The way Vista is upgraded is pretty obviously the way it should have been since Win 9x. The point was that if they were going to use a browser for required support it is obviously anti competitive to demand that you use only their browser.
The only problem with the Vista upgrade scheme is that it is only a small part of an OS that is pretty much useless for most people's needs. I'm pretty certain that it will be regularly used to pipe DRM, EULAs, and other anti customer functionality bits into millions of computers.
Hey! We are talking about millions of computers being remotely infiltrated to do something other then what the owner wishes! Microsoft has created what amounts to the world's largest botnet!!!
Yes, it is pretty obvious that the little blue 'e' was an abuse of Microsoft's total control of the OS market but I always though the clear cut, slam dunk antitrust violation in that regard was that they made it impossible to use a different browser to download updates for their OS.
They basically said, "Sorry but you can only get support for our OS if you use our browser..." Now how did that get past the DOJ and why hasn't it been nuked out of Windows since then?
I think the real point is if it has something that I need. I realize that Microsoft needs it but I don't really care what they need.
If they made an updated version of XP that didn't add restrictions and was refined to be more efficient I would be interested in buying it. I'm not interested in anything that is new in Vista. Slow animated transitions? (I took them out of XP too...) More complex visual displays? A completely redesigned layout that isn't more efficient or intuitive?
Now why would you expect me to want to buy this again?
"Shiny" We are all raccoons because we like shiny things!
So you go and pay so many extra $$s to get your nice "shiny" cell phone with all of the "shiny" extra features, and you realize that you are going to replace it within two years. (Actually 2 years seems to be on the outside.)
Why do you want to pay so much extra for a disposable camera and music player? That is what it really is. I see some great small MP3 players for really cheap and a real digital camera takes way better pictures and both of them last a lot longer.
I realize that as an uber geek you must have as many electronic functions packed in your pocket at one time as possible but have you considered that you are going to end up paying way over $2000 in a span of ten years? For way less money you could have a GREAT digital camera and a GREAT MP3 player. Then all you would need is a series of cheap cell phones because you are going to dispose of them regularly anyway.
. . .
As example, take the man who put his kid in the microwave. New level of stupidity, and shock, for humanity right there... Where do you get that large of a microwave?
The precedent that you would set would be specific to the question in front of the court. Your hypothetical case can't set any precedent related to damages. Damages comes in to play after the case has been decided in favor of one of the parties. In the punishment phase they look at fault and claimed losses and put a price tag on it. You can't really set any sort of precedent for damages because the court figured that out a long time ago.
...that the Illuminati have already decided who they want to be the next US president, and they are worried about the sheep messing it up for them. No.
It actually means that after a trial run at fixing elections with electronic voting machines it now means that Florida is giving up on the pretense of being a democracy.
Thank god for improvements in "Truth in Government".
The "anti-theft" protections on retail items are so over the top that it should probably be prosecuted for the damage it is causing to the environment. The quantity of packaging that goes into the trash is ridiculous. At DVD stores they actually sell DVD openers for the packaging. It makes no sense based on the number of DVDs actually stolen. If it was a sizable percentage I could understand but instead it seems to be a case of us paying for a solution that is probably more expensive the problem.
If you really read the article it gives a cost of the loss: $400 million.
This isn't the cost of the loss of DVDs. It is the cost of the loss in the entire "Entertainment Products" sector. The exact quote is, "Retail theft of entertainment products, including video games, accounts for as much as $400 million in annual losses,..."
Lets look at this. The number is probably padded because when a group is trying to make a point they always pick the numbers skewed towards the point they are trying to make. A common concept in retail is called "Keystoning". The idea is that you want to try to purchase the product at 1/2 of the price you want to sell it for. I suspect that the $400 million is the retail price. That isn't what they paid for it. They might claim their loss includes their profit but the fact is the thieves aren't going to buy it anyway and as long as they were able to restock it they were still able to sell all of them that people were going to buy anyway.
So a more realistic actual cost of the loss for the ENTIRE "Entertainment Products" sector is probably less then $300 million. There are over 300 million people in the US so the industry's loss for the entire "Entertainment Products" is probably less then a dollar per person.
I fail to understand their alarm at the problem... But if they can convince people that there is a huge problem and they are the victim they can continue various antisocial tactics without quite as much public backlash and they can convince lawmakers to give them concessions.
Then you'll have to manually select and run all the on demand shows individually so the MythTV box can record them. Or you could simply start your "on demand" show feeding into your DVR, go to the bathroom, make a snack, let the dog out, and then start watching your show and then skip past the commercials with the time buffer that has built up. (You will have to live with the stigma of knowing that you could have seen you show 5 minutes earlier...)
I wonder how many years it will be before we are required to have our eyelids mechanically clamped open with our heads aimed at the screen, to enable the 'premium' content from our entertainment provider.
(To risk the wrath of our Corporate Overlords. ..)
The first amendment is a right of The People. A lot of the problems that we have stem from lawmakers (conveniently) forgetting that the Bill of Rights are the people's rights and that corporations clearly aren't people and unless there is an amendment to the constitution to change it, corporations do not get those protections.
It think the confusion seems to spring from the fact that campaign contributions and lobbying money mostly comes from corporations. I wonder if a blanket ban of contributions from any source other then individual people would make anything work better...
In the 50s 60s and 70s we all believed that it was possible to work and innovate to create a world where the future was bright and full of possibility. We knew our world was full of atrocities and we lived under the cloud of Mutually Assured Destruction, but we really believed that it was possible to beat those enemies and if we created enough we could make a world where 'it all would be better'.
I don't see that innovation and 'pushing towards the future' gives the average man the same vision of hope anymore. I see two groups that look towards the future with bright eyes. Techies that can't wait for the computers that the future will bring and people who believe that tomorrow will bring an ecologically sound and energy secure future (without a real struggle). The best a lot of us are hoping for is a way to innovate so as to avoid disaster. We are missing the part where we think that we might go beyond a possible disaster into a utopian future.
I think that we can agree that most people don't think that we are going to solve our non political struggles without a painful struggle and sacrifice. We realize that what was our 'manifest destiny' of progress is destroying the world we live in and charging into the future doesn't have that child-like glee anymore.
Wally excelled in quite a different era. It was a time where men were creating a new type of future where anything was possible with the application of human ingenuity and effort. He was a shining example of this stage of history.
We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.
It interests me that so many people have become all up in arms wailing that we should have prevented something that has never happened before in history.
You've somehow forgotten about Columbine? No. Other then the fact that people died and it happened in a school there wasn't a lot of similarity. Columbine was a planned out armed assault with multiple participants with a much lower body count.
Virginia was a single wacko that snapped over an imaginary relationship failure, who then went back to his room, hung out for a bit and then went completely over the edge and managed to amass a body count without precedent. There isn't much they could have done to prevent this because we very wisely live in a world where we don't expect every person walking past us to be a homicidal maniac.
Let's face it. If you take a population of 300 million people everyday a number of them will do something so crazy that it is "unimaginable". The real surprise (luckily) is that it doesn't happen more often.
When you get done creating your 'security state' I have a little secret for you...
When referring to me, how's about we stick with things that I've actually said. Referring to you? Huh?
I think that most readers could identify that "you" referred to "You - the reader". I think that the carriage returns and the "-----" pretty obviously separated the presented ideas.
-----
Every time something really sick hits the media people get all wound up about it and start to hand away their hard fought liberties for non existant 'safety' and at the same time they will get in their car while talking on their cell phones while not freaking out that each month more people die in cars then died in 911.
"We need the freedom of our cars even though it is fraught with personal danger but we will gladly hand over all of our freedom to protect against an unbelievably unlikely danger that you can't protect against anyway..." (Woopie!!!)
Come on "We the people" think about this with your fore brains.
. .. After all, the pen IS mightier than the sword... or the gun
It is very difficult to kill someone with a pen. A gun, on the other hand... . .. The "Pen" refers to the conveyance of ideas.
Ideas have caused far more deaths then a lone person with a gun...
-----
It interests me that so many people have become all up in arms wailing that we should have prevented something that has never happened before in history.
When you get done creating your 'security state' I have a little secret for you...
You still won't be safe. You never will be safe. It isn't possible. Life still has a 100% mortality rate! You are mortal and you are going to die. Get over it.
Hiding in a closet shivering in fear doesn't make you more alive. Your mortality is what makes you feel alive. Don't deny it. Deal with it and LIVE.
I live in California and I have never seen anything about recycling CFLs. If we don't know that we are supposed to be recycling them, and if they don't make it extremely easy for us to recycle, how does anyone expect any of them to actually be recycled.
On the other side of this: Talked to my uncle who is a chemist who specializes in molecular contamination for Goddard and he feels that the 5 milligrams listed as being in each CFL sounds a bit high. As far as the localized environmental contamination from a single bulb breaking, he wondered why they didn't open a window. That would take care of gaseous mercury. As far as the small droplets of mercury, he brought up the interesting fact that mercury has such a high surface tension that as the droplets become smaller the surface tension keeps the mercury from evaporating. If there is carpet in the room, the mercury would work its way down under the carpet into the mat where he felt that it wouldn't effect the rooms occupants.
The real issue here seems to be the long term environmental damage from the disposal of billions of CFLs.
BTW - Has anyone independently confirmed the quantity of mercury that each CFL contains? This story makes the situation sound real bad but I would like to be sure that they are that toxic before we start pushing the bandwagon back the other direction.
0.001%? Did they even ship enough disks in the first place to get such a small number of complaints as one in 100,000? I think it should be instantly apparent that Sony's numbers mean nothing. I am surprised that Sony could get any reported complaints.
Think about it. You go out to the store and buy a DVD and have this problem. Say that you have the persistence to play with the problem and somehow figure out that it is the formatting of the disk that causes the problem.
How are you going to "contact Sony"? This company has a billion contact points and none of them are labeled "call here when your DVD disk has a problem". The likely course is that you return it to Circuit City or Best Buy and the pimply kid behind the counter certainly isn't going to call Sony and report it.
Basically there is almost no chance that Sony will hear a thing because they are structured so they don't have to listen to customers.
There is nothing magical about anyone who has received driving training. The vast majority of trainees in any driving class won't make any noticeable long term improvement in there driving skills. The biggest thing we work on in law enforcement driving training is undoing the plethora of bad habits and incorrect attitudes that they have. A major stumbling block is that there is a tendency for policemen to have a somewhat inflated ego. Basically lots of them got into the business because it gave them guns, badges, etc... And it gave them Control. The ego needs to be worked out of a lot of them so they can open their minds to learn and be safer.
Ambulance drivers aren't given "Go Fast" training in any part of the country that I am aware of. As a rule of thumb they aren't allowed to pass ANY moving traffic on the right. They will only pass on the left. I have never heard of one speeding or even progressing quickly into an intersection on a red light. If you watch they tend to slow to less then 10 miles an hour and carefully inspect an intersection before sticking their nose out.
Police officers tend to be much more aggressive. It is never publicized but their vehicle attrition rate is amazing. (If you know someone working at a body shop with a police contract ask them!) If any group of people had the accident rate of police officers on duty they would never be able to get insurance. Police are just as likely to get distracted and sloppy about their driving as any other person but they are put in situations where they are encouraged to drive much more aggressively then the average driver. Driving training doesn't do anything magical for them either. Most people don't have any gift for driving. That goes for the police too. They do have some misconceptions trained out of them and they have actually practiced car control but it doesn't really do anything to make them 'special drivers'.
The biggest problem I see with police and driving is that they aren't subject to the traffic laws that the rest of us are even when they are off duty. Ask one of them about it. They will give you a story about "how they are always on call to backup any other law enforcement officer at any time and if they were to give each other tickets that would reduce their trust and reliance on one another".
What a load of horse dookey.
So their reason for letting each other get away with ignoring the laws that they enforce on us is that they are so childish that they wouldn't help an officer in need if they had received a ticket from them? My god, just spouting that kind of stupidity should be grounds for immediate termination.
Unless they are willing to follow the laws they have no business enforcing them.
BTW - The law does say that if they are running lights/siren/etc in the line of duty they can enter intersections against a red light and ignore other traffic laws. That is how it should be but if they collide with someone who has a green light it IS the officer's fault.
We deal with drives from hundreds of customer offices where we provide thousands of computers for free. A very simple policy makes something like this data loss exceedingly unlikely. We don't take the drive from any computer and reuse it straight away EVER.
The process for every drive that comes in is to label it with:
* The customer's name
* The model of computer (in case we need to boot it)
* The OS (in case we have to attempt recovery)
* The date received
The drives are stored in a secure area and we don't reuse a drive until it has "ripened" for at least 45 days. Drives that are reused are wiped then reimaged. Drives that aren't going to be reused because they are damaged or because they are too small, are destroyed after 6 months with a welder's slag hammer.
(Also you can remove the magnets from the drives and use them to hang things in your cube!)
The nice thing about the MP3 model is it only rewards songs that are worth it. Anyone who has bought CDs knows each CD is engineered to have 2-3 good tracks and the rest as mediocre filler songs. The big songs are what they advertise and publicize via concerts, radio, movie soundtracks, etc. The filler take much less money to produce.
If everyone is only buying the songs they like, it sends a drastic message: We won't pay for crap. Instead of an artist releasing 20 tracks a year, they could release half a dozen extremely high quality, worthwhile songs, and hopefully make the same -- or more -- revenue (since they don't need to make 11 filler tracks). . .. The problem with this statement is that when you ask a band before an album is released which songs are the 'real good ones' they will list a lot of songs that the public ends up seeing as 'filler'. They just can't tell. After they work on it, struggle with it, and create it out of nothing it becomes 'their baby' and they can't see it with the public's generic eyes. Look up a list of B sides that are huge hits and see how many of the A sides you can't remember. It is surprising!
It is good that you can purchase just the songs that you feel are 'the good ones' but it is a double edged sword. You never get exposed to those 'other songs' that never got any radio play that you still love.
I still hope that there is a massive enough shift in the market that a serious mainstream alternative to the RIAA evolves. When they become enough of a monopoly that they can stop caring about the customer or their suppliers (artists) they need to be slapped back into reality.
The FCC had a December 2006 deadline to turn off analog TV transmissions. The fact that 2 years before that most of the TVs being sold were still analog made the lawmakers reconsider pulling the plug. (Apparently pissing off a large percentage of their constituency is scary for a politician!)
I think that 2009 might stick though. TVs are all HD now and when people have seen the quality that comes from a simple HD antenna they will run to switch.
I don't have cable. (Can't stomach the concept of paying for TV that has commercials...) Last night I finished a homemade bowtie antenna (like a DB2) and watched TV for the first time in digital.
OMG. Perfect reception on way to many channels. The Oscars in HD is actually more interesting. I will never use the rabbit ears again.
Slashdot Mirror
Links are still dead...
The way Vista is upgraded is pretty obviously the way it should have been since Win 9x. The point was that if they were going to use a browser for required support it is obviously anti competitive to demand that you use only their browser.
The only problem with the Vista upgrade scheme is that it is only a small part of an OS that is pretty much useless for most people's needs. I'm pretty certain that it will be regularly used to pipe DRM, EULAs, and other anti customer functionality bits into millions of computers.
Hey! We are talking about millions of computers being remotely infiltrated to do something other then what the owner wishes! Microsoft has created what amounts to the world's largest botnet!!!
Yes, it is pretty obvious that the little blue 'e' was an abuse of Microsoft's total control of the OS market but I always though the clear cut, slam dunk antitrust violation in that regard was that they made it impossible to use a different browser to download updates for their OS.
They basically said, "Sorry but you can only get support for our OS if you use our browser..." Now how did that get past the DOJ and why hasn't it been nuked out of Windows since then?
I think the real point is if it has something that I need. I realize that Microsoft needs it but I don't really care what they need.
If they made an updated version of XP that didn't add restrictions and was refined to be more efficient I would be interested in buying it. I'm not interested in anything that is new in Vista. Slow animated transitions? (I took them out of XP too...) More complex visual displays? A completely redesigned layout that isn't more efficient or intuitive?
Now why would you expect me to want to buy this again?
"Shiny" We are all raccoons because we like shiny things!
So you go and pay so many extra $$s to get your nice "shiny" cell phone with all of the "shiny" extra features, and you realize that you are going to replace it within two years. (Actually 2 years seems to be on the outside.)
Why do you want to pay so much extra for a disposable camera and music player? That is what it really is. I see some great small MP3 players for really cheap and a real digital camera takes way better pictures and both of them last a lot longer.
I realize that as an uber geek you must have as many electronic functions packed in your pocket at one time as possible but have you considered that you are going to end up paying way over $2000 in a span of ten years? For way less money you could have a GREAT digital camera and a GREAT MP3 player. Then all you would need is a series of cheap cell phones because you are going to dispose of them regularly anyway.
Using dead people for oil production would just drive up the price of Soylent Green.
As example, take the man who put his kid in the microwave. New level of stupidity, and shock, for humanity right there... Where do you get that large of a microwave?
"Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?"
Just what we need. More interconnected national databases...
The precedent that you would set would be specific to the question in front of the court. Your hypothetical case can't set any precedent related to damages. Damages comes in to play after the case has been decided in favor of one of the parties. In the punishment phase they look at fault and claimed losses and put a price tag on it. You can't really set any sort of precedent for damages because the court figured that out a long time ago.
...that the Illuminati have already decided who they want to be the next US president, and they are worried about the sheep messing it up for them. No.It actually means that after a trial run at fixing elections with electronic voting machines it now means that Florida is giving up on the pretense of being a democracy.
Thank god for improvements in "Truth in Government".
The "anti-theft" protections on retail items are so over the top that it should probably be prosecuted for the damage it is causing to the environment. The quantity of packaging that goes into the trash is ridiculous. At DVD stores they actually sell DVD openers for the packaging. It makes no sense based on the number of DVDs actually stolen. If it was a sizable percentage I could understand but instead it seems to be a case of us paying for a solution that is probably more expensive the problem.
..."
If you really read the article it gives a cost of the loss: $400 million.
This isn't the cost of the loss of DVDs. It is the cost of the loss in the entire "Entertainment Products" sector. The exact quote is, "Retail theft of entertainment products, including video games, accounts for as much as $400 million in annual losses,
Lets look at this. The number is probably padded because when a group is trying to make a point they always pick the numbers skewed towards the point they are trying to make. A common concept in retail is called "Keystoning". The idea is that you want to try to purchase the product at 1/2 of the price you want to sell it for. I suspect that the $400 million is the retail price. That isn't what they paid for it. They might claim their loss includes their profit but the fact is the thieves aren't going to buy it anyway and as long as they were able to restock it they were still able to sell all of them that people were going to buy anyway.
So a more realistic actual cost of the loss for the ENTIRE "Entertainment Products" sector is probably less then $300 million. There are over 300 million people in the US so the industry's loss for the entire "Entertainment Products" is probably less then a dollar per person.
I fail to understand their alarm at the problem... But if they can convince people that there is a huge problem and they are the victim they can continue various antisocial tactics without quite as much public backlash and they can convince lawmakers to give them concessions.
I wonder how many years it will be before we are required to have our eyelids mechanically clamped open with our heads aimed at the screen, to enable the 'premium' content from our entertainment provider.
(I feel a patent coming on!!!)
(To risk the wrath of our Corporate Overlords. . .)
The first amendment is a right of The People. A lot of the problems that we have stem from lawmakers (conveniently) forgetting that the Bill of Rights are the people's rights and that corporations clearly aren't people and unless there is an amendment to the constitution to change it, corporations do not get those protections.
It think the confusion seems to spring from the fact that campaign contributions and lobbying money mostly comes from corporations. I wonder if a blanket ban of contributions from any source other then individual people would make anything work better...
In the 50s 60s and 70s we all believed that it was possible to work and innovate to create a world where the future was bright and full of possibility. We knew our world was full of atrocities and we lived under the cloud of Mutually Assured Destruction, but we really believed that it was possible to beat those enemies and if we created enough we could make a world where 'it all would be better'.
I don't see that innovation and 'pushing towards the future' gives the average man the same vision of hope anymore. I see two groups that look towards the future with bright eyes. Techies that can't wait for the computers that the future will bring and people who believe that tomorrow will bring an ecologically sound and energy secure future (without a real struggle). The best a lot of us are hoping for is a way to innovate so as to avoid disaster. We are missing the part where we think that we might go beyond a possible disaster into a utopian future.
I think that we can agree that most people don't think that we are going to solve our non political struggles without a painful struggle and sacrifice. We realize that what was our 'manifest destiny' of progress is destroying the world we live in and charging into the future doesn't have that child-like glee anymore.
Wally excelled in quite a different era. It was a time where men were creating a new type of future where anything was possible with the application of human ingenuity and effort. He was a shining example of this stage of history.
We now seem to see a future where human ingenuity is being bent to restrict mankind.
Wally, we need more like you. You will be missed.
You've somehow forgotten about Columbine? No. Other then the fact that people died and it happened in a school there wasn't a lot of similarity. Columbine was a planned out armed assault with multiple participants with a much lower body count.
Virginia was a single wacko that snapped over an imaginary relationship failure, who then went back to his room, hung out for a bit and then went completely over the edge and managed to amass a body count without precedent. There isn't much they could have done to prevent this because we very wisely live in a world where we don't expect every person walking past us to be a homicidal maniac.
Let's face it. If you take a population of 300 million people everyday a number of them will do something so crazy that it is "unimaginable". The real surprise (luckily) is that it doesn't happen more often. When you get done creating your 'security state' I have a little secret for you...
When referring to me, how's about we stick with things that I've actually said. Referring to you? Huh?
I think that most readers could identify that "you" referred to "You - the reader". I think that the carriage returns and the "-----" pretty obviously separated the presented ideas.
-----
Every time something really sick hits the media people get all wound up about it and start to hand away their hard fought liberties for non existant 'safety' and at the same time they will get in their car while talking on their cell phones while not freaking out that each month more people die in cars then died in 911.
"We need the freedom of our cars even though it is fraught with personal danger but we will gladly hand over all of our freedom to protect against an unbelievably unlikely danger that you can't protect against anyway..." (Woopie!!!)
Come on "We the people" think about this with your fore brains.
After all, the pen IS mightier than the sword... or the gun
It is very difficult to kill someone with a pen. A gun, on the other hand...
. .
Ideas have caused far more deaths then a lone person with a gun...
-----
It interests me that so many people have become all up in arms wailing that we should have prevented something that has never happened before in history.
When you get done creating your 'security state' I have a little secret for you...
You still won't be safe. You never will be safe. It isn't possible. Life still has a 100% mortality rate! You are mortal and you are going to die. Get over it.
Hiding in a closet shivering in fear doesn't make you more alive. Your mortality is what makes you feel alive. Don't deny it. Deal with it and LIVE.
I live in California and I have never seen anything about recycling CFLs. If we don't know that we are supposed to be recycling them, and if they don't make it extremely easy for us to recycle, how does anyone expect any of them to actually be recycled.
On the other side of this: Talked to my uncle who is a chemist who specializes in molecular contamination for Goddard and he feels that the 5 milligrams listed as being in each CFL sounds a bit high. As far as the localized environmental contamination from a single bulb breaking, he wondered why they didn't open a window. That would take care of gaseous mercury. As far as the small droplets of mercury, he brought up the interesting fact that mercury has such a high surface tension that as the droplets become smaller the surface tension keeps the mercury from evaporating. If there is carpet in the room, the mercury would work its way down under the carpet into the mat where he felt that it wouldn't effect the rooms occupants.
The real issue here seems to be the long term environmental damage from the disposal of billions of CFLs.
BTW - Has anyone independently confirmed the quantity of mercury that each CFL contains? This story makes the situation sound real bad but I would like to be sure that they are that toxic before we start pushing the bandwagon back the other direction.
Now that I think about it, why didn't Doom have a cell phone as a weapon?
Think about it. You go out to the store and buy a DVD and have this problem. Say that you have the persistence to play with the problem and somehow figure out that it is the formatting of the disk that causes the problem.
How are you going to "contact Sony"? This company has a billion contact points and none of them are labeled "call here when your DVD disk has a problem". The likely course is that you return it to Circuit City or Best Buy and the pimply kid behind the counter certainly isn't going to call Sony and report it.
Basically there is almost no chance that Sony will hear a thing because they are structured so they don't have to listen to customers.
There is nothing magical about anyone who has received driving training. The vast majority of trainees in any driving class won't make any noticeable long term improvement in there driving skills. The biggest thing we work on in law enforcement driving training is undoing the plethora of bad habits and incorrect attitudes that they have. A major stumbling block is that there is a tendency for policemen to have a somewhat inflated ego. Basically lots of them got into the business because it gave them guns, badges, etc... And it gave them Control. The ego needs to be worked out of a lot of them so they can open their minds to learn and be safer.
Ambulance drivers aren't given "Go Fast" training in any part of the country that I am aware of. As a rule of thumb they aren't allowed to pass ANY moving traffic on the right. They will only pass on the left. I have never heard of one speeding or even progressing quickly into an intersection on a red light. If you watch they tend to slow to less then 10 miles an hour and carefully inspect an intersection before sticking their nose out.
Police officers tend to be much more aggressive. It is never publicized but their vehicle attrition rate is amazing. (If you know someone working at a body shop with a police contract ask them!) If any group of people had the accident rate of police officers on duty they would never be able to get insurance. Police are just as likely to get distracted and sloppy about their driving as any other person but they are put in situations where they are encouraged to drive much more aggressively then the average driver. Driving training doesn't do anything magical for them either. Most people don't have any gift for driving. That goes for the police too. They do have some misconceptions trained out of them and they have actually practiced car control but it doesn't really do anything to make them 'special drivers'.
The biggest problem I see with police and driving is that they aren't subject to the traffic laws that the rest of us are even when they are off duty. Ask one of them about it. They will give you a story about "how they are always on call to backup any other law enforcement officer at any time and if they were to give each other tickets that would reduce their trust and reliance on one another".
What a load of horse dookey.
So their reason for letting each other get away with ignoring the laws that they enforce on us is that they are so childish that they wouldn't help an officer in need if they had received a ticket from them? My god, just spouting that kind of stupidity should be grounds for immediate termination.
Unless they are willing to follow the laws they have no business enforcing them.
BTW - The law does say that if they are running lights/siren/etc in the line of duty they can enter intersections against a red light and ignore other traffic laws. That is how it should be but if they collide with someone who has a green light it IS the officer's fault.
We deal with drives from hundreds of customer offices where we provide thousands of computers for free. A very simple policy makes something like this data loss exceedingly unlikely. We don't take the drive from any computer and reuse it straight away EVER.
The process for every drive that comes in is to label it with:
* The customer's name
* The model of computer (in case we need to boot it)
* The OS (in case we have to attempt recovery)
* The date received
The drives are stored in a secure area and we don't reuse a drive until it has "ripened" for at least 45 days. Drives that are reused are wiped then reimaged. Drives that aren't going to be reused because they are damaged or because they are too small, are destroyed after 6 months with a welder's slag hammer.
(Also you can remove the magnets from the drives and use them to hang things in your cube!)
If everyone is only buying the songs they like, it sends a drastic message: We won't pay for crap. Instead of an artist releasing 20 tracks a year, they could release half a dozen extremely high quality, worthwhile songs, and hopefully make the same -- or more -- revenue (since they don't need to make 11 filler tracks).
. .
It is good that you can purchase just the songs that you feel are 'the good ones' but it is a double edged sword. You never get exposed to those 'other songs' that never got any radio play that you still love.
I still hope that there is a massive enough shift in the market that a serious mainstream alternative to the RIAA evolves. When they become enough of a monopoly that they can stop caring about the customer or their suppliers (artists) they need to be slapped back into reality.
The FCC had a December 2006 deadline to turn off analog TV transmissions. The fact that 2 years before that most of the TVs being sold were still analog made the lawmakers reconsider pulling the plug. (Apparently pissing off a large percentage of their constituency is scary for a politician!)
I think that 2009 might stick though. TVs are all HD now and when people have seen the quality that comes from a simple HD antenna they will run to switch.
I don't have cable. (Can't stomach the concept of paying for TV that has commercials...) Last night I finished a homemade bowtie antenna (like a DB2) and watched TV for the first time in digital.
OMG. Perfect reception on way to many channels. The Oscars in HD is actually more interesting. I will never use the rabbit ears again.