I was not even talking about a smartphone at all. My phone service is with Verizon.
This is about the mobile hotspot. That specifically was capped as of the next billing cycle. My connections are via laptops primarily. Since I route most, if not all traffic, across the VPN to my data center I would never stay under the cap.
I'm not talking Netflix. Just RDP connections, SSH shells, etc. Transferring 1MB files around each time I make a change in the code adds up pretty damn quick. Not to mention downloading a log file locally, pushing an update to a server, etc.
Agents can push around 50 megs back and forth for a single transaction with a customer. Whether it is real estate, insurance, or medical, quite often you will find that the contracts and documents can easily be that big by the time you are done. If an agent has a good day and does even a couple transactions, you just exceeded your cap for the month.
Have 2 or 3 agents on a single hotspot and you are screwed.
Our usage is not unreasonable. If they would raise the cap from 3 to 10 I think it might work. 15 would give us some breathing room.
Anybody trying to do so... you have to not give up. Not only will they not tell you about it, but FIVE supervisors acted like they did not even know it and kept telling me that if I cancelled there would be an ETF.
After 1 hour and 10 minutes.... I finally got through to a high enough supervisor that parroted the same thing you said, "Material change. Material change. Squawk!".
I would recommend that everybody cancel right now. 3GB ain't shit. Paying for a higher cap is just retarded. Additionally, don't be fooled by the unlimited on the smartphone. If they can catch you, at all, they will apply the.25c per MB fee on you. Tethering any device to your smartphone either physically, or as a hot spot, is not unlimited either. They will claim that your usage is so far out of normal that you have to be doing it. So beware.
For the people out there who say they don't really get that high on the usage... that is for a smartphone. Try taking a mobile hotspot around with 2 people connecting to it and you will find out that you can easily do about 500-600 megs per day (couple hours of usage mobile). Even alone, I can push a couple hundred megs per day across my VPN connection back to a data center.
That's the biggest problem. Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint have no fucking clue, or worse, they do. Normal usage rates for laptops by a professional or employee in the field exceed that by a large margin.
I have no problem with caps. I do have a problem with caps that are designed to incur overusage fees for reasonable use. The best thing we can do is vote with our wallets.
As for business, I have had numerous meetings with regional managers for all the carriers and explained that the only way I could get on board is if they had a pooled cap for all the hotspots underneath a business account (50 minimum is reasonable) and reporting for anybody that was exceeding expected usage. The overall pool cap had to be reasonable too. Something that businesses could actually stay under. Verizon was the only one that stated they were working and discussing something like that.
Yes, but they are trying to apply this to existing plans. Not grandfathering in existing mobile hotspots, but screwing everybody.
Not going to happen. I will cancel, write the attorney general if I have too, and shove the ETF straight up their fucking asses.
3GB is absolutely worthless for a cap. I only have that cap on 3G right now and I don't care because I have it locked to 4G. It's a problem for business too. Verizon and Sprint just don't get it. Average use, and I mean average, would be around 20 gigs per month at least.
If the caps were anything near reasonable I would be cool with it. Unlimited is impossible, I can accept that. Or at least that truly unlimited would have higher associated costs.
These fucking carriers are either unlimited or set you to a small teeny weeny trickle of data. It's stupid as hell. Clear was great for a while till they overloaded their infrastructure and banned VPN. Of course, they won't admit it, but their quality speaks for itself.
This whole thing sucks ass. I got to call up and cancel tomorrow.
You buffoon. How could you forget the sweat stains of Elvis? It's a serious group of people. They make a pilgrimage to their own Mecca every year, Graceland.
XML is used in my projects all the time to transfer data around between processes but security is typically provided by SSL via HTTPS. Some of the extra security we have added is by encrypting specific fields, and we do that with AES 256.
Till today I did not even know there *was* an encryption standard for XML docs and I still don't know *where* to use it. Is it built in to PHP? Is it part of the standard parsers out there?
My biggest question is why was the standard even developed in the first place and who actually uses it?
I never knew anything about that. Only thing I remember is that he gave me a viable alternative to piracy and/or purchasing over priced CDs.
It was the DRM that turned me off the Kindle from the first place, which is ironically, still a result from Steve Jobs. He was the one who showed me that eventually I could purchase DRM free music and I have not been interested in getting involved with any kind of transaction system that does not allow DRM free downloads.
Same reason why I will never have a Blockbuster account with video. "Purchases" are anything but.
Thanks for the insight into the publishing business. I don't mind paying the price for dead trees right now, because that does not have any DRM.
Proprietary platforms are not doing well. IIS is dead and dying. Most systems I run across using it are 3rd party CMS for time clocks, payroll, and patient record systems. It is costly to implement since it requires quite a bit of MS licensing to get off the ground, and (IMO) a developer premium to modify and extend the systems, if that is even possible.
There are still a lot of development firms and in-house coders doing ASP,.Net but those all have higher costs than Open Source once all things are considered. It is no coincidence that the majority of the world's websites are on Apache/Linux.
Internet Explorer 6 still exists mainly because the high costs of developing those systems in the first place has/is precluding their maintenance and upgrades because the companies can't fund the projects to do it. When possible they are seemingly, to me, switching out for open source platforms so they are not "held hostage" like they were before.
It's hard to get a new IIS/ASP based website/system approved when an equivalent PHP/Javascript website/system running on Linux/Apache will get the job done just as nicely and have access to a heck of a lot more open source code. Not to mention future maintenance is easier since I am pretty sure there are quite a few more developers out there for PHP and Javascript than there are for MS proprietary platforms.
So unless you are part of die hard MS group, you are not going to be choosing IIS any time soon for a new project.... not by a long shot.
How is this relevant to Flash?
Just today I was looking for a plug in to do something on a project and ran across something that looked fairly interesting, but required a bunch of Flash. I turned down specifically because of Flash.
I am not interested in proprietary platforms at this point, which includes Flash when a little extra searching usually allows me to find something else. After about another 10 minutes of searching I came across a plug in which supported IE 6.0+, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and did not require flash, or any other dependencies outside of what was already included in JQuery.
So why would I choose Flash at this point?
Adobe knows this. They are preparing to abandon Flash. From what I have been hearing Adobe is very hard at work to make a solid product to create interactive content without Flash, but HTML5 instead. PDF is embedded in business deeper than fax machines at this point at they know it. They want everybody that uses Adobe on a daily basis to create content and systems to be able to continue to do so. Transitioning away from Flash only makes sense for them in the long run.
Adobe is not alone either. Microsoft has already thrown in the towel on Silverlight. Both of those companies can see the writing on the wall... and that is the future will be open standards and open source. In order to keep their positions they are both going to develop tools not tied to their proprietary platforms, although I predict Adobe will be far more successful.
Flash is dying. It is going to die because of the developers and business considerations when choosing what platform to develop on don't predispose somebody, that is open minded, to choose proprietary systems when open source is so much cheaper and having a website that is simple means the users need far less installed on their systems and browsers to make it work.
I'm sorry.... the days of me having to install several ActiveX controls just to gain access to a site/system are coming to an end. That includes Flash too.
I don't think it is an exaggeration either. I surf with a Flash blocker all the time. It is getting less and less frequent that I have to click on a Flash object to enable it. Even on major websites like CNN.com, it has become noticeably less frequent when it used to be Flash heavy on pretty much everything.
I have been interested from the beginning, but not offense or trolling intended, but who gives a flying $(#)($ about a new format.
As long as Amazon still has control over my Kindle and can remove my "property" without knowledge or consent I could care less about significant improvements to the file formats and features. It's interesting, but I would rather know that Amazon has fundamentally changed its policies. That *would* be welcome news.
This is like Sony introducing a new firmware with some cool features..... but we still have to overlook that we are on a locked down paranoid platform, the PS3.
There was a lot I did not appreciate about Steve Jobs, but man did he give us some freedom to truly own our music again. I wish I could download purchased books without DRM like I can music.
it IS communication. It is the #1 reason I use facebook, to communicate with people I know around the world.
Most of time it is not meaningful communication. Just a bunch of repeated bullshit over and over again. Who likes what, this and that, etc. Social gaming is anything but social. There have been articles and studies on that.
Communication is more than that.
No, No it doesn't need to die. Email is still useful For one thing I don't want every want my messages with one person be all merged into one long stream every every communication I've had with that one person. But you claim that Email needs to die because A) it is a drain on resources. (whose?) and B) it is inefficient (as if HTML is more efficient) You do realize that if email dies, then that spam content will move to facebook. Replace "email" with "stream of messages." Pretty much any issue you have with email, can also be applied to facebook's messaging system
Email as a concept is useful. Its implementation is what needs to die. It is a drain on ISP resources. All of that complex programming and lookups to decide if something is SPAM or not takes CPU cycles and bandwidth. HTML has nothing to do with it. I mentioned it as a means of file transport. All email messages are converted to text. If you don't know how that works then look it up. Converting a binary file to ASCII so you can store it in plain text is grossly inefficient.
I never said Facebook was where it needed to go, or even should go. We have better ideas and more advanced methods to transmit messages and content. The challenge is adjusting to that new system. It's kind of like faxes. That technology is decades old and we can't seem to get rid of it either.
The transition will be very challenging and most likely involve legacy email support and a translation into the new platform slowly phased out over time.
But you ARE a datapoint. Get over it, and move on with life.
No. I am human being. Just getting over it is giving up when there is no reason to do so. You may feel that powerless to change things, but it is the malcontent that bring change into the world. I can imagine your sentiments have been echoed time and time again in the past. Your kind of mentality is not what pushes innovation and progress.
So you are planning on dropping off the grid, living off the land, and not having contact with anyone?
With respect, you have a reading comprehension problem. I said P2P SNS, meaning, Peer-To-Peer Social-Networking-Server. This idea ties in with newer capabilities we are building into DNS, such as DNS SRV records for example. It also closely ties in with the movement to decentralize the DNS.
With such a platform I could have a $50 linux based server plugged into a wall outlet acting as one. If I wanted more capabilities I could even have it hosted somewhere like a website. The implementations are varied, but the effect is the same.
A P2P SNS infrastructure would allow the two of us to create a trust relationship, no different than friendship. I control what information, groups, pictures, content, posts, communications, etc. that you have access to from me. The difference between that and Facebook is the data itself is located on my equipment and communications between us are secure and protected. Analysis is impossible and it does not allow advertisers and marketers access to a single company to pay to for a summary about you (anonymized or not), or even your data directly. The only risk is how much I trust you. Would you allow my information to be re-transmitted to somebody else? Well that plays itself out every single day in relationships around the world. Personally, I just want a relationship with you alone and not have a gigantic third party corporation in between us that is beholden to the shareholders. Unlike you or I, that third party has a motivation to violate our
Yeah.... I play a different game with those fuckers.
Agent: What citizenship are you? Me: The one on my drivers license. Agent: Where you coming from? Me: Where I have been. Agent: Where do you live? me: Where I came from. Agent: Didnt you just come from El Centro? me: I don't know. Agent: El Centro is where you just came from. Me: Then why did you ask? Agent: How long you staying where you going? me: I don't know yet. Agent: How could you not know? Me: It depends. Agent: On what? Me: On what happens when I get there Agent: You have anything in the trunk I should know about? Me: I have no idea. Agent: You don't know what is in your trunk? Me: No, I know what is in my trunk more or less. Agent: Then is there anything I should know about? Me: I don't know who you are or what your job description *is* so that is impossible to answer.
This goes on till one of two things happen. A tazer or they just get frustrated and let me go.
Human rights are what might be referred to as universal truths.
There is no such thing as a universal truth in the context of rights. Human rights are either legal rights, or they don't exist except as wishful thinking, exactly in the same class as light-sabres and religion.
Sure there is. There are universal truths in the context of anything.
A universal truth is simply something that is considered self-evident, transcends different societies and cultures, etc. That's all that it is. It is not wishful thinking because it not limited to an ideal, or something that does not as of yet exist.
You seem to be grouping universal truths in with philosophy and faith, hence your references to light-sabres (fiction) and religion (faith). It is not so limited.
I'm neither a brony or a gay man. However, I have a few gay friends, some in particular close friends for a few decades.
Anything involving the love of My Little Pony, by an adult, especially a man, gay or not, is just plain funny . I make no apologies about that. It's hilarious.
I think you are being overly pedantic about this. I don't exactly see you fighting either, just attempting to define it differently.
Legal rights are what you say they are... legal entitlements granted by the state (an entity with sufficient power to enforce) to the people (those without power, but in some implementations, influence the state).
Human rights are what might be referred to as universal truths. They are what the vast majority of all people, in all societies, would agree should be included or otherwise protected as legal entitlements in the society they are in.
You are trying to expand the scope of what is a simple statement on a fundamentally important right to be a philosophical discussion. That is not bad, in of itself, but I just don't see why this is the time do it.:)
Perhaps you thought I had some sense of entitlement, which I do not.
I was rather intrigued, so I looked up the term "brony":
The term brony, meaning a male, older viewer of the tv programme “my little pony” and “my little pony – friendship is magic” who is generally either embarrased by his affections toward the pregramme, or openly flaunts it. Can be used as an insult for a gay or overly effeminate boy/man..
It has held up very well. In fact, it is more relevant now than it was when it came out in theaters.
Excellent movie.
Hard to explain without giving out spoilers, all I can say is that I disagree and it has help up very well. I watched it recently and it was as good as seeing it the first time again.
but there's no obligation for them to make a sale/establish a debt simply because you are presenting cash.
Your answer is right there.
ALL sales establish debt regardless of payment methods. Factor it into the price stating that it is going to be $x cost + $y interest = $z total. You have the option of paying it total at the time of transaction.. or paying it off slowly over time. Since you could make it layaway... then technically the deposit is paid at noon and the balance is paid in a separate transaction at 12:01.
Whether you pay by credit card, debit card, etc. it does not matter. It is all debt. Cash is then acceptable as payment towards debt by superseding federal law.
There are so many ways around this it's ridiculous. What this will really come down to is the first person that gets arrested under the law, and the first DA to actually attempt prosecution. If the state does not think this will get immediately pushed (and funded by advocates the whole way) to the US Supreme Court.... then they have some serious mentally challenged people working in the legislature.
All the state did is set them up for ridicule, derision, and a whole bunch of costs to pick a fight with the feds over it.
Hey look some 12 year old just saw fight club for the first time.
While that is funny.... he has made some quite excellent points:
1) Communication should be open and federated, yet private and protected by strong cryptography.
Wow. Kind of hard to disagree with that at all. Spot on so far....
2) Communication is a human right.
Is there anybody that is really going to fight this point at all?
3) Social networking needs to be seen as something other than an "app" or a trendy buzzword. Why can't we call it communication? Why can't we standardize a protocol for more robust communication than is offered by email?
No. Fucking. Shit.
Right now, Social Networking is derided by quite a few of us here on Slashdot because we don't see it as useful communication. I still see it's use as nothing more than sharing of worthless information and tweets about stuff I don't really want to know. Signal to Noise ratio is not good. Other than some funny pictures and a quips about your daily life, it is just a gaming portal.... Farmville... need I say more?
It should be communication. Email needs to die, it has served its purpose. Right now, it is just a huge drain on resources since 90% of resources used are to fight SPAM. Sending data through it requires Base 64 encoding, which is the most hilariously inefficient form of data transfer on the planet. I find it useful because it can change any data to be "safe" for transfer between processes mainly because none of the characters inside it are picked up by compilers, interpreters, etc. XML fields wrapped in CDATA can still fail.
4) Under proprietary services, you'll never be anything more than an identified consumer (even by pseudonym) on the corporate feedlot, for sale to advertisers.
Is anyone disagreeing with that? It's true. Whether or not you care about is a different argument.
5) There will always be a primary key, even if it isn't the same one issued to you by the government (legal name). This is Google - they'll hoover up your phone number, email, address, from you and your contacts, and identify you anyway. Don't kid yourselves. Unless you're a hardcore privacy geek, your friends will leak info, even if you don't. Google is letting you use a pseudonym because they know their datamining is so powerful that they can identify you anyway.
Also true. Data mining has become a new field and a new market. Even if you don't participate, what you are is extrapolated from information provided by people you know. Almost impossible to fight.... unless you don't want to have any life at all.
6) I don't mind sharing my life, but I'm not going to share it with an advertising conglomerate and any marketroid willing to cough up the required price.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. You want to control who knows what about you. It's called privacy, and deriding the ability to share information with a friend without having it spread across the whole world, intelligence communities, and marketing groups is not fair, and wanting it is not indicative of a tin foil hatter.
7) Stop filling out your own marketing profiles. Revolt. You are a human being, not a datapoint.
Why not? Why should you be penalized for having a life by constant bombardment by advertisers and governments profiling you?
I don't think you should.
The day I join Social Networking is when I can host my own personal P2P SNS that does not allow any huge corporation like Google to analyze my personal data and relationships.
It's not easy. It will take time, development, and testing. We can get there and take true control over our communications and turn ISPs into what they were always intended to be... common carriers.
Geee you're right. That was an assumption on my part, that the lack of oxygen could negatively impact the monkey's survivability in space. I did not check for a pulse.
I'll wait for the report before making any wild statements again.
Well.... lightning is generally considered to be billions of watts of energy. I think peak power is nearly one trillion. So let's just say average is 800 billion watts to be conservative.
The time machine required a minimum of 1.21 jigawatts. I always guessed that the farther you wanted to go back the more you needed, but I theoretically think there could have been a fuse to limit it. We have a flux capacitor, so I imagine a fuse and the ability to control that much power must have existed too.
Dr. Brown said a lightning bolt was the "only" thing capable, so I think the ratio of jiggawatts to terrawatts is 1.5:1 at the low end.
That means that 286 horsepower = 0.0000002665875 jigawatts, assuming that 286 horsepower is ~213k watts (I had to look that up).
P.S - That means the Mr. Fusion used on the Delorean later really kicked some ass. That's a kitchen appliance putting out 3.75 million horsepower . In other words... you would need some real courage to stick your dick into vacuum cleaners of the future.
Well.... lightning is generally considered to be billions of watts of energy. I think peak power is nearly one trillion. So let's just say average is 800 billion watts to be conservative.
The time machine required a minimum of 1.21 jigawatts. I always guessed that the farther you wanted to go back the more you needed, but I theoretically think there could have been a fuse to limit it. We have a flux capacitor, so I imagine a fuse and the ability to control that much power must have existed too.
Dr. Brown said a lightning bolt was the "only" thing capable, so I think the ratio of jiggawatts to terrawatts is 1.5:1 at the low end.
That means that 286 horsepower = 0.0000002665875 jigawatts, assuming that 286 horsepower is ~213k watts (I had to look that up).
Are they launching yet another USA-only service or will they realize the potential market in all the other countries is much greater than the USA alone?
Will they use these new channels to try and push WebM adoption on their users or will they use the industry-standard H.264? Will Flash be required, no matter which CODEC is used?
I don't know about WebM, but their service will not be USA-only. It's YouTube owned content. The vast majority of the reasons why US content is not available world wide, or at the same time, has to do with shortsighted retarded fuckfaced retarded dipshit Entertainment Executives. I'll tell you how I really feel later:)
If it does come out, don't worry, you will be able to see it everywhere except Pakistan. Pakistan won't be YouTube's fault either.
There is no way a revival could tarnish that show, if all the original writers and cast come back.
Of course, you would need to completely ignore the movie entirely, or just accept that the characters magically came back to life. Shepherd is dead, but remember that Wash died too. Wash really helped bring some comedy to the show.
All of the characters in that show have gone in to do pretty well in other TV shows and movies, so I think they could only be better as actors. It's only been 10 years, so everybody pretty much looks the same. At least the last time I saw them in anything.
Unless there is a really serious commitment with money behind it, the production value was fantastic, it will fail... again.
Best probably to leave this one alone in the past. You know... so there is no "Fat Elvis" deal with it.
So many shows are like that. Faulty Towers, Space 2.0, etc. All wonderful shows that died before their time.
It really depends. My tolerance is exceptionally high, and I do mean exceptional. As a party trick I used to take pepper spray (outside) and put it directly on nachos and eat it. Don't do it, your stomach has a pretty bad reaction even if your mouth is fine. Made over a thousand bucks snorting Tabasco sauce from people that did not know me.
Most of the contests at restaurants are kind of laughable to me. I saw one guy give up after two wings and look like he was on the verge of death. I asked if I could try one while he was pounding down glass after glass of milk and it was about an 8.5. Pretty damn close to my own threshold. Really surprised people by eating 4.
On a daily basis though, I do eat quite spicy food. Probably ridiculously hot to most people. The key to me is the taste, which has nothing to do with the heat. Jalapenos that come in a jar just plain taste good and barely register a 1 on my scale. Used to eat them straight out of the jar as a child for snacks. Habanero is another good tasting pepper, along with Thai chilies.
All the chilies used in the big contests? Taste like shit to me, and I have tasted them all.
As for the stuff I really like, I can honestly say that I do enjoy cooking with them and eating them. It's a pain in the ass though making two different curry dishes though for guests.
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I was not even talking about a smartphone at all. My phone service is with Verizon.
This is about the mobile hotspot. That specifically was capped as of the next billing cycle. My connections are via laptops primarily. Since I route most, if not all traffic, across the VPN to my data center I would never stay under the cap.
I'm not talking Netflix. Just RDP connections, SSH shells, etc. Transferring 1MB files around each time I make a change in the code adds up pretty damn quick. Not to mention downloading a log file locally, pushing an update to a server, etc.
Agents can push around 50 megs back and forth for a single transaction with a customer. Whether it is real estate, insurance, or medical, quite often you will find that the contracts and documents can easily be that big by the time you are done. If an agent has a good day and does even a couple transactions, you just exceeded your cap for the month.
Have 2 or 3 agents on a single hotspot and you are screwed.
Our usage is not unreasonable. If they would raise the cap from 3 to 10 I think it might work. 15 would give us some breathing room.
I already went through this today.
Anybody trying to do so... you have to not give up. Not only will they not tell you about it, but FIVE supervisors acted like they did not even know it and kept telling me that if I cancelled there would be an ETF.
After 1 hour and 10 minutes.... I finally got through to a high enough supervisor that parroted the same thing you said, "Material change. Material change. Squawk!".
I would recommend that everybody cancel right now. 3GB ain't shit. Paying for a higher cap is just retarded. Additionally, don't be fooled by the unlimited on the smartphone. If they can catch you, at all, they will apply the .25c per MB fee on you. Tethering any device to your smartphone either physically, or as a hot spot, is not unlimited either. They will claim that your usage is so far out of normal that you have to be doing it. So beware.
For the people out there who say they don't really get that high on the usage... that is for a smartphone. Try taking a mobile hotspot around with 2 people connecting to it and you will find out that you can easily do about 500-600 megs per day (couple hours of usage mobile). Even alone, I can push a couple hundred megs per day across my VPN connection back to a data center.
That's the biggest problem. Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint have no fucking clue, or worse, they do. Normal usage rates for laptops by a professional or employee in the field exceed that by a large margin.
I have no problem with caps. I do have a problem with caps that are designed to incur overusage fees for reasonable use. The best thing we can do is vote with our wallets.
As for business, I have had numerous meetings with regional managers for all the carriers and explained that the only way I could get on board is if they had a pooled cap for all the hotspots underneath a business account (50 minimum is reasonable) and reporting for anybody that was exceeding expected usage. The overall pool cap had to be reasonable too. Something that businesses could actually stay under. Verizon was the only one that stated they were working and discussing something like that.
Yes, but they are trying to apply this to existing plans. Not grandfathering in existing mobile hotspots, but screwing everybody.
Not going to happen. I will cancel, write the attorney general if I have too, and shove the ETF straight up their fucking asses.
3GB is absolutely worthless for a cap. I only have that cap on 3G right now and I don't care because I have it locked to 4G. It's a problem for business too. Verizon and Sprint just don't get it. Average use, and I mean average, would be around 20 gigs per month at least.
If the caps were anything near reasonable I would be cool with it. Unlimited is impossible, I can accept that. Or at least that truly unlimited would have higher associated costs.
These fucking carriers are either unlimited or set you to a small teeny weeny trickle of data. It's stupid as hell. Clear was great for a while till they overloaded their infrastructure and banned VPN. Of course, they won't admit it, but their quality speaks for itself.
This whole thing sucks ass. I got to call up and cancel tomorrow.
You buffoon. How could you forget the sweat stains of Elvis? It's a serious group of people. They make a pilgrimage to their own Mecca every year, Graceland.
I was thinking the exact same thing. W.T.F....
XML is used in my projects all the time to transfer data around between processes but security is typically provided by SSL via HTTPS. Some of the extra security we have added is by encrypting specific fields, and we do that with AES 256.
Till today I did not even know there *was* an encryption standard for XML docs and I still don't know *where* to use it. Is it built in to PHP? Is it part of the standard parsers out there?
My biggest question is why was the standard even developed in the first place and who actually uses it?
Interesting.
I never knew anything about that. Only thing I remember is that he gave me a viable alternative to piracy and/or purchasing over priced CDs.
It was the DRM that turned me off the Kindle from the first place, which is ironically, still a result from Steve Jobs. He was the one who showed me that eventually I could purchase DRM free music and I have not been interested in getting involved with any kind of transaction system that does not allow DRM free downloads.
Same reason why I will never have a Blockbuster account with video. "Purchases" are anything but.
Thanks for the insight into the publishing business. I don't mind paying the price for dead trees right now, because that does not have any DRM.
There is another thing to consider:
Proprietary platforms are not doing well. IIS is dead and dying. Most systems I run across using it are 3rd party CMS for time clocks, payroll, and patient record systems. It is costly to implement since it requires quite a bit of MS licensing to get off the ground, and (IMO) a developer premium to modify and extend the systems, if that is even possible.
There are still a lot of development firms and in-house coders doing ASP, .Net but those all have higher costs than Open Source once all things are considered. It is no coincidence that the majority of the world's websites are on Apache/Linux.
Internet Explorer 6 still exists mainly because the high costs of developing those systems in the first place has/is precluding their maintenance and upgrades because the companies can't fund the projects to do it. When possible they are seemingly, to me, switching out for open source platforms so they are not "held hostage" like they were before.
It's hard to get a new IIS/ASP based website/system approved when an equivalent PHP/Javascript website/system running on Linux/Apache will get the job done just as nicely and have access to a heck of a lot more open source code. Not to mention future maintenance is easier since I am pretty sure there are quite a few more developers out there for PHP and Javascript than there are for MS proprietary platforms.
So unless you are part of die hard MS group, you are not going to be choosing IIS any time soon for a new project.... not by a long shot.
How is this relevant to Flash?
Just today I was looking for a plug in to do something on a project and ran across something that looked fairly interesting, but required a bunch of Flash. I turned down specifically because of Flash.
I am not interested in proprietary platforms at this point, which includes Flash when a little extra searching usually allows me to find something else. After about another 10 minutes of searching I came across a plug in which supported IE 6.0+, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and did not require flash, or any other dependencies outside of what was already included in JQuery.
So why would I choose Flash at this point?
Adobe knows this. They are preparing to abandon Flash. From what I have been hearing Adobe is very hard at work to make a solid product to create interactive content without Flash, but HTML5 instead. PDF is embedded in business deeper than fax machines at this point at they know it. They want everybody that uses Adobe on a daily basis to create content and systems to be able to continue to do so. Transitioning away from Flash only makes sense for them in the long run.
Adobe is not alone either. Microsoft has already thrown in the towel on Silverlight. Both of those companies can see the writing on the wall... and that is the future will be open standards and open source. In order to keep their positions they are both going to develop tools not tied to their proprietary platforms, although I predict Adobe will be far more successful.
Flash is dying. It is going to die because of the developers and business considerations when choosing what platform to develop on don't predispose somebody, that is open minded, to choose proprietary systems when open source is so much cheaper and having a website that is simple means the users need far less installed on their systems and browsers to make it work.
I'm sorry.... the days of me having to install several ActiveX controls just to gain access to a site/system are coming to an end. That includes Flash too.
I don't think it is an exaggeration either. I surf with a Flash blocker all the time. It is getting less and less frequent that I have to click on a Flash object to enable it. Even on major websites like CNN.com, it has become noticeably less frequent when it used to be Flash heavy on pretty much everything.
Exactly.
I have been interested from the beginning, but not offense or trolling intended, but who gives a flying $(#)($ about a new format.
As long as Amazon still has control over my Kindle and can remove my "property" without knowledge or consent I could care less about significant improvements to the file formats and features. It's interesting, but I would rather know that Amazon has fundamentally changed its policies. That *would* be welcome news.
This is like Sony introducing a new firmware with some cool features..... but we still have to overlook that we are on a locked down paranoid platform, the PS3.
There was a lot I did not appreciate about Steve Jobs, but man did he give us some freedom to truly own our music again. I wish I could download purchased books without DRM like I can music.
it IS communication. It is the #1 reason I use facebook, to communicate with people I know around the world.
Most of time it is not meaningful communication. Just a bunch of repeated bullshit over and over again. Who likes what, this and that, etc. Social gaming is anything but social. There have been articles and studies on that.
Communication is more than that.
No, No it doesn't need to die. Email is still useful For one thing I don't want every want my messages with one person be all merged into one long stream every every communication I've had with that one person. But you claim that Email needs to die because A) it is a drain on resources. (whose?) and B) it is inefficient (as if HTML is more efficient) You do realize that if email dies, then that spam content will move to facebook. Replace "email" with "stream of messages." Pretty much any issue you have with email, can also be applied to facebook's messaging system
Email as a concept is useful. Its implementation is what needs to die. It is a drain on ISP resources. All of that complex programming and lookups to decide if something is SPAM or not takes CPU cycles and bandwidth. HTML has nothing to do with it. I mentioned it as a means of file transport. All email messages are converted to text. If you don't know how that works then look it up. Converting a binary file to ASCII so you can store it in plain text is grossly inefficient.
I never said Facebook was where it needed to go, or even should go. We have better ideas and more advanced methods to transmit messages and content. The challenge is adjusting to that new system. It's kind of like faxes. That technology is decades old and we can't seem to get rid of it either.
The transition will be very challenging and most likely involve legacy email support and a translation into the new platform slowly phased out over time.
But you ARE a datapoint. Get over it, and move on with life.
No. I am human being. Just getting over it is giving up when there is no reason to do so. You may feel that powerless to change things, but it is the malcontent that bring change into the world. I can imagine your sentiments have been echoed time and time again in the past. Your kind of mentality is not what pushes innovation and progress.
So you are planning on dropping off the grid, living off the land, and not having contact with anyone?
With respect, you have a reading comprehension problem. I said P2P SNS, meaning, Peer-To-Peer Social-Networking-Server. This idea ties in with newer capabilities we are building into DNS, such as DNS SRV records for example. It also closely ties in with the movement to decentralize the DNS.
With such a platform I could have a $50 linux based server plugged into a wall outlet acting as one. If I wanted more capabilities I could even have it hosted somewhere like a website. The implementations are varied, but the effect is the same.
A P2P SNS infrastructure would allow the two of us to create a trust relationship, no different than friendship. I control what information, groups, pictures, content, posts, communications, etc. that you have access to from me. The difference between that and Facebook is the data itself is located on my equipment and communications between us are secure and protected. Analysis is impossible and it does not allow advertisers and marketers access to a single company to pay to for a summary about you (anonymized or not), or even your data directly. The only risk is how much I trust you. Would you allow my information to be re-transmitted to somebody else? Well that plays itself out every single day in relationships around the world. Personally, I just want a relationship with you alone and not have a gigantic third party corporation in between us that is beholden to the shareholders. Unlike you or I, that third party has a motivation to violate our
Yeah.... I play a different game with those fuckers.
Agent: What citizenship are you?
Me: The one on my drivers license.
Agent: Where you coming from?
Me: Where I have been.
Agent: Where do you live?
me: Where I came from.
Agent: Didnt you just come from El Centro?
me: I don't know.
Agent: El Centro is where you just came from.
Me: Then why did you ask?
Agent: How long you staying where you going?
me: I don't know yet.
Agent: How could you not know?
Me: It depends.
Agent: On what?
Me: On what happens when I get there
Agent: You have anything in the trunk I should know about?
Me: I have no idea.
Agent: You don't know what is in your trunk?
Me: No, I know what is in my trunk more or less.
Agent: Then is there anything I should know about?
Me: I don't know who you are or what your job description *is* so that is impossible to answer.
This goes on till one of two things happen. A tazer or they just get frustrated and let me go.
There is no such thing as a universal truth in the context of rights. Human rights are either legal rights, or they don't exist except as wishful thinking, exactly in the same class as light-sabres and religion.
Sure there is. There are universal truths in the context of anything .
A universal truth is simply something that is considered self-evident, transcends different societies and cultures, etc. That's all that it is. It is not wishful thinking because it not limited to an ideal, or something that does not as of yet exist.
You seem to be grouping universal truths in with philosophy and faith, hence your references to light-sabres (fiction) and religion (faith). It is not so limited.
I'm neither a brony or a gay man. However, I have a few gay friends, some in particular close friends for a few decades.
Anything involving the love of My Little Pony, by an adult, especially a man, gay or not, is just plain funny . I make no apologies about that. It's hilarious.
I think you are being overly pedantic about this. I don't exactly see you fighting either, just attempting to define it differently.
Legal rights are what you say they are... legal entitlements granted by the state (an entity with sufficient power to enforce) to the people (those without power, but in some implementations, influence the state).
Human rights are what might be referred to as universal truths. They are what the vast majority of all people, in all societies, would agree should be included or otherwise protected as legal entitlements in the society they are in.
You are trying to expand the scope of what is a simple statement on a fundamentally important right to be a philosophical discussion. That is not bad, in of itself, but I just don't see why this is the time do it. :)
Perhaps you thought I had some sense of entitlement, which I do not.
I wonder how many people out there actually get that reference :)
Thanks for making me feel super old.
I was rather intrigued, so I looked up the term "brony":
The term brony, meaning a male, older viewer of the tv programme “my little pony” and “my little pony – friendship is magic” who is generally either embarrased by his affections toward the pregramme, or openly flaunts it.
Can be used as an insult for a gay or overly effeminate boy/man..
Thank You. That made my day.
It has held up very well. In fact, it is more relevant now than it was when it came out in theaters.
Excellent movie.
Hard to explain without giving out spoilers, all I can say is that I disagree and it has help up very well. I watched it recently and it was as good as seeing it the first time again.
but there's no obligation for them to make a sale/establish a debt simply because you are presenting cash.
Your answer is right there.
ALL sales establish debt regardless of payment methods. Factor it into the price stating that it is going to be $x cost + $y interest = $z total. You have the option of paying it total at the time of transaction.. or paying it off slowly over time. Since you could make it layaway... then technically the deposit is paid at noon and the balance is paid in a separate transaction at 12:01.
Whether you pay by credit card, debit card, etc. it does not matter. It is all debt. Cash is then acceptable as payment towards debt by superseding federal law.
There are so many ways around this it's ridiculous. What this will really come down to is the first person that gets arrested under the law, and the first DA to actually attempt prosecution. If the state does not think this will get immediately pushed (and funded by advocates the whole way) to the US Supreme Court.... then they have some serious mentally challenged people working in the legislature.
All the state did is set them up for ridicule, derision, and a whole bunch of costs to pick a fight with the feds over it.
Hey look some 12 year old just saw fight club for the first time.
While that is funny.... he has made some quite excellent points:
1) Communication should be open and federated, yet private and protected by strong cryptography.
Wow. Kind of hard to disagree with that at all. Spot on so far....
2) Communication is a human right.
Is there anybody that is really going to fight this point at all?
3) Social networking needs to be seen as something other than an "app" or a trendy buzzword. Why can't we call it communication? Why can't we standardize a protocol for more robust communication than is offered by email?
No. Fucking. Shit.
Right now, Social Networking is derided by quite a few of us here on Slashdot because we don't see it as useful communication. I still see it's use as nothing more than sharing of worthless information and tweets about stuff I don't really want to know. Signal to Noise ratio is not good. Other than some funny pictures and a quips about your daily life, it is just a gaming portal.... Farmville... need I say more?
It should be communication. Email needs to die, it has served its purpose. Right now, it is just a huge drain on resources since 90% of resources used are to fight SPAM. Sending data through it requires Base 64 encoding, which is the most hilariously inefficient form of data transfer on the planet. I find it useful because it can change any data to be "safe" for transfer between processes mainly because none of the characters inside it are picked up by compilers, interpreters, etc. XML fields wrapped in CDATA can still fail.
4) Under proprietary services, you'll never be anything more than an identified consumer (even by pseudonym) on the corporate feedlot, for sale to advertisers.
Is anyone disagreeing with that? It's true. Whether or not you care about is a different argument.
5) There will always be a primary key, even if it isn't the same one issued to you by the government (legal name). This is Google - they'll hoover up your phone number, email, address, from you and your contacts, and identify you anyway. Don't kid yourselves. Unless you're a hardcore privacy geek, your friends will leak info, even if you don't. Google is letting you use a pseudonym because they know their datamining is so powerful that they can identify you anyway.
Also true. Data mining has become a new field and a new market. Even if you don't participate, what you are is extrapolated from information provided by people you know. Almost impossible to fight.... unless you don't want to have any life at all.
6) I don't mind sharing my life, but I'm not going to share it with an advertising conglomerate and any marketroid willing to cough up the required price.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. You want to control who knows what about you. It's called privacy, and deriding the ability to share information with a friend without having it spread across the whole world, intelligence communities, and marketing groups is not fair, and wanting it is not indicative of a tin foil hatter.
7) Stop filling out your own marketing profiles. Revolt. You are a human being, not a datapoint.
Why not? Why should you be penalized for having a life by constant bombardment by advertisers and governments profiling you?
I don't think you should.
The day I join Social Networking is when I can host my own personal P2P SNS that does not allow any huge corporation like Google to analyze my personal data and relationships.
It's not easy. It will take time, development, and testing. We can get there and take true control over our communications and turn ISPs into what they were always intended to be... common carriers.
Did you observe the monkey to know it's dead?
Geee you're right. That was an assumption on my part, that the lack of oxygen could negatively impact the monkey's survivability in space. I did not check for a pulse.
I'll wait for the report before making any wild statements again.
the presumably now-dead monkey
Ohhh.. I'm pretty sure the monkey is dead.
Well.... lightning is generally considered to be billions of watts of energy. I think peak power is nearly one trillion. So let's just say average is 800 billion watts to be conservative.
The time machine required a minimum of 1.21 jigawatts. I always guessed that the farther you wanted to go back the more you needed, but I theoretically think there could have been a fuse to limit it. We have a flux capacitor, so I imagine a fuse and the ability to control that much power must have existed too.
Dr. Brown said a lightning bolt was the "only" thing capable, so I think the ratio of jiggawatts to terrawatts is 1.5:1 at the low end.
That means that 286 horsepower = 0.0000002665875 jigawatts, assuming that 286 horsepower is ~213k watts (I had to look that up).
P.S - That means the Mr. Fusion used on the Delorean later really kicked some ass. That's a kitchen appliance putting out 3.75 million horsepower . In other words... you would need some real courage to stick your dick into vacuum cleaners of the future.
Well.... lightning is generally considered to be billions of watts of energy. I think peak power is nearly one trillion. So let's just say average is 800 billion watts to be conservative.
The time machine required a minimum of 1.21 jigawatts. I always guessed that the farther you wanted to go back the more you needed, but I theoretically think there could have been a fuse to limit it. We have a flux capacitor, so I imagine a fuse and the ability to control that much power must have existed too.
Dr. Brown said a lightning bolt was the "only" thing capable, so I think the ratio of jiggawatts to terrawatts is 1.5:1 at the low end.
That means that 286 horsepower = 0.0000002665875 jigawatts, assuming that 286 horsepower is ~213k watts (I had to look that up).
Are they launching yet another USA-only service or will they realize the potential market in all the other countries is much greater than the USA alone?
Will they use these new channels to try and push WebM adoption on their users or will they use the industry-standard H.264? Will Flash be required, no matter which CODEC is used?
I don't know about WebM, but their service will not be USA-only. It's YouTube owned content. The vast majority of the reasons why US content is not available world wide, or at the same time, has to do with shortsighted retarded fuckfaced retarded dipshit Entertainment Executives. I'll tell you how I really feel later :)
If it does come out, don't worry, you will be able to see it everywhere except Pakistan. Pakistan won't be YouTube's fault either.
There is no way a revival could tarnish that show, if all the original writers and cast come back.
Of course, you would need to completely ignore the movie entirely, or just accept that the characters magically came back to life. Shepherd is dead, but remember that Wash died too. Wash really helped bring some comedy to the show.
All of the characters in that show have gone in to do pretty well in other TV shows and movies, so I think they could only be better as actors. It's only been 10 years, so everybody pretty much looks the same. At least the last time I saw them in anything.
Unless there is a really serious commitment with money behind it, the production value was fantastic, it will fail... again.
Best probably to leave this one alone in the past. You know ... so there is no "Fat Elvis" deal with it.
So many shows are like that. Faulty Towers, Space 2.0, etc. All wonderful shows that died before their time.
It really depends. My tolerance is exceptionally high, and I do mean exceptional. As a party trick I used to take pepper spray (outside) and put it directly on nachos and eat it. Don't do it, your stomach has a pretty bad reaction even if your mouth is fine. Made over a thousand bucks snorting Tabasco sauce from people that did not know me.
Most of the contests at restaurants are kind of laughable to me. I saw one guy give up after two wings and look like he was on the verge of death. I asked if I could try one while he was pounding down glass after glass of milk and it was about an 8.5. Pretty damn close to my own threshold. Really surprised people by eating 4.
On a daily basis though, I do eat quite spicy food. Probably ridiculously hot to most people. The key to me is the taste, which has nothing to do with the heat. Jalapenos that come in a jar just plain taste good and barely register a 1 on my scale. Used to eat them straight out of the jar as a child for snacks. Habanero is another good tasting pepper, along with Thai chilies.
All the chilies used in the big contests? Taste like shit to me, and I have tasted them all.
As for the stuff I really like, I can honestly say that I do enjoy cooking with them and eating them. It's a pain in the ass though making two different curry dishes though for guests.