...what's your basis of calling it ridiculously low? Do you know the dropped call rate of other companies?
There are periods when I have no dropped calls. There are also periods where I drop a call two or three times in a single hour. This is in an area that typically has 3-5 bars of signal. A number as low as 0.1% can't possibly be correct unless their methodology is flawed. Most likely, their methodology is the same as the methodology used for determining whether to credit the customer: if the customer calls the same number back within a minute, it's a dropped call. That only works, however, if you're able to get a call out within a minute. Most of the time, when I see dropped calls, it takes longer than that before I'm able to get a call out because the tower is too overloaded. I suspect that their dropped call rate is low by at least an order of magnitude as a result of their methodology, and possibly two orders in some parts of the country.
On the contrary. In my mind, that suggests it's more likely that he had the good sense to mix the chemicals outside and only bring them inside after adding appropriate stabilizers, plastics, etc.
Let's not forget, God apparently didn't protect the gardener.
Dude. Seriously? The guy steps on a glorified landmine, and ended up with only some singed hair, some burns, and some puncture wounds. He didn't even lose any limbs. If God wasn't protecting him, then I'd say he's the luckiest S.O.B. on the planet, and this guy should buy a freaking lottery ticket.
For all intents and purposes these tenants destroyed the property.
Are you saying that it isn't possible to keep explosive materials safely? Then I guess somebody better tell the military, and all the cities with military bases should burn them down because they're a public nuisance. See how absurd that sounds? This guy had been building up an explosives cache for years and had not blown himself up. Therefore, one can only conclude that he was taking sufficient safety measures to prevent premature detonation. This, in turn, means that it should have been possible to destroy the explosives without endangering the property. Therefore, the tenant didn't destroy the property.
What we actually have here is a situation in which the tenant created something that the government isn't willing to spend the time and money to dispose of safely, so instead of doing it the right way, they're just burning down the house. That's a choice by the government, not an imperative. The home is no more a public nuisance than any other home with any smaller amount of explosives or weapons in it; the risk to the person removing the explosives is identical whether it's enough to kill that person or enough to blow the side off the house. More importantly, if the house had enough explosives in it to pose a significant risk of harm to the nearby houses, they would not be burning down the house because they would run too much risk of causing an explosion and taking out the neighborhood. Therefore, one can only conclude that the decision to burn down the house is merely one of expediency. With that in mind, the city should be required to allow the homeowner sufficient time to hire a cleanup crew to dispose of the explosives in lieu of ordering the structure burned to the ground. If they have not done so, one could legitimately argue that the onus is on the city to pay for the cost of reconstruction.
I as a tax payer should not compensate the landlord for his loss.
So instead, you as a home owner's insurance payer will compensate the landlord. Really, you're likely to pay a larger chunk of the cost by not having the government cover it unless you don't own property....
D'oh! Just noticed an error in that post. I meant to say that the left tail light is always visible except when you are going around a sharp left-hand turn and there is another vehicle in the lane to your left (or when you are in the leftmost lane and there is a solid center barrier). Sorry. My bad.
You're all wrong, though. You're all assuming a straight road with no visual obstructions on either side, but that's simply not an accurate picture of many roads. In the real world, only the center tail light is (almost) always within your field of view. The other lights are *commonly* obscured on roads like Highway 17, which I drive several times per week (and drove today). This road leaves first-time drivers white-knuckled even at 15 under the posted limit.
The left tail light is always in your field of view except when you are going around a sharp left-hand corner and there is a car in the lane in front of you, at which point it can be obscured (and, BTW, will *only* be obscured if you *are* leaving a safe distance in front of you; if you're tailgating, it would likely be in view). Thus, this light is generally sufficient by itself if it is working because it is so seldom obscured for any significant period of time.
The right tail light, however, is frequently obscured on sharp right hand turns. Most sharp right hand turns (assuming you are in the right lane) are on mountainous roads with either a rock face or a dropoff to your right. In such cases, there is a visual obstruction on the right shoulder that obscures your view of the right brake light and tail light substantially.
And when you're going around tight corners with switchbacks, you're spending a considerable portion of your attention just staying between the lines. In these situations it is of the *utmost* importance that all vehicle lights be functioning because that extra half second before you realize that only one brake light is on could make the difference between a wreck and not, particularly when the car itself is around a corner that provides barely enough visibility to allow for a safe stopping distance at the speed limit.
Moreover, when driving such a road, you're primarily concentrating on what is in front of you. The vehicle in a sharp right-hand turn is way off to your right through a grove of trees and ten feet below you as well. It's exceptionally difficult to see, much less regularly watch, the rightmost brake light on such a vehicle without steering your car into the guard rail. That's why they tell you when driving at night to never look at the headlights of the oncoming cars. You'll tend to steer towards what you're looking at. And when the road has a one foot margin between the right line and a concrete wall, looking at stuff to your right is an absolute no-no. So basically, the right tail light is in your extreme peripheral vision, which makes it much less useful than the left tail light, which is actually moderately visible without glancing all the way off the road..
Finally, I'll add one more benefit to the center tail light: it is higher up off the ground than the outer tail lights. This makes it easier to see it on vehicles that are several cars ahead of you because you are more likely to be able to see it over or through the other cars (particularly if you're in a taller vehicle).
Agreed. Or, as Edison put it, "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." If anyone honestly thinks the idea is the hard part, that person hasn't ever tried to actually make anything.:-) That's not saying that the idea isn't important---without an idea, nothing would ever get made---and perhaps with really basic inventions, the idea actually is a significant part of the work. However, there's a rather obvious counterexample to put things in perspective:
Hundreds of writers throughout time have thought of the idea of building a time machine. Yet 115 years after the H.G. Wells novel of that title, we still don't have one. Clearly, when it comes to any suitably complex invention, the idea is not the hard part.
Ideas inspire genius---they give genius a reason to push the human race forward---but they are not genius. Only an idea with a working implementation is genius, or at least an idea whose implementation has been roughed out and shown to be feasible. Up until that point, it is just a thought---no better or worse than any of the other billions of thoughts had by everyone on the planet in any given moment. Sadly, as a society, we seem to give far too much credit to the "idea men" and far too little credit to the people who actually get things done. *sigh*
Clear delineation between developer and 'idea' people just doesn't make much sense except in the most straightforward cases, and none of those straightforward 'ideas' are valuable (mostly one-off customized solutions of common setups required to work with a customers uniquely evolved system).
Agreed. Most of the good tech companies, major web companies, etc. have gotten their start not because of an idea person, but because of a programmer who had an idea. Programmers (and, to some degree, non-programmer computer power users) are much more likely to have a concept of what's possible, practical, and useful in technology. The farther you get from that, the less likely you are to have a good idea. Either way, the first thing you should do if you have an idea is to discuss it with people who do have a background in programming. Don't be surprised if it gets shot down as impossible or impractical.
I would argue that any instantiation in the real world---and there are, after all, stuffed Mickey Mouse dolls, people walking around in suits at theme parks, etc.---is as good a reference point as the Grand Canyon. Pac-Man, not so much, perhaps. At some point, the existence of the object in the real world provides at minimum a fair use defense, e.g. taking or painting a picture of the guy in the Mickey costume talking to your kids. This doesn't help with trademark infringement, of course.
With Pac-Man, it isn't so much that there's a frame of reference, but rather that the imagery itself is trivial, and it's not clear whether it is substantive enough to even have copyright protection as a standalone work. It is basically a crude one-color representation of a pie with a slice taken out of it and a dot for an eye. I mean, I can draw a stick figure, but that doesn't mean it should enjoy copyright protection for the next hundred plus years, nor that I should have the right to sue somebody for drawing a similar stick figure. That's basically the level of artistry we're talking about here. Like I said, it's not clear-cut.
Because the painting is a copyrighted work. There is artistic value added in the framing, in the perspective, in the time of day the photo was taken, etc.
It's a fine line. Two people draw a picture of the Grand Canyon. One starts by taking a famous photograph and painting it. The other goes to where that photo was taken. At what point is copyright violated? Is knowing that the picture was taken from that point a violation of copyright? Probably not. Is painting the actual photo? Probably. A person paints a picture of Mickey Mouse based collectively on hundreds of images of Mickey Mouse and does so in a style that differs substantively from the original. Is that a copyright violation? It starts to get pretty fuzzy. (It's definitely a trademark violation, though.) Is copying the look of something as trivial as Pac-Man characters a violation? Maybe.
Now given that something a simple as a Pac-Man character would almost inherently look fairly similar to the original, that does raise the question of whether the original work contains sufficient originality to be protectable by copyright in the first place. I don't have an opinion on that, but I wouldn't want to be the one trying to use that as my defense. My guess is that the work is protectable by copyright and that this derivative work is not of a sufficiently transformative nature and looks way too similar to the original, and as such represents an infringing unauthorized derivative work. That said, IANAL, and the original poster should really contact someone who is instead of posting on Slashdot.
I'm sorry, WHAT? Do you have some sort of visual impairment that prevents you from seeing the whole car in front of you? I always see the tail lights (on both sides) when driving behind another car - how do you NOT?
It's not that you can't see the right brake light. Sure, it's there. It just isn't where you're primarily paying attention. You're primarily paying attention to the traffic coming towards you and the traffic in front of you, which means you are less likely to notice a light way off to the right. Of course this does depend in part on distance, but if you're far enough away for a bad left brake light to not be a problem, you're also far enough out that you don't need the brake light to realize the car is stopped.
What I want is radar or sonar with a HUD on my windshield that shows me a 2D representation of everything around me relative to my location. If there's a kid behind the car, it would show up as a blob behind the vehicle. If there's a car in your blind spot, it would show up as a blob off the back corner of your car. And so on. Such a system, unlike a camera, would make normal driving safer instead of just focusing on a single (and relatively rare) aspect of driving. The only hard part is deciding what is ground clutter and what is something important.
The brake light on the right side of the vehicle is nearly useless unless the vehicle is in the lane to your left because it isn't really in front of you when you're in the driver's seat. Thus, with traditional twin tail lights, you had only a single brake light filament standing between you and a wreck. The center brake light fixtures, by contrast, typically have multiple bulbs (or are LED-based, which are even more reliable), which means you now have typically four filaments standing between you and a wreck. They make driving a lot safer.
You don't even need to spoof the GPS signals. Just spoof the response from the GPS receiver. Most high-end cameras don't have built-in GPS receivers anyway (much to my dismay), so you end up using an external USB-based GPS receiver. It looks suspiciously like a serial port.... And even if you have a camera that does have integrated GPS, if you're going to the trouble to desolder a CCD, you can remove a GPS chip just as easily.
Trust me. You can do far more damage to someone psychologically by not hitting them physically. Imagine this. You wake up and find your head shaved and/or your hair glued to the pillow. You step out of bed onto an emptied box of thumbtacks. When you get downstairs, you find out that your pet dog is hanging from the ceiling fan with its guts strewn on the floor. Your elementary school daughter's class schedule is missing from the front of the refrigerator, and the words "You're next" are written in the dog's blood on the kitchen floor.
You run out of the house to go pick up your daughter, but your car door locks are glued shut. And the ignition lock. And the tires are flat. You run inside to call someone for a ride, when the phone rings and you hear heavy breathing. You suddenly notice a bloody knife beside the phone that was not there when you walked out to the car.
You quickly hang up and call the police, then call someone to get a ride to work. When you go to lunch, you find out that your credit cards have been reported stolen and your bank account is now empty. And then you find out that your psycho ex has accused you of molesting your daughter, resulting in a year-long court battle. And then she hides child porn on your computer. And then you lose your job, your freedom, your child, and your sanity, all without a single direct physical act of violence against you.
Yes, this is an extreme example, but to suggest that you have to physically beat someone to cause serious injury to that person is utterly foolish.
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman.
Only if you define it narrowly to be reported physical domestic violence. If you look at it more broadly and include emotional abuse and unreported abuse, I think you'll find that men and women are roughly equal opportunity offenders. It just looks like it's mostly men on women because:
Statistically men are stronger than women on average. Thus men are far more likely to be able to physically overpower women than the other way around, and men are likely to cause more damage to women on average than the other way around.
Men are statistically less likely to put up with it and stay in the relationship, so domestic violence against men tends to be more distributed, making it harder to spot. You're less likely to notice that a girl gave a different guy a black eye every week than to notice that a girl has gotten a black eye every week.
Women are more likely to abuse people in ways that don't leave a physical scar. You know, like boiling your bunny.
And in spite of the shock, at least in principle, if the antivirus software were good (which it sounds like maybe wasn't the case for you), one could reasonably argue that this is a useful service for your average person who doesn't understand technology. Given that nearly 100% of people who buy computers at Best Buy don't understand technology (or else they would have shopped online to get a significantly better deal), the net result of this is fewer non-antivirus-savvy Windows users letting their subscription lapse and becoming a nuisance on the 'net. That said, they should be required to send you mail before auto-renewing so that you would know what's going on.
That's what Symantec does. They buy a company, outsource development and support, cut staff to the bare minimum needed to meet contractual obligations (if that), pump it full of nagging goodness, and try to squeeze every cent out of the product before the users realize that it has been glorified abandonware for years. They do that in pretty much every aspect of their business, not just antivirus protection.
Why should Level3 get to connect to the network for free?
I think you have it backwards. Why should Comcast get to connect through Level3's network for free?
Generally speaking, companies providing a service charge companies whose customers want to access that service. This means that Comcast pays to get better access to servers like YouTube that are hosted by other networks like Level3, not the other way around. The very notion of Comcast charging Level3 for better access to their customers is absurd.
YouTube is providing a service. Comcast's customers are just consumers. They're interchangeable. Services like YouTube aren't. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, faster access to YouTube matters, and faster access to Comcast's customers don't. YouTube doesn't benefit from those faster pipes. They get paid the same whether the customer gets a lower bandwidth stream or a higher bandwidth stream. They get paid whether it stutters every once in a while or not, so long as it isn't degraded beyond usability. Comcast's customers, on the other hand, demand better service, so Comcast should have to pay.
If Comcast wants to not pay such exorbitant bandwidth costs for peering, maybe they should have thought of that before they decided to become an ISP that almost exclusively caters to individual customers and small businesses. There's nothing inherently stopping Comcast from rolling out true business-grade pipes with guaranteed bandwidth to big businesses and putting themselves on a level playing field. They merely have chosen not to do so, and that's their choice. The consequence is that as ISPs go, they just aren't very important, so they have to pay to peer, and nobody pays them to peer. That's just the way the Internet works.
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There are periods when I have no dropped calls. There are also periods where I drop a call two or three times in a single hour. This is in an area that typically has 3-5 bars of signal. A number as low as 0.1% can't possibly be correct unless their methodology is flawed. Most likely, their methodology is the same as the methodology used for determining whether to credit the customer: if the customer calls the same number back within a minute, it's a dropped call. That only works, however, if you're able to get a call out within a minute. Most of the time, when I see dropped calls, it takes longer than that before I'm able to get a call out because the tower is too overloaded. I suspect that their dropped call rate is low by at least an order of magnitude as a result of their methodology, and possibly two orders in some parts of the country.
On the contrary. In my mind, that suggests it's more likely that he had the good sense to mix the chemicals outside and only bring them inside after adding appropriate stabilizers, plastics, etc.
Dude. Seriously? The guy steps on a glorified landmine, and ended up with only some singed hair, some burns, and some puncture wounds. He didn't even lose any limbs. If God wasn't protecting him, then I'd say he's the luckiest S.O.B. on the planet, and this guy should buy a freaking lottery ticket.
Are you saying that it isn't possible to keep explosive materials safely? Then I guess somebody better tell the military, and all the cities with military bases should burn them down because they're a public nuisance. See how absurd that sounds? This guy had been building up an explosives cache for years and had not blown himself up. Therefore, one can only conclude that he was taking sufficient safety measures to prevent premature detonation. This, in turn, means that it should have been possible to destroy the explosives without endangering the property. Therefore, the tenant didn't destroy the property.
What we actually have here is a situation in which the tenant created something that the government isn't willing to spend the time and money to dispose of safely, so instead of doing it the right way, they're just burning down the house. That's a choice by the government, not an imperative. The home is no more a public nuisance than any other home with any smaller amount of explosives or weapons in it; the risk to the person removing the explosives is identical whether it's enough to kill that person or enough to blow the side off the house. More importantly, if the house had enough explosives in it to pose a significant risk of harm to the nearby houses, they would not be burning down the house because they would run too much risk of causing an explosion and taking out the neighborhood. Therefore, one can only conclude that the decision to burn down the house is merely one of expediency. With that in mind, the city should be required to allow the homeowner sufficient time to hire a cleanup crew to dispose of the explosives in lieu of ordering the structure burned to the ground. If they have not done so, one could legitimately argue that the onus is on the city to pay for the cost of reconstruction.
So instead, you as a home owner's insurance payer will compensate the landlord. Really, you're likely to pay a larger chunk of the cost by not having the government cover it unless you don't own property....
Hawking: But what if they blow up that checkpoint?
Old woman: You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's security checkpoints all the way down!
D'oh! Just noticed an error in that post. I meant to say that the left tail light is always visible except when you are going around a sharp left-hand turn and there is another vehicle in the lane to your left (or when you are in the leftmost lane and there is a solid center barrier). Sorry. My bad.
You're all wrong, though. You're all assuming a straight road with no visual obstructions on either side, but that's simply not an accurate picture of many roads. In the real world, only the center tail light is (almost) always within your field of view. The other lights are *commonly* obscured on roads like Highway 17, which I drive several times per week (and drove today). This road leaves first-time drivers white-knuckled even at 15 under the posted limit.
The left tail light is always in your field of view except when you are going around a sharp left-hand corner and there is a car in the lane in front of you, at which point it can be obscured (and, BTW, will *only* be obscured if you *are* leaving a safe distance in front of you; if you're tailgating, it would likely be in view). Thus, this light is generally sufficient by itself if it is working because it is so seldom obscured for any significant period of time.
The right tail light, however, is frequently obscured on sharp right hand turns. Most sharp right hand turns (assuming you are in the right lane) are on mountainous roads with either a rock face or a dropoff to your right. In such cases, there is a visual obstruction on the right shoulder that obscures your view of the right brake light and tail light substantially.
And when you're going around tight corners with switchbacks, you're spending a considerable portion of your attention just staying between the lines. In these situations it is of the *utmost* importance that all vehicle lights be functioning because that extra half second before you realize that only one brake light is on could make the difference between a wreck and not, particularly when the car itself is around a corner that provides barely enough visibility to allow for a safe stopping distance at the speed limit.
Moreover, when driving such a road, you're primarily concentrating on what is in front of you. The vehicle in a sharp right-hand turn is way off to your right through a grove of trees and ten feet below you as well. It's exceptionally difficult to see, much less regularly watch, the rightmost brake light on such a vehicle without steering your car into the guard rail. That's why they tell you when driving at night to never look at the headlights of the oncoming cars. You'll tend to steer towards what you're looking at. And when the road has a one foot margin between the right line and a concrete wall, looking at stuff to your right is an absolute no-no. So basically, the right tail light is in your extreme peripheral vision, which makes it much less useful than the left tail light, which is actually moderately visible without glancing all the way off the road..
Finally, I'll add one more benefit to the center tail light: it is higher up off the ground than the outer tail lights. This makes it easier to see it on vehicles that are several cars ahead of you because you are more likely to be able to see it over or through the other cars (particularly if you're in a taller vehicle).
Agreed. Or, as Edison put it, "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." If anyone honestly thinks the idea is the hard part, that person hasn't ever tried to actually make anything. :-) That's not saying that the idea isn't important---without an idea, nothing would ever get made---and perhaps with really basic inventions, the idea actually is a significant part of the work. However, there's a rather obvious counterexample to put things in perspective:
Hundreds of writers throughout time have thought of the idea of building a time machine. Yet 115 years after the H.G. Wells novel of that title, we still don't have one. Clearly, when it comes to any suitably complex invention, the idea is not the hard part.
Ideas inspire genius---they give genius a reason to push the human race forward---but they are not genius. Only an idea with a working implementation is genius, or at least an idea whose implementation has been roughed out and shown to be feasible. Up until that point, it is just a thought---no better or worse than any of the other billions of thoughts had by everyone on the planet in any given moment. Sadly, as a society, we seem to give far too much credit to the "idea men" and far too little credit to the people who actually get things done. *sigh*
Agreed. Most of the good tech companies, major web companies, etc. have gotten their start not because of an idea person, but because of a programmer who had an idea. Programmers (and, to some degree, non-programmer computer power users) are much more likely to have a concept of what's possible, practical, and useful in technology. The farther you get from that, the less likely you are to have a good idea. Either way, the first thing you should do if you have an idea is to discuss it with people who do have a background in programming. Don't be surprised if it gets shot down as impossible or impractical.
I would argue that any instantiation in the real world---and there are, after all, stuffed Mickey Mouse dolls, people walking around in suits at theme parks, etc.---is as good a reference point as the Grand Canyon. Pac-Man, not so much, perhaps. At some point, the existence of the object in the real world provides at minimum a fair use defense, e.g. taking or painting a picture of the guy in the Mickey costume talking to your kids. This doesn't help with trademark infringement, of course.
With Pac-Man, it isn't so much that there's a frame of reference, but rather that the imagery itself is trivial, and it's not clear whether it is substantive enough to even have copyright protection as a standalone work. It is basically a crude one-color representation of a pie with a slice taken out of it and a dot for an eye. I mean, I can draw a stick figure, but that doesn't mean it should enjoy copyright protection for the next hundred plus years, nor that I should have the right to sue somebody for drawing a similar stick figure. That's basically the level of artistry we're talking about here. Like I said, it's not clear-cut.
Because the painting is a copyrighted work. There is artistic value added in the framing, in the perspective, in the time of day the photo was taken, etc.
It's a fine line. Two people draw a picture of the Grand Canyon. One starts by taking a famous photograph and painting it. The other goes to where that photo was taken. At what point is copyright violated? Is knowing that the picture was taken from that point a violation of copyright? Probably not. Is painting the actual photo? Probably. A person paints a picture of Mickey Mouse based collectively on hundreds of images of Mickey Mouse and does so in a style that differs substantively from the original. Is that a copyright violation? It starts to get pretty fuzzy. (It's definitely a trademark violation, though.) Is copying the look of something as trivial as Pac-Man characters a violation? Maybe.
Now given that something a simple as a Pac-Man character would almost inherently look fairly similar to the original, that does raise the question of whether the original work contains sufficient originality to be protectable by copyright in the first place. I don't have an opinion on that, but I wouldn't want to be the one trying to use that as my defense. My guess is that the work is protectable by copyright and that this derivative work is not of a sufficiently transformative nature and looks way too similar to the original, and as such represents an infringing unauthorized derivative work. That said, IANAL, and the original poster should really contact someone who is instead of posting on Slashdot.
You face backwards when you drive? Ah. That explains your driving record!
It's not that you can't see the right brake light. Sure, it's there. It just isn't where you're primarily paying attention. You're primarily paying attention to the traffic coming towards you and the traffic in front of you, which means you are less likely to notice a light way off to the right. Of course this does depend in part on distance, but if you're far enough away for a bad left brake light to not be a problem, you're also far enough out that you don't need the brake light to realize the car is stopped.
What I want is radar or sonar with a HUD on my windshield that shows me a 2D representation of everything around me relative to my location. If there's a kid behind the car, it would show up as a blob behind the vehicle. If there's a car in your blind spot, it would show up as a blob off the back corner of your car. And so on. Such a system, unlike a camera, would make normal driving safer instead of just focusing on a single (and relatively rare) aspect of driving. The only hard part is deciding what is ground clutter and what is something important.
The brake light on the right side of the vehicle is nearly useless unless the vehicle is in the lane to your left because it isn't really in front of you when you're in the driver's seat. Thus, with traditional twin tail lights, you had only a single brake light filament standing between you and a wreck. The center brake light fixtures, by contrast, typically have multiple bulbs (or are LED-based, which are even more reliable), which means you now have typically four filaments standing between you and a wreck. They make driving a lot safer.
You don't even need to spoof the GPS signals. Just spoof the response from the GPS receiver. Most high-end cameras don't have built-in GPS receivers anyway (much to my dismay), so you end up using an external USB-based GPS receiver. It looks suspiciously like a serial port.... And even if you have a camera that does have integrated GPS, if you're going to the trouble to desolder a CCD, you can remove a GPS chip just as easily.
Trust me. You can do far more damage to someone psychologically by not hitting them physically. Imagine this. You wake up and find your head shaved and/or your hair glued to the pillow. You step out of bed onto an emptied box of thumbtacks. When you get downstairs, you find out that your pet dog is hanging from the ceiling fan with its guts strewn on the floor. Your elementary school daughter's class schedule is missing from the front of the refrigerator, and the words "You're next" are written in the dog's blood on the kitchen floor.
You run out of the house to go pick up your daughter, but your car door locks are glued shut. And the ignition lock. And the tires are flat. You run inside to call someone for a ride, when the phone rings and you hear heavy breathing. You suddenly notice a bloody knife beside the phone that was not there when you walked out to the car.
You quickly hang up and call the police, then call someone to get a ride to work. When you go to lunch, you find out that your credit cards have been reported stolen and your bank account is now empty. And then you find out that your psycho ex has accused you of molesting your daughter, resulting in a year-long court battle. And then she hides child porn on your computer. And then you lose your job, your freedom, your child, and your sanity, all without a single direct physical act of violence against you.
Yes, this is an extreme example, but to suggest that you have to physically beat someone to cause serious injury to that person is utterly foolish.
Someone smart off the grid won't be using cards.
FTFY.
Just turn the gain all the way down, then rip the CCD off the board and emulate it with an FPGA.
Only if you define it narrowly to be reported physical domestic violence. If you look at it more broadly and include emotional abuse and unreported abuse, I think you'll find that men and women are roughly equal opportunity offenders. It just looks like it's mostly men on women because:
Just saying.
And in spite of the shock, at least in principle, if the antivirus software were good (which it sounds like maybe wasn't the case for you), one could reasonably argue that this is a useful service for your average person who doesn't understand technology. Given that nearly 100% of people who buy computers at Best Buy don't understand technology (or else they would have shopped online to get a significantly better deal), the net result of this is fewer non-antivirus-savvy Windows users letting their subscription lapse and becoming a nuisance on the 'net. That said, they should be required to send you mail before auto-renewing so that you would know what's going on.
That's what Symantec does. They buy a company, outsource development and support, cut staff to the bare minimum needed to meet contractual obligations (if that), pump it full of nagging goodness, and try to squeeze every cent out of the product before the users realize that it has been glorified abandonware for years. They do that in pretty much every aspect of their business, not just antivirus protection.
Exactly. Someone not on the feds' radar screen who may or may not be smart enough to stay that way.
I think you have it backwards. Why should Comcast get to connect through Level3's network for free?
Generally speaking, companies providing a service charge companies whose customers want to access that service. This means that Comcast pays to get better access to servers like YouTube that are hosted by other networks like Level3, not the other way around. The very notion of Comcast charging Level3 for better access to their customers is absurd.
YouTube is providing a service. Comcast's customers are just consumers. They're interchangeable. Services like YouTube aren't. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, faster access to YouTube matters, and faster access to Comcast's customers don't. YouTube doesn't benefit from those faster pipes. They get paid the same whether the customer gets a lower bandwidth stream or a higher bandwidth stream. They get paid whether it stutters every once in a while or not, so long as it isn't degraded beyond usability. Comcast's customers, on the other hand, demand better service, so Comcast should have to pay.
If Comcast wants to not pay such exorbitant bandwidth costs for peering, maybe they should have thought of that before they decided to become an ISP that almost exclusively caters to individual customers and small businesses. There's nothing inherently stopping Comcast from rolling out true business-grade pipes with guaranteed bandwidth to big businesses and putting themselves on a level playing field. They merely have chosen not to do so, and that's their choice. The consequence is that as ISPs go, they just aren't very important, so they have to pay to peer, and nobody pays them to peer. That's just the way the Internet works.