Dyndns's subscription cost, while it isn't epsilon, certainly is delta. A one-year subscription is $20, or you could do monthly for $2.
They appear to have increased their prices, but are still pretty cheap. I bought 1 year for $15, and a few months ago I renewed for another 2 years for $30 (expires 2013). Apparently, it's now $20 per year or $40 for 2 years.
BTW, my router only supports a couple of dynamic DNS services (including dyndns.com). However, my two Synology boxes - both of which are capable of being DHCP servers - have support for a much longer list of dynamic DNS services: freedns.org Zoneedit.com DNSPod.com ChangeIP.com dynamic DO!.jp selfHOST.de 3322.org able.or.kr No-IP.com Two-DNS.de DYNDNS.org
After being exposed to Christian missionaries, Hong had a revelation that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and promptly set out to establish the Great Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. This brutal effort was also known as the Taiping rebellion and was the bloodiest civil war of all time. Death toll estimates vary from 20 million to 40 million, all in China, and achieved through hand-to-hand methods (no firebombing air raids or other industrial mass-murder techniques). Since this was in the 1855-1865 period, the casualties were a comparable fraction of the world's population to the accomplishments of Hitler and Stalin combined. The Taiping rebellion probably was not mentioned in your school history lessons, but should have been. It is unflattering to Christianity, whichever viewpoint you take.
BTW, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Hitler was a Christian (of the lapsed Catholic variety), and is known to have disparaged the paganism espoused by Himmler and a few others.
I think someone needs to re-read Leviticus. Yahweh most certainly hates homosexuals.
And amputees. God hates amputees so much there has never been a miracle restoration of an amputated limb, no matter how much praying is done at Lourdes or other "miracle" sites. Not even an amputated finger or thumb has been restored. God probably also hates paraplegiacs, eunuchs, and a bunch of others, including those who merely lost their adult teeth.
Buddhism, for example, did not start out as a religion. Siddartha Gautama figured out how to get enlightened (to end suffering completely in this lifetime) and started telling other people about it. He said you shouldn't kill people because it would hinder one's progress to enlightenment (not cause of any 'divine justice' or whatever, but simply cause the mental qualities that arise as a result of planning to and executing a murder are antithetical to the ones required to calm the mind and lead to the end of suffering).
Minor correction: Buddhism was an offshoot from the older Jain religion, which which it shares many precepts. Gautama took many (but not all) pre-existing ideas from Jainism and adapted them (non-violence, vegetarianism, enlightenment, buddha, etc.). He was apparently quite aware of Jainism, and followed several Jain practices. The two religions are linked in many ways.
Also, lenses whose primary intended use is portraiture are slightly "soft". The degree of softness can be controllable as in certain lenses from Canon and Pentax. This is deliberate, so that the image can be tuned to catch sufficient details of a face (presumably occupying a good part of the photo) without showing the individual pores or small scale blemishes. It's hard to get an exact equivalent by blurring during postprocessing. But you're right about much of it being in the lighting, and most of the rest is setting and composition.
About 1% of the population is capable of multitasking. Only they can focus on their gadget and the road. The rest should stay as far away from that as possible.
According to published studies, those who are actually good at multitasking generally consider themselves bad at it, and tend to avoid it. On the other hand, those who consider themselves good at multitasking are rather bad at it. Yet another manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Of Nokia's current offerings, the only one that tempts me is the MeeGo-based N9, which has a decent Linux and 64GB of storage. It also has Nokia's Ovi Maps, which are pretty good, at no extra cost. Alas, it is destined to be an orphan. If Nokia pushed it more broadly, it would be a winner - far better than their W7 Lumia 800 (costs more for slightly fewer screen pixels, similar features, but only 16GB storage) which I also handled in one store.
If you need ftp or ssh, you have to state the specific need and how it relates to the business.
How long do these requests take to process?
No idea what the statistical distribution of lag times is. For the few I've needed (ssh or remote desktop to client sites where we're running process experiments), I was able to open a connection within 30 minutes to 3 hours of requesting it.
Also, even ports 80 and 443 are heavily filtered so that social media sites (youtube, facebook, etc.), name redirection sites (dyndns and its ilk), file lockers (megaupload, etc.), webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc.) and all sites hosting questionable activities are blocked.
If YouTube is blocked, how long does a request to view a video published by one of the company's suppliers take?
Something important from a supplier posted on Youtube??? Pardon my laughter, but this probably never happens. If a supplier has a public video which it's important for us to see, they would put it on their own web site. If it's less than 50MB, they can just email it to us.
If Facebook is blocked, how long does a request by the company's marketing department to update the company's official Facebook page take?
We have a corporate presence on Facebook, so there are some marketing-communications groups with permanent access. The remaining 100,000 employees don't need to use Facebook for work purposes.
If webmail is blocked, how long does a request to connect each employee to the company's Google Apps server take?
Webmail is blocked because the company has its own extensive email infrastructure and all email is logged for SarBox compliance (among several important reasons). Use of Gmail or other Google Apps (or anything similar) for company purposes is explicitly forbidden. All company-related email must use the official infrastructure.
This all sounds like control-freakery, but it appears to be part of a system that works. We design and make high tech products, but targeted at different industry segments rather than at consumers. The company is doing quite nicely, with good financial results even in the "recession". Bonuses in 2011 are up on 2010, which were well up on 2009, which were up a bit on 2008. And projections for 2012 are fairly decent also.
Yeah , online great idea. I mean why bother just putting a disc in a tray and waiting 30 secos for the game to boot when you can wait 48 hours for the 50GB to download first instead.
Agreed that the download latency would suck today, but it's not always as bad as your example. We have 100/100 fiber, and in principle it would take about 70 minutes to download 50GB. In practice, downloads can be slower than 100Mbps, especially when downloading stuff from other countries, but when downloading from a major reputable company we usually get 30Mbps or better per site (and can saturate the 100Mbps by downloading several items simultaneously).
Of course, our connection is not particularly fast. There are growing numbers of homes with Gbps speeds in Japan, Korea, and the Nordic countries; capacity limits are mostly unheard of in those countries, and huge where they do exist. A 50GB download which takes less than 10 minutes might be reasonable, provided it takes place only once per game (i.e. include a multi-TB local disk).
It is possible that an employee of a studio is downloading via torrents without permission.
I'm flabbergasted that this is actually possible, unless the employee in question is privileged in particular ways, such as by being a network administrator.
After all, how many people do you know use their work networks to download pirated content.
None. Those who use torrents do so at home.
Reputable companies which are large enough to have an IT department will have strict enforcement of many network policies, especially those which are related to commercial risk. Where I work, everything other than ports 80 and 443 must be opened on a per-node and per destination basis. If you need ftp or ssh, you have to state the specific need and how it relates to the business. Also, even ports 80 and 443 are heavily filtered so that social media sites (youtube, facebook, etc.), name redirection sites (dyndns and its ilk), file lockers (megaupload, etc.), webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc.) and all sites hosting questionable activities are blocked. I suspect running a client for IRC or BitTorrent would get you nowhere. There are probably some ways around this, but looking for them would be stupid and might set off career-threatening alarm bells.
I visited site out of curiosity. I don't pirate, yet they say I downloaded a bunch of shows (CSI Miami? Please, who watches that? Well, not me.) I am starting to think that site is not at all legit.
Do you have an unprotected (or minimally protected) wireless LAN and neighbors at fairly close range? That's a hole that the unscrupulous might take advantage of. At least, it would provide one explanation for the allegation of downloading stuff which you did not download.
I also visited the site, out of a particular curiosity. It said my permanent IP address was not in their database.
I'm not sure how to interpret this - I have used torrents, but only for Linux ISOs (a few flavors of Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS). However, the site does not appear to restrict itself to torrents of questionable legality, but apparently encompasses all file sharing, including the legal sharing of GPL and CC works. If you enter "Ubuntu" in their search box, it will return a number of ISO links along with links to videos, books, etc.
NAT allows devices behind the wall to be addressed by port, sharing a single IP address. At an extreme you could have 65535 addressable devices behind a NAT firewall, exposed to the public internet as one IP address.
In most cases, NAT allows multiple clients behind the address translation, but does not necessarily allow multiple servers, since each service typically can handle only one or a few ports. For instance, how many ftp servers or http servers can you have behind a NAT router? Hint: it's not a large number.
Here's another example of where NAT breaks down: to access our work VPN from home, you connect to an outside box, which sends a token to a third box. That third box then sends an unsolicited packet on port 500/ISAKMP to the IP of the first box. With NAT, the router cannot know where to send this unsolicited packet, since it is sent to the router's IP address. We have to designate a particular internal node as the recipient for unsolicited port 500 packets, and then it works - for that machine. Here's the rub: we have two PCs which we'd sometimes like to connect to the VPN simultaneously (my wife works for the same employer as me), but NAT allows only one to do so at a time, so NAT breaks this function. Port 500 is the standard port used for key exchange in secure VPNs.
It really is more of a question of how it's deployed and targeted. Some software users (many many Office customers) don't actually know their way around their systems.
75% of the users don't know that you can search a document, so they _read_ it to find stuff.
Alas, this is likely true. And of those who do know of the ctrl-F shortcut, I'd wager barely half know how to insert a cross-reference. Based on the documents and emails produced by allegedly native speakers of English, I'd also wager that the majority don't know how to use a spell-checker (or don't know how to switch off the autocorrect function and its amusing stupidity).
Something no one would need if proper assignment of IP ranges had been done.
No point asking what you mean, since you evidently speak from ignorance. Even with optimal assignment of IPv4 addresses, it would only delay the inevitable shortfall. Sooner or later, the number of addressable end-points on the internet would exceed 4 billion. NAT is an unfortunate workaround to delay the effects of the shortfall; it should be a freely-chosen option, not an enforced requirement.
But they will release something on schedule. As the day approaches, its features will be trimmed to meet the schedule, as usual. The promised features will come in SP1 and some of them might even work reliably by then (Quality is job 1.1), while security will come in SP2 or SP3. Fool people once, shame on you. Fool people dozens of times, and you must be Microsoft.
They* killed a killed a guy for being... "dangerous terrorist". No trial, no judge, no lawyer, no oversight.
Care to share the name? News reports? Evidence? If you have evidence, go to the press, or Cryptome or...
...
So, back to the point, citations please.
Well, assuming GP was referring to US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, there is no shortage of press commentary. Apparently US citizen Salmir Khan was killed in the same attack, but was not deliberately targeted, being just another collateral casualty. The press reports include statements of concern regarding this extra-judicial execution of al-Awlaki being ordered by the sitting US president. It was not a "heat of the moment" death in a shootout or in an attempt to escape from being arrested. Moreover, was not convicted of any offence, not even in absentia. Although many accusations were made (presumably with justification), no charges were ever laid against him. From what is in the press reports, he was by no means a Mahatma Gandhi, but the ordering of an execution without even going through the motions of a trial (not even a mock trial) should be disturbing to any US citizen. It's easier to slide down the slippery slope than to climb back up.
Oh, here's a few press references, in the Wahington Post, the Huffington Post, and CBS News. Use your Google-fu to find many many more. There is also an interesting comment in the New York Times, which suggests that legal advice given to the president before the execution was that it would be illegal.
Let me choose about 20 channels, and cut my bill about 70%.
Whatever the cable companies decide to let you do, cutting your bill is not among them. Their incremental cost of providing you with channels is essentially zero. Cable companies are expert in slicing and dicing the channels into packages so that each package typically has one channel that many people would consider "must have" and a load of dross. This maximizes the number of packages each customer buys, and hence maximizes revenue for the cable company.
If you were to be allowed to choose individual channels, they'd each have to cost about as much as a whole package. That's the way it goes here in Finland, where cable companies are required by law to provide individual channels on request. Most of them cost between euro5.95 and euro9.95 per channel, much the same as getting a whole package which includes that channel. Some channels, of course, are much more expensive and mostly sold individually: Manchester United channel (WTF?), various "adult" channels, and a few movie channels.
The last time they shuffled our pay package channels around to make it so we'd need to buy more packages (splitting Animal Planet, Discovery Science, and National Geographic), we canceled the lot. We still get the basic channel package because that's included in our network service, but even that may change in the new year. It seems that nobody in the house actually watches TV much, not even the kids, so it was just money wasted. 'Nuff said.
One of the uncomfortable truths (uncomfortable for MBA cost minimizers) is that know-how is between the ears. It is not in the manuals or specifications, which merely prove that their writers had the know-how. Even more important is the know-why, which is part of the institutional memory which also resides between the ears.
I have witnessed some "technology transfers" where a set of working products was transferred with documentation, design data, and much background information to a group in another region (mostly EU/US transfers). The first group is then wound down or redeployed. The new group does fine at first, until a new version of a product is needed. Then they always make mistakes the original designers would consider childish or stupid. They don't know the why behind design decisions, and don't know what to avoid. In my experience, it takes 5-10 years to build a decent product design group from scratch. On the other hand, an existing design group will sustain itself by mentoring and guidance of new inductees by experienced members.
The only successful technology transfer which I participated in was one where a few senior designers were transferred with the set of products they were responsible for. It was far from cheap in up-front costs, but it avoided the crises and financial disasters which afflicted the other transfers after a year or two.
Slashdot Mirror
What use would the CIA have for honest staff?
The rest of them need someone to practice their dishonesty on?
Dyndns's subscription cost, while it isn't epsilon, certainly is delta. A one-year subscription is $20, or you could do monthly for $2.
They appear to have increased their prices, but are still pretty cheap. I bought 1 year for $15, and a few months ago I renewed for another 2 years for $30 (expires 2013). Apparently, it's now $20 per year or $40 for 2 years.
BTW, my router only supports a couple of dynamic DNS services (including dyndns.com). However, my two Synology boxes - both of which are capable of being DHCP servers - have support for a much longer list of dynamic DNS services: freedns.org Zoneedit.com DNSPod.com ChangeIP.com dynamic DO!.jp selfHOST.de 3322.org able.or.kr No-IP.com Two-DNS.de DYNDNS.org
Show me something comparable to Stalin and Mao
I'll give you one: Hong Xiuquan.
After being exposed to Christian missionaries, Hong had a revelation that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and promptly set out to establish the Great Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. This brutal effort was also known as the Taiping rebellion and was the bloodiest civil war of all time. Death toll estimates vary from 20 million to 40 million, all in China, and achieved through hand-to-hand methods (no firebombing air raids or other industrial mass-murder techniques). Since this was in the 1855-1865 period, the casualties were a comparable fraction of the world's population to the accomplishments of Hitler and Stalin combined. The Taiping rebellion probably was not mentioned in your school history lessons, but should have been. It is unflattering to Christianity, whichever viewpoint you take.
BTW, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Hitler was a Christian (of the lapsed Catholic variety), and is known to have disparaged the paganism espoused by Himmler and a few others.
I think someone needs to re-read Leviticus. Yahweh most certainly hates homosexuals.
And amputees. God hates amputees so much there has never been a miracle restoration of an amputated limb, no matter how much praying is done at Lourdes or other "miracle" sites. Not even an amputated finger or thumb has been restored. God probably also hates paraplegiacs, eunuchs, and a bunch of others, including those who merely lost their adult teeth.
Buddhism, for example, did not start out as a religion. Siddartha Gautama figured out how to get enlightened (to end suffering completely in this lifetime) and started telling other people about it. He said you shouldn't kill people because it would hinder one's progress to enlightenment (not cause of any 'divine justice' or whatever, but simply cause the mental qualities that arise as a result of planning to and executing a murder are antithetical to the ones required to calm the mind and lead to the end of suffering).
Minor correction: Buddhism was an offshoot from the older Jain religion, which which it shares many precepts. Gautama took many (but not all) pre-existing ideas from Jainism and adapted them (non-violence, vegetarianism, enlightenment, buddha, etc.). He was apparently quite aware of Jainism, and followed several Jain practices. The two religions are linked in many ways.
Also, lenses whose primary intended use is portraiture are slightly "soft". The degree of softness can be controllable as in certain lenses from Canon and Pentax. This is deliberate, so that the image can be tuned to catch sufficient details of a face (presumably occupying a good part of the photo) without showing the individual pores or small scale blemishes. It's hard to get an exact equivalent by blurring during postprocessing. But you're right about much of it being in the lighting, and most of the rest is setting and composition.
No true Scotsman would wear cosmetics!
Or anything else... under his kilt.
Mama (Earth) is that you?
Not much methane in a queef...
About 1% of the population is capable of multitasking. Only they can focus on their gadget and the road. The rest should stay as far away from that as possible.
According to published studies, those who are actually good at multitasking generally consider themselves bad at it, and tend to avoid it. On the other hand, those who consider themselves good at multitasking are rather bad at it. Yet another manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Shit! We're next!
-Canadian AC
Ha! USA! USA! USA!
Time for Luddites to move to Zimbabwe?
Of Nokia's current offerings, the only one that tempts me is the MeeGo-based N9, which has a decent Linux and 64GB of storage. It also has Nokia's Ovi Maps, which are pretty good, at no extra cost. Alas, it is destined to be an orphan. If Nokia pushed it more broadly, it would be a winner - far better than their W7 Lumia 800 (costs more for slightly fewer screen pixels, similar features, but only 16GB storage) which I also handled in one store.
If you need ftp or ssh, you have to state the specific need and how it relates to the business.
How long do these requests take to process?
No idea what the statistical distribution of lag times is. For the few I've needed (ssh or remote desktop to client sites where we're running process experiments), I was able to open a connection within 30 minutes to 3 hours of requesting it.
Also, even ports 80 and 443 are heavily filtered so that social media sites (youtube, facebook, etc.), name redirection sites (dyndns and its ilk), file lockers (megaupload, etc.), webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc.) and all sites hosting questionable activities are blocked.
If YouTube is blocked, how long does a request to view a video published by one of the company's suppliers take?
Something important from a supplier posted on Youtube??? Pardon my laughter, but this probably never happens. If a supplier has a public video which it's important for us to see, they would put it on their own web site. If it's less than 50MB, they can just email it to us.
If Facebook is blocked, how long does a request by the company's marketing department to update the company's official Facebook page take?
We have a corporate presence on Facebook, so there are some marketing-communications groups with permanent access. The remaining 100,000 employees don't need to use Facebook for work purposes.
If webmail is blocked, how long does a request to connect each employee to the company's Google Apps server take?
Webmail is blocked because the company has its own extensive email infrastructure and all email is logged for SarBox compliance (among several important reasons). Use of Gmail or other Google Apps (or anything similar) for company purposes is explicitly forbidden. All company-related email must use the official infrastructure.
This all sounds like control-freakery, but it appears to be part of a system that works. We design and make high tech products, but targeted at different industry segments rather than at consumers. The company is doing quite nicely, with good financial results even in the "recession". Bonuses in 2011 are up on 2010, which were well up on 2009, which were up a bit on 2008. And projections for 2012 are fairly decent also.
Yeah , online great idea. I mean why bother just putting a disc in a tray and waiting 30 secos for the game to boot when you can wait 48 hours for the 50GB to download first instead.
Agreed that the download latency would suck today, but it's not always as bad as your example. We have 100/100 fiber, and in principle it would take about 70 minutes to download 50GB. In practice, downloads can be slower than 100Mbps, especially when downloading stuff from other countries, but when downloading from a major reputable company we usually get 30Mbps or better per site (and can saturate the 100Mbps by downloading several items simultaneously).
Of course, our connection is not particularly fast. There are growing numbers of homes with Gbps speeds in Japan, Korea, and the Nordic countries; capacity limits are mostly unheard of in those countries, and huge where they do exist. A 50GB download which takes less than 10 minutes might be reasonable, provided it takes place only once per game (i.e. include a multi-TB local disk).
It is possible that an employee of a studio is downloading via torrents without permission.
I'm flabbergasted that this is actually possible, unless the employee in question is privileged in particular ways, such as by being a network administrator.
After all, how many people do you know use their work networks to download pirated content.
None. Those who use torrents do so at home.
Reputable companies which are large enough to have an IT department will have strict enforcement of many network policies, especially those which are related to commercial risk. Where I work, everything other than ports 80 and 443 must be opened on a per-node and per destination basis. If you need ftp or ssh, you have to state the specific need and how it relates to the business. Also, even ports 80 and 443 are heavily filtered so that social media sites (youtube, facebook, etc.), name redirection sites (dyndns and its ilk), file lockers (megaupload, etc.), webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc.) and all sites hosting questionable activities are blocked. I suspect running a client for IRC or BitTorrent would get you nowhere. There are probably some ways around this, but looking for them would be stupid and might set off career-threatening alarm bells.
I visited site out of curiosity. I don't pirate, yet they say I downloaded a bunch of shows (CSI Miami? Please, who watches that? Well, not me.)
I am starting to think that site is not at all legit.
Do you have an unprotected (or minimally protected) wireless LAN and neighbors at fairly close range? That's a hole that the unscrupulous might take advantage of. At least, it would provide one explanation for the allegation of downloading stuff which you did not download.
I also visited the site, out of a particular curiosity. It said my permanent IP address was not in their database.
I'm not sure how to interpret this - I have used torrents, but only for Linux ISOs (a few flavors of Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS). However, the site does not appear to restrict itself to torrents of questionable legality, but apparently encompasses all file sharing, including the legal sharing of GPL and CC works. If you enter "Ubuntu" in their search box, it will return a number of ISO links along with links to videos, books, etc.
NAT allows devices behind the wall to be addressed by port, sharing a single IP address. At an extreme you could have 65535 addressable devices behind a NAT firewall, exposed to the public internet as one IP address.
In most cases, NAT allows multiple clients behind the address translation, but does not necessarily allow multiple servers, since each service typically can handle only one or a few ports. For instance, how many ftp servers or http servers can you have behind a NAT router? Hint: it's not a large number.
Here's another example of where NAT breaks down: to access our work VPN from home, you connect to an outside box, which sends a token to a third box. That third box then sends an unsolicited packet on port 500/ISAKMP to the IP of the first box. With NAT, the router cannot know where to send this unsolicited packet, since it is sent to the router's IP address. We have to designate a particular internal node as the recipient for unsolicited port 500 packets, and then it works - for that machine. Here's the rub: we have two PCs which we'd sometimes like to connect to the VPN simultaneously (my wife works for the same employer as me), but NAT allows only one to do so at a time, so NAT breaks this function. Port 500 is the standard port used for key exchange in secure VPNs.
It really is more of a question of how it's deployed and targeted. Some software users (many many Office customers) don't actually know their way around their systems.
75% of the users don't know that you can search a document, so they _read_ it to find stuff.
Alas, this is likely true. And of those who do know of the ctrl-F shortcut, I'd wager barely half know how to insert a cross-reference. Based on the documents and emails produced by allegedly native speakers of English, I'd also wager that the majority don't know how to use a spell-checker (or don't know how to switch off the autocorrect function and its amusing stupidity).
Something no one would need if proper assignment of IP ranges had been done.
No point asking what you mean, since you evidently speak from ignorance. Even with optimal assignment of IPv4 addresses, it would only delay the inevitable shortfall. Sooner or later, the number of addressable end-points on the internet would exceed 4 billion. NAT is an unfortunate workaround to delay the effects of the shortfall; it should be a freely-chosen option, not an enforced requirement.
I'll be waiting for SP1.
But they will release something on schedule. As the day approaches, its features will be trimmed to meet the schedule, as usual. The promised features will come in SP1 and some of them might even work reliably by then (Quality is job 1.1), while security will come in SP2 or SP3. Fool people once, shame on you. Fool people dozens of times, and you must be Microsoft.
They* killed a killed a guy for being ... "dangerous terrorist". No trial, no judge, no lawyer, no oversight.
Care to share the name? News reports? Evidence? If you have evidence, go to the press, or Cryptome or...
So, back to the point, citations please.
Well, assuming GP was referring to US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, there is no shortage of press commentary. Apparently US citizen Salmir Khan was killed in the same attack, but was not deliberately targeted, being just another collateral casualty. The press reports include statements of concern regarding this extra-judicial execution of al-Awlaki being ordered by the sitting US president. It was not a "heat of the moment" death in a shootout or in an attempt to escape from being arrested. Moreover, was not convicted of any offence, not even in absentia. Although many accusations were made (presumably with justification), no charges were ever laid against him. From what is in the press reports, he was by no means a Mahatma Gandhi, but the ordering of an execution without even going through the motions of a trial (not even a mock trial) should be disturbing to any US citizen. It's easier to slide down the slippery slope than to climb back up.
Oh, here's a few press references, in the Wahington Post, the Huffington Post, and CBS News. Use your Google-fu to find many many more. There is also an interesting comment in the New York Times, which suggests that legal advice given to the president before the execution was that it would be illegal.
Let me choose about 20 channels, and cut my bill about 70%.
Whatever the cable companies decide to let you do, cutting your bill is not among them. Their incremental cost of providing you with channels is essentially zero. Cable companies are expert in slicing and dicing the channels into packages so that each package typically has one channel that many people would consider "must have" and a load of dross. This maximizes the number of packages each customer buys, and hence maximizes revenue for the cable company.
If you were to be allowed to choose individual channels, they'd each have to cost about as much as a whole package. That's the way it goes here in Finland, where cable companies are required by law to provide individual channels on request. Most of them cost between euro5.95 and euro9.95 per channel, much the same as getting a whole package which includes that channel. Some channels, of course, are much more expensive and mostly sold individually: Manchester United channel (WTF?), various "adult" channels, and a few movie channels.
The last time they shuffled our pay package channels around to make it so we'd need to buy more packages (splitting Animal Planet, Discovery Science, and National Geographic), we canceled the lot. We still get the basic channel package because that's included in our network service, but even that may change in the new year. It seems that nobody in the house actually watches TV much, not even the kids, so it was just money wasted. 'Nuff said.
And then they wonder why people think that consultants are basically thieves with a title.
What makes you think consultants get a title?
If you really believed that you would have posted as AC.
His name looks like "Smith", but it's pronounced "AC"...
One of the uncomfortable truths (uncomfortable for MBA cost minimizers) is that know-how is between the ears. It is not in the manuals or specifications, which merely prove that their writers had the know-how. Even more important is the know-why, which is part of the institutional memory which also resides between the ears.
I have witnessed some "technology transfers" where a set of working products was transferred with documentation, design data, and much background information to a group in another region (mostly EU/US transfers). The first group is then wound down or redeployed. The new group does fine at first, until a new version of a product is needed. Then they always make mistakes the original designers would consider childish or stupid. They don't know the why behind design decisions, and don't know what to avoid. In my experience, it takes 5-10 years to build a decent product design group from scratch. On the other hand, an existing design group will sustain itself by mentoring and guidance of new inductees by experienced members.
The only successful technology transfer which I participated in was one where a few senior designers were transferred with the set of products they were responsible for. It was far from cheap in up-front costs, but it avoided the crises and financial disasters which afflicted the other transfers after a year or two.