When you design remote controls, make them rubberized. The extra revenue you make from selling replacements (when the hard brittle plastic kind inevitably break) does not come close to compensating for the loss of goodwill and the sheer inventory management costs of keeping all those back models in stock.
Home automation units based on X10/Insteon or proprietary systems like Control4 or Savant start at $100-200. At a time when you can buy a fully functional WiFi router with a 200+MHz processor, a minimum 8M of RAM, 16MB of flash for under $50, why is there not a home automation system that costs $50 and uses standard TCP/IP and WiFi for connectivity?
This restaurant recently opened in Cow Hollow. Their sense of timing is less than fortunate, what with a predictable restaurant bloodbath just over the horizon, but they claim to offer simple crab shack fare prepared with fresh ingredients. I had a crab roll with shoestring potatoes there today.
The crab was OK, not outstanding. The shoestring potatoes were indeed cut very fine, slimmer even than Zuni’s, not the mere frites that some places try to pass as pommes allumettes or shoestring fries, but they were not served hot and really should have been put in the oven prior to serving.
It’s not bad food, but the price is too high, before we even consider the coming recession. If you’re hankering for a crab or lobster roll, the Woodhouse Fish Company on Market and Church is a better choice.
As I was browsing through Google News, I saw some particularly acrid editorials in the WSJ. Their Op-Ed pages have been the preserve of lunatics long before Rupert Murdoch acquired them, but you would think the markets’ fiasco and the general opprobrium of discredit raining upon Wall Street would lead them to some well deserved humility.
In France, nuclear power plants follow a standardized design. The end result is that France gets more than 70% of its electricity from nuclear, reducing its dependence on oil or natural gas from the unsavory regimes in Russia or Algeria, and making it a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The lessons from security incidents are also immediately applied to all other plants, leading to higher overall safety. Technicians trained on one plant are qualified for all, leading to more flexibility in managing the workforce.
In the US, each nuclear plant is a one-off, with the results being much higher costs to construct and operate them.
The same situation applies to the by-laws of public companies. Each is hand-crafted. The only beneficiaries of this situation are lawyers and crooked executives who use their mastery of the arcana in by-laws to prevent shareholders from exercising their rights.
Public company rules should be defined by statute, not left to the discretion of executives and their tame boards.