Including the delivery driver themselves. Have seen Ring video of the driver putting the package down, shooting a photo, then picking it right back up and walking away.

The outfit I work with now is a customer. Right in the heart of Los Angeles, you can see the high rises downtown standing in the parking lot. Right about at the I5/I710 interchange, in case you know the area.

The building is a temporary location, with 13 units (Commercial condominium). When it was built, none of the providers ran anything to the building, making it an unserved island in the area. As a result the choices we faced when we moved in were cellular (cheap, unusably bad signal strength, we tried), terrestrial microwave (Expensive setup, 3 year commitment for a 1 year need - "Just pay for 3 years and use it for 1, see, it's solved - we'll bill for the last 2 years when you move out."), or having one of the wired outfits run a connection to the building for $60K plus. Of course, once run, the other tenants could jump on but nobody wanted to go first and for a 1 year sublease it made no sense for us.

Starlink was not available when we moved in, but became available a couple months later. No regrets, yes it's expensive but it's the only thing that made sense for our position. And when we leave in a couple months we can take the hardware and set it up at the permanent location - which is still under construction and won't have service for a couple of months. Then we turn the service off and put the hardware on a shelf until we need it again. Or sell it, whatever.

No kidding.

And as a matter of fact, the instructions for the Liberator state that:

Not the sharpest move, I'd say. Considering what they were scheduling.

Exactly.

I go to Las Vegas on business on a semi regular basis. It's a one hour flight for me and generally I can get done what I need to do in a day, and it's generally connected to a trade show in one of the hotels currently served by the Monorail.

ANY sort of taxi/rideshare in Vegas is a crapshoot (ha!). The taxi companies all "change shifts" at the time people are generally leaving the LVCC or hotels, so there's a huge line to get a lift to the airport. If the Monorail actually RAN to the airport it would be packed, but I'm sure the taxi & limo companies will block that - and they both own and lease enough politicians in town to make sure that never happens.

As a pilot myself, after first looking at the Figure 1 I was alarmed at the thought of the pilot sitting in the center of a large combustion gas turbine. I was relieved to see that the designers put some protective buffers filled with fuel between the pilot and the inner annulus of the compressor. What could possibly go wrong?

It's not really even a ripping station. It's a system for watching your DVDs and BDs in a really convenient manner.

Disclaimer: I work in the industry that Kaleidescape sells to, I work with a couple of people that used to work there, and I know Michael Malcom. And we've got one of their systems set up in our offices.

Your analysis is correct in that the system copies DVDs, BDs and CDs to a hard disk array that, in our case, is in a rack in the equipment room (it's got fans that are loud along with with the spinning drives) and plays them via a player with an HDMI output in a different part of the building. The units are connected via the same Ethernet network used for data. If you know the background, you know that the founders of the company approached the DVD CCA and did, indeed, get a license. The DVD CCA changed their mind about the license later. They are the ass clowns, in case there was any doubt.

It's not just the playback that's useful, the system allows you to set favorite scenes and jump right to them. We need to demonstrate various audio and video capabilities of the equipment we manufacture. Being able to jump from movie to movie, scene to scene with a push of a button - or to write a simple script to run a full demonstration - without having to wait for each disk to spin up, display the FBI warning, etc. is the reason we have the unit.

We've also bought every single title that's on it. When you are playing a scene from a movie to the people who were involved in making it, it would be really embarrassing to explain that you ripped it from a rental. Not that people that pay the amount that one of these systems cost are the kind of people who flinch at paying for a movie anyway.

Do you want to know who owns systems like this? There's one big group I know of - next time you see a movie, watch the names in big type in the credits. When their home systems stop working, I hope they direct their ire at the DVD CCA, because those are the folks that broke their toys.

My inlaws. They have cable internet but will NOT get rid of AOL. Any time I'm over doing "family tech support" I just use FF, which causes great amounts of agitation over the fears that I might have "done something" to the AOL setup. Oh, how I wish.

Had to send an email from their place to myslf via AOL because I didn't have my laptop with me. Good Lord, that interface sucks.

I just got back from CES last night, and this happened to a vendor I had an appointment with.

We were on the 30th floor of the Venetian. The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association, the entity that puts on CES) arranges to take complete floors for things that make noise - they had the 29th, the 30th and the 32nd along with parts of the 34th and 35th and probably others. We make noise, we're selling high end home/corporate theater sound systems and the demos exceed 100 dB at certain points, so combined with the traffic there's no way any regular guest would be happy there. Each room gets a sign to tell other attendees who is there, the doors are generally left wide open and music (and bodies) permeate the hallways all day.

As a point of reference the room cost, paid to the CEA directly, is about $20K for about a week (including setup before the show and teardown afterward), and there are lots of other costs as well. The cost is a serious barrier to entry for smaller firms.

On Friday we were visited by a vendor offering a product that we use and need. I wanted to learn more, and they told me they were just upstairs on the 31st floor, gave me a card with their suite number, and we arranged to get together Saturday morning after a meeting I already had scheduled. I sent them a text message Saturday morning and didn't hear back until their salesman was back in our suite with an explanation.

It turns out that they had managed to book a room on that floor just above other CES exhibitors, had 16 cases of equipment brought up by the hotel staff, and had been bringing people in since the show opened. As they were in the hotel along with the other exhibitors I thought nothing of it and assumed they were just another exhibitor - but it turns our they had not gone through the CEA. Hotel security - and the local Sheriff according to them - took their stuff and them from the room & put them on the curb at 10:00 PM Friday night.

Now in this case they did confess to me that they pulled out the agreement that they signed when they checked in, and that agreement said they would not be making loud noises or conducting business - and they felt that since their products are still in the development stage they didn't count. They were told they had been discovered because they were doing music demonstrations in the room during show hours and people could hear it through the (closed) doors. Since they were not on a floor the CEA had taken 100% of for sound demos it was disturbing other guests and that's how they were discovered.

They ended up in another hotel, where I met them Sunday. I'll be curious to see if they were offered the chance to pay $10K to stay, which is about what a room the size of the one they had would have cost if they booked it properly although they would not have been in the program or on the signs.

This one really steamed my clams. And it is still available on certain models, so it was clearly an intentional downgrade for certain users. I used that feature all the time.