You should have gone to the AG first, and sued after. $1200 is well above the $500 required to be considered a felony, and that doesn't go to piddly small claims court, that goes to federal court. No doubt when your AG found out and started poking around PayPal's lawyers began shitting bricks, hence the reimbursement.
Now, that judge was obviously a dumbass, and if you had opportunity to vote on her re-appointment (I don't think you normally do for local courts) I hope you voted no.
For breach of contract (NOT THEFT!) the jurisdiction is often pre-determined when it involves inter-state commerce, and that IS enforceable.
Also bear in mind that consideration does not have to be large, it just has to exist. The common example is the single peppercorn - it is enough to qualify as consideration. Size does not matter, it simply must be aggreed upon by both parties, and it cannot be nothing - you can't have a contract where you agree to pay $20 per month without receiving anything in return, you must receive something, even if it is only a peppercorn.
Poor service is not enough to be breach of contract if they are fulfilling the elements of the contract, only at a lower quality than expected. Unless of course, you've dictated the quality as an element of the consideration.
So if the PHONECOMPANY salesman says "we will never change these terms," then the terms change, you may be entitled to relief (this is just a simple example at hand).
The salesman does not need to say the terms will never change, a contract is not valid in the US if the terms have been changed but not agreed to by both parties. That is a federal statute, state law cannot override it, and if they try to force you into arbitration you can flip them the bird and sue for breach of contract. You might even have a shot at suing the state if they push it too much (and of course, you are actually protected by the federal statute). State laws are trumped by federal laws in every case, so state mandated arbitration does not apply when a federal statute is being broken.
Attempting to change your contract without your consent definitely falls under federal contract law. You cannot sign away your rights, and state laws cannot restrict or eliminate rights granted under federal law.
I love how all of your examples of "unfettered capitalism gone wrong" involve the US Government circumventing the market, it is pretty much the opposite of "unfettered capitalism". All of these issues were caused by Government involvment and regulation - the WORST example being Bell Systems, which received a government guaranteed monopoly on telephone infrastructure. The company was eventually split, bringing about the likes of AT&T and others (ComCast and Verizon came from this as well, though I believe they had different names at the time). The taxpayer funded infrastructure was almost certainly necessary, but the government sanctioned monopoly was the worst way to go about it. We still deal with the results of that interferance in market forces today.
So, the only examples you have of capitalism failing are all at the hands of government interferance, and you want to use that as proof the government needs to be more involved? What are you, stupid? That's the same logic that bails out a tanking company and then gets upset about shareholders rewarding CEOs million dollar bonuses for saving their bottom line.
The common person's life is most enriched when they have the most opportunity to succeed. Communism has shown that when the government controls and owns everything, the common person has the least opportunity to succeed. Look at Soviet Russia before it collapsed or communist China before they began introducing more capitalism to their system, Russia had 0% unemployment but 1/3 of the country could not afford a loaf of bread per day. Even if they could afford it, the supply always ran out. China caught things before it got that bad, and now they are becoming the dominant economic power in the world, yet you could hardly call it a free country. Anarchy is just about as bad, the only thing that may make it better than communism is the fact that at least you have a chance (if a slim one) to rise out of nothing to succeed.
What the government SHOULD be doing is attempting to make the market as free as possible for the individual. This requires some regulation and control, but the goal should not be to make it fair to everybody (that's impossible, in any system), but to create the most individual freedom without inhibiting another individual's freedom. The -only- economic system that can do that is a capitalist system. Socialism looks good on paper, but the further you try to push it the worse it gets. Capitalism is much easier to predict and control, though you can see the results of poor government regulation in the recent crisis as well. Dig into the root causes of the market crash, and you'll see quite a lot of government involvement in unbalancing the market. All in the interest of "enriching the life of the common person". I bet all those people who were recently forclosed on feel real enriched thanks to the government programs that allowed them to buy houses they could not afford.
In otherwords, quit reading the bullshit of a bum who'd rather complain about his station in life than work to improve it (aka, Carl Marx) and open your eyes to what really happened, and what continues to happen to further fuck over the "common person". Under the current leadership (Bush and Congress included), we have the super-rich who are too big to fail, and the lower class who are too small to succeed.
Go ahead, try and get some bailout money for yourself, you'll see what I mean. Too small to matter, that's what the "common person" is to Obama, Congress, and hell the rest of the US Government.
Re:How About Personal responsibility
on
The Outing of Pranknet
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· Score: 2, Interesting
To be fair, they were actually police, and they came to rob her with an illegally obtained no-knock warrant. Believing or not believing they were the police would not have helped - they didn't ask, they just killed her when she put up a small resistance to her home invasion.
Now, getting off topic a bit, but I found this part of the story to be really, really disturbing:
The Rev. Markel Hutchins, acting as spokesman for Johnston's family, said her family members were "stunned and disappointed" by the announcement of the indictments because they believe it will disrupt a larger federal investigation of civil rights violations by the Atlanta Police Department.[13]
WTF? Who the hell is "stunned and dissapointed" when the murderer's of a family member are indicted for murder? That's fucked up. It's not like the indictments are going to somehow hide the illegal warrants regularly being obtained at that PD, and it isn't like NOT indicting the guys will kill an investigation into the rest of the department. Whether or not you can make what you have stick is a problem prosecutors deal with all the time, and they probably would not have gotten anything out of these guys either.
More than likely they are in a similar situation. People tend to group based on their similar social situation, as well as their interests.
If they are hanging out all day in a chat room dreaming up pranks, they need to have someone to chat with.
While having a job would not eliminate their ability to pull these pranks, it would severely hamper their ability to do so. Plus there is much, much less incentive to pull retarded pranks if you are occupied - and being compensated for your occupation - for most of the day.
In other words, the reason these guys are probably doing this is because they still live at their parent's and have no job and are bored shitless. Even if they do have a job, it's not likely it is anything more than a crappy fast food gig, maybe even part time only. Instead of being productive, they have chosen to be disruptive.
What they really need is a good hard ass kicking and to be kicked to the curb. Not much else will likely wake their asses up.
Apple doesn't currently have a 12" laptop, but their 13" laptop is about double the price of Dell's offering. I can double the hard drive and RAM of the mac and still not hit $750, where you only get a $999 option for the MAC. Hell the Dell business class 12-13" offering is only about $800, and that was two years ago. Now, if you buy all the goodies for it you'll hit $1500 easy, but the laptop itself was pretty cheap.
I have never, in all my years, seen a Mac on the market cheaper than any other PC with similar specs. Not to say it couldn't happen, but call me one hell of a dubious guy about your claim.
If you sold your friend on a Mac with price instead of the superior user experience, you did your friend a great disservice. Macs are slick as hell, and probably worth the premium, but I've never heard of one ever being cheaper. If you aren't full of BS, you must have managed to hit the market just right to pull off a "cheap" Mac.
Actually OS X is just a pretty version of Unix, much like Linux (though in most cases a -hell- of a lot more polished). It is actually based on freebsd; you can access a terminal and run normal unix commands on it. It is highly customized, but so is Ubuntu or Fedora.
They have about 90% of the desktop Unix "market", maybe a little less, and almost none of the Unix server market. Even paring down the market like that, they have nowhere near the market share Microsoft has in the broader OS market.
Finally, when evaluating a monopoly, you don't arbitrarily define the market, you look at who the competitors are. Apple doesn't give a rats ass about the Unix market, they aren't really competing in it, though you could associate them in it. They are competing in the OS market, with the likes of Windows and other OS vendors, like Canonical. They don't even hardly compete with RedHat because they are primarily unix workstations and servers, though they are more similar to each other than to Windows.
You are a monopoly when you have enough market pressure to force your competitors to produce inferior products to your own. It goes beyond out-maneuvering the competitors and gaining a market advantage, because once you can force your competitor to produce an inferior product, you can drive them out of the marketplace and control the market at will.
Look at telco's for a good example of monopolies. They are more localized than they once were, but in any given area it is virtually impossible for a new competitor to enter the market and provide a better service for less money. The monopolies own the entire infrastructure, even though it was paid for by tax dollars. Nobody gets in without their say-so, nobody could get approval to run new lines to create a competing infrastructure, and nobody could afford to do so anyway. It is the very definition of a monopoly, it was broken up once before, and it needs to be broken up further still.
We are not as bad in the PC market, though we were close for a while a few years ago. Microsoft got beat the hell up for it too, and lost a lot of their market control. They still dominate however, and calling Apple a monopoly is a joke.
However, they operate on the same principles as other scams like the pidgeon drop, which are trust between scammer and scammee, mistrust of others, urgency, the natural built-in desire to help someone in need, and greed.
They first target the natural human compulsion to help someone in need and the natural mistrust of others. It's usually prince so-and-so died, they have millions of dollars locked up in a bank, and the government is investigating their holdings to take some or all of it. The individual contacting you poses as the family's lawyer, which gives them a position of authority and trust that they are an impartial facilitator. Because the money will soon be discovered and taken by the government, speed is critical and you must act NOW to help move this money. When they tell you that you will recieve a reward of $5k plus the money you put up for helping, but they just need you to send $2.5k to their representative in the US (their liquid funds are frozen, see) so they can get things moving, well, where's the risk? They have millions of dollars they are moving, once it is moved of course they can pay out $7.5k, no problem! It's a pittance! Trust, mistrust, helpfullness, urgency, and greed. The potential for a big cash payout and get people to overlook the glaring problems with the scam, just like in any other scam.
You have to be gullible to fall for it, but if you are it has all the right elements of a successful scam. And a lot of non-tech people (and there are a LOT of non-tech people) are both gullible and have never heard of this scam before. Not to say tech folk aren't just as gullible, sometimes they can be worse than the average joe, just usually not for tech-based scams like this.
These are the same people who fall for chain letters, and while less popular now, those things are still around and still pulling in money.
The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 200,000km/s, or right around 66% of the speed of light in a vacuum.
Copper is actually nearly as fast, but other technical limitations cause shorter copper runs, and therefore higher delays, than fiber over long distances.
That's why fiber is used for distance, but we can still get 10gigabit+ for short runs of copper.
It was sarcasm bro, obviously your people aren't dropping dead in the street, and your elderly aren't being euthanized. That was supposed to be so outlandish you would realize that the next bit, about the AM radio, was poking fun at US political commentators.
The US has, bar none, the best medical care in the world. But it will cost you. Nobody is refused emergency, life-saving care, but that doesn't mean you don't pay for it. If you can't afford it, chances are your life is pretty much over from a financial standpoint.
Hence, the satire about how "horrible" universal healthcare is.
Personally, I don't want universal healthcare, I just want the dirtbag insurance companies to have to pay their fair share. That's why they exist in the first place. Right now they are screwing the US system frontwards and backwards, and it's really causing havoc.
The FBI et. all don't actively pursue Nigerian scammers for the simple reason that they cannot pursue Nigerian scammers. It has nothing to do with "taking down the boss". If those Nigerians lived in the US they would be in jail. Period.
First, the US cannot go after Nigerian scammers because they live in frickin Nigeria, the US has no authority there and at best can only exert a moderate amount of pressure to encourage Nigerian officials to pursue the scammers.
Second, every US citizen has the right to be a dumbass. There was a story here on/. a few months ago of a woman who sent around $450k to a Nigerian scammer. She blew her husband's retirement on it even. The entire community knew it was happening, and tried to stop her, told her she was being scammed, hell the sheriff even asked her to stop, but there was nothing they could legally do to stop her from pissing her money away. She was convinced each time that she was just "one more payment" away from getting those millions of dollars. Where the hell her husband was this whole time I have no idea, but if someone wants to be a dumbass nobody has a right to stop you unless you are doing something illegal.
Getting scammed is not illegal.
Nigerian officials obviously aren't going to do more than a token attempt to go after these guys to improve US relations, because they boost the Nigerian economy. Think about it, they are getting US money by exporting idiocy. And Americans buy it in droves, unfortunately.
What the fuck kind of operations do you run? Don't let me near them, please, they might kill me.
Safe mode is bad. It means something fucked up. That it fails safe is obviously good engineering, but that it fails in the first place is a very bad thing.
If your design is constantly tripping safe mode, then it's a shitty ass design and you probably fucked up the fail safe too, and anything critical in/near your system is bound to suffer irreparable damage eventually.
I seriously hope you don't run a gas plant or something. Unless you have really good people working for you, you will probably kill someone some day. Even good people may not be able to stop your dumb ass and your idiotic idea of what a fail safe exists for.
Intel and AMD are doing this, and NVidia is going to be left in the dust. Why do you think they are shifting some of their focus to ultra-high end parallel processing tasks? NVidia is slowly moving away from the desktop market, or at least are building a safety net in case they get pushed out of it. Who knows, maybe they'll team up with VIA to produce a third alternative to the CPU/GPU combo.
Yes, that's the solution. Have your code run on any system, all too willing to be duped by street vendors, and blissfully unaware of the nefarious intentions of the guy waving candy from the back of the BUS.
I don't see the problem, I run strange code all the time and nothing bad has ever happened. That I know of. Yet.;)
I apologize in advance; I'm not normally a grammar Nazi as I make the same mistakes myself, but this just made me cringe:
That means 16 thousand inputs takes 1 seconds.
Holy crap! If the subject is plural, the verb must be plural. Takes is not plural! I know the "s" throws you off, but takes is singular, take is plural. If that were all I would have been able to refrain from getting all Nazi on you, but "1 seconds"? Seriously?
Say it with me: 16 thousand inputs take 1 second.
Usually I make that kind of mistake when I edit and re-edit a statement without checking it thoroughly, so I can see how it might have happened. Still, I was almost unable to read the rest of your post because "inputs takes 1 seconds" was so mind-numbing.
This one is probably worse, but for some reason not as mind-numbing. Perhaps only because it came after "inputs takes 1 seconds".
Which means, you have 1/2 of a second to transfer the data up and down, which means, in this case, if the dataset is under a couple gigabytes for those 16,000 entries using PCI Express.
If the dataset is under a couple gigabytes what? You just left the poor sentance there, hanging, fragmented. It will never be whole. Also, the double "which means," is inane and over-uses the comma, but that's just nit-picking.
Now, for bonus points, where is the grammar error in my post? It must exist, it's a fundamental law of nature that one always commits a grammar error when correcting another's grammar. The more smug the correction the more glaring the error.
I have yet to find a really great (works well most of the time without tweaking the heck out of it) converter, but Calibre is getting close. It's also not just a converter, but a full Sony eBook Library replacement, which I think is -really- nice. Unless of course you like paying far too much for books at the Sony store.
If all you want is HD playback and HDMI, $100 is way too much to spend. That stuff is coming built-in on $80 motherboards now-days. A $50 video card can do all that just fine.
It's $1,000,000 more profit in a year than any other US car company made, and the rest didn't just get loans, they got free money too. Except Ford, they just took the loans. They still didn't make any profit though.
Ok, a power meter is not infrastructure. Infrastructure is the stuff that gets the power from point A to point B. To start charging for that power, all a business needs to do is spend a few hundred bucks on a power meter. That is hardly an infrastructure problem. If the hotel you go to does not have a meter, they will get one when they start seeing more electric cars come through.
It's a new revenue stream that requires NO NEW INFRASTRUCTURE, just a meter to start charging. Hell they can charge now without a meter, just charge $15 to use their power. Simple. Done. OMG, I'm a genius.
Again, the only places that will have infrastructure issues are those cities that are already at or near capacity on their current infrastructure - charging cars is not going to be this massive new hit on power, the most it will do over the next 20 years is raise electricity consumption per-capata by a few percent. I'd be shocked if it went up past 15% more than our electricity consumption is already projected to rise.
Shoulda clicked a few more links before posting, here are the commercial grade products, meant specifically for applications like charging for power usage.
They run around $500, a very, very easy investment to make. Charge a 10% premium on the power (more like 50%+ while it's still a novel thing) and you've got a new revenue stream.
Like I said, power metering has been around a long, long time. It's not some new pie-in-the-sky idea.
Someone should invent some sort of electric meter, and charge based on usage! OMG, this is brilliant!
I'm gonna sell this idea to the power companies, since obviously right now they can only be guessing at usage, this is way more efficient!
Seriously man, metered power is old news, really old news. It's relatively simple technology, hell you can buy a meter to monitor your power usage for a single device in your home for at most a couple hundred bucks. Here are some consumer models ranging from $45-$220. Charging for the power is just one step beyond it, and there is an entire industry (granted, it's generally a public utility) that operates on that concept.
This is not rocket science, and people aren't idiots. Except maybe you. Unless you were being sarcastic. If so I didn't get it. Cheers.
If you spend $10 yesterday to make $11 today, but the dollar today is only worth 90% of what it was yesterday, you did not make a $1 profit, you took a $0.1 loss.
It's not funny money, it's real buying power. Granted, had you not done anything you would have lost $1 in buying power instead.
This is called accounting. You should learn a little.
The Model S looks to be more in line with a decent BMW than a more affordable vehicle. Tesla's plan from the beginning has been to develop their tech on the markets most able to support them - first the people with cash to burn, for whom $100k+ for a status symbol seems like a good deal (and who can lay down a $30k deposit and let it ride for a year or two). Next they target the "well off" folks, who could maybe swing a Roadster but don't really have money to burn. They can afford nice cars, and would see $50k for a status symbol in addition to a nice vehicle as a good investment.
Whatever comes after the Model S will be targeted for a much wider market, probably in the $30k range. By then they should have the base to support it, and get the price down in that range reasonably. It will compete with the nicer Subarus, Toyatas, Hondas, and domestics.
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You should have gone to the AG first, and sued after. $1200 is well above the $500 required to be considered a felony, and that doesn't go to piddly small claims court, that goes to federal court. No doubt when your AG found out and started poking around PayPal's lawyers began shitting bricks, hence the reimbursement.
Now, that judge was obviously a dumbass, and if you had opportunity to vote on her re-appointment (I don't think you normally do for local courts) I hope you voted no.
For breach of contract (NOT THEFT!) the jurisdiction is often pre-determined when it involves inter-state commerce, and that IS enforceable.
Also bear in mind that consideration does not have to be large, it just has to exist. The common example is the single peppercorn - it is enough to qualify as consideration. Size does not matter, it simply must be aggreed upon by both parties, and it cannot be nothing - you can't have a contract where you agree to pay $20 per month without receiving anything in return, you must receive something, even if it is only a peppercorn.
Poor service is not enough to be breach of contract if they are fulfilling the elements of the contract, only at a lower quality than expected. Unless of course, you've dictated the quality as an element of the consideration.
So if the PHONECOMPANY salesman says "we will never change these terms," then the terms change, you may be entitled to relief (this is just a simple example at hand).
The salesman does not need to say the terms will never change, a contract is not valid in the US if the terms have been changed but not agreed to by both parties. That is a federal statute, state law cannot override it, and if they try to force you into arbitration you can flip them the bird and sue for breach of contract. You might even have a shot at suing the state if they push it too much (and of course, you are actually protected by the federal statute). State laws are trumped by federal laws in every case, so state mandated arbitration does not apply when a federal statute is being broken.
Attempting to change your contract without your consent definitely falls under federal contract law. You cannot sign away your rights, and state laws cannot restrict or eliminate rights granted under federal law.
I love how all of your examples of "unfettered capitalism gone wrong" involve the US Government circumventing the market, it is pretty much the opposite of "unfettered capitalism". All of these issues were caused by Government involvment and regulation - the WORST example being Bell Systems, which received a government guaranteed monopoly on telephone infrastructure. The company was eventually split, bringing about the likes of AT&T and others (ComCast and Verizon came from this as well, though I believe they had different names at the time). The taxpayer funded infrastructure was almost certainly necessary, but the government sanctioned monopoly was the worst way to go about it. We still deal with the results of that interferance in market forces today.
So, the only examples you have of capitalism failing are all at the hands of government interferance, and you want to use that as proof the government needs to be more involved? What are you, stupid? That's the same logic that bails out a tanking company and then gets upset about shareholders rewarding CEOs million dollar bonuses for saving their bottom line.
The common person's life is most enriched when they have the most opportunity to succeed. Communism has shown that when the government controls and owns everything, the common person has the least opportunity to succeed. Look at Soviet Russia before it collapsed or communist China before they began introducing more capitalism to their system, Russia had 0% unemployment but 1/3 of the country could not afford a loaf of bread per day. Even if they could afford it, the supply always ran out. China caught things before it got that bad, and now they are becoming the dominant economic power in the world, yet you could hardly call it a free country. Anarchy is just about as bad, the only thing that may make it better than communism is the fact that at least you have a chance (if a slim one) to rise out of nothing to succeed.
What the government SHOULD be doing is attempting to make the market as free as possible for the individual. This requires some regulation and control, but the goal should not be to make it fair to everybody (that's impossible, in any system), but to create the most individual freedom without inhibiting another individual's freedom. The -only- economic system that can do that is a capitalist system. Socialism looks good on paper, but the further you try to push it the worse it gets. Capitalism is much easier to predict and control, though you can see the results of poor government regulation in the recent crisis as well. Dig into the root causes of the market crash, and you'll see quite a lot of government involvement in unbalancing the market. All in the interest of "enriching the life of the common person". I bet all those people who were recently forclosed on feel real enriched thanks to the government programs that allowed them to buy houses they could not afford.
In otherwords, quit reading the bullshit of a bum who'd rather complain about his station in life than work to improve it (aka, Carl Marx) and open your eyes to what really happened, and what continues to happen to further fuck over the "common person". Under the current leadership (Bush and Congress included), we have the super-rich who are too big to fail, and the lower class who are too small to succeed.
Go ahead, try and get some bailout money for yourself, you'll see what I mean. Too small to matter, that's what the "common person" is to Obama, Congress, and hell the rest of the US Government.
To be fair, they were actually police, and they came to rob her with an illegally obtained no-knock warrant. Believing or not believing they were the police would not have helped - they didn't ask, they just killed her when she put up a small resistance to her home invasion.
Now, getting off topic a bit, but I found this part of the story to be really, really disturbing:
The Rev. Markel Hutchins, acting as spokesman for Johnston's family, said her family members were "stunned and disappointed" by the announcement of the indictments because they believe it will disrupt a larger federal investigation of civil rights violations by the Atlanta Police Department.[13]
WTF? Who the hell is "stunned and dissapointed" when the murderer's of a family member are indicted for murder? That's fucked up. It's not like the indictments are going to somehow hide the illegal warrants regularly being obtained at that PD, and it isn't like NOT indicting the guys will kill an investigation into the rest of the department. Whether or not you can make what you have stick is a problem prosecutors deal with all the time, and they probably would not have gotten anything out of these guys either.
More than likely they are in a similar situation. People tend to group based on their similar social situation, as well as their interests.
If they are hanging out all day in a chat room dreaming up pranks, they need to have someone to chat with.
While having a job would not eliminate their ability to pull these pranks, it would severely hamper their ability to do so. Plus there is much, much less incentive to pull retarded pranks if you are occupied - and being compensated for your occupation - for most of the day.
In other words, the reason these guys are probably doing this is because they still live at their parent's and have no job and are bored shitless. Even if they do have a job, it's not likely it is anything more than a crappy fast food gig, maybe even part time only. Instead of being productive, they have chosen to be disruptive.
What they really need is a good hard ass kicking and to be kicked to the curb. Not much else will likely wake their asses up.
I call bullshit.
Apple doesn't currently have a 12" laptop, but their 13" laptop is about double the price of Dell's offering. I can double the hard drive and RAM of the mac and still not hit $750, where you only get a $999 option for the MAC. Hell the Dell business class 12-13" offering is only about $800, and that was two years ago. Now, if you buy all the goodies for it you'll hit $1500 easy, but the laptop itself was pretty cheap.
I have never, in all my years, seen a Mac on the market cheaper than any other PC with similar specs. Not to say it couldn't happen, but call me one hell of a dubious guy about your claim.
If you sold your friend on a Mac with price instead of the superior user experience, you did your friend a great disservice. Macs are slick as hell, and probably worth the premium, but I've never heard of one ever being cheaper. If you aren't full of BS, you must have managed to hit the market just right to pull off a "cheap" Mac.
Actually OS X is just a pretty version of Unix, much like Linux (though in most cases a -hell- of a lot more polished). It is actually based on freebsd; you can access a terminal and run normal unix commands on it. It is highly customized, but so is Ubuntu or Fedora.
They have about 90% of the desktop Unix "market", maybe a little less, and almost none of the Unix server market. Even paring down the market like that, they have nowhere near the market share Microsoft has in the broader OS market.
Finally, when evaluating a monopoly, you don't arbitrarily define the market, you look at who the competitors are. Apple doesn't give a rats ass about the Unix market, they aren't really competing in it, though you could associate them in it. They are competing in the OS market, with the likes of Windows and other OS vendors, like Canonical. They don't even hardly compete with RedHat because they are primarily unix workstations and servers, though they are more similar to each other than to Windows.
You are a monopoly when you have enough market pressure to force your competitors to produce inferior products to your own. It goes beyond out-maneuvering the competitors and gaining a market advantage, because once you can force your competitor to produce an inferior product, you can drive them out of the marketplace and control the market at will.
Look at telco's for a good example of monopolies. They are more localized than they once were, but in any given area it is virtually impossible for a new competitor to enter the market and provide a better service for less money. The monopolies own the entire infrastructure, even though it was paid for by tax dollars. Nobody gets in without their say-so, nobody could get approval to run new lines to create a competing infrastructure, and nobody could afford to do so anyway. It is the very definition of a monopoly, it was broken up once before, and it needs to be broken up further still.
We are not as bad in the PC market, though we were close for a while a few years ago. Microsoft got beat the hell up for it too, and lost a lot of their market control. They still dominate however, and calling Apple a monopoly is a joke.
My sig applies to you.
Most people don't get sucked in by the scams.
However, they operate on the same principles as other scams like the pidgeon drop, which are trust between scammer and scammee, mistrust of others, urgency, the natural built-in desire to help someone in need, and greed.
They first target the natural human compulsion to help someone in need and the natural mistrust of others. It's usually prince so-and-so died, they have millions of dollars locked up in a bank, and the government is investigating their holdings to take some or all of it. The individual contacting you poses as the family's lawyer, which gives them a position of authority and trust that they are an impartial facilitator. Because the money will soon be discovered and taken by the government, speed is critical and you must act NOW to help move this money. When they tell you that you will recieve a reward of $5k plus the money you put up for helping, but they just need you to send $2.5k to their representative in the US (their liquid funds are frozen, see) so they can get things moving, well, where's the risk? They have millions of dollars they are moving, once it is moved of course they can pay out $7.5k, no problem! It's a pittance! Trust, mistrust, helpfullness, urgency, and greed. The potential for a big cash payout and get people to overlook the glaring problems with the scam, just like in any other scam.
You have to be gullible to fall for it, but if you are it has all the right elements of a successful scam. And a lot of non-tech people (and there are a LOT of non-tech people) are both gullible and have never heard of this scam before. Not to say tech folk aren't just as gullible, sometimes they can be worse than the average joe, just usually not for tech-based scams like this.
These are the same people who fall for chain letters, and while less popular now, those things are still around and still pulling in money.
The show "Cash Cab" proves the point. Most people manage the first few questions before missing one.
For Jay Leno's "JayWalking", they tend to hit up several people and pick out the biggest dumbasses.
The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 200,000km/s, or right around 66% of the speed of light in a vacuum.
Copper is actually nearly as fast, but other technical limitations cause shorter copper runs, and therefore higher delays, than fiber over long distances.
That's why fiber is used for distance, but we can still get 10gigabit+ for short runs of copper.
It was sarcasm bro, obviously your people aren't dropping dead in the street, and your elderly aren't being euthanized. That was supposed to be so outlandish you would realize that the next bit, about the AM radio, was poking fun at US political commentators.
The US has, bar none, the best medical care in the world. But it will cost you. Nobody is refused emergency, life-saving care, but that doesn't mean you don't pay for it. If you can't afford it, chances are your life is pretty much over from a financial standpoint.
Hence, the satire about how "horrible" universal healthcare is.
Personally, I don't want universal healthcare, I just want the dirtbag insurance companies to have to pay their fair share. That's why they exist in the first place. Right now they are screwing the US system frontwards and backwards, and it's really causing havoc.
The FBI et. all don't actively pursue Nigerian scammers for the simple reason that they cannot pursue Nigerian scammers. It has nothing to do with "taking down the boss". If those Nigerians lived in the US they would be in jail. Period.
First, the US cannot go after Nigerian scammers because they live in frickin Nigeria, the US has no authority there and at best can only exert a moderate amount of pressure to encourage Nigerian officials to pursue the scammers.
Second, every US citizen has the right to be a dumbass. There was a story here on /. a few months ago of a woman who sent around $450k to a Nigerian scammer. She blew her husband's retirement on it even. The entire community knew it was happening, and tried to stop her, told her she was being scammed, hell the sheriff even asked her to stop, but there was nothing they could legally do to stop her from pissing her money away. She was convinced each time that she was just "one more payment" away from getting those millions of dollars. Where the hell her husband was this whole time I have no idea, but if someone wants to be a dumbass nobody has a right to stop you unless you are doing something illegal.
Getting scammed is not illegal.
Nigerian officials obviously aren't going to do more than a token attempt to go after these guys to improve US relations, because they boost the Nigerian economy. Think about it, they are getting US money by exporting idiocy. And Americans buy it in droves, unfortunately.
What the fuck kind of operations do you run? Don't let me near them, please, they might kill me.
Safe mode is bad. It means something fucked up. That it fails safe is obviously good engineering, but that it fails in the first place is a very bad thing.
If your design is constantly tripping safe mode, then it's a shitty ass design and you probably fucked up the fail safe too, and anything critical in/near your system is bound to suffer irreparable damage eventually.
I seriously hope you don't run a gas plant or something. Unless you have really good people working for you, you will probably kill someone some day. Even good people may not be able to stop your dumb ass and your idiotic idea of what a fail safe exists for.
Since when has NVidia sold CPU's?
Intel and AMD are doing this, and NVidia is going to be left in the dust. Why do you think they are shifting some of their focus to ultra-high end parallel processing tasks? NVidia is slowly moving away from the desktop market, or at least are building a safety net in case they get pushed out of it. Who knows, maybe they'll team up with VIA to produce a third alternative to the CPU/GPU combo.
Yes, that's the solution. Have your code run on any system, all too willing to be duped by street vendors, and blissfully unaware of the nefarious intentions of the guy waving candy from the back of the BUS.
I don't see the problem, I run strange code all the time and nothing bad has ever happened. That I know of. Yet. ;)
I apologize in advance; I'm not normally a grammar Nazi as I make the same mistakes myself, but this just made me cringe:
That means 16 thousand inputs takes 1 seconds.
Holy crap! If the subject is plural, the verb must be plural. Takes is not plural! I know the "s" throws you off, but takes is singular, take is plural. If that were all I would have been able to refrain from getting all Nazi on you, but "1 seconds"? Seriously?
Say it with me: 16 thousand inputs take 1 second.
Usually I make that kind of mistake when I edit and re-edit a statement without checking it thoroughly, so I can see how it might have happened. Still, I was almost unable to read the rest of your post because "inputs takes 1 seconds" was so mind-numbing.
This one is probably worse, but for some reason not as mind-numbing. Perhaps only because it came after "inputs takes 1 seconds".
Which means, you have 1/2 of a second to transfer the data up and down, which means, in this case, if the dataset is under a couple gigabytes for those 16,000 entries using PCI Express.
If the dataset is under a couple gigabytes what? You just left the poor sentance there, hanging, fragmented. It will never be whole. Also, the double "which means," is inane and over-uses the comma, but that's just nit-picking.
Now, for bonus points, where is the grammar error in my post? It must exist, it's a fundamental law of nature that one always commits a grammar error when correcting another's grammar. The more smug the correction the more glaring the error.
Happy hunting!
Calibre is decent, I'd say.
I have yet to find a really great (works well most of the time without tweaking the heck out of it) converter, but Calibre is getting close. It's also not just a converter, but a full Sony eBook Library replacement, which I think is -really- nice. Unless of course you like paying far too much for books at the Sony store.
If all you want is HD playback and HDMI, $100 is way too much to spend. That stuff is coming built-in on $80 motherboards now-days. A $50 video card can do all that just fine.
It's $1,000,000 more profit in a year than any other US car company made, and the rest didn't just get loans, they got free money too. Except Ford, they just took the loans. They still didn't make any profit though.
Ok, a power meter is not infrastructure. Infrastructure is the stuff that gets the power from point A to point B. To start charging for that power, all a business needs to do is spend a few hundred bucks on a power meter. That is hardly an infrastructure problem. If the hotel you go to does not have a meter, they will get one when they start seeing more electric cars come through.
It's a new revenue stream that requires NO NEW INFRASTRUCTURE, just a meter to start charging. Hell they can charge now without a meter, just charge $15 to use their power. Simple. Done. OMG, I'm a genius.
Again, the only places that will have infrastructure issues are those cities that are already at or near capacity on their current infrastructure - charging cars is not going to be this massive new hit on power, the most it will do over the next 20 years is raise electricity consumption per-capata by a few percent. I'd be shocked if it went up past 15% more than our electricity consumption is already projected to rise.
http://www.powermeterstore.com/c629/revenue_and_billing_meters.php
Oops.
Always preview.
Shoulda clicked a few more links before posting, here are the commercial grade products, meant specifically for applications like charging for power usage.
They run around $500, a very, very easy investment to make. Charge a 10% premium on the power (more like 50%+ while it's still a novel thing) and you've got a new revenue stream.
Like I said, power metering has been around a long, long time. It's not some new pie-in-the-sky idea.
Someone should invent some sort of electric meter, and charge based on usage! OMG, this is brilliant!
I'm gonna sell this idea to the power companies, since obviously right now they can only be guessing at usage, this is way more efficient!
Seriously man, metered power is old news, really old news. It's relatively simple technology, hell you can buy a meter to monitor your power usage for a single device in your home for at most a couple hundred bucks. Here are some consumer models ranging from $45-$220. Charging for the power is just one step beyond it, and there is an entire industry (granted, it's generally a public utility) that operates on that concept.
This is not rocket science, and people aren't idiots. Except maybe you. Unless you were being sarcastic. If so I didn't get it. Cheers.
If you spend $10 yesterday to make $11 today, but the dollar today is only worth 90% of what it was yesterday, you did not make a $1 profit, you took a $0.1 loss.
It's not funny money, it's real buying power. Granted, had you not done anything you would have lost $1 in buying power instead.
This is called accounting. You should learn a little.
The Model S looks to be more in line with a decent BMW than a more affordable vehicle. Tesla's plan from the beginning has been to develop their tech on the markets most able to support them - first the people with cash to burn, for whom $100k+ for a status symbol seems like a good deal (and who can lay down a $30k deposit and let it ride for a year or two). Next they target the "well off" folks, who could maybe swing a Roadster but don't really have money to burn. They can afford nice cars, and would see $50k for a status symbol in addition to a nice vehicle as a good investment.
Whatever comes after the Model S will be targeted for a much wider market, probably in the $30k range. By then they should have the base to support it, and get the price down in that range reasonably. It will compete with the nicer Subarus, Toyatas, Hondas, and domestics.