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Comment They want the court fight (Score 4, Informative) 335

They know this is an issue they'll win in the long run. There is no justification for the states doing what they are doing, they've just been paid off by the auto dealers. Tesla has won every fight about this I'm aware of. So they want it, they want to get this straightened out in the courts.

If you try to do something to skirt the law, you risk it biting you in the ass later. If you get a court ruling saying "You are allowed to do this, the state has to F off," then you are good to go.

Also, you might notice it gets them press. Nothing like looking like the poor trod on underdog to get more people sympathetic to your cause an interested in your product. They go about everything above board, get stepped on, fight back, win, and then get their way, plus good PR.

Have to take the long view on these things.

Comment Re:Well hang on there (Score 1) 907

No kidding. The whole reason there's a time between "due" and "late" is so that you've time to get a payment out and deal with any issues. Hence it behooves you to pay when something comes due, or shortly after, rather than wait.

Like one time I get a call from some business who just got a check from me to them by mistake. It was for my association dues. My bank mails out a cashier's check, at my behest, each month to the property manager. They had done so properly, but the USPS fucked up and sent it to the wrong address. Now this was no issue as I still had 25 days until payment was late. So I called the bank, they voided the first check and issued a new one. Everything got there no problem.

Now had I waited till the last second it would have been ok, I wouldn't have been out of house and home or anything, but it would have been a hassle getting things all straightened out, and I might have had to pay a late fee. Probably not, as they need to be nice to the owners since we hire them, but they would have the right to charge it.

You want to build slack in to your schedule in case something goes wrong, and that applies to finance as well as it does travel or the like. Well, that time between "due" and "late" is the slack.

Comment Re:Well hang on there (Score 1) 907

I wouldn't presume reporters did their job, they rarely do these days. It is amazing how lazy most reporting is. I generally assume when you hear a story with no discussion of it that all they did was get that person/company's story and print it and did no checking. Usually, I'm right in that :P.

Comment Well hang on there (Score 4, Interesting) 907

While I'm not saying we should take the word of the lenders without verification, neither should we take the word of the people who are on the receiving end. They may very well not be telling the whole story. Some people who have financial troubles have them because of their own choices, but they rarely admit it.

I had a roommate like that. He was an alcoholic who wouldn't admit it or deal with it. He continually made bad choices in his life, but would never admit anything was his fault. In terms of finance he never paid things when they came due, he didn't pay until he was forced to. It was "due" according to him when they were about to shut off his service, or the like. So he'd get mad about his cellphone getting shut down when he was "a day late" by which he really mean "45 days past the due date, over 30 days late, and had 2 threatening letters to disconnect."

So before you go jumping to the defense of the people in the article, you might want to see what the terms of something like this is. I don't know, and I'm not saying it isn't a "you have to pay by the second it is due or we shut it off," but it also might well be a normal "It is due on day X, late on day X+15, and we shut it off on day X+20," and the people involved have just decided that "X+20" is the day it is "due".

With regards to #2, where in the US if you call 911 do you not get an ambulance? They are not taxpayer funded, but they are required to take ALL calls. If there's a medical emergency, you'll get transport and treatment, even if you lack the means to pay. That is part of the problem with high healthcare costs (the costs of people who don't pay get rolled in to the people who do) and an excellent argument for universal healthcare at least for emergency treatment.

Comment Precisely (Score 3, Interesting) 167

They were mad at Dell because Dell wasn't in Apple's market. Apple was exploding with growth, whereas Dell "only" had a stable market that they did well in. They didn't like all the server sales because that wasn't a growth market with huge margins.

With high end boutique computers would be a similar issue. While margins might be good, volume would be low and would never go up. It will always be a specialty market. Hence not something investors want money being "wasted" on. Doesn't matter there's money to be made, it isn't enough money fast enough with the promise of infinite growth.

Well, sounds like the private investors that own Dell now are a bit more sensible. They realize that there's something to be said for making money in smaller markets.

Comment Re:all in all (Score 2) 221

It already is a fortress. In time of war, nations protect their leaders. And the US has been at war for twenty years.

Open the doors of the Temple of Janus, acknowledge the truth. Every day that the US drops a bomb somewhere in the world is a day that the President of the United States should not sleep easy in his bed. One cannot be angry when one nation attacks another, and that other nation responds in any manner it can.

Comment He's not actually interested (Score 1) 125

It is AMD fanboy sour grapes. For some reason some people get really personally invested in their choice of graphics card. So when the other company comes out with a card that is substantially better than what their company has, they get all ass hurt and start trying to make excuses as to what it is bad. The nVidia fans did that back when the AMD 5870 came out and nVidia had no response. Same deal here. The GeForce 900 series are a reasonable bit faster than the AMD 200 series, and way more power efficient. At this time, AMD doesn't have a response, so the AMD fanboys are going on the defensive.

The real answer is, of course, buy the card that works best for your usage, which will vary person to person.

Comment Very much so (Score 1) 287

I always thought it was an awesome idea to have a bigass set of computers at home... Ya well now I get paid to manage a bigass set of computers professionally and I'd rather just leave them there, thanks. Also there's no compelling reason to want my own servers for the sort of things I do, VMs work so well. I'll just lease one from somewhere, or spin one up at work.

At home, all my gear is related to, well, home use. More than a non-geek would have for sure but no data center.

Comment Re:Probably a bad idea, but... (Score 1) 192

I am pleased that Scotland has the opportunity to vote for independence, but believe it would be a stupid decision. The UK is a large, important country in Europe. They have the ability to influence world decisions with an infrastructure built up across two world wars and the cold war. Should Scotland spin off, the Scots themselves will lose world influence.

Comment Re:Interesting what he chose not to answer (Score 1) 106

I find this show difficult to watch, because it seems to mock the people and groups I grew up with. I have since married and become a bit more "normal", giving up my D&D and video game habits. I do not like seeing my friends (and my self) mocked. I do not believe I have ever met people as lovely, self-effacing and generous as those called geeks.

Those would have been valuable questions to ask.

Comment Is that a serious question? (Score 4, Interesting) 981

Because if it is, you need to pull your head out of your ass and go and do some extremely basic, cursory, research on the situation in the US. There are for sure some loud fundy Christian that like to whine about science, evolution in particular. However they have had little and less success in pushing their agenda and the US remains a powerful center of scientific research.

Trying to equate the US to ISIS is beyond stupid.

Comment Also, what does it actually prevent? (Score 1) 600

You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.

It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.

It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.

Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.

It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.

It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.

Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.

So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.

Comment It also buys you (Score 3) 249

Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.

You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.

That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.

Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.

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One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is... If they do foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little. -- Joe Martin

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