You don't seem to remember much from history... The first "Big dog" in piracy was Napster, and they flourished at a time when the vast majority of the public had 56k connections at best. More often than not even slower speeds. All bandwidth caps do is drive consumers to lower quality encoding. The major media outlets probably don't realize it, but this hurts them the most. Despite the fact that they think "pirates" are some parasitic new species that in now way puts money into their system it's quite the opposite. Some of their biggest customers are pirates. The fact of the matter is, they can't get what they want. Which is any movie/show they want at any time, in decent quality at a reasonable price. The media industry seems to think that $300+ per month is a reasonable price for a cable/satellite connection that has "all" the channels, is choked with ever increasing commercials and isn't even on-demand. Add to that, the fact that your forced to scroll through hundreds of channels that you don't want, due to horrible packages forced on the cable providers by content producers.
Piracy is driven, solely, by the media industry that's complaining about it. They could end it tomorrow if they wanted to. But they have this rediculous pipe dream that the internet will lead to them cutting costs by not having to produce physical copies of their media any longer, but at the same time they can raise the price of that very same media. Sorry, that's not going to happen guys. It's 2012, time to get a clue.
So your car notices it's noon... and you've been driving for 3hrs... your Fords graphical speedometer switches to a display of a slowly rotating bigmac, the drivers side window lowers just a crack to admit the familiar smell of McDonalds frys as the car slows while it passes a McDonnalds. Your radio goes mute and you heard your cars AI voice speak softly into your ear "are you lovin it? BigMac for onlly 99cents for a limited time. Simply say 'I'm hungry' to stop at the closest drive though."
It very much depends on the meter. If it's the same old meter but with wifi... then it's no big deal. We have one in our home, it just tracks your usage and then the truck drives by every month and collects the amount we used that month. The only data they get is like what you said.
However, these new devices do much more. They are connected to the utilities home office. The utility knows, real time, exactly how much power you're using. Imagine a utility worker making $10/hr pulling up the records for the mansion down the street and seeing their usage at nearly 0 for the past 2 weeks... might be a good night for a visit. That's the up-front and obvious problem. But it can get worse than that. There's plenty of data to be collected from your house wiring. Think of your house wiring as an antenna. It can pick up just about any signal traveling about your home. They very well could design these devices to pick up your wireless traffic, your cellphone traffic, etc... If you don't believe me, ask a musician if they've ever had the experience where you take a guitar amp, unplugged the guitar and cranked up the gain... suddenly you're listening to cell conversations, air traffic conversations, the local McDonalds drive through... whatever. I've even heard it happen at live shows.
How much do you want to bet their conclusions are that "Fair use" is an outdated concept and should be eliminated all together? Seems like a far more likely outcome than anything beneficial.
you have to understand how small the event horizon is on something like this. The chances of it hitting ANY atom in your brain is so low that it's more likely that the planet would get hit by a full sized black hole than one of these tiny ones. Not only can they pass through matter and not hit atoms, they can pass through atoms and not any of its constituent particles.
I think you're missing the point. Often this data is worth more than the device itself. When you're reading books on Herpes management or something, and they use your internet connected TV to start flooding you with herpes treatment commercials... and now have you tied down buying medication at $100/month for the rest of your life... The value of knowing exactly what to put in front of your eyeballs quickly dwarfs the value of whatever device you're using to access the data their mining. We are likely to see, in the near future, free smartphones, ebooks, tablets, whatever... in exchange for mining all of our data. Eventually I doubt it will even be possible to buy a device that doesn't mine your data.
Generally I'm a libertarian, but this is a rare case where the direction the free market will take us is a bad place indeed. The only real solution here is clearly written legislation. Unfortunately that is very unlikely. Sort of some tragic event happening and making national news (maybe pedophiles using this data for some nefarious purpose) I doubt it will ever come up in congress.
You're foolishly misguided if you think the RIAA is going to stop suing people that have no way to defend themselves. If anything they will use these warnings against these people.
Yes, and I'd probobly put the OS on an SSD. But for large storage of movies, that can get expensive. Take a laptop drive, get some large rubber bands, rig up a harness to suspend the drive inside the rubber bands and viola... It works great. The problem in laptops is the drive has very little room to move, so they can't really put a big shock absorber in there. But in a van? Plenty of room.
Not anymore there aren't. My father runs a small custom electronics manufacturing plant. They basically build one-off type parts for companies. For example, building a gas station chain? Need a coin-op for your car washes? Well, you only need 100 of them... it's hard to get an order like that done out of asia. So that's where his company fits in. One of their biggest problems is sourcing parts. EVERYTHING is in asia, and everything is geared to that market now. It wasn't that way 20 years ago but it certainly is now. Often it's cheaper for them to buy pre-assembled boards designed for something out and remove the components they need to put on the new product. One time they found a lamp at the home depot that had a part they needed in it, that met spec. The lamp was cheaper than ordering the part from anywhere so they bought 5 pallets of the lamp from home depot and set about tearing them down. Silly, but it got the job done.
You're making a rational well thought out decision that has world consequences. Good for you. Now go convince people in africa driving 1970s vans that get 5mpg that they should toss them out an buy a $30k hybrid and we're set. Good luck!
I've done a lot of stuff like this. So here's my advice: 1. your van likely got 12mpg city when it was brand new... What it gets now is probably a lot worse... so keep that in mind. 2. The alternator is likely already beefy. I'm not sure about your particular model but there are likely even higher amperage alternatives you can get. This will, of course, hurt your millage even further. The key here is to get the power consumed lower than the power produced by the alternator AT IDLE. You can literally drain your batter dead while idling in a parking lot otherwise. 3. for extended life while the engine in off, simply get more batteries. Preferably deep cycle. Get a HIGH amperage relay and put it in-between your primary (starter) battery and your extra batteries then hook the relay on-terminal to the "ON" part of your starter switch. The premise here is that when you start the van. All the batteries are in parralel, but when in ACC mode your equipment is only hooked up to the extra batteries. If you drain them dead, that's fine because the starter battery isn't connected. 4. There are 12volt power supplies (regulators) for computers made for cars. You do not need an inverter and I'd highly recommend against them as they are very inefficient. 5. Laptop diskdrives are designed to take shocks. When choosing drives, laptop drives are your first choice. 6. Por15 and Hurculiner are your best friend on old vehicles. Rip out the carpet, coat it in one or the other and put the carpet back in. 7. Metal vans are bad for wifi... you'll need an external antenna. 8. Don't over-do your stereo. It's dempting but really anything over 200 watts (even the sub) is just to annoy people outside the car. 9. When running your cable for power from your extra batteries, etc... Make sure you put fuses as close to the batteries as possible. If one of your cables rubs and contacts metal, your vans going to go up in flames if it's not properly fused. 10. The cables you use should be bought from a farm implement supplier. (Farm and Fleet, Fleet Farm, etc...) You can get rolls of battery cable the thickness of your index finger, for very cheap. The ridiculous stuff they sell like monster cable, etc... is totally worthless and costs a fortune.
We're going to hear lots of lamenting and hating of Exxon, but they're just a business providing what their customers want. And sad to say... all of you that are bitching about them ARE their customers. I've got one question for you: Have you stopped driving you car yet? Stopped using busses? Stopped using electricity? No? The problem isn't Exxon, the problem is we the people. We WILL use all of the fossil fuels. We'll burn them till their gone. Even if the US and Europe banned their use tomorrow, China, Russia, and Africa would gladly take up the slack.
So the question isn't "How do we find alternatives to fossil fuels" because we aren't going to find anything nearly as cheap and easy in the near future. The question is "how can we deal with whatever problems using them is going to cause?" If they really are going to cause so much damage it ends the world, then we're fucked. Cause it's going to happen. If, instead, it's going to gradually raise the tempureture of the planet over the next 200 year, then we'll likely be able to come up with some technology to help mitigate the effects. If we can't we'd better at least learn to deal with them... because the fact is, it's going to happen... no matter how much you complain on an internet forum using your computer with it's 500 watt power supply that you left on all day while you were at work.
You mean someone else should pay for it for you. Sorry, I'd rather not.
YOU have to pay for your own healthcare. That's the way it works. If you want to be a jobless bum... that's fine. But don't expect the rest of us to feed you, put clothes on your back and cure your cancer when you get sick.
Your employer wants you to have healthcare. It's "cheaper" for them to pay for it, than it is for them to allow you to go without it. But if there's a "free" alternative, even if it's crappy, that's good enough for them.
The REASON we have employer provided healthcare is because during World War II the federal government instituted wage controls. Employers were only allowed to pay you a certain wage. To attract more talented workers they had to find other ways to attract them that was not a direct payment. Vacation time, fringe benefits, and a relatively new idea... health insurance (or at least the precursor to insurance) were added to employment plans. The hospitals of the time had trouble with wildly fluctuating rates of income. During the flu season or during an epidemic, their income soared, but at other times they had almost no patients at all. When people did get sick, they had a hard time paying the bill. As a solution to all of this, hospitals started offering flat rates for a certain period of time... $6/year bought you 3 weeks in the hospital (keep in mind that you were basically just laying in a bed and getting food and water) These plans flourished until they were ubiquitous.
Now they are expected to provide insurance. The only reason employers still pay for healthcare is because they have to. There is no other system to make sure their employees are insured. Well, there wasn't until now. So guess which one they'll pick?
And when it's cheaper for your employer to drop your insurance, pay a small tax, and let you live on medicare, how long do you think you'll have that plan?
Yes, it's entirely the United States fault that world governments are slipping into totalitarianism.lol NZ made their own choices. As heavy handed and anti-freedom as our government is turning, NZ didn't need any coaxing to go along with this.
That's horseshit. The H1Bs that I see come in are almost always temps. Sure they cost 30% more PER HOUR. If you care to do the accounting like that. But the cost of a real worker, one that requires health insurance, vacation, raises and A DESK far dwarfs what they pay these H1Bs that come in. They hire them because they are disposable. When they decide to lay them all off, no one will complain.
I'm all for easier immigration. But we should give these people easy paths to citizenship so they can join the market and enjoy the same protections we all have. Currently we give them slave visas, use them until we don't need them any more and then kick them out of the country. We should be ashamed, not just do to the harm to our workers but also the harm to these immigrants we're exploiting and our own integrity.
Sure... they didnt talk to him at all... he was never on set. They never met him, never talked about politics over beers, and had no incentive to throw a little joke his way because he was basically responsible for them all having jobs. right.
I never said I was offended. I could give a shit less. I just said they were pansies for doing it and then not owning up to it. If you're going to suggest someone should be killed and their head put on a stake because you really think they did something awful, the fucking say so. If you're just trying to impress your yuppie friends but don't want to lose your job over the whole thing, then maybe your convictions aren't quite as die-hard as you thought.
If I thought you'd done something so bad that your head should be removed and put on a stake, I'd cut your god damn head off an put in on a stake. I wouldn't suggest the idea behind your back and then pretend like I never said it. It's called integrity. Something that, whomever did this, clearly has none of.
um... with most OS's, if a drive suddenly stops allowing you to write to it, it's dead to the OS. I'm sure that if you're technically savvy enough you can extract data from it. But try booting windows off a read-only drive that randomly stopped allowing writes the last time the OS was running. You aren't going to get very far, and I think the majority of people would consider that a dead drive.
And then you drive through a Minnesota "check point" at 3 in the afternoon, their breathalyzer reads 6.0 and they run you in even though you'd be dead if it were that high... you have to pay a $2k fine, lose your license for a year and your boss cans you for making the company look bad. I don't see how your logic changes the fact that they are convicting people based on faulty evidence. Drunk driving is bad... but faulty convictions aren't going to stop it. As many people as get charged with it every year, it doesn't even seem like real convictions are doing much good either.
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V8 engines belong in ugly cars. It's kind of the point. Nothing like blowing the doors off a brand new corvette with a rusty Oldsmobile.
You don't seem to remember much from history... The first "Big dog" in piracy was Napster, and they flourished at a time when the vast majority of the public had 56k connections at best. More often than not even slower speeds. All bandwidth caps do is drive consumers to lower quality encoding. The major media outlets probably don't realize it, but this hurts them the most. Despite the fact that they think "pirates" are some parasitic new species that in now way puts money into their system it's quite the opposite. Some of their biggest customers are pirates. The fact of the matter is, they can't get what they want. Which is any movie/show they want at any time, in decent quality at a reasonable price. The media industry seems to think that $300+ per month is a reasonable price for a cable/satellite connection that has "all" the channels, is choked with ever increasing commercials and isn't even on-demand. Add to that, the fact that your forced to scroll through hundreds of channels that you don't want, due to horrible packages forced on the cable providers by content producers.
Piracy is driven, solely, by the media industry that's complaining about it. They could end it tomorrow if they wanted to. But they have this rediculous pipe dream that the internet will lead to them cutting costs by not having to produce physical copies of their media any longer, but at the same time they can raise the price of that very same media. Sorry, that's not going to happen guys. It's 2012, time to get a clue.
So your car notices it's noon... and you've been driving for 3hrs... your Fords graphical speedometer switches to a display of a slowly rotating bigmac, the drivers side window lowers just a crack to admit the familiar smell of McDonalds frys as the car slows while it passes a McDonnalds. Your radio goes mute and you heard your cars AI voice speak softly into your ear "are you lovin it? BigMac for onlly 99cents for a limited time. Simply say 'I'm hungry' to stop at the closest drive though."
Since when has outrage stopped a government from collecting their hard earned bribes?
It very much depends on the meter. If it's the same old meter but with wifi... then it's no big deal. We have one in our home, it just tracks your usage and then the truck drives by every month and collects the amount we used that month. The only data they get is like what you said.
However, these new devices do much more. They are connected to the utilities home office. The utility knows, real time, exactly how much power you're using. Imagine a utility worker making $10/hr pulling up the records for the mansion down the street and seeing their usage at nearly 0 for the past 2 weeks... might be a good night for a visit. That's the up-front and obvious problem. But it can get worse than that. There's plenty of data to be collected from your house wiring. Think of your house wiring as an antenna. It can pick up just about any signal traveling about your home. They very well could design these devices to pick up your wireless traffic, your cellphone traffic, etc... If you don't believe me, ask a musician if they've ever had the experience where you take a guitar amp, unplugged the guitar and cranked up the gain... suddenly you're listening to cell conversations, air traffic conversations, the local McDonalds drive through... whatever. I've even heard it happen at live shows.
How much do you want to bet their conclusions are that "Fair use" is an outdated concept and should be eliminated all together? Seems like a far more likely outcome than anything beneficial.
unfortunately fads only die when even more terrible fads replace them.
you have to understand how small the event horizon is on something like this. The chances of it hitting ANY atom in your brain is so low that it's more likely that the planet would get hit by a full sized black hole than one of these tiny ones. Not only can they pass through matter and not hit atoms, they can pass through atoms and not any of its constituent particles.
I think you're missing the point. Often this data is worth more than the device itself. When you're reading books on Herpes management or something, and they use your internet connected TV to start flooding you with herpes treatment commercials... and now have you tied down buying medication at $100/month for the rest of your life... The value of knowing exactly what to put in front of your eyeballs quickly dwarfs the value of whatever device you're using to access the data their mining. We are likely to see, in the near future, free smartphones, ebooks, tablets, whatever... in exchange for mining all of our data. Eventually I doubt it will even be possible to buy a device that doesn't mine your data.
Generally I'm a libertarian, but this is a rare case where the direction the free market will take us is a bad place indeed. The only real solution here is clearly written legislation. Unfortunately that is very unlikely. Sort of some tragic event happening and making national news (maybe pedophiles using this data for some nefarious purpose) I doubt it will ever come up in congress.
You're foolishly misguided if you think the RIAA is going to stop suing people that have no way to defend themselves. If anything they will use these warnings against these people.
Yes, and I'd probobly put the OS on an SSD. But for large storage of movies, that can get expensive. Take a laptop drive, get some large rubber bands, rig up a harness to suspend the drive inside the rubber bands and viola... It works great. The problem in laptops is the drive has very little room to move, so they can't really put a big shock absorber in there. But in a van? Plenty of room.
0 is not NULL.
Period.
It's a bug, the submitter is correct.
Not anymore there aren't.
My father runs a small custom electronics manufacturing plant. They basically build one-off type parts for companies. For example, building a gas station chain? Need a coin-op for your car washes? Well, you only need 100 of them... it's hard to get an order like that done out of asia. So that's where his company fits in. One of their biggest problems is sourcing parts. EVERYTHING is in asia, and everything is geared to that market now. It wasn't that way 20 years ago but it certainly is now. Often it's cheaper for them to buy pre-assembled boards designed for something out and remove the components they need to put on the new product. One time they found a lamp at the home depot that had a part they needed in it, that met spec. The lamp was cheaper than ordering the part from anywhere so they bought 5 pallets of the lamp from home depot and set about tearing them down. Silly, but it got the job done.
You're making a rational well thought out decision that has world consequences. Good for you. Now go convince people in africa driving 1970s vans that get 5mpg that they should toss them out an buy a $30k hybrid and we're set. Good luck!
And the computer you're on right now? Powered by hamsters is it?
I've done a lot of stuff like this. So here's my advice:
1. your van likely got 12mpg city when it was brand new... What it gets now is probably a lot worse... so keep that in mind.
2. The alternator is likely already beefy. I'm not sure about your particular model but there are likely even higher amperage alternatives you can get. This will, of course, hurt your millage even further. The key here is to get the power consumed lower than the power produced by the alternator AT IDLE. You can literally drain your batter dead while idling in a parking lot otherwise.
3. for extended life while the engine in off, simply get more batteries. Preferably deep cycle. Get a HIGH amperage relay and put it in-between your primary (starter) battery and your extra batteries then hook the relay on-terminal to the "ON" part of your starter switch. The premise here is that when you start the van. All the batteries are in parralel, but when in ACC mode your equipment is only hooked up to the extra batteries. If you drain them dead, that's fine because the starter battery isn't connected.
4. There are 12volt power supplies (regulators) for computers made for cars. You do not need an inverter and I'd highly recommend against them as they are very inefficient.
5. Laptop diskdrives are designed to take shocks. When choosing drives, laptop drives are your first choice.
6. Por15 and Hurculiner are your best friend on old vehicles. Rip out the carpet, coat it in one or the other and put the carpet back in.
7. Metal vans are bad for wifi... you'll need an external antenna.
8. Don't over-do your stereo. It's dempting but really anything over 200 watts (even the sub) is just to annoy people outside the car.
9. When running your cable for power from your extra batteries, etc... Make sure you put fuses as close to the batteries as possible. If one of your cables rubs and contacts metal, your vans going to go up in flames if it's not properly fused.
10. The cables you use should be bought from a farm implement supplier. (Farm and Fleet, Fleet Farm, etc...) You can get rolls of battery cable the thickness of your index finger, for very cheap. The ridiculous stuff they sell like monster cable, etc... is totally worthless and costs a fortune.
Good luck!
We're going to hear lots of lamenting and hating of Exxon, but they're just a business providing what their customers want. And sad to say... all of you that are bitching about them ARE their customers. I've got one question for you: Have you stopped driving you car yet? Stopped using busses? Stopped using electricity? No? The problem isn't Exxon, the problem is we the people. We WILL use all of the fossil fuels. We'll burn them till their gone. Even if the US and Europe banned their use tomorrow, China, Russia, and Africa would gladly take up the slack.
So the question isn't "How do we find alternatives to fossil fuels" because we aren't going to find anything nearly as cheap and easy in the near future. The question is "how can we deal with whatever problems using them is going to cause?" If they really are going to cause so much damage it ends the world, then we're fucked. Cause it's going to happen. If, instead, it's going to gradually raise the tempureture of the planet over the next 200 year, then we'll likely be able to come up with some technology to help mitigate the effects. If we can't we'd better at least learn to deal with them... because the fact is, it's going to happen... no matter how much you complain on an internet forum using your computer with it's 500 watt power supply that you left on all day while you were at work.
You mean someone else should pay for it for you. Sorry, I'd rather not.
YOU have to pay for your own healthcare. That's the way it works. If you want to be a jobless bum... that's fine. But don't expect the rest of us to feed you, put clothes on your back and cure your cancer when you get sick.
Your employer wants you to have healthcare. It's "cheaper" for them to pay for it, than it is for them to allow you to go without it. But if there's a "free" alternative, even if it's crappy, that's good enough for them.
The REASON we have employer provided healthcare is because during World War II the federal government instituted wage controls. Employers were only allowed to pay you a certain wage. To attract more talented workers they had to find other ways to attract them that was not a direct payment. Vacation time, fringe benefits, and a relatively new idea... health insurance (or at least the precursor to insurance) were added to employment plans. The hospitals of the time had trouble with wildly fluctuating rates of income. During the flu season or during an epidemic, their income soared, but at other times they had almost no patients at all. When people did get sick, they had a hard time paying the bill. As a solution to all of this, hospitals started offering flat rates for a certain period of time... $6/year bought you 3 weeks in the hospital (keep in mind that you were basically just laying in a bed and getting food and water) These plans flourished until they were ubiquitous.
Now they are expected to provide insurance. The only reason employers still pay for healthcare is because they have to. There is no other system to make sure their employees are insured. Well, there wasn't until now. So guess which one they'll pick?
And when it's cheaper for your employer to drop your insurance, pay a small tax, and let you live on medicare, how long do you think you'll have that plan?
Yes, it's entirely the United States fault that world governments are slipping into totalitarianism.lol
NZ made their own choices. As heavy handed and anti-freedom as our government is turning, NZ didn't need any coaxing to go along with this.
That's horseshit. The H1Bs that I see come in are almost always temps. Sure they cost 30% more PER HOUR. If you care to do the accounting like that. But the cost of a real worker, one that requires health insurance, vacation, raises and A DESK far dwarfs what they pay these H1Bs that come in. They hire them because they are disposable. When they decide to lay them all off, no one will complain.
I'm all for easier immigration. But we should give these people easy paths to citizenship so they can join the market and enjoy the same protections we all have. Currently we give them slave visas, use them until we don't need them any more and then kick them out of the country. We should be ashamed, not just do to the harm to our workers but also the harm to these immigrants we're exploiting and our own integrity.
Sure... they didnt talk to him at all... he was never on set. They never met him, never talked about politics over beers, and had no incentive to throw a little joke his way because he was basically responsible for them all having jobs. right.
I never said I was offended. I could give a shit less. I just said they were pansies for doing it and then not owning up to it. If you're going to suggest someone should be killed and their head put on a stake because you really think they did something awful, the fucking say so. If you're just trying to impress your yuppie friends but don't want to lose your job over the whole thing, then maybe your convictions aren't quite as die-hard as you thought.
If I thought you'd done something so bad that your head should be removed and put on a stake, I'd cut your god damn head off an put in on a stake. I wouldn't suggest the idea behind your back and then pretend like I never said it. It's called integrity. Something that, whomever did this, clearly has none of.
um... with most OS's, if a drive suddenly stops allowing you to write to it, it's dead to the OS. I'm sure that if you're technically savvy enough you can extract data from it. But try booting windows off a read-only drive that randomly stopped allowing writes the last time the OS was running. You aren't going to get very far, and I think the majority of people would consider that a dead drive.
And then you drive through a Minnesota "check point" at 3 in the afternoon, their breathalyzer reads 6.0 and they run you in even though you'd be dead if it were that high... you have to pay a $2k fine, lose your license for a year and your boss cans you for making the company look bad. I don't see how your logic changes the fact that they are convicting people based on faulty evidence. Drunk driving is bad... but faulty convictions aren't going to stop it. As many people as get charged with it every year, it doesn't even seem like real convictions are doing much good either.