pass for retirement age. Since you feel so strongly about it, why don't you go undercut their demand and do the job for $146K? That'll teach 'em!

How many Android phones have you had that didn't require you to either wait for your carrier to provide an update (and they never do), or give up and root the machine to install Cyanogenmod or whatever, or you just bought a new shiny phone to replace it? My HTC Aria is so hopelessly vendor-locked I doubt it's worth putting Cyanogen on it (the OTA upgrade from 2.1 to 2.3 never succeeded.) My newer Samsung did get upgraded to 4.4.2, but my Coby tablet running 4.0.4 isn't the version the manufacturer sells today, so I doubt they'll bother with customer satisfaction.

I haven't been able to Google up a good reference to Android documentation from Google that says how a regular user can upgrade their own Android version, as opposed to "Wait until your vendor ships an upgrade!"

Yes, folks, not all PCMCIA is the same. The newer ones support Cardbus cards; the older ones don't, and this machine is absolutely an older one. I've got a Pentium-75 laptop that only takes the original-flavored cards.

Yes, you'll have to look up your old friend Kermit (or Xmodem/Ymodem/Zmodem, or maybe even UUCP), and it'll have to run for a few days unless you can get it to sync up at higher speeds like 115200, but it's not information you really need much faster than that.

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

First, keep in mind, to the MBA, a line in the summary plus 20 supporting pages is "a line", at least when it benefits him to call it "one line".

Next, that one line can be HUGE sometimes. It can require whole new additional sub-susyems. Must interface with existing PCs -%gt; Must interface with existing PCs including the Univac in the basement. (and by interface with, they also mean translate between).

And, as BronsCon points out, sometimes one WORD is a problem depending on when it changes.

Dropping or adding the word 'not' can also make life interesting.

You can't have an estimate without knowing exactly what you will be doing. Finding out exactly what you are doing is also known as the design phase. It is the highest paying part of the project and can easily be 50 to 90% of the whole project. But they want the time estimate up front...

Once given, they will want to stick to the estimate as if it was carved on stone tablets by Moses.

If the project involves replacing of interfacing with a legacy system, or for that matter gathering requirements from people you don't know yet even estimating the design phase timeline can be a problem.

If it requires anything that can be described as experimental, you need to perform the experiments before you can commit to a timeline. The estimated time to do the experimentation will be even further out of the question if there is any possibility that one result could lead to an additional experiment.