I will note that sending *letters* to congresscritters is largely useless these days due to how mail is handled for them. If it's a container (envelopes included) it's handled offsite with a significant delay.
Fax, website contact forms, email, and postcards are the connection methods of choice these days.
Personally, I've found Dropbox to be a very convenient way to get things onto my phone, particularly ebooks. Dump them from Calibre into a Books directory in Dropbox, then go to the phone and just open the file.
I'd consider doing the same with SugarSync, but there's no official Linux client yet, and doesn't look to be one for quite some time if ever (though there's an independent working on one using their published API). One big difference: SugarSync lets you specify the directories to sync.
The article lists T-Mobile as having an "unlimited" plan for $30, but in reality it's more like "If you go above 5GB, we'll cap your bandwidth down to EDGE speeds until the end of the month." They also just recently added a tethering plan for I believe an extra $15 or so a month, which would put that 5GB+ at around $45 ($35-40 if you have a loyalty plan) with tethering. Of course, people have figured out other ways to tether on at least some of their devices....
Really, this makes me think of chorded keyboards like the Twiddler. Sure I could learn it eventually, but I think it'd still be slower than Swype or even than hunt & peck on a reasonably-sized on-screen keyboard. The main thing I think this is addressing is inaccuracy in hitting keys on an on-screen keyboard, and it's doing it in what feels to me like a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner.
Hell, I'm not even programming for Android and I think I could reimplement Graffiti faster than I could get comfortable with writing with this.
Go-oo.org is a fork managed by some folks at Novell that incorporates multiple patches that haven't made it into the main branch yet. One of those is exceeding 65K rows (now 1048576). It's not in the main branch because there are apparently some problems with calculation performance with many rows and some problems with positioning with drawing objects. More details in http://kohei.us/2010/02/20/increasing-calcs-row-limit-to-1-million/
There are still a few USB drives out there with hardware write protect switches, but they're hard to find and you'll probably have to order online. I have what may at this point be the best listing available at http://www.fencepost.net/2010/03/usb-flash-drives-with-hardware-write-protection/, culled from a variety of searches, message boards, and one German computer magazine (c't) which has its own listing.
In the US, the most likely drives to find in stores if you're looking are a couple of Imation models (Pivot and Clip), plus lingering supplies of the older Swivel models (the swivel isn't all that sturdy, pockets will beat it up over time). I've not seen these widely in stores, but you may find the Clip in college bookstores - I suspect that's their target for the style.
I know someone with multiple sclerosis/MS, and there are some legitimate studies of this sort of thing going on related to MS and other autoimmune diseases. Apparently there was some sort of study done in south america where the control group had multiple relapses (MS attacks) but the group with intestinal parasites had basically none over the course of the study. That's prompted further studies involving pig whipworms (which don't thrive and reproduce in humans), along with the obvious investigations of the mechanisms involved. I believe the same thing is also being looked at for Crohn's.
In this particular case it sounds like Thesis is screwed because they're incorporating WordPress code into their theme - game over.
In the more general case, I think you could make a credible argument that WordPress is designed to look for and utilize external libraries (called "themes") and that just doing so should not make WordPress' license apply to that theme (or plugin). My reasoning there is that if you argue that WordPress incorporating a theme makes the WP license (GPL) apply to that theme, what prevents that theme's license from correspondingly "infecting" WordPress?
Although they'd probably have been better off donating a few million to http://www.gorilla-haven.org/ to get Pimlico's DateBk6 (http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/).
I'm still amazed at how relatively crappy the calendar and address book apps are on Blackberries 10 years after people figured it out properly on the Palm, and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being truly happy with address books on any of the big smartphones.
20 meters away from "booming operations?" Hm, what's the definition of that? How large is a "booming operations" area? 500 meters? 1 kilometer? 1 mile? I suspect it's "Whatever the BP guy tells the local enforcement folks it is," which I'd have a problem with. Does "booming operations" cover the employees doing the booming when they're off-duty? "Congratulations, you've just tried to interview a someone who was laying boom 6 hours ago about the ban on respirators, here's your Class D Felony indictment."
I would absolutely not purchase anything without seeing how it works on campus first. There should be enough people around with enough different options to get a feel for things over the first couple of weeks (or less). My advice prior to that (and afterwards) is to get a Google Voice number and use that as your number - that way you can have it forward to whatever number you end up with, get text messages via email, etc. If you decide long-term to move away from GV you can do so after you have a phone that works.
I use UMA on my Blackberry regularly, but at least on my device I've seen times where it seems like it'll refuse to connect via UMA until it's seen a regular mobile signal. That may just be me (there are people using it internationally where they're definitely not getting a T-Mobile USA signal), but it's something to be aware of. There are other things that may keep it from working as well - UMA requires TCP connections on ports 500 and 4500, so if those are blocked it'll cause problems. There's a variety of information available from a few years ago when UMA first showed up about what needs to be open for it to function.
This is why I wouldn't want to be a small company developing applications for the iPhone/iPod/iPad - if you don't have the clout to get preapproval, you're stuck with investing your time and money in doing the development then hoping that Apple will actually approve your application.
They might be doing so. Google Maps on my Blackberry 8320 (no GPS) shows my location to within a few hundred meters in a few places, and I can think of multiple ways they could be doing so all of which involve WiFi.
There are other curious beasts out there, such as Kanguru's e-Flash which has both eSATA and USB connectors. It's steepish at $105+ for 32GB (vs $60 or so for 32GB USB), but not absurd. 64GB also available.
I'm sure it's a niche product that will go away after USB3 becomes widespread, but for now it's a nice mix of both worlds.
How many projects out there become the hot new thing for a week or so, then the primary person working on the project changes jobs / gets married / joins a commune and eventually people start saying "Well, I found this open source project that sounds right, but it looks like it's been dead since 2007."
I use Docu-Track.com's PDF-Xchange viewer as the default PDF app (including embedded in browser) and it warns that the PDF is attempting to run a program.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out.
That combination right there is going to be very powerful, and there are at least two arguments to be based on it: first, if even the copyright owners can't figure out what material is supposed to be there, how are we expected to do so? A followup offer might be "Your honor, if you'll instruct Viacom that they must allow Google and its legal team to index and have access to all of their internal communications and financials, we'll use that information to remove only the Viacom-owned items that Viacom didn't upload or cause to have uploaded."
The second argument could easily be that Google made a strong effort to remove copyrighted materials but that their efficiency in doing so was severely degraded by Viacom's uploading materials in ways that effectively contaminated the identification of infringing materials. Remove all the red ones!OK, here they are.Whoops, I really meant all the red ones except this one, that one, that other one, the one over there and maybe a few more.And how are we supposed to know which ones you want removed?Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
A bit of additional detail: They run what I assume is a fairly stock CPanel setup, though they may have some tweaks. I have a reseller account with them which gets me simple access to the control panels for my resold customers, I pay Hosting Matters at half the normal price for each plan, then bill my customers however much I've agreed to with them (generally quite a bit more than that base price, but I do handholding as part of it).
I decided on Hosting Matters back during one of the election years - either 2000 or 2004 - in large part because they were hosting multiple politically-oriented sites from both left and right, and handling the headaches of high traffic and occasional attacks in a manner that impressed me. I figured that if they were doing that well hosting several of the top 25 political discussion sites during a hot election season, I was willing to run with them.
I've been with them for years, and they do a pretty decent job. * Their support is responsive, knowledgeable and long-term (when I've needed to put in support tickets I generally get quick response and quick action, frequently from the same folks I've been seeing for years and sometimes from the owner), * they'll move accounts off of servers as needed (e.g. if a domain is being attacked or possibly slashdotted, or if you need something that hasn't been rolled out to older servers), * they have customer forums that are readable by anyone (though they're less active now than they were a few years back), * When something goes wrong, they'll update with more information and what's being done to address the problem. This really cropped up a few years back when someone working in the Peak 10 (peak10.com) Jacksonville data center yanked a few drives out of some of their servers, back when they weren't using much space and didn't actually have a cage (now they have at least two locked cages, I believe). * They do run backups, though I've never needed to contact them about that. My evidence, from October, 2009: "Merritt has apparently suffered a primary drive failure. The good news is the backups run in the wee hours this morning are complete so we'll be putting new drives in the box and restoring everyone from backup. As always, if you have any questions, hit us up at the helpdesk." * They don't oversell - the accounts have limitations, but are more than adequate. The pricing is not the cheapest out there, but is certainly far from expensive.
In the case mentioned (Mark Saylor, California Highway Patrol, '09 Lexus crash), I've seen reports that it wasn't possible to turn the key to kill the car, because it uses a push-button ignition. It's apparently possible to kill the engine by holding the button in, but since it was a loaner car he wasn't that familiar with it. Apparently the vehicle in question also has push-button shifting, and may not allow a shift into neutral while the vehicle is in motion.
Heck, what percentage of the general population knows that there's a difference between pressing the power button (signal to OS) on a modern PC and holding the power button (tell the power supply to shut down) on a modern PC?
Amazon doesn't have any reason to delist the paper versions, they still make the same amount they did before. If Macmillan ebooks aren't available through Amazon, it doesn't really hurt Amazon that much.
Also, if Amazon really wants to slap Macmillan, they can change how they list paper versions to imply that the publisher doesn't make electronic versions available while a literal reading says only that they're not available through Amazon.
If nothing else, the companies that booked directly with the hotels and were not getting CES/CEA special rates should be able to initiate chargebacks (because odds are high it was all paid for on someone's credit card). They contracted for a service, that service was aggressively not delivered.
The drawback to this is the possibility of not being able to book into the same hotel in the future, at least not under the same name. Similarly, if the hotels share information (any legal issues with that?) possibly being effectively blacklisted from that whole area of Vegas.
If you want to get lawyers involved, there may be other claims as others have pointed out, but that probably gets more risky and potentially expensive.
Neil Gaiman has spoken at various times (e.g. Neil Gaiman at Open Rights Group) about the fact that most of his readers found him free, then started to buy his books. Cory Doctorow summarizes this beautifully in the foreword to Little Brother (freely downloadable from Cory's Site, read the section "The Copyright Thing."
I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.
Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.
People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.
Baen with Webscriptions and its Free Library has been making e-books in multiple formats available for years. They've found that after an author puts a few books into the Free Library the sales of that author's backlist (including the freely-available books) rise. I suspect that they get more sales & readers for Webscriptions as well - if I can buy individual ebooks for $6 or the entire set of releases for the month (up to 4 "frontlist" new publications plus some backlist) for $15, I might as well cough up the couple of extra books and see which writers I like.
Slashdot Mirror
I will note that sending *letters* to congresscritters is largely useless these days due to how mail is handled for them. If it's a container (envelopes included) it's handled offsite with a significant delay.
Fax, website contact forms, email, and postcards are the connection methods of choice these days.
Wow, Unison added Android support?
Personally, I've found Dropbox to be a very convenient way to get things onto my phone, particularly ebooks. Dump them from Calibre into a Books directory in Dropbox, then go to the phone and just open the file.
I'd consider doing the same with SugarSync, but there's no official Linux client yet, and doesn't look to be one for quite some time if ever (though there's an independent working on one using their published API). One big difference: SugarSync lets you specify the directories to sync.
The article lists T-Mobile as having an "unlimited" plan for $30, but in reality it's more like "If you go above 5GB, we'll cap your bandwidth down to EDGE speeds until the end of the month." They also just recently added a tethering plan for I believe an extra $15 or so a month, which would put that 5GB+ at around $45 ($35-40 if you have a loyalty plan) with tethering. Of course, people have figured out other ways to tether on at least some of their devices....
Really, this makes me think of chorded keyboards like the Twiddler. Sure I could learn it eventually, but I think it'd still be slower than Swype or even than hunt & peck on a reasonably-sized on-screen keyboard. The main thing I think this is addressing is inaccuracy in hitting keys on an on-screen keyboard, and it's doing it in what feels to me like a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner.
Hell, I'm not even programming for Android and I think I could reimplement Graffiti faster than I could get comfortable with writing with this.
Go-oo.org is a fork managed by some folks at Novell that incorporates multiple patches that haven't made it into the main branch yet. One of those is exceeding 65K rows (now 1048576). It's not in the main branch because there are apparently some problems with calculation performance with many rows and some problems with positioning with drawing objects. More details in http://kohei.us/2010/02/20/increasing-calcs-row-limit-to-1-million/
There are still a few USB drives out there with hardware write protect switches, but they're hard to find and you'll probably have to order online. I have what may at this point be the best listing available at http://www.fencepost.net/2010/03/usb-flash-drives-with-hardware-write-protection/, culled from a variety of searches, message boards, and one German computer magazine (c't) which has its own listing.
In the US, the most likely drives to find in stores if you're looking are a couple of Imation models (Pivot and Clip), plus lingering supplies of the older Swivel models (the swivel isn't all that sturdy, pockets will beat it up over time). I've not seen these widely in stores, but you may find the Clip in college bookstores - I suspect that's their target for the style.
I know someone with multiple sclerosis/MS, and there are some legitimate studies of this sort of thing going on related to MS and other autoimmune diseases. Apparently there was some sort of study done in south america where the control group had multiple relapses (MS attacks) but the group with intestinal parasites had basically none over the course of the study. That's prompted further studies involving pig whipworms (which don't thrive and reproduce in humans), along with the obvious investigations of the mechanisms involved. I believe the same thing is also being looked at for Crohn's.
In this particular case it sounds like Thesis is screwed because they're incorporating WordPress code into their theme - game over.
In the more general case, I think you could make a credible argument that WordPress is designed to look for and utilize external libraries (called "themes") and that just doing so should not make WordPress' license apply to that theme (or plugin). My reasoning there is that if you argue that WordPress incorporating a theme makes the WP license (GPL) apply to that theme, what prevents that theme's license from correspondingly "infecting" WordPress?
Although they'd probably have been better off donating a few million to http://www.gorilla-haven.org/ to get Pimlico's DateBk6 (http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/). I'm still amazed at how relatively crappy the calendar and address book apps are on Blackberries 10 years after people figured it out properly on the Palm, and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being truly happy with address books on any of the big smartphones.
20 meters away from booms, no problem.
20 meters away from "booming operations?" Hm, what's the definition of that? How large is a "booming operations" area? 500 meters? 1 kilometer? 1 mile? I suspect it's "Whatever the BP guy tells the local enforcement folks it is," which I'd have a problem with. Does "booming operations" cover the employees doing the booming when they're off-duty? "Congratulations, you've just tried to interview a someone who was laying boom 6 hours ago about the ban on respirators, here's your Class D Felony indictment."
I would absolutely not purchase anything without seeing how it works on campus first. There should be enough people around with enough different options to get a feel for things over the first couple of weeks (or less). My advice prior to that (and afterwards) is to get a Google Voice number and use that as your number - that way you can have it forward to whatever number you end up with, get text messages via email, etc. If you decide long-term to move away from GV you can do so after you have a phone that works.
I use UMA on my Blackberry regularly, but at least on my device I've seen times where it seems like it'll refuse to connect via UMA until it's seen a regular mobile signal. That may just be me (there are people using it internationally where they're definitely not getting a T-Mobile USA signal), but it's something to be aware of. There are other things that may keep it from working as well - UMA requires TCP connections on ports 500 and 4500, so if those are blocked it'll cause problems. There's a variety of information available from a few years ago when UMA first showed up about what needs to be open for it to function.
This is why I wouldn't want to be a small company developing applications for the iPhone/iPod/iPad - if you don't have the clout to get preapproval, you're stuck with investing your time and money in doing the development then hoping that Apple will actually approve your application.
They might be doing so. Google Maps on my Blackberry 8320 (no GPS) shows my location to within a few hundred meters in a few places, and I can think of multiple ways they could be doing so all of which involve WiFi.
There are other curious beasts out there, such as Kanguru's e-Flash which has both eSATA and USB connectors. It's steepish at $105+ for 32GB (vs $60 or so for 32GB USB), but not absurd. 64GB also available.
I'm sure it's a niche product that will go away after USB3 becomes widespread, but for now it's a nice mix of both worlds.
How many projects out there become the hot new thing for a week or so, then the primary person working on the project changes jobs / gets married / joins a commune and eventually people start saying "Well, I found this open source project that sounds right, but it looks like it's been dead since 2007."
I use Docu-Track.com's PDF-Xchange viewer as the default PDF app (including embedded in browser) and it warns that the PDF is attempting to run a program.
That combination right there is going to be very powerful, and there are at least two arguments to be based on it: first, if even the copyright owners can't figure out what material is supposed to be there, how are we expected to do so? A followup offer might be "Your honor, if you'll instruct Viacom that they must allow Google and its legal team to index and have access to all of their internal communications and financials, we'll use that information to remove only the Viacom-owned items that Viacom didn't upload or cause to have uploaded."
The second argument could easily be that Google made a strong effort to remove copyrighted materials but that their efficiency in doing so was severely degraded by Viacom's uploading materials in ways that effectively contaminated the identification of infringing materials. Remove all the red ones! OK, here they are. Whoops, I really meant all the red ones except this one, that one, that other one, the one over there and maybe a few more. And how are we supposed to know which ones you want removed? Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
A bit of additional detail: They run what I assume is a fairly stock CPanel setup, though they may have some tweaks. I have a reseller account with them which gets me simple access to the control panels for my resold customers, I pay Hosting Matters at half the normal price for each plan, then bill my customers however much I've agreed to with them (generally quite a bit more than that base price, but I do handholding as part of it).
I decided on Hosting Matters back during one of the election years - either 2000 or 2004 - in large part because they were hosting multiple politically-oriented sites from both left and right, and handling the headaches of high traffic and occasional attacks in a manner that impressed me. I figured that if they were doing that well hosting several of the top 25 political discussion sites during a hot election season, I was willing to run with them.
I've been with them for years, and they do a pretty decent job.
* Their support is responsive, knowledgeable and long-term (when I've needed to put in support tickets I generally get quick response and quick action, frequently from the same folks I've been seeing for years and sometimes from the owner),
* they'll move accounts off of servers as needed (e.g. if a domain is being attacked or possibly slashdotted, or if you need something that hasn't been rolled out to older servers),
* they have customer forums that are readable by anyone (though they're less active now than they were a few years back),
* When something goes wrong, they'll update with more information and what's being done to address the problem. This really cropped up a few years back when someone working in the Peak 10 (peak10.com) Jacksonville data center yanked a few drives out of some of their servers, back when they weren't using much space and didn't actually have a cage (now they have at least two locked cages, I believe).
* They do run backups, though I've never needed to contact them about that. My evidence, from October, 2009: "Merritt has apparently suffered a primary drive failure. The good news is the backups run in the wee hours this morning are complete so we'll be putting new drives in the box and restoring everyone from backup. As always, if you have any questions, hit us up at the helpdesk."
* They don't oversell - the accounts have limitations, but are more than adequate. The pricing is not the cheapest out there, but is certainly far from expensive.
In the case mentioned (Mark Saylor, California Highway Patrol, '09 Lexus crash), I've seen reports that it wasn't possible to turn the key to kill the car, because it uses a push-button ignition. It's apparently possible to kill the engine by holding the button in, but since it was a loaner car he wasn't that familiar with it. Apparently the vehicle in question also has push-button shifting, and may not allow a shift into neutral while the vehicle is in motion.
Heck, what percentage of the general population knows that there's a difference between pressing the power button (signal to OS) on a modern PC and holding the power button (tell the power supply to shut down) on a modern PC?
Amazon doesn't have any reason to delist the paper versions, they still make the same amount they did before. If Macmillan ebooks aren't available through Amazon, it doesn't really hurt Amazon that much.
Also, if Amazon really wants to slap Macmillan, they can change how they list paper versions to imply that the publisher doesn't make electronic versions available while a literal reading says only that they're not available through Amazon.
If nothing else, the companies that booked directly with the hotels and were not getting CES/CEA special rates should be able to initiate chargebacks (because odds are high it was all paid for on someone's credit card). They contracted for a service, that service was aggressively not delivered.
The drawback to this is the possibility of not being able to book into the same hotel in the future, at least not under the same name. Similarly, if the hotels share information (any legal issues with that?) possibly being effectively blacklisted from that whole area of Vegas.
If you want to get lawyers involved, there may be other claims as others have pointed out, but that probably gets more risky and potentially expensive.
Baen with Webscriptions and its Free Library has been making e-books in multiple formats available for years. They've found that after an author puts a few books into the Free Library the sales of that author's backlist (including the freely-available books) rise. I suspect that they get more sales & readers for Webscriptions as well - if I can buy individual ebooks for $6 or the entire set of releases for the month (up to 4 "frontlist" new publications plus some backlist) for $15, I might as well cough up the couple of extra books and see which writers I like.
I find it amusing that they managed to do this (though it does sound like they were within their rights to do so) just before they close for 3 weeks.
Seems to me that in a situation like this the best thing to do is let him fire you so you can collect unemployment.