Yes, it gives me a point on which to teach them about responsible use of finances and how they can't have everything in life.

Mod parent up!

NetFlix and Hulu would be Information Services, aka Content Provider.

Generic ISPs are not Information Services, but Communications Services. They content of the communications just happens to be data instead of voice.

The problem is that the ISPs also have a Content-Provider side of the business - e.g. uVerse TV, Xfinity, Cable TV Services, Disney (since it's owned by one of the cable companies), and more. So there is an inherent conflict of interest.

HOAs are not voluntary in most cases. In some states there is no requirement to disclose the HOA prior to closing either.

Yes, an HOA can be setup as voluntary; but most are not and are part of the Land Deed that goes with the property in a clause that cannot be removed from the Deed. Fees and Fines can be placed as liens against the property (usually granted to the HOA in the Deed).

My parent's, for instance, bought a house in OH. They didn't know there was an HOA at all until months later when someone from the HOA tried to collect dues. The majority of the people in the development did not want the HOA. They couldn't absolve it unless they got the local township to annex them; and the township didn't want to annex them.

When my wife & I bought our first home in SC, they was a voluntary HOA. We never joined since the rules of the HOA only applied if you were in the HOA; and there wasn't really any benefit to being part of it. It has since dissolved because of not enough members, meetings, etc.

When we were looking for a home in GA we came across a number of HOAs, including one that was "voluntary" - voluntary until an owner joined it, then it was no longer voluntary for them or any subsequent owners. They were actively trying to get all the homes to be no longer voluntary.

When we bought our second home in GA, there was no real HOA. There is an "HOA" but it's only got charge of the maintenance for the entrance; no rules, no attachment to the deed, etc.

Both in SC and in GA we had to look long and hard to find an HOA that was not restrictive. Most had dumb rules like "you cannot work on a car in your driveway except in emergency". The worst was one in SC that had a rule that anyone under 18 found on common property after 10 PM would be arrested for trespassing - they made the rule in response to a couple of minors and an adult vandalizing the pool house.

Ultimately, HOAs do not "increase or maintain value" for a home. They decrease it because of the rules and how hard it is to change them.

My Gateway 2000 P-75 (Pentium 75 MHz) had a "Turbo" button (http://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=433)

Yes:

Boeing vs Airbus

US (individual) vs Europe (collective)

It's called Inflation.

I'm familiar with the "power tool" that gave that, and it was buggy and caused XP to crash a lot. Yes, I used it, and it wasn't available for Win2k.

But at the same time,Terminal Services was available in XP which is how they enabled the multi-user mode for XP; no more than two of which could be RDP sessions, and they would log out each other and the local user. (Unlike in Windows Server where they can co-exist.)

I'm pretty sure AutoCAD can do all that stuff. I know it does the 3D stuff - the part I referenced was designed in a 3D model in AutoCAD. The problem is all the layering you have to do so see everything fitting together - updating every single diagram to show the new parts. Now, may be AutoCAD and others make that easier than I realize (I'm no expert at them); and I really don't know why they didn't figure out that the parts wouldn't fit (in this case, the one end of the piece made and the piece it attached to couldn't be physically accessed because other stuff interfered on one side but not the other, or at least the other wasn't as bad).

I wouldn't be surprised by a "shitty drawing" though as the one ME in charge was not liked very well by the technicians since this was not an abnormal thing - everything being in the drawing, but not necessarily being obvious how to do it, even when multiple detailed diagrams were provided. But that's a different thing entirely.

When talking about cars - I'm referring to things like you have to take off 10 parts that requires 8 hours of labor to do in order to change 1 part that takes only 30 minutes of labor; when providing a little more space could have enabled one to change that part in 30 minutes entirely without to disassemble a chunk of the vehicle to get to it.

No, I think most would rather that someone they know could work on it, only the cars are so needlessly complex and require such special tools that most do not know how to work on them, so people take them to the shop because they don't know what else to do.

I would love to fix my own cars; and I do do some of the work myself. But even then, there are limits simply due to the computer being so integral to everything.

Sadly, even most shops now are useless as they just plug the computer in and do what it tells them. This has probably lead to the current issue with my 2005 Mazda3 which needs a major repair to stop it burning oil (a known issue on the 2.3 litre engine that seems to be related to ethanol content in the gasoline, and one which is not being owned up to by Mazda - seems one of the original OEM parts doesn't withstand ethanol very well, so you have to replace it with an after-market part); it probably could have been fixed early on with very little issue except the dealer just plugged in the OBDII to the computer which said everything was running fine, and kept going. Only after one big repair at another (non-Dealer that was still Mazda approved) shop was the oil burning uncovered.

No, it's a matter of technology creeping too far in and people feeling helpless about it as a result - that an design engineers who don't know who to design to actually make things easy to work on since they do everything in AutoCAD where its just a few clicks. I had a direct experience there where an engineer designed something in AutoCAD per their boss's requirements, the parts were made, and when the technicians when to put them on, it didn't work due to how all the parts fit together and would have broken due to fatigue at some point since it bent under the weight - this after many hours of design and review and much expense in building the parts; the technician and I went to the hardware store and spent $13 CAN and solved the problem in under an hour.

Yes, just look at the analysis of the licenses surrounding the Open Source .NET projects MS is running. An Open Source Windows wouldn't likely be any different.

FYI - it's called Terminal Services. XP and every consumer release (e.g Vista, 7, 8, 10) are limited to only 2 logins simulaneously; while the server editions are limited to 5 out the gate, and more with sufficient CALs. But it's all based on their Terminal Services functionality that goes back to NT4; it just wasn't natively integrated until an SP for WinXP and Windows Server 2003 - prior to that it was an add-on or dedicated product (Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition).

That's actually not a big problem. It just means you push the panels far enough away from the earth that they can interface with a series of geo-synchronous satellites that are used to transmit the power from the collector to the ground station such that all of them take turns in transmitting the signal to the ground relay satellite (collector -> geo-sync array -> relay -> ground station). Now, power is loss with each transmission, but space being space it's probably still quite efficient.

Problem then becomes weight. They're not light (no pun intended); and either you have to tether it or you're back to microwave/laser transmission with less control over placement due to winds than there is in space.