If the best way to build a craft that can travel through both outer space and all layers of a planetary atmosphere is to make it in the shape of a big disc, why have none of Earth's aerospace engineers ever built a craft using that shape? I guess it must have taken the Roswell incident to convince them it was a bad idea.
The shape of the craft in space is irrelevant, and the shape in the atmosphere is only relevant if either A. you are entering in free fall as our ships do (and thus need to dissipate a lot of heat) or B. you are using air to produce lift. If your craft stays aloft in some other way, the shape of the craft doesn't matter nearly as much.
How about: How did aliens travel across countless light years of space to reach our planet in a craft that was just 50' in diameter? Presumably a couple generations of the crew would have grown old and died on the voyage. That's a pretty small space to raise a family in.
Assuming, that is, that the aliens grow at the same rate we do. An alien with a 500 year lifespan would not have that problem. Also, there's the possibility of some sort of stasis or hibernation. You're making way too many wrong assumptions, starting with the assumption that any aliens we meet will be in any way like life on Earth.
And how did these aliens plan to get back?
Well, presumably in their ship. They probably were not planning to crash it.
Don't get me wrong, the most plausible explanation for UFOs is a secret experimental U.S. or Russian spy vehicle, and the most plausible explanation for the "aliens" is that they used midgets for weight/size reasons. Occam's Razor suggests that this is significantly more likely than an alien visitation. However, that doesn't mean that the alien explanation is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
No, it's quite possible, though fairly unlikely, that you would survive, You're going to lose most of that 500 MPH forward velocity to wind resistance pretty quickly. Remember that terminal velocity for a person is only about 100-125 MPH.
So the real question that you have to ask is whether you can survive an impact at 100-125 MPH. And the answer is "If you do it right, yes, there's a slim chance." Aim for mud, snow, or trees to cushion your fall.
Thus far, I believe the survival record for free fall from a plane without a parachute was 22,000 feet. 30,000 feet, while a fair bit higher, is not actually any different from 22,000 feet thanks to terminal velocity, so the only important question is whether you have the foresight to curl up into a ball to accelerate your drop to 10,000 feet and whether you are still conscious when you get there to spread yourself back out and aim for something soft.
Because of the safety hardware I mentioned, if you're overclocking a CPU hard enough to cause permanent damage, you're going to experience pretty much continuous stalls and freezes every couple of minutes to such an extent that you probably won't even get the device to fully boot before it halts its own CPU. Unless you are a complete and total moron, you're going to realize very quickly that you've hosed things, and you're going to switch back to a more functional kernel that does proper power management.
If that brief period of time is enough to damage the CPU, then any number of other failures from a minor kernel bug to leaving it in the car on a sunny day would also damage the CPU, meaning that your modifications are not really the cause of the premature failure.
And if you're only pushing the CPU a little bit beyond its design spec, it is very unlikely that you'll cause it to fail within any typical extended warranty period.
Either way, your point is mostly moot. When it comes to embedded devices, nobody in their right minds is going to go writing or installing custom kernels with custom power management stacks unless they absolutely have to. The number of people who would do such things are countable on one hand. I'm guessing that 99.999999999% of all mods to embedded devices are pure user space mods—adding extra software, for example. Maybe speeding up laptop fans in some cases, but....
Why should the manufacturer investigate? Because the law puts the burden of proof on the shoulders of the company that is trying to weasel out of terms of the contract (warranty), just as it should be. If the company wants to not honor the warranty, that's fine, but if they can't provide at minimum a preponderance of evidence that the mod caused the damage, they will lose in court. Thus, it is in their best interest to do due diligence.
More to the point, if the cost of doing due diligence is too high, it is usually in their best interest to give the customer the benefit of the doubt and honor the warranty. This is by design. In general, the company that created the product has vastly more power in dictating warranty terms than the customer. Magnuson-Moss attempts to level that playing field just a little by eliminating a common source of abuse. It was originally intended to allow customers to buy lower cost aftermarket replacement parts for cars. That is to say, it was specifically designed to cover what you describe as "significant modifications".
If it is even possible to overheat your processor to the point that it causes damage, the CPU wasn't designed correctly. Period. Because if you can do it through overclocking, somebody else can do it by leaving the phone on the dashboard or hitting a kernel bug that puts the CPU in a tight loop.
Really you can't program a CPU to run continuously at 100% so that it overheats?
Not if the CPU was designed correctly, no. A proper CPU has temperature sensors in it, and halts itself (outside of software control) if the temperature exceeds safety limits. I'm not aware of any CPU cores (except for certain specialty parts designed for automotive use) that don't have such hardware. It's considered a very basic part of proper hardware design.
That's completely irrelevant to the question of software for purely electronic devices, though. With the exception of software that directly controls mechanical devices, it is almost impossible for software to permanently damage hardware, so long as it does not attempt to rewrite firmware in a hard-to-reverse way. That's the whole point of layer separation in computers.
As such, changing the software is closer to keeping the Ford engine and mechanical bits, but replacing the shell of the car and its interior with a fiberglass conversion body. Obviously, Ford won't be held responsible for the paint peeling off, but that doesn't absolve them of liability for failures in the drivetrain.
Given that the quality control problems with those DVDs have been ongoing for several years, and given that the first three DVD sets (locally at Fry's) hadn't been sitting on their shelf for two or three years, I think it's safe to say that MGM must know about the quality control problems and simply chooses to ignore them. My guess is that they're counting on people buying these sets and not having time to watch all 55 DVDs before the return window closes.
So the way I figure it, I'm sticking it to the man by using a laptop to verify all the discs quickly and then returning sets until I actually get a good one. By returning 6 sets, I figure MGM lost money on my purchase even by the most conservative estimates. If enough people did that, maybe MGM would think twice before using a fly-by-night DVD fabrication plant in the future.
So yeah, it was inconvenient, but I figure it's the least I can do to improve things. And it looks like it worked. After I sent them a very detailed analysis of the issue, Amazon pulled the product entirely.
The whole point of carrying a drive with you is to have it with you. If it's not attached to something like my keys, it will end up on the ground somewhere with 100% certainty.
As for the DVDs, I'm fine with them getting scratched over time. I'm not fine with getting a brand new box of 55 DVDs and finding that 13 of them are unreadable. That's just incompetent.
...it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today.
Agreed. I just went down a list of the products I've bought in the past year, and if you ignore DVDs and books, the percentage that have worked correctly for more than a week is somewhere around zero.
USB flash drive watch (ThinkGeek): broke after four days. When the replacement arrived, the flash drive was halfway pulled apart, the glue that held it together having apparently failed. This tells me that it probably failed QA testing (somebody had to have tried to open it or else it would not have been hanging halfway out), but got shipped to me in spite of that. Yikes.
USB keychain drive from Kingston: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four or five months. Replacement drive with substantially inferior case: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four days.
USB keychain drive from Lacie (XtremKey): the wire part that held it onto my keychain broke after less than a week, and has subsequently been replaced by a hand-crimped steel cord from Home Depot. Details in my Amazon review.
Konica Minolta color laser printer: needs a technician to recalibrate it right out of the box because the fuser isn't fusing properly on card stock.
Eyeglasses arrived from the manufacturer with a scratch across the middle of one lens.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
And the list goes on. So yeah, I hear you. The only difference between the Chinese knock offs and the worst American products are that the worst American products at least ostensibly work for a couple of days before they don't. Usually. And this is what happens when consumers don't care about product quality.
I'm assuming what you mean by "under certain circumstances" is that you have to itemize, which means it's only worth doing if you already have enough deductions to exceed the standard deduction.
I wondered that myself. I mean, if you were encoding to it, it would work because you'd rewrite those blocks with the length information at the end, but that won't work if you're just copying files. It would take a fairly intelligent controller to result in something playable....
That's okay. In five years, computers will probably be shipping with full disk encryption enabled by default anyway. The risk of data theft and identity theft from unencrypted laptops walking away is simply too great.
What other GSM carriers? AFAIK, AT&T just bought the last one of consequence, not counting single-city local carriers and AT&T MVNOs that already operate on AT&T's network.
I think that it is important for everyone on the Internet to agree that automatically filtering out the most offensive search terms is not the same thing as editorial oversight on every single possible search suggestion. You see, that's what they are essentially arguing—that Google effectively made the statement because their basic filters are tantamount to human editorial oversight in a newspaper. That's pretty clearly a prima facie *insane* position.
Even if the search filtering were a very sophisticated AI system, no matter how good a filter is at removing potentially defamatory search terms, it won't be perfect, and some will get through. And worse, it damages the public good to have those filters there in the first place.
The problem is that if you extend "offensive" to mean "defamatory", then it can no longer suggest typo corrections in such search terms, either. At what point is it "close enough"? That represents a significant loss of usefulness for someone who is trying to find out if someone is a con man. It's a delicate balance.
I would like to see the shitstorm that would arise if Google played that card.
As would I. Italy has been pulling crap like this for quite a few years, and this is the second absolutely ridiculous judgment against Google in an Italian court in the past... what, day? Two days?
The fact is that Google doesn't create those search suggestions. It merely presents a list of other people's queries based on frequency. That means that Google didn't defame this person. A lot of people doing previous searches did. This would have been an open and shut case in Google's favor in anything but a kangaroo court, which can only lead a sane person to question whether they would have ruled the same way had it been an Italian company. Just saying.
I think it's about time a major Internet company had the cojones to put Italy in its place—redirect all Google search and Gmail access from Italy to a page explaining the court case, and explaining why Google will no longer serve clients inside Italy. People at the top of Italy's government would be bending over backwards not only to correct the court's decision, but also to make sure it never happens again. Three hours. Tops. And even that's only if they do it over the lunch hour.
Here in Sweden just about every apartment building and college dorm comes with washing machines that are free to use for all tenants.
Maybe that was just my uni. They also charged something like $600 a year for a parking permit.... If you're not poor going in, you will be coming out.:-)
$80 is about SEK 500, I can tell you right now that here in Sweden I have serious trouble finding a decent pair of shoes my size for that amount of money. Now, if you're also low on winter clothes, underwear, socks, t-shirts and a few other items of clothing that sure isn't just $80 worth of clothes.
Obviously there's a significant cost difference between where you live and the United States. Around these parts, people trying to live on the cheap buy a pair of sandals for $10-20, and I think my last pair of sneakers was about $35 or so. Thus, from my perspective, $80 is lunch every day for two weeks, or for a month if I don't eat out. It's four decent shirts (made in China). It's roughly 60 pairs of socks (three for four dollars). It's renting roughly 2.6 movies every day for an entire month from a RedBox machine, which is just an insane number of movies to watch....
There really should be a happy medium in which you can pay for some entertainment without starving.:-)
Of course they could've gotten by with less, but everyone cares a little more about something in their lives. For some it's a good pair of skis, for others it's a good computer, for others yet it's a good car. These are items we are willing to sacrifice a little extra money on, even if we have very little to begin with. For someone who is poor it can also be a way to feel "at least I'm not so poor I can't afford a good computer/car/stereo/snowboard" even if it means almost starving for several months.
I'm not saying that spending money on the TV isn't the best choice. Certainly, compared with something ephemeral like a movie rental, it's a much better choice. I just don't see it as justification for piracy, particularly given how many sources of free entertainment exist. At least in the U.S., assuming you're living on campus, there's usually free cable TV. And there are legitimate free sources of entertainment on the Internet (YouTube, Hulu, etc.) that similarly don't require pirating anything. All piracy really does is let you see the movie a year or two before it shows up on over-the-air TV for free....
Redbox vending machine? Heh, I've never lived anywhere that had anything like that
It's a fairly new thing around here, too (in the last two or three years), but they're popping up everywhere. The selection is somewhat variable, but rentals are a dollar a day, and you don't even have to drop them off at the same place you got them. A lot of folks rent one in the airport to watch on the plane, then drop it off at the box on the other end. Pretty neat.
Of course you have to choose. Some people choose to spend their money on rent, clothes and food and don't see why they shouldn't be allowed a little entertainment when the guy down the street just got lucky with regards to who his parents ended up being and can afford to eat out every day, live in a large modern apartment, buy a dozen new movies every month and never worry about money...
The problem with pirating the movie is that somebody had to work to make those movies, and those folks deserve to get paid for their work. It's really no different than going to a grocery store and giving them the money to pay for a loaf worth of wheat flour, but walking out with a finished loaf of bread. Well, okay, it's a little different in that the finished loaf of bread required other ingredients and electricity or gas to cook it, but it's still better than a car analogy.:-)
Now, you might be willing to make these sacrifices for a limited time...
Stop right there. You obviously didn't read what I said. What I said was that two years is not a limited time for most people. It's an eternity. Most people have a hard time giving up something for Lent, and that's just 48 days.
you let your wardrobe shrink until you're doing the laundry at least once per week.
Yeah. Right. Given that it costs two or three bucks per dryer load, no college student with the slightest bit of financial sense is going to let worn out clothing cost them washer/dryer loads.
Also, I've had most of my clothes since the 90s, and none of them have worn out other than socks plus the occasional knit shirt or light jacket. If you're wearing out a week's worth of clothing in a couple of years (remember, we're talking about college here), you should be applying that whole "save up to buy stuff" attitude towards buying better quality clothing. Buy cheap, buy twice.
... these are all things that naturally have a higher priority than DVDs.
And with the exception of food, those are all things that you can catch up on with the first month's $80. What about the $80 every month after that?
Let me guess, you live in a 2000+ sqft house, have two cars and think any poor person who isn't living in a cardboard box isn't really poor?
No, I think that anyone who can afford to blow $2,000 on a TV and a computer isn't really poor, and anybody who says that this person couldn't have gotten by with a $500 used laptop and a $200 LCD TV is just using poverty as an excuse to pirate movies.
It's one thing to say, "I can't afford to go to the movies, so I'll do without or rent a $1 movie from a RedBox vending machine." It's quite another to say, "I can't afford to go to the movies because I spent all my money on something else that I wanted but didn't really need, so I'm going to have someone open the back door for me so I can sneak in." And when you pirate movies, that's basically what you're doing. For that latter group, I have about as much sympathy as I do for the person claiming to not have enough money to feed his/her kids while still managing to afford a three-pack-a-day smoking habit.
Those of us who have actually experienced having to save up money to buy the things we want (unlike you, I'm guessing) know that sometimes you have to choose what to do with your money. That's just part of life. Although I'm way past the stage in my life (grad school) where I was using TV as my primary entertainment because I could afford neither a large DVD collection nor space to store it, I'm still actively saving money in hopes to one day cover the cost of a house where I don't have to rent the land under it. Life is choice.
It's not about lack of sympathy at all. Sympathy doesn't require turning a blind eye towards bad behavior. You can feel sorry for the person whose brother molested him as a kid without saying that it's okay for him to turn into a serial rapist. We're all responsible for our own actions, and anyone who says otherwise is just looking for an excuse to try to assuage his or her own guilt. Period.
But that's not realistic. If you can stand to give up $80 a month for over two years to buy a $2400 computer and TV combination, then you can't possibly be giving up anything that is truly a basic need. I could believe it if we were talking about a couple of months or three, but not for two years.
Either way, my point was not that the student would necessarily spend all of that $80 on entertainment. My point was that it was ridiculous to suggest that such a person could not afford to spend anything at all. You can get an awful lot of entertainment out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart or whatever. Five bucks will buy you a DVD set with twenty Hitchcock movies. And there are lots of collections of four movies for five or ten bucks.
That's not even considering the question of whether the person could have bought a cheaper computer and TV after half as many months, and could then have spent money on entertainment (and clothes and food) for the remaining months.
The fact remains that almost without exception, lack of finances is an excuse, not a justification. Lack of funds is no more justification for piracy than it is justification for spending yourself into tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. What you call basic needs, I call a luxury. Once you are getting enough food to be healthy, have a roof over your head, and have basic utilities, everything else is optional. How you choose to spend your money beyond that is up to you. Anyone who claims that he or she doesn't have a choice is kidding him/herself.
And you'd still have to solve the problem of corporate blackmail, "if you do that we'll move our plant to another state/overseas".
Oh, that's easy to solve. Just create tax structures that are not favorable to offshoring. This means:
For companies that are incorporated in the U.S., remove all taxation on bringing money in from overseas branches and replace it with a blanket tax on all profit made anywhere in the world.
Add a 200% "branded product" import duty (phased in over ten years) that is charged upon the import of any product that is marked with any trademark held by any company incorporated in the United States, with an added 20% duty for any additional trademark branding after the first three.
Add a 200% "product branding" value added tax for any U.S. company adding a trademarked brand to any imported product after importing, with an additional 20% VAT for any additional trademark branding after the first three.
And so on. Make it cheaper for the companies to hire people in the U.S. or to build automated plants in the U.S. than to offshore the work in another country.
Now admittedly, this doesn't solve the problem of them threatening to move the plant to another state. That is best solved by rolling your eyes and saying, "If it were so easy, you would have done it already."
Become unwieldy if the number of revoked certs gets too high.
Cannot provide information about certs that have expired (and indeed, one of the reasons for having to have expiration dates is to prevent the CRL from getting too big).
Are expensive from a network bandwidth perspective.
OCSP (ideally over HTTPS) solves these problems, and is thus a much better solution than CRLs. Really, we should just abandon CRLs entirely and mandate OCSP.
That said, there is an enhancement that would make OCSP better: session support:
The computer asks about a domain.
The server tells the computer that the cert is valid and caches the fact that the session identifier wants to know about that domain.
The browser caches the validity response.
The cert gets revoked by someone.
The computer asks that server for the validity of a different domain.
The server sends a reply with an attachment that says "And also the cert foo.bar.example.org is no longer valid."
Alternatively, if the server no longer has a cache for that session identifier, it would send back a "no such session" error, and the browser would throw away all cache entries for that session.
This would allow a cert to be revoked almost in real time instead of having propagation delays caused by OCSP caching.
That said, in the grand scheme of things, OCSP is probably good enough.
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The shape of the craft in space is irrelevant, and the shape in the atmosphere is only relevant if either A. you are entering in free fall as our ships do (and thus need to dissipate a lot of heat) or B. you are using air to produce lift. If your craft stays aloft in some other way, the shape of the craft doesn't matter nearly as much.
Assuming, that is, that the aliens grow at the same rate we do. An alien with a 500 year lifespan would not have that problem. Also, there's the possibility of some sort of stasis or hibernation. You're making way too many wrong assumptions, starting with the assumption that any aliens we meet will be in any way like life on Earth.
Well, presumably in their ship. They probably were not planning to crash it.
Don't get me wrong, the most plausible explanation for UFOs is a secret experimental U.S. or Russian spy vehicle, and the most plausible explanation for the "aliens" is that they used midgets for weight/size reasons. Occam's Razor suggests that this is significantly more likely than an alien visitation. However, that doesn't mean that the alien explanation is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
No, it's quite possible, though fairly unlikely, that you would survive, You're going to lose most of that 500 MPH forward velocity to wind resistance pretty quickly. Remember that terminal velocity for a person is only about 100-125 MPH.
So the real question that you have to ask is whether you can survive an impact at 100-125 MPH. And the answer is "If you do it right, yes, there's a slim chance." Aim for mud, snow, or trees to cushion your fall.
Thus far, I believe the survival record for free fall from a plane without a parachute was 22,000 feet. 30,000 feet, while a fair bit higher, is not actually any different from 22,000 feet thanks to terminal velocity, so the only important question is whether you have the foresight to curl up into a ball to accelerate your drop to 10,000 feet and whether you are still conscious when you get there to spread yourself back out and aim for something soft.
Because of the safety hardware I mentioned, if you're overclocking a CPU hard enough to cause permanent damage, you're going to experience pretty much continuous stalls and freezes every couple of minutes to such an extent that you probably won't even get the device to fully boot before it halts its own CPU. Unless you are a complete and total moron, you're going to realize very quickly that you've hosed things, and you're going to switch back to a more functional kernel that does proper power management.
If that brief period of time is enough to damage the CPU, then any number of other failures from a minor kernel bug to leaving it in the car on a sunny day would also damage the CPU, meaning that your modifications are not really the cause of the premature failure.
And if you're only pushing the CPU a little bit beyond its design spec, it is very unlikely that you'll cause it to fail within any typical extended warranty period.
Either way, your point is mostly moot. When it comes to embedded devices, nobody in their right minds is going to go writing or installing custom kernels with custom power management stacks unless they absolutely have to. The number of people who would do such things are countable on one hand. I'm guessing that 99.999999999% of all mods to embedded devices are pure user space mods—adding extra software, for example. Maybe speeding up laptop fans in some cases, but....
Why should the manufacturer investigate? Because the law puts the burden of proof on the shoulders of the company that is trying to weasel out of terms of the contract (warranty), just as it should be. If the company wants to not honor the warranty, that's fine, but if they can't provide at minimum a preponderance of evidence that the mod caused the damage, they will lose in court. Thus, it is in their best interest to do due diligence.
More to the point, if the cost of doing due diligence is too high, it is usually in their best interest to give the customer the benefit of the doubt and honor the warranty. This is by design. In general, the company that created the product has vastly more power in dictating warranty terms than the customer. Magnuson-Moss attempts to level that playing field just a little by eliminating a common source of abuse. It was originally intended to allow customers to buy lower cost aftermarket replacement parts for cars. That is to say, it was specifically designed to cover what you describe as "significant modifications".
If it is even possible to overheat your processor to the point that it causes damage, the CPU wasn't designed correctly. Period. Because if you can do it through overclocking, somebody else can do it by leaving the phone on the dashboard or hitting a kernel bug that puts the CPU in a tight loop.
Not if the CPU was designed correctly, no. A proper CPU has temperature sensors in it, and halts itself (outside of software control) if the temperature exceeds safety limits. I'm not aware of any CPU cores (except for certain specialty parts designed for automotive use) that don't have such hardware. It's considered a very basic part of proper hardware design.
That's completely irrelevant to the question of software for purely electronic devices, though. With the exception of software that directly controls mechanical devices, it is almost impossible for software to permanently damage hardware, so long as it does not attempt to rewrite firmware in a hard-to-reverse way. That's the whole point of layer separation in computers.
As such, changing the software is closer to keeping the Ford engine and mechanical bits, but replacing the shell of the car and its interior with a fiberglass conversion body. Obviously, Ford won't be held responsible for the paint peeling off, but that doesn't absolve them of liability for failures in the drivetrain.
Anyone who keeps any of the following on his/her laptop:
Remember: identity theft is an equal opportunity crime. Identity thieves don't care if you are rich, poor, man, woman, famous, or obscure.
Given that the quality control problems with those DVDs have been ongoing for several years, and given that the first three DVD sets (locally at Fry's) hadn't been sitting on their shelf for two or three years, I think it's safe to say that MGM must know about the quality control problems and simply chooses to ignore them. My guess is that they're counting on people buying these sets and not having time to watch all 55 DVDs before the return window closes.
So the way I figure it, I'm sticking it to the man by using a laptop to verify all the discs quickly and then returning sets until I actually get a good one. By returning 6 sets, I figure MGM lost money on my purchase even by the most conservative estimates. If enough people did that, maybe MGM would think twice before using a fly-by-night DVD fabrication plant in the future.
So yeah, it was inconvenient, but I figure it's the least I can do to improve things. And it looks like it worked. After I sent them a very detailed analysis of the issue, Amazon pulled the product entirely.
The whole point of carrying a drive with you is to have it with you. If it's not attached to something like my keys, it will end up on the ground somewhere with 100% certainty.
As for the DVDs, I'm fine with them getting scratched over time. I'm not fine with getting a brand new box of 55 DVDs and finding that 13 of them are unreadable. That's just incompetent.
No, they don't. The CC companies would yank their merchant account if they pulled that.
And in fact, PayPal describes the chargeback process.
Agreed. I just went down a list of the products I've bought in the past year, and if you ignore DVDs and books, the percentage that have worked correctly for more than a week is somewhere around zero.
USB flash drive watch (ThinkGeek): broke after four days. When the replacement arrived, the flash drive was halfway pulled apart, the glue that held it together having apparently failed. This tells me that it probably failed QA testing (somebody had to have tried to open it or else it would not have been hanging halfway out), but got shipped to me in spite of that. Yikes.
USB keychain drive from Kingston: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four or five months. Replacement drive with substantially inferior case: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four days.
USB keychain drive from Lacie (XtremKey): the wire part that held it onto my keychain broke after less than a week, and has subsequently been replaced by a hand-crimped steel cord from Home Depot. Details in my Amazon review.
Konica Minolta color laser printer: needs a technician to recalibrate it right out of the box because the fuser isn't fusing properly on card stock.
Eyeglasses arrived from the manufacturer with a scratch across the middle of one lens.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
And the list goes on. So yeah, I hear you. The only difference between the Chinese knock offs and the worst American products are that the worst American products at least ostensibly work for a couple of days before they don't. Usually. And this is what happens when consumers don't care about product quality.
I'm assuming what you mean by "under certain circumstances" is that you have to itemize, which means it's only worth doing if you already have enough deductions to exceed the standard deduction.
I wondered that myself. I mean, if you were encoding to it, it would work because you'd rewrite those blocks with the length information at the end, but that won't work if you're just copying files. It would take a fairly intelligent controller to result in something playable....
This is why you complain to your credit card company instead. Then eBay has a choice of either eating the loss or going after the seller.
That's okay. In five years, computers will probably be shipping with full disk encryption enabled by default anyway. The risk of data theft and identity theft from unencrypted laptops walking away is simply too great.
What other GSM carriers? AFAIK, AT&T just bought the last one of consequence, not counting single-city local carriers and AT&T MVNOs that already operate on AT&T's network.
I think that it is important for everyone on the Internet to agree that automatically filtering out the most offensive search terms is not the same thing as editorial oversight on every single possible search suggestion. You see, that's what they are essentially arguing—that Google effectively made the statement because their basic filters are tantamount to human editorial oversight in a newspaper. That's pretty clearly a prima facie *insane* position.
Even if the search filtering were a very sophisticated AI system, no matter how good a filter is at removing potentially defamatory search terms, it won't be perfect, and some will get through. And worse, it damages the public good to have those filters there in the first place.
The problem is that if you extend "offensive" to mean "defamatory", then it can no longer suggest typo corrections in such search terms, either. At what point is it "close enough"? That represents a significant loss of usefulness for someone who is trying to find out if someone is a con man. It's a delicate balance.
As would I. Italy has been pulling crap like this for quite a few years, and this is the second absolutely ridiculous judgment against Google in an Italian court in the past... what, day? Two days?
The fact is that Google doesn't create those search suggestions. It merely presents a list of other people's queries based on frequency. That means that Google didn't defame this person. A lot of people doing previous searches did. This would have been an open and shut case in Google's favor in anything but a kangaroo court, which can only lead a sane person to question whether they would have ruled the same way had it been an Italian company. Just saying.
I think it's about time a major Internet company had the cojones to put Italy in its place—redirect all Google search and Gmail access from Italy to a page explaining the court case, and explaining why Google will no longer serve clients inside Italy. People at the top of Italy's government would be bending over backwards not only to correct the court's decision, but also to make sure it never happens again. Three hours. Tops. And even that's only if they do it over the lunch hour.
Maybe that was just my uni. They also charged something like $600 a year for a parking permit.... If you're not poor going in, you will be coming out. :-)
Obviously there's a significant cost difference between where you live and the United States. Around these parts, people trying to live on the cheap buy a pair of sandals for $10-20, and I think my last pair of sneakers was about $35 or so. Thus, from my perspective, $80 is lunch every day for two weeks, or for a month if I don't eat out. It's four decent shirts (made in China). It's roughly 60 pairs of socks (three for four dollars). It's renting roughly 2.6 movies every day for an entire month from a RedBox machine, which is just an insane number of movies to watch....
There really should be a happy medium in which you can pay for some entertainment without starving. :-)
I'm not saying that spending money on the TV isn't the best choice. Certainly, compared with something ephemeral like a movie rental, it's a much better choice. I just don't see it as justification for piracy, particularly given how many sources of free entertainment exist. At least in the U.S., assuming you're living on campus, there's usually free cable TV. And there are legitimate free sources of entertainment on the Internet (YouTube, Hulu, etc.) that similarly don't require pirating anything. All piracy really does is let you see the movie a year or two before it shows up on over-the-air TV for free....
It's a fairly new thing around here, too (in the last two or three years), but they're popping up everywhere. The selection is somewhat variable, but rentals are a dollar a day, and you don't even have to drop them off at the same place you got them. A lot of folks rent one in the airport to watch on the plane, then drop it off at the box on the other end. Pretty neat.
The problem with pirating the movie is that somebody had to work to make those movies, and those folks deserve to get paid for their work. It's really no different than going to a grocery store and giving them the money to pay for a loaf worth of wheat flour, but walking out with a finished loaf of bread. Well, okay, it's a little different in that the finished loaf of bread required other ingredients and electricity or gas to cook it, but it's still better than a car analogy. :-)
Stop right there. You obviously didn't read what I said. What I said was that two years is not a limited time for most people. It's an eternity. Most people have a hard time giving up something for Lent, and that's just 48 days.
Yeah. Right. Given that it costs two or three bucks per dryer load, no college student with the slightest bit of financial sense is going to let worn out clothing cost them washer/dryer loads.
Also, I've had most of my clothes since the 90s, and none of them have worn out other than socks plus the occasional knit shirt or light jacket. If you're wearing out a week's worth of clothing in a couple of years (remember, we're talking about college here), you should be applying that whole "save up to buy stuff" attitude towards buying better quality clothing. Buy cheap, buy twice.
And with the exception of food, those are all things that you can catch up on with the first month's $80. What about the $80 every month after that?
No, I think that anyone who can afford to blow $2,000 on a TV and a computer isn't really poor, and anybody who says that this person couldn't have gotten by with a $500 used laptop and a $200 LCD TV is just using poverty as an excuse to pirate movies.
It's one thing to say, "I can't afford to go to the movies, so I'll do without or rent a $1 movie from a RedBox vending machine." It's quite another to say, "I can't afford to go to the movies because I spent all my money on something else that I wanted but didn't really need, so I'm going to have someone open the back door for me so I can sneak in." And when you pirate movies, that's basically what you're doing. For that latter group, I have about as much sympathy as I do for the person claiming to not have enough money to feed his/her kids while still managing to afford a three-pack-a-day smoking habit.
Those of us who have actually experienced having to save up money to buy the things we want (unlike you, I'm guessing) know that sometimes you have to choose what to do with your money. That's just part of life. Although I'm way past the stage in my life (grad school) where I was using TV as my primary entertainment because I could afford neither a large DVD collection nor space to store it, I'm still actively saving money in hopes to one day cover the cost of a house where I don't have to rent the land under it. Life is choice.
It's not about lack of sympathy at all. Sympathy doesn't require turning a blind eye towards bad behavior. You can feel sorry for the person whose brother molested him as a kid without saying that it's okay for him to turn into a serial rapist. We're all responsible for our own actions, and anyone who says otherwise is just looking for an excuse to try to assuage his or her own guilt. Period.
Err... a $2000 computer. I corrected the math from three years down to 2, but forgot to fix the number. My bad.
But that's not realistic. If you can stand to give up $80 a month for over two years to buy a $2400 computer and TV combination, then you can't possibly be giving up anything that is truly a basic need. I could believe it if we were talking about a couple of months or three, but not for two years.
Either way, my point was not that the student would necessarily spend all of that $80 on entertainment. My point was that it was ridiculous to suggest that such a person could not afford to spend anything at all. You can get an awful lot of entertainment out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart or whatever. Five bucks will buy you a DVD set with twenty Hitchcock movies. And there are lots of collections of four movies for five or ten bucks.
That's not even considering the question of whether the person could have bought a cheaper computer and TV after half as many months, and could then have spent money on entertainment (and clothes and food) for the remaining months.
The fact remains that almost without exception, lack of finances is an excuse, not a justification. Lack of funds is no more justification for piracy than it is justification for spending yourself into tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. What you call basic needs, I call a luxury. Once you are getting enough food to be healthy, have a roof over your head, and have basic utilities, everything else is optional. How you choose to spend your money beyond that is up to you. Anyone who claims that he or she doesn't have a choice is kidding him/herself.
Oh, that's easy to solve. Just create tax structures that are not favorable to offshoring. This means:
And so on. Make it cheaper for the companies to hire people in the U.S. or to build automated plants in the U.S. than to offshore the work in another country.
Now admittedly, this doesn't solve the problem of them threatening to move the plant to another state. That is best solved by rolling your eyes and saying, "If it were so easy, you would have done it already."
CRLs are hopeless because they:
OCSP (ideally over HTTPS) solves these problems, and is thus a much better solution than CRLs. Really, we should just abandon CRLs entirely and mandate OCSP.
That said, there is an enhancement that would make OCSP better: session support:
This would allow a cert to be revoked almost in real time instead of having propagation delays caused by OCSP caching.
That said, in the grand scheme of things, OCSP is probably good enough.