This is an easy question to answer:
I can't go to the store and buy software for it.
I can't play ANY games on it that aren't total crap or 10yrs old
It's hard to use for most people. (editing text files in emacs is not easy for most people)
The linux support community are a bunch of assholes. Try and post a question in a linux forum asking how to do something, you get treated like an idiot.
Even if you had someone to support you, the entire appearance, function and utility of it differs widely from distro to distro... even from release to release. Win7 may be a lot different than Win95... but not nearly as different as 2 Ubuntu distros that are less than 5yrs apart. So even a linux pro can be lost unless you drop to command line, and even then they may be confused unless you're using the same distro... not to mention that its virtually impossible to support a novice, over the phone, while they're entering console commands.
None of this is new... it's the same problem that linux has always had.
Of course, and I, as well as most people, find menga gross. Illegal however? That would be nearly impossible to legislate unless we start talking about thought crimes. And once it's illegal to "think" something, no matter how horrible a thought it is... we are all doomed.
And there you go... when the government decides market forces aren't smart enough to provide the most economical solution, you can always count on the government to be sure and introduce the least economical solution in its place, and then tax all of its competitors to make sure it "appears" the cheapest solution.
When they take YOUR rights away, they start by taking them away from someone you find distasteful. Often it is the mistake of the naive to think that Rights only apply to the good and just citizen. What they do not realize is that, if you can make a distinction regarding who deserves certain Rights and who does not, it is only a matter of time before the government finds a way to make that very distinction against you. Rights are not rights unless they apply to everyone, equally.
This is why you hack the living shit out of a kindle 5min after taking it out of the box. The "kindle" sucks. A hacked kindle on the other hand, is a marvelous device and what Amazon should be selling in the first place.
I disagree. This American Life is a good show. I've listened to them for years. They are clearly very left-winged journalists (most are I guess) but this show in particular does a very good job of trying to present the other side of topic. In particular I recommend the 2 pieces they did on the financial crisis and how it happened. Their conclusions are startling and some of the best work on the topic I've heard. In fact, it's probably the ONLY journalistic effort I've seen to actually explain the subject in any depth what-so-ever.
You're talking about their pop-culture. What the African American community "glorifies" in their music. I listed to death metal, which, by your definitional "glorifies" serial killers, murder, satanism, Vikings, planets exploding, fictitious gods from fantasy books, etc... And yet, I've strangely never tried to blow up the earth. Music is music, and has nothing to do with reality. The same goes for the African American community.
It's a token effort that only large ISPs are making. My guess is that they are doing this in exchange for something... cheap deals on digital content, or something of the sort. In reality they will do very little to enforce this. The second this starts costing them customers they'll drop it like a hot potato. Remember, they have absolutely no incentive to help the dieing media industry police their content.
I think that one thing we can agree on is that statistics are total horseshit. Sure, if done by a totally impartial party (which doesn't exist) they might be useful. But in something as divisive as race, crime, punishment, slavery, social equality, who is really impartial? Ask yourself a few questions and you soon realize how pointless these statistics are...
1. Who is black? Most blacks have a large part of their genetics made up of Caucasian genes. Look at our president. I'm white, my son is adopted from the heart of Africa, 100% African genes. Is he black? Certainly... but how does he fall into these statistics? He's going to have the up-bringing of any white-middle class child.
2. Who's collecting these statistics? The judicial system? The judicial system has been proven prejudice by hundreds of studies over the years. They convict more minorities of crimes, they give them longer sentences, they charge them with more infractions. They pull over a white kid with a pocket knife and they call his parents, they get a black kid with the same knife and he's getting charged with a felony. Are blacks really twice as likely to commit a crime with a knife? Or are they just twice as likely to get convicted?
3. The AC poster is clearly a troll and probably doesn't even believe in what he's saying. So there's that.
I'd argue that "WHICH the later regret in most cases." They rarely regret it. If they want some big project, done in-house... their co-workers in IS will tell them... it's a dumb idea. They'll clearly make a better product more in-line with what they "need" than what they "want" But... then again, that's not what they want is it? An out-sourced company comes in and builds them exactly what they ask for... to the letter... and leaves. Then, when that sucks, the people that hired them can blame the nameless outsourced company and declare all the problems their having someone elses fault. If they had done it in-house... that blame game would come to a quick end when a knowledgeable IS staff is sitting there ready to defend themselves.
I maintain a DB and recently had our marketing department get sent to me to quote syncing this DB with some software they have. They had apparently gotten quotes from outside vendors and the VPs caught wind of the price tag and said "No way in hell" So I meet with these people with the novel question of: "What is this software? What does it do? Who is maintaining it? Because it sure as hell isn't IS." It ended up that the director of marketing was the "Technical lead" for the product. So I asked her what kind of backend DB it used... what API did it have... did we have a support contract with the vendor... She had no idea. In fact, they weren't sure where their contract was. I got the joy of asking her if we were pirating the software. "Whats that mean?" It was a rather hilarious meeting.
You're a fool. You've not been "in the system" yet.
you're 18 and dating a 16yr old? Sex predator for life. You have to "Register" every time you move so your neighbors can know who you are.
Get pulled over for speeding and the cops had a bad day? He searches your care and finds that set of kitchen knives you just bought your wife... felony possession of a concealed weapon (any blade over 6" qualifies)
Have a SINGLE drink at the bar... then, on the way home a kid rides out in front of your car and you hit them. When there is an accident, ANY measurable amount of alcohol in your system is considered a DUI. You're charged with vehicular manslaughter and will most assuredly be convicted.
I've know people all 3 of these situations have happened to. They all went to jail and all have felonies on their record.
While in college, I made enemies with the local college police. They had a pretty good reputation for harassment and lack of faith in the constitution, so local lawyers had made themselves available for advice, free of charge, to students in my particular situation. The police would pull me over, ask to search me... my car... they'd roll up on me while I was walking down the street. They'd meet me outside of class to ask me "Questions" regarding topics I had no knowledge of.
The lawyer was very wise and told me a few things:
Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them.
The police are not here to serve and protect. They are here to arrest people. Period. They have special police, called detectives, that gather evidence, but the vast majority of police do one thing and one thing only... arrest people. When talking to a police officer, remember their goal. They are not your friend. They are not there to help. They are there to either arrest you, or someone you know. Why are you helping them arrest you by continuing to talk?
The police do not decide if you are guilty. Often they try to coerce you into giving them more evidence against you, by convincing you that if you admit to something, or let them search you, they will find you more believable. You have NO REASON to care what the police believe. Their opinion is not important. If they have cause to arrest you, you are going to jail. PERIOD. When the police officer walks up to you, they already know if they are going to arrest you or not. Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you in a court of law. By talking or letting them search you, you are simply giving them more evidence... or even giving them a reason to arrest you where one did not exist before.
After speaking with the lawyer, I took his advice. Every time a police officer tried to talk to me, I simply refused. "I'm sorry sir, I have nothing to say to you" if they continued, then I used the lawyers line "Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them." I've used this line dozens of times in my life and I have never had a cop continue to bug me after using it... although several commented that it was clever.
The campus police quickly realized I wasn't going to fall for their games anymore. So they charged me with something I had nothing to do with. I demanded a trial, much to their dismay. They tried numerous times to plead me out. I took it to court and acted as my own lawyer. They actually called several witnesses, none of whom had ever seen me before. The judge threw it out. I gave the prosecutor and police officer the devil horns and winked on the way out. I was never pulled over or questioned again in that town.
I dunno about him, but I'm certainly against such things. I think your mistake is that you believe the government cares about the environment and that these laws in some way help it. The environment doesn't contribute to campaigns.
They'd just tell us. Often the first point of contact was a phone call. The FBI agent knows that he's a lot more likely to get the information he's looking for if he's friendly and helpful, has a chat and explains what's going on. As cut and dry as a warrant may seem, it's really up to the person pulling the info how much effort they want to put into it. We're talking about mainframes from the 60's... cross referencing data and the like is a pain in the ass. Sure we can dump it all to a text file and send it to him. But if he sends the warrant and says he's looking for a pattern of phone calls to banks in a certain area... and the admins bored... the admin can organize the data in such a way to make it a lot easier on the FBI agent. If the agents a prick, we can simply fax him 1000 pages plain phone numbers in the worst font we can find and the warrants fulfilled. If he's cool and you're excited about helping him, you can send him a spreadsheet with all the info cross reference and tagged. Here are banks, here are credit unions, here he was been calling some woman in L.A. every Thursday at 3pm for 2 years. Sysadmins are good at finding that sort of thing, why not be nice to us?
So, is that 12x the revenue at release? Or 12x the revenue compared to when they went free2play which was after the game had been out for years and basically wasn't even for sale anymore? Also... Revenue? What a useless number. How much have PROFITS increased? You now have hundreds of thousands of people playing your game for free... not buying anything at all. Are the few that are paying, actually making up for all that?
The clear endgame for this situation is to get people to pay as much money as possible for something that takes the least amount of work. So basically, new weapons that use the same skin as old weapons but make winning much easier. To shut up people who don't want to pay, you make the weapon unlock-able, but make unlocking it significantly more difficult than paying $19.95.
I understand that these companies are out there to make a profit, but if you drive customers away by building a name for yourself based on poor investment in new content, and nickle and diming your customers (See EA and SOE as good examples) Eventually, no matter how great of a game you produce, people are going to ignore it because they know what's coming next. 2 months after release "here's the other half of the game and it'll cost you $300 to get it all, but we won't tell you that, we'll just obfuscate the price of everything to the point that you have no idea what you're paying anymore, maybe we'll make you buy 1 kind of in-game credit and then trade it for different kinds of in-game credits, all with different values and exchange rates" (See StarTrek online, it does this in spades)
The gaming industry has killed itself off multiple times due to profit over-reach. I think we're headed down the same road again.
what you're talking about is socialist economics. The problem with that system is, who determines how much it costs to produce and ship it? If you let the business decide, they'll obviously lie. So then the government has to set a price and.. well... we all know where that leads. Instead we have a capitalist system. In capitalism, the price of something is based on how much the consumer is willing to pay. If the consumer is willing to pay less, then the buisness need to find a cheaper way to produce and ship the item. The unfortunate fact in capitalism is that if most people are willing to pay more for something than you are... you are also going to pay more. Even worse, if bushiness' collude to fix prices, they in-effect, trick people into believing the value of something is higher than it really is. "If everyone is selling this for $20, it must be worth $20"
So I used to work in the part of an ISP that dealt with the copyright complaints and law enforcement requests. The large copyright owners (like record companies) were the only ones that really sent us anything. They hired companies that represented them, collected info off of torrent clients, file sharing programs and websites and then sent complaints to us. That I know of, no request ever came for actual customer records. None... ever. While I worked there, no requests ever came, no that worked there could remember it ever happening, and I'm still friends with people that work there and they still tell me they've never had a request. We got law enforcement requests... but even those we're pretty rare. Local police don't really seem all that interested in anything more than emergency requests revolving around hostage situations (typically crazy boyfriends locked himself in girlfriends house with a gun/knife) The FBI would send requests to us, but they were often very elaborate requests having to do with con-artists or embezzlement cases where they were just looking for billing records. Wire-taps are VERY rare.
I'm not sure how many people get sued, but I serviced several million customers and none ever got anything more than a meaningless email from their ISP that likely went to a mailbox they hadn't used in years. I've believed for a while now that the lawsuits you hear about are more likely just scare tactics and there's really not that much legal action taken.
Best Scifi I've read. A warning though, it's pretty heady stuff. Some of the concepts are bizarre to say the least, but I think he's got a very realistic view of the future. I found myself having to re-read many parts of the books because some of the concepts were so advanced I was having trouble grasping what was going on.
Here's the amazon link to the first book: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-Book/dp/0812579844/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1331087154&sr=1-2
It IS the be-all end-all of computer graphics. Indirect lighting is only a problem due to the limitations of CPU speed. Specifically, when you set up a render you set it up with the number of "bounces" a ray will make. When you're doing live video, those bounces are set to about 3... it's hard to get ambient lighting with that. Is a Raytracing engine the solution to computer graphics right now? Probably not. In 100 years when computers are likely smarter than we are and have us hosted in matrix-like virtual environment so they can feed off of our souls, what kind of rendering will they use? Ray-tracing. Set the number of ray bounces to 1000... or 10,000 and your ambient lighting issues suddenly go away.
Even now, Raytracing could do a lot more. Remember that the ONLY reason DirectX works at all is that there are hardware developers building specific equipment to take advantage of it and accelerate its content. There are no Raytracing video cards, although there have been several attempts at creating some proof of concepts. I'm not sure how much it would help but I know for a fact that DirectX would be dead without the existence of Nvidia and ATI.
It would be more effective and have less side effects if they just constructed the room with materials that naturally turned it into a Faraday cage. I think it would be relatively trivial to invent wallpaper that was made with a sheet of conductive metal film. Overlap them, connect them to a ground (any plumbing fixture would do) and cellphones would stop working inside that room. You don't have all of the problems that jammers cause or any legal issues with the FCC.
You would still need a clear sign indicating that cellphones will not work in the theater... and people like me wouldn't be able to go (I'm on call 24/7and have my phone on vibrate)
A less intrusive solution would be to have a friendly bluetooth or wifi signal that indicated that "This area is a vibrate only area" and get the cellphone manufacturers on-board. Then the theater could set your phone to vibrate for you if you let them. This would let people like me, who HAVE to have their phone with them at all times, still go to the movies.
The majority of the "profit" telcos make is from their business clients. Residential customers are not profitable at all. The only reason they care in the least about resi customers is because, in order to own the territory you have to service both. What little money they do make in the residential market is usually due to large government subsidies, like Obama's recent DSL expansion project. And trust me, all that money went strait into the bank. The telcos just listed projects they had already had on the books in planning for years, and then collected the money. Thank you uncle sam.
You're only saying this because you don't have a clue how 3D engines work. A raytraced game could potentially look "real" unlike current games which continue to just look like more and more sophisticated animated cartoons. Google raytraced images sometime, it's hard to tell that they are CG and not real a lot of times.
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This is an easy question to answer:
I can't go to the store and buy software for it.
I can't play ANY games on it that aren't total crap or 10yrs old
It's hard to use for most people. (editing text files in emacs is not easy for most people)
The linux support community are a bunch of assholes. Try and post a question in a linux forum asking how to do something, you get treated like an idiot.
Even if you had someone to support you, the entire appearance, function and utility of it differs widely from distro to distro... even from release to release. Win7 may be a lot different than Win95... but not nearly as different as 2 Ubuntu distros that are less than 5yrs apart. So even a linux pro can be lost unless you drop to command line, and even then they may be confused unless you're using the same distro... not to mention that its virtually impossible to support a novice, over the phone, while they're entering console commands.
None of this is new... it's the same problem that linux has always had.
Of course, and I, as well as most people, find menga gross. Illegal however? That would be nearly impossible to legislate unless we start talking about thought crimes. And once it's illegal to "think" something, no matter how horrible a thought it is... we are all doomed.
And there you go... when the government decides market forces aren't smart enough to provide the most economical solution, you can always count on the government to be sure and introduce the least economical solution in its place, and then tax all of its competitors to make sure it "appears" the cheapest solution.
When they take YOUR rights away, they start by taking them away from someone you find distasteful. Often it is the mistake of the naive to think that Rights only apply to the good and just citizen. What they do not realize is that, if you can make a distinction regarding who deserves certain Rights and who does not, it is only a matter of time before the government finds a way to make that very distinction against you. Rights are not rights unless they apply to everyone, equally.
So they took 20 blood tests over a 14month period and this is a big deal?
This is why you hack the living shit out of a kindle 5min after taking it out of the box. The "kindle" sucks. A hacked kindle on the other hand, is a marvelous device and what Amazon should be selling in the first place.
I disagree. This American Life is a good show. I've listened to them for years. They are clearly very left-winged journalists (most are I guess) but this show in particular does a very good job of trying to present the other side of topic. In particular I recommend the 2 pieces they did on the financial crisis and how it happened. Their conclusions are startling and some of the best work on the topic I've heard. In fact, it's probably the ONLY journalistic effort I've seen to actually explain the subject in any depth what-so-ever.
You're talking about their pop-culture. What the African American community "glorifies" in their music. I listed to death metal, which, by your definitional "glorifies" serial killers, murder, satanism, Vikings, planets exploding, fictitious gods from fantasy books, etc... And yet, I've strangely never tried to blow up the earth. Music is music, and has nothing to do with reality. The same goes for the African American community.
It's a token effort that only large ISPs are making. My guess is that they are doing this in exchange for something... cheap deals on digital content, or something of the sort. In reality they will do very little to enforce this. The second this starts costing them customers they'll drop it like a hot potato. Remember, they have absolutely no incentive to help the dieing media industry police their content.
I think that one thing we can agree on is that statistics are total horseshit. Sure, if done by a totally impartial party (which doesn't exist) they might be useful. But in something as divisive as race, crime, punishment, slavery, social equality, who is really impartial? Ask yourself a few questions and you soon realize how pointless these statistics are...
1. Who is black? Most blacks have a large part of their genetics made up of Caucasian genes. Look at our president. I'm white, my son is adopted from the heart of Africa, 100% African genes. Is he black? Certainly... but how does he fall into these statistics? He's going to have the up-bringing of any white-middle class child.
2. Who's collecting these statistics? The judicial system? The judicial system has been proven prejudice by hundreds of studies over the years. They convict more minorities of crimes, they give them longer sentences, they charge them with more infractions. They pull over a white kid with a pocket knife and they call his parents, they get a black kid with the same knife and he's getting charged with a felony. Are blacks really twice as likely to commit a crime with a knife? Or are they just twice as likely to get convicted?
3. The AC poster is clearly a troll and probably doesn't even believe in what he's saying. So there's that.
The trial only took a day... so... yea
I'd argue that "WHICH the later regret in most cases." They rarely regret it. If they want some big project, done in-house... their co-workers in IS will tell them... it's a dumb idea. They'll clearly make a better product more in-line with what they "need" than what they "want" But... then again, that's not what they want is it? An out-sourced company comes in and builds them exactly what they ask for... to the letter... and leaves. Then, when that sucks, the people that hired them can blame the nameless outsourced company and declare all the problems their having someone elses fault. If they had done it in-house... that blame game would come to a quick end when a knowledgeable IS staff is sitting there ready to defend themselves.
I maintain a DB and recently had our marketing department get sent to me to quote syncing this DB with some software they have. They had apparently gotten quotes from outside vendors and the VPs caught wind of the price tag and said "No way in hell" So I meet with these people with the novel question of: "What is this software? What does it do? Who is maintaining it? Because it sure as hell isn't IS." It ended up that the director of marketing was the "Technical lead" for the product. So I asked her what kind of backend DB it used... what API did it have... did we have a support contract with the vendor... She had no idea. In fact, they weren't sure where their contract was. I got the joy of asking her if we were pirating the software. "Whats that mean?" It was a rather hilarious meeting.
You're a fool. You've not been "in the system" yet.
you're 18 and dating a 16yr old? Sex predator for life. You have to "Register" every time you move so your neighbors can know who you are.
Get pulled over for speeding and the cops had a bad day? He searches your care and finds that set of kitchen knives you just bought your wife... felony possession of a concealed weapon (any blade over 6" qualifies)
Have a SINGLE drink at the bar... then, on the way home a kid rides out in front of your car and you hit them. When there is an accident, ANY measurable amount of alcohol in your system is considered a DUI. You're charged with vehicular manslaughter and will most assuredly be convicted.
I've know people all 3 of these situations have happened to. They all went to jail and all have felonies on their record.
While in college, I made enemies with the local college police. They had a pretty good reputation for harassment and lack of faith in the constitution, so local lawyers had made themselves available for advice, free of charge, to students in my particular situation. The police would pull me over, ask to search me... my car... they'd roll up on me while I was walking down the street. They'd meet me outside of class to ask me "Questions" regarding topics I had no knowledge of.
The lawyer was very wise and told me a few things:
Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them.
The police are not here to serve and protect. They are here to arrest people. Period. They have special police, called detectives, that gather evidence, but the vast majority of police do one thing and one thing only... arrest people. When talking to a police officer, remember their goal. They are not your friend. They are not there to help. They are there to either arrest you, or someone you know. Why are you helping them arrest you by continuing to talk?
The police do not decide if you are guilty. Often they try to coerce you into giving them more evidence against you, by convincing you that if you admit to something, or let them search you, they will find you more believable. You have NO REASON to care what the police believe. Their opinion is not important. If they have cause to arrest you, you are going to jail. PERIOD. When the police officer walks up to you, they already know if they are going to arrest you or not. Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you in a court of law. By talking or letting them search you, you are simply giving them more evidence... or even giving them a reason to arrest you where one did not exist before.
After speaking with the lawyer, I took his advice. Every time a police officer tried to talk to me, I simply refused. "I'm sorry sir, I have nothing to say to you" if they continued, then I used the lawyers line "Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them." I've used this line dozens of times in my life and I have never had a cop continue to bug me after using it... although several commented that it was clever.
The campus police quickly realized I wasn't going to fall for their games anymore. So they charged me with something I had nothing to do with. I demanded a trial, much to their dismay. They tried numerous times to plead me out. I took it to court and acted as my own lawyer. They actually called several witnesses, none of whom had ever seen me before. The judge threw it out. I gave the prosecutor and police officer the devil horns and winked on the way out. I was never pulled over or questioned again in that town.
I dunno about him, but I'm certainly against such things. I think your mistake is that you believe the government cares about the environment and that these laws in some way help it. The environment doesn't contribute to campaigns.
Except pot
They'd just tell us. Often the first point of contact was a phone call. The FBI agent knows that he's a lot more likely to get the information he's looking for if he's friendly and helpful, has a chat and explains what's going on. As cut and dry as a warrant may seem, it's really up to the person pulling the info how much effort they want to put into it. We're talking about mainframes from the 60's... cross referencing data and the like is a pain in the ass. Sure we can dump it all to a text file and send it to him. But if he sends the warrant and says he's looking for a pattern of phone calls to banks in a certain area... and the admins bored... the admin can organize the data in such a way to make it a lot easier on the FBI agent. If the agents a prick, we can simply fax him 1000 pages plain phone numbers in the worst font we can find and the warrants fulfilled. If he's cool and you're excited about helping him, you can send him a spreadsheet with all the info cross reference and tagged. Here are banks, here are credit unions, here he was been calling some woman in L.A. every Thursday at 3pm for 2 years. Sysadmins are good at finding that sort of thing, why not be nice to us?
So, is that 12x the revenue at release? Or 12x the revenue compared to when they went free2play which was after the game had been out for years and basically wasn't even for sale anymore? Also... Revenue? What a useless number. How much have PROFITS increased? You now have hundreds of thousands of people playing your game for free... not buying anything at all. Are the few that are paying, actually making up for all that?
The clear endgame for this situation is to get people to pay as much money as possible for something that takes the least amount of work. So basically, new weapons that use the same skin as old weapons but make winning much easier. To shut up people who don't want to pay, you make the weapon unlock-able, but make unlocking it significantly more difficult than paying $19.95.
I understand that these companies are out there to make a profit, but if you drive customers away by building a name for yourself based on poor investment in new content, and nickle and diming your customers (See EA and SOE as good examples) Eventually, no matter how great of a game you produce, people are going to ignore it because they know what's coming next. 2 months after release "here's the other half of the game and it'll cost you $300 to get it all, but we won't tell you that, we'll just obfuscate the price of everything to the point that you have no idea what you're paying anymore, maybe we'll make you buy 1 kind of in-game credit and then trade it for different kinds of in-game credits, all with different values and exchange rates" (See StarTrek online, it does this in spades)
The gaming industry has killed itself off multiple times due to profit over-reach. I think we're headed down the same road again.
what you're talking about is socialist economics. The problem with that system is, who determines how much it costs to produce and ship it? If you let the business decide, they'll obviously lie. So then the government has to set a price and.. well... we all know where that leads. Instead we have a capitalist system. In capitalism, the price of something is based on how much the consumer is willing to pay. If the consumer is willing to pay less, then the buisness need to find a cheaper way to produce and ship the item. The unfortunate fact in capitalism is that if most people are willing to pay more for something than you are... you are also going to pay more. Even worse, if bushiness' collude to fix prices, they in-effect, trick people into believing the value of something is higher than it really is. "If everyone is selling this for $20, it must be worth $20"
So I used to work in the part of an ISP that dealt with the copyright complaints and law enforcement requests. The large copyright owners (like record companies) were the only ones that really sent us anything. They hired companies that represented them, collected info off of torrent clients, file sharing programs and websites and then sent complaints to us. That I know of, no request ever came for actual customer records. None... ever. While I worked there, no requests ever came, no that worked there could remember it ever happening, and I'm still friends with people that work there and they still tell me they've never had a request. We got law enforcement requests... but even those we're pretty rare. Local police don't really seem all that interested in anything more than emergency requests revolving around hostage situations (typically crazy boyfriends locked himself in girlfriends house with a gun/knife) The FBI would send requests to us, but they were often very elaborate requests having to do with con-artists or embezzlement cases where they were just looking for billing records. Wire-taps are VERY rare.
I'm not sure how many people get sued, but I serviced several million customers and none ever got anything more than a meaningless email from their ISP that likely went to a mailbox they hadn't used in years. I've believed for a while now that the lawsuits you hear about are more likely just scare tactics and there's really not that much legal action taken.
The Golden Age trilogy. by John C. Wright
Best Scifi I've read. A warning though, it's pretty heady stuff. Some of the concepts are bizarre to say the least, but I think he's got a very realistic view of the future. I found myself having to re-read many parts of the books because some of the concepts were so advanced I was having trouble grasping what was going on.
Here's the amazon link to the first book: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-Book/dp/0812579844/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1331087154&sr=1-2
It IS the be-all end-all of computer graphics. Indirect lighting is only a problem due to the limitations of CPU speed. Specifically, when you set up a render you set it up with the number of "bounces" a ray will make. When you're doing live video, those bounces are set to about 3... it's hard to get ambient lighting with that. Is a Raytracing engine the solution to computer graphics right now? Probably not. In 100 years when computers are likely smarter than we are and have us hosted in matrix-like virtual environment so they can feed off of our souls, what kind of rendering will they use? Ray-tracing. Set the number of ray bounces to 1000... or 10,000 and your ambient lighting issues suddenly go away.
Even now, Raytracing could do a lot more. Remember that the ONLY reason DirectX works at all is that there are hardware developers building specific equipment to take advantage of it and accelerate its content. There are no Raytracing video cards, although there have been several attempts at creating some proof of concepts. I'm not sure how much it would help but I know for a fact that DirectX would be dead without the existence of Nvidia and ATI.
It would be more effective and have less side effects if they just constructed the room with materials that naturally turned it into a Faraday cage. I think it would be relatively trivial to invent wallpaper that was made with a sheet of conductive metal film. Overlap them, connect them to a ground (any plumbing fixture would do) and cellphones would stop working inside that room. You don't have all of the problems that jammers cause or any legal issues with the FCC.
You would still need a clear sign indicating that cellphones will not work in the theater... and people like me wouldn't be able to go (I'm on call 24/7and have my phone on vibrate)
A less intrusive solution would be to have a friendly bluetooth or wifi signal that indicated that "This area is a vibrate only area" and get the cellphone manufacturers on-board. Then the theater could set your phone to vibrate for you if you let them. This would let people like me, who HAVE to have their phone with them at all times, still go to the movies.
The majority of the "profit" telcos make is from their business clients. Residential customers are not profitable at all. The only reason they care in the least about resi customers is because, in order to own the territory you have to service both. What little money they do make in the residential market is usually due to large government subsidies, like Obama's recent DSL expansion project. And trust me, all that money went strait into the bank. The telcos just listed projects they had already had on the books in planning for years, and then collected the money. Thank you uncle sam.
You're only saying this because you don't have a clue how 3D engines work. A raytraced game could potentially look "real" unlike current games which continue to just look like more and more sophisticated animated cartoons. Google raytraced images sometime, it's hard to tell that they are CG and not real a lot of times.