Studies have concluded DST is more expensive than standard time in energy costs (http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429.pdf), the last rule change, extending it by another month was estimated to have cost the US between $550M and $1B and may adversely affect accidents and medical conditions.

Do away with the time shift and set it to standard permanently, or set it to saving time, but stop the incessant back and forth, it's just plain silly.

You know, there is a solution to even this (not liking cold calling people, even if it's a business and they expect random calls). I don't have any diagnosed mental issues, but I do dislike calling people in general. I think it started when I worked collections for a year and a half. That basically made me not want to call people to some extent. It's minor, but still.

Anyway, on to the solution: Virtual Assistants. There are services for all price ranges starting as low as $10 a month. You can submit a web query or e-mail (or call, but in that case, what is the assistant doing for you???) and they will call to get the info for you and e-mail you with it. Of course, it's still slower than a web site working, but there are a surprising number of things that still seem to need a phone call. It's great because they'll also play phone tag for you.

"I don't want cast aspersions unnecessarily on Abu Dubai — but they're not Canada," said Adams

I think you're okay... They'll both assume you must be talking about the other one.

I don't know what it is, but slashdot editors just LOVE the hell out of cell phone tracking. I mean, there has probably been a story or two on the subject before now:

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/12/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

Everyone go out and find all the cell phone tracking stories you can, and submit every one to /. They love it when you do that!

What are the odds your family isn't all on a single cellular carrier, making you unable to take advantage of such redundancy?

Verizon and Sprint are compatible, while AT&T and T-Mobile are compatible. And with them all switching to LTE, it's likely they will all be mutually compatible in a few more years, when manufacturers start selling multi-band LTE phones.

Most every post-paid cellular plan includes voice roaming. Even if you're not paying for roaming normally, when you dial 911, all restrictions are dropped, and your cell will connect to any available tower from any provider that it can.

It's probably because the laptops don't break very often, are pretty standardized along the lines (i.e. the T510-T540, W510-W540 all use the same batteries, and the T and W series use the same power adapters within the letter series) have good warranty service and are very price competitive.

So all good things for cost savings and reliability for a fleet of laptops.

This is because Lenovo tends to be price competitive and less failure prone (at least in my experience with the business lines). Also, their tech support believes your troubleshooting rather than asking if you've tried turning it on and off.

That said, their on-site service is apparently woefully understaffed, and it is most definitely NOT NBD no mater what they claim. More like next business week. Then again, I only need that in the exceedingly rare case I need a desktop's motherboard replaced.

We just keep spares anyway because buying one extra of each model we use is a cheap insurance for this issue.

Balloons cost a million to launch, and stay up a couple weeks. I could see drones having a real advantage. Then again, geostationary satellites have an even bigger advantage.

In FIOS areas, it's no longer possible to get a POTS landline. You can get a phone service over FIOS, but it's subject to wall-power being available, and you're using the same E-911 system as normal VoIP or cell phone services, anyhow. It's the FCC that's to blame for me not having a landline.

Also, there's no reason cellular 911 service shouldn't be ultra-reliable. There are 4 different nationwide carriers in the US. What are the odds that all 4 of them will have ALL their overlapping cell towers in an area knocked-out? That does happen, today, but ONLY because the FCC pussied-out on requiring them to have backup generators in each cell tower, and lets them just keep a few backup batteries in there for short power outages.

And if some event damages the fiber-optic line to my house, there's no chance I'm fixing it... At least with a cell phone I have the option of climbing onto higher-ground and trying to get a signal from a more remote tower, or even just SMS texting emergency services (coming real-soon-now) and hoping.

With ad-hoc WiFi in cell phones, people may soon be able to self-assemble into their own wireless network that spans whole cities, after a disaster knocks-out all other local service. Try that with your land-line.

For those of you who don't know Bob the Builder, here in the Britain he appears on TV all the time, is inexplicably popular with people who have had barely any education, implements large scale infrastructure projects with no regard to their actual cost, and often repeats the catchphrase "Yes we can".

Do you have something similar in the USA?

This just eliminates the time frame Beltway insiders have typically had to wait while spinning through Washington's revolving doors.

It also serves to legitimize the fact we live in a corporatacracy.

Yea, but how much actually needs to be troubleshot? Just re-create the system from scratch in a known configuration using config management and standardized OS deployments.

If it still fails, it's probably something you just do as a bug report that the developers can spin up using the same OS and config settings and then fix.

The interesting thing is if development can be automated. To some extent it might, or be made so end users can do it - look at "bad systems" like Labview or other simple drag and drop stuff. I imagine someone is going to keep working to make more and more stuff abstract or really simple libraries to hook together.

Tracker software, the maker of PDF-X-Change software seems to do this. It also seems to work pretty well.

The problem I have is they hire such bad checkout people or have so few on staff at any time, or have such limited authority to do anything (i.e. someone has a travellers check or food stamp or insert non cash/credit form of payment here and the store for some reason requires them to accept it but doesn't train them or let the average cashier do it) that it is usually faster for me to do the self checkout in a lot of cases.

There are stores (Wegmans, Target) that seem to pay enough and have enough people on staff that I can check out faster with a cashier, but BJs, Walmart, Lowes, etc have lines where it takes 15+ minutes just waiting for your turn at the cashier.

Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't done the RFID you walk through a reader, insert card or have a payment fob like the store card, you approve on a screen or get the details on your smartphone app or by e-mail or something and you leave...

Did you see the puppetconf presentation? They're pretty much going away from Ruby and going to APIs. Yea, you can still use Ruby, but c++ native client is what's going to be shipping next year... The server is going Java.