So what's stopping us? Simple. The manufacturing capacity exists in China and they are willing to look the other way and ignore environmental laws. Oh, and don't forget that a significant percentage of the parts are also manufactured there. The cost of manufacturing finished goods anywhere else is significantly higher because you first have to import the parts and China has tariffs that deliberately make it more expensive for unfinished goods to leave the country.
It's not nearly as easy as you think. If China closed its borders. the world economy would basically collapse. It would take decades to get back on track. About the only first-world country that might be okay is Japan, mainly because some of their manufacturers haven't offshored all their manufacturing capacity. They basically have the high-tech world by the privates.
All the more reason for the world to start making backup plans now and not allow them to become further entrenched.
You think it's more likely that a CEO made a moral choice? Don't make me laugh. If morals had anything to do with it, they would never have gotten into China in the first place. It's not like Tiananmen Square hadn't happened yet....
No, I strongly suspect it's more like "Betraying the trust of other people is okay as long as you don't betray mine." And odds are, in a few months, this will all be forgotten and it will be back to business as usual, censorship, spying, and all. I'd love to be wrong about my cynicism, but it happens so rarely these days....
Which brings us to the second-most likely suspect: one of Google's competitors in China. Think about it for a moment:
If they successfully hack the servers, they give the info to the Chinese government and Google gets blamed for revealing data even if they didn't. The American public gets mad at Google, who loses market share. The dissidents hear about it through the underground and realize that Google is insecure and they lose more market share.
If they get caught, everyone blames the Chinese government, Google has a hissy fit and pulls out of China and loses all its market share.
It's a win-win as long as it can't be pinned on them specifically.
Also, the LoC actually is responsible for a *lot* of copyright-related rulemaking. Among other things, it sets statutory rates for various licenses, produces a list of exemptions from the DMCA, etc., all of which are, in fact, legally binding just as though they were codified in Title 17. Whether this truly falls within that realm or not is something the courts would have to decide, but good luck trying to get a judge to set aside something that is so broadly accepted.
The big difference, of course, is that most CB radio drivers are primarily listening, while most cell phone users talk too much. It's not listening on a cell phone that causes problems. You naturally tune out the cell phone if something is happening around you and you can't think. It's when you try to think about something else sufficient to talk and answer complex questions that you get in trouble.
I'm not saying that cell phones cause accidents, though. People concentrating on something other than driving causes accidents, whether the other end of the conversation is in the seat next to you or across the country. Ultimately, the only real difference is that people in the car are less likely to push you beyond what you can handle because they have visual clues that you are getting distracted. That's not enough of a difference in compromisation for additional laws to make sense, though.
That's why you force yourself to key in one letter at a time, then look back at the road. You do not ever, ever, ever look away from the road for more than a second or so at a time. If you really can't keep it in your lane doing that, you don't deserve to be driving. Either that or you're doing it at a highly inappropriate time (going around a curve, for example).
The problem is that the phone and/or tower drops the call too quickly. Almost inevitably, you have a strong signal within a second after dropping a call, so the problem is a failure in the call handoff. If the towers would just hold on a little longer, you'd experience a couple second glitch and then you'd be talking again.
First, if you are an existing T-Mobile customer, you typically don't qualify for the lowest subsidized phone price. I did a Google search, and as best I can tell, existing customers who are no longer under any subsidy period pay $179 for the G1 as of just a couple of weeks ago. (I'm not a T-Mobile customer, so I can't verify this definitively.) Therefore, if you don't switch phone companies after your contract period is up, your second phone will still be cheaper to buy outright with the $10/month discount than to buy under contract.
Second, unless your plan drops by $10 when the subsidy period ends, it's not just $290. It's $50 + ($10 * n) where n is the lifetime of the phone in months before you replace it. What this means is that if you don't replace your phone at least every three years, you're better off buying it outright. And if you replace it after two, on your next phone, you pay $10 more than the equivalent of another year worth of subsidy. Thus, if you replace it exactly at the end of the subsidy period, you just lost at least $10 of your savings from the first phone. And that's for upgrading to an older phone.
Your best deal is probably to switch phone companies every two years. If you aren't willing to do that, you're probably better off buying your phone outright with the T-Mobile discounted service rate in the long run. You can bet your bottom dollar that those discounts are calculated based on the average number of years a person remains a T-Mobile customer, and that on average, T-Mobile gets the better end of the deal. Actually, they probably get the better end of the deal either way....:-)
The reason many people believe in the so-called "30-second rule" is that it is codified by a copyright office circular, but only for academic purposes. It may not be strictly codified in law, but you'd have a rather hard time filing a suit for a shorter clip used within the context of educational use, and if you tried, there's a good chance the other party would be awarded court costs for your blatant abuse of the legal system by going against the published guidance of the LoC.
Outside the educational use context, though, the "30-second rule" is completely meaningless. For example, if I aired a 30-second TV commercial and argued that I could use any song I wanted to because the snippet was under 30 seconds long, I'd be laughed out of court. The problem is that most people don't understand that personal use and educational use are not always subject to the same body of copyright law, and thus misinterpret what "most copyright lawyers" believe.
Actually, the 30 seconds thing is just plain wrong. It's 45 seconds, and it is only true if the clip is solely used by someone to promote the sale of the song. There was an attempt to get a more general 30 second exemption for commercial use, but that didn't ever make it out of Congress, I don't think.
The 10% thing comes from Circular 21, which is a set of guidelines for educators from the LOC regarding non-performance fair use in a classroom setting. It doesn't necessarily apply outside of that setting, but within that setting, it's generally considered to be "safe".
Without a merchant account? Google Checkout, Digital River, Kagi... With a merchant account? Lots.
Here's a helpful guide to choosing a CC processor. They even have a page at the end that submits your application to multiple CC processors for consideration. I haven't used those processors personally, but I'm pretty sure they're reputable.
Uh... no.... It has nothing to do with his race. In fact, until you mentioned it, I had completely forgotten that he was of African descent, and when you said that, I had to think about it for several seconds just to figure out what you could be implying.
I think his opinions are consistently fringe opinions that trample on the Constitution with regularity, voting to protect laws that harm the public and voting to overturn laws that protect the public. As far as I'm concerned, such blatant disregard for the public good has no place on the People's Court, much less the Supreme Court. Strict constructionist views have no legitimate place in law, IMHO. Literal interpretation of the letter of the law without concern for who is harmed is not justice. It's mechanical logic. If you can replace the judge with an expert system and get the same rulings consistently, that's a pretty clear sign of a bad judge.
...but if this is just a bureaucracy stuff up, then this is not really news - PayPal does this all the time.
That's the heart of the problem, though. When it happens to Wikileaks, it gets attention, but PayPal pulls this crap constantly. With Wikileaks, it isn't a big deal, but only because they have enough clout to get things fixed. Most people that PayPal screws like this don't have that much clout, so PayPal walks all over them. I'm all for this getting media attention, if only to cast a spotlight on PayPal's shady dealings and hopefully make people mad enough to get them investigated, fined, and declared a bank subject to the consumer protection laws that apply to the banking industry.
Agreed. Having been the buyer in a transaction that PayPal froze (which was only resolved quickly because one of the other people who was getting screwed knew one of their VPs), I can't imagine why any nonprofit organization trusts them as far as they can throw them. There are plenty of real credit card processors that don't act like thugs. I would urge Wikileaks to pick one and terminate their relationship with PayPal ASAP.
You're dealing with a very unusual amount of data there. I think you'll find that the vast majority of businesses don't have a 300-tape library cabinet.... And the main reason that tape is so expensive is that it is only a good deal when you have an insane amount of data. Economies of scale and all. This problem is likely to continue to get worse.
Crap. The link from Google clearly said 1.5 TB drive, complete with specs, but the actual page is 500 GB. The company must have either changed the page or is serving bogus data to Google's search bots.
I don't. Net yet. I want idiots like Bill O'Reilly to have to live in the world that they created. In fact, I want to get all the Bill O'Reillys and Pat Robertsons of the world in one location in the middle of nowhere so that it only takes one act of God to put them in their place. When they are rescued five days later, starving from under the collapsed ruins of their hotel or whatever, only to be forced to wander the streets for days without food, water, or shelter because there's no money or help coming any time soon and no way off the island, maybe then they'll start to act like reasonable and decent human beings.
You know, sort of an "A Christmas Carol" meets "Deep Impact" kind of thing.
My prediction is that a bunch of people who know each other offline get together and pull a prank that ends up getting published as news. I'm seeing a sex scandal involving the President, the Pope, three aliens, a dead hooker, and the ghost of Elvis.
Regarding transport, that's not particularly hard. You just use a standard foam-lined briefcase. Punch out slots for the drives. Slip the drive into a foil bag, slide the bag into the slot, repeat. Transport the case. Most of us carry hard drives all the time in laptops with far less protection. A drive that is shut down with the head parked is fairly robust.
Regarding the slot loader, because hard drives don't require an expensive tape drive, you don't need such a beast. Assuming you use a series of those open-front FireWire 800 drive trays attached to multiple cards, you can attach at least a couple dozen drives to a computer and address them all at once. This also makes the maximum total sustained bandwidth much greater than that of the tape drive.
They hold 1.6 TB if the data compresses easily. For many types of data, they hold half that. You can't guarantee that a tape will back up a single hard drive without swapping tapes. At 1.6 TB, they're marginally cheaper than ATA hard drives ($50 for a 1.5 TB internal drive). At.8 TB, they're almost twice as expensive. Both hold the same data. Both get tossed out and replaced when they go bad. When used as part of a backup rotation, both will, statistically speaking, outlast the backup rotation. So it really comes down to cost and ease of use. The hard drive wins in both places hands down.
I'm not talking about replication here, BTW. I'm talking about using hard drives the same way you would use a tape. You stick the drive in a docking station, clone the data to the drive, spin it down, and shelve it just like you would with a tape. The difference is that the hard drive doesn't require any special hardware to read it and can be brought online at a moment's notice with much faster random access to your backed up data.
For most backup purposes (short-term to medium-term), I'd pick a hard drive over tape any day. Tapes are still a better choice if your goal is long-term storage of backups (years), of course.
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So what's stopping us? Simple. The manufacturing capacity exists in China and they are willing to look the other way and ignore environmental laws. Oh, and don't forget that a significant percentage of the parts are also manufactured there. The cost of manufacturing finished goods anywhere else is significantly higher because you first have to import the parts and China has tariffs that deliberately make it more expensive for unfinished goods to leave the country.
It's not nearly as easy as you think. If China closed its borders. the world economy would basically collapse. It would take decades to get back on track. About the only first-world country that might be okay is Japan, mainly because some of their manufacturers haven't offshored all their manufacturing capacity. They basically have the high-tech world by the privates.
All the more reason for the world to start making backup plans now and not allow them to become further entrenched.
You think it's more likely that a CEO made a moral choice? Don't make me laugh. If morals had anything to do with it, they would never have gotten into China in the first place. It's not like Tiananmen Square hadn't happened yet....
No, I strongly suspect it's more like "Betraying the trust of other people is okay as long as you don't betray mine." And odds are, in a few months, this will all be forgotten and it will be back to business as usual, censorship, spying, and all. I'd love to be wrong about my cynicism, but it happens so rarely these days....
Something about a land war in Asia.
Which brings us to the second-most likely suspect: one of Google's competitors in China. Think about it for a moment:
It's a win-win as long as it can't be pinned on them specifically.
Here you go.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf
Also, the LoC actually is responsible for a *lot* of copyright-related rulemaking. Among other things, it sets statutory rates for various licenses, produces a list of exemptions from the DMCA, etc., all of which are, in fact, legally binding just as though they were codified in Title 17. Whether this truly falls within that realm or not is something the courts would have to decide, but good luck trying to get a judge to set aside something that is so broadly accepted.
The big difference, of course, is that most CB radio drivers are primarily listening, while most cell phone users talk too much. It's not listening on a cell phone that causes problems. You naturally tune out the cell phone if something is happening around you and you can't think. It's when you try to think about something else sufficient to talk and answer complex questions that you get in trouble.
I'm not saying that cell phones cause accidents, though. People concentrating on something other than driving causes accidents, whether the other end of the conversation is in the seat next to you or across the country. Ultimately, the only real difference is that people in the car are less likely to push you beyond what you can handle because they have visual clues that you are getting distracted. That's not enough of a difference in compromisation for additional laws to make sense, though.
That's why you force yourself to key in one letter at a time, then look back at the road. You do not ever, ever, ever look away from the road for more than a second or so at a time. If you really can't keep it in your lane doing that, you don't deserve to be driving. Either that or you're doing it at a highly inappropriate time (going around a curve, for example).
The problem is that the phone and/or tower drops the call too quickly. Almost inevitably, you have a strong signal within a second after dropping a call, so the problem is a failure in the call handoff. If the towers would just hold on a little longer, you'd experience a couple second glitch and then you'd be talking again.
First, if you are an existing T-Mobile customer, you typically don't qualify for the lowest subsidized phone price. I did a Google search, and as best I can tell, existing customers who are no longer under any subsidy period pay $179 for the G1 as of just a couple of weeks ago. (I'm not a T-Mobile customer, so I can't verify this definitively.) Therefore, if you don't switch phone companies after your contract period is up, your second phone will still be cheaper to buy outright with the $10/month discount than to buy under contract.
Second, unless your plan drops by $10 when the subsidy period ends, it's not just $290. It's $50 + ($10 * n) where n is the lifetime of the phone in months before you replace it. What this means is that if you don't replace your phone at least every three years, you're better off buying it outright. And if you replace it after two, on your next phone, you pay $10 more than the equivalent of another year worth of subsidy. Thus, if you replace it exactly at the end of the subsidy period, you just lost at least $10 of your savings from the first phone. And that's for upgrading to an older phone.
Your best deal is probably to switch phone companies every two years. If you aren't willing to do that, you're probably better off buying your phone outright with the T-Mobile discounted service rate in the long run. You can bet your bottom dollar that those discounts are calculated based on the average number of years a person remains a T-Mobile customer, and that on average, T-Mobile gets the better end of the deal. Actually, they probably get the better end of the deal either way.... :-)
The reason many people believe in the so-called "30-second rule" is that it is codified by a copyright office circular, but only for academic purposes. It may not be strictly codified in law, but you'd have a rather hard time filing a suit for a shorter clip used within the context of educational use, and if you tried, there's a good chance the other party would be awarded court costs for your blatant abuse of the legal system by going against the published guidance of the LoC.
Outside the educational use context, though, the "30-second rule" is completely meaningless. For example, if I aired a 30-second TV commercial and argued that I could use any song I wanted to because the snippet was under 30 seconds long, I'd be laughed out of court. The problem is that most people don't understand that personal use and educational use are not always subject to the same body of copyright law, and thus misinterpret what "most copyright lawyers" believe.
Actually, the 30 seconds thing is just plain wrong. It's 45 seconds, and it is only true if the clip is solely used by someone to promote the sale of the song. There was an attempt to get a more general 30 second exemption for commercial use, but that didn't ever make it out of Congress, I don't think.
The 10% thing comes from Circular 21, which is a set of guidelines for educators from the LOC regarding non-performance fair use in a classroom setting. It doesn't necessarily apply outside of that setting, but within that setting, it's generally considered to be "safe".
Without a merchant account? Google Checkout, Digital River, Kagi... With a merchant account? Lots.
Here's a helpful guide to choosing a CC processor. They even have a page at the end that submits your application to multiple CC processors for consideration. I haven't used those processors personally, but I'm pretty sure they're reputable.
You can get student credit cards before you are 18. A lot of people in high school have them.
Uh... no.... It has nothing to do with his race. In fact, until you mentioned it, I had completely forgotten that he was of African descent, and when you said that, I had to think about it for several seconds just to figure out what you could be implying.
I think his opinions are consistently fringe opinions that trample on the Constitution with regularity, voting to protect laws that harm the public and voting to overturn laws that protect the public. As far as I'm concerned, such blatant disregard for the public good has no place on the People's Court, much less the Supreme Court. Strict constructionist views have no legitimate place in law, IMHO. Literal interpretation of the letter of the law without concern for who is harmed is not justice. It's mechanical logic. If you can replace the judge with an expert system and get the same rulings consistently, that's a pretty clear sign of a bad judge.
Google checkout supports donations for non-profit orgs and political contributions.
That's the heart of the problem, though. When it happens to Wikileaks, it gets attention, but PayPal pulls this crap constantly. With Wikileaks, it isn't a big deal, but only because they have enough clout to get things fixed. Most people that PayPal screws like this don't have that much clout, so PayPal walks all over them. I'm all for this getting media attention, if only to cast a spotlight on PayPal's shady dealings and hopefully make people mad enough to get them investigated, fined, and declared a bank subject to the consumer protection laws that apply to the banking industry.
Clarence Thomas's opinions are almost always worst, no matter what side he is on....
Agreed. Having been the buyer in a transaction that PayPal froze (which was only resolved quickly because one of the other people who was getting screwed knew one of their VPs), I can't imagine why any nonprofit organization trusts them as far as they can throw them. There are plenty of real credit card processors that don't act like thugs. I would urge Wikileaks to pick one and terminate their relationship with PayPal ASAP.
You're dealing with a very unusual amount of data there. I think you'll find that the vast majority of businesses don't have a 300-tape library cabinet.... And the main reason that tape is so expensive is that it is only a good deal when you have an insane amount of data. Economies of scale and all. This problem is likely to continue to get worse.
Crap. The link from Google clearly said 1.5 TB drive, complete with specs, but the actual page is 500 GB. The company must have either changed the page or is serving bogus data to Google's search bots.
I don't. Net yet. I want idiots like Bill O'Reilly to have to live in the world that they created. In fact, I want to get all the Bill O'Reillys and Pat Robertsons of the world in one location in the middle of nowhere so that it only takes one act of God to put them in their place. When they are rescued five days later, starving from under the collapsed ruins of their hotel or whatever, only to be forced to wander the streets for days without food, water, or shelter because there's no money or help coming any time soon and no way off the island, maybe then they'll start to act like reasonable and decent human beings.
You know, sort of an "A Christmas Carol" meets "Deep Impact" kind of thing.
My prediction is that a bunch of people who know each other offline get together and pull a prank that ends up getting published as news. I'm seeing a sex scandal involving the President, the Pope, three aliens, a dead hooker, and the ghost of Elvis.
Regarding transport, that's not particularly hard. You just use a standard foam-lined briefcase. Punch out slots for the drives. Slip the drive into a foil bag, slide the bag into the slot, repeat. Transport the case. Most of us carry hard drives all the time in laptops with far less protection. A drive that is shut down with the head parked is fairly robust.
Refurb. $50.39 each.
http://3btech.net/rese507232bu.html
Regarding the slot loader, because hard drives don't require an expensive tape drive, you don't need such a beast. Assuming you use a series of those open-front FireWire 800 drive trays attached to multiple cards, you can attach at least a couple dozen drives to a computer and address them all at once. This also makes the maximum total sustained bandwidth much greater than that of the tape drive.
A drug-induced tumor and deeper in debt.
They hold 1.6 TB if the data compresses easily. For many types of data, they hold half that. You can't guarantee that a tape will back up a single hard drive without swapping tapes. At 1.6 TB, they're marginally cheaper than ATA hard drives ($50 for a 1.5 TB internal drive). At .8 TB, they're almost twice as expensive. Both hold the same data. Both get tossed out and replaced when they go bad. When used as part of a backup rotation, both will, statistically speaking, outlast the backup rotation. So it really comes down to cost and ease of use. The hard drive wins in both places hands down.
I'm not talking about replication here, BTW. I'm talking about using hard drives the same way you would use a tape. You stick the drive in a docking station, clone the data to the drive, spin it down, and shelve it just like you would with a tape. The difference is that the hard drive doesn't require any special hardware to read it and can be brought online at a moment's notice with much faster random access to your backed up data.
For most backup purposes (short-term to medium-term), I'd pick a hard drive over tape any day. Tapes are still a better choice if your goal is long-term storage of backups (years), of course.