This means that getting together with your friends to hang out, and then deciding together that it would be nice to acquire a small amount of marijuana is not a misdemeanor, as the law books state, but a felony because you involved your friends. The best part? You don't even have to actually acquire the green stuff, simply planning with someone else to go buy some makes you a felon.
Probably wise to choose your friends carefully then if you're going to do something (however trivially) illegal with them. It's called common sense.
Please forgive the late reply, I've been somewhat busy for the past week.
The issue I was describing has nothing to do with choosing your friends carefully (everyone knows "it's only illegal if you get caught"). The base problem is that it is illegal to discuss perpetrating a crime in the first place, and the "criminality" of that discussion is higher than the actual crime.
Think about it this way: If you get pulled over for speeding, you get a citation. If the laws concerning conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor were applied to moving violations, you would go to jail (instead of being issued a ticket) if the officer who pulled you over had a reasonable suspicion that you intended to exceed the posted speed limit.
Rather than the maximum sentences for cyber crimes have failed to keep pace with the severity of the threats, it seems that in many cases the problem is that hacked party's network security has failed to keep pace with the value of the data.
If a thief breaks a company's car window (where there's a sign that says "Credit card numbers stored here!") and steals a printout with a million credit card numbers, everyone will say the company was stupid for leaving the printout sitting on the car seat.
Yet when a hacker exploits a well known (and easily eliminated) SQL injection vulnerability to do the same thing, suddenly the hacker is escalated to "organized crime" level?
I think the main issue here is that anyone with an IQ of 80+ can smash a car window to grab something they want from a car's seat or floorboard, whereas the hackers have "specialized information" that allows them to do things like injecting malicious SQL.
The issue is about being able to punish the hackers when they get caught. Of course, it's not enough to simply prove they did it; they want to prove some sort of criminal conspiracy to escalate the charges - never mind that there are already laws on the books that escalate charges if the authorities can prove collusion (it is a felony in most jurisdictions to conspire to commit a misdemeanor (among other things)).
Interestingly enough, we already have something that could be used to increase the penalties for illegal activity.
Conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor is a felony.
This means that getting together with your friends to hang out, and then deciding together that it would be nice to acquire a small amount of marijuana is not a misdemeanor, as the law books state, but a felony because you involved your friends. The best part? You don't even have to actually acquire the green stuff, simply planning with someone else to go buy some makes you a felon.
Therefore, being asked or told to do something one is aware is illegal, and then doing it, could result in being charged with a felony instead of a misdemeanor charge. This could turn graffiti, stealing a pack of gum, spitting on the sidewalk, etc, into a felony charge... simply because it was done by more than one person.
-- Remember, kids, it's only illegal if you get caught!
That totally pales in comparison to several other presidents. The worst one in my book was Lyndon Johnson, who's responsible for destroying the American economy in the 70s because of the Vietnam War, plus the deaths of over 50,000 American citizens in that atrocity, plus countless Vietnamese. He's not quite as bad as Stalin who's responsible for 20-30 million deaths, but the Vietnam war probably killed about 1 million total, and most of the blood of those are on LBJ's hands.
Maybe it's time we humans figured out that being the aggressor in any multi-national conflict is a good way to ruin the economy...
Now they are doing simple b&e and being 'praised' for it. If this same group had smashed open a door and stole the information and spray painted the walls would we still be applauding them? No we would throw their asses in jail.
Actually, I would call them Shadowrunners, and welcome the new era that I've seen coming for many years now.
I think I managed to wander off-topic in my rambling, but the gist of what I was attempting to put forth was that a small subset of the people willing to make micro-purchases are responsible for a large amount of the actual currency flow. The study's main thrust was that it appears it is not the price of the additional content that drives the purchase decisions, but some other factor; while the price point does have an impact, it is not as great an impact as whatever drives people to spend money on a game's downloadable content in the first place.
If I recall correctly, the study was attempting to correlate data on what drives microtransaction-style purchasing in the first place. More to the point, it was an attempt to discover whether price actually meant anything to the consumers who were actually making the purchases. The conclusion was that some users seem to just be bigger spenders than others, by enormous margins. They considered those users to be the "cash cows", so to speak, because once they decided to purchase additional content for a given game, they seemed to purchase almost indiscriminately... as opposed to the remaining 80% of the users, who (by and large) only purchased specific content.
They didn't appear to have a clue what made those users purchase orders of magnitude more of the additional content than the other users, although they seemed highly interested in obtaining that information...
Ok, I think we're talking about two separate ideas, here. I was actually talking about the phone game market (which I guess is slightly off-topic), where microtransactions account for something like 80% of certain software houses' income. The question, apparently, isn't whether someone is willing to pay $5.00 vs $0.50, it's more whether an individual is willing to make a microtransaction in the first place. The numbers I was reading (sorry, can't find the link now) said something like 20% of the people making microtransactions are worth %70 of the microtransaction income. If that subset of people is willing to spend any money whatsoever on the microtransactions, then they haven't got any qualms with dropping twenty, fifty, or even more on a single game's purchasable content.
You're giving specific numbers on specific content on a specific platform, whereas the data I was working with suggested that it was an overarching study (at least, they were talking about multiple phone platforms, rather than one specific OS).
Oh, and just so we can stay on the same page, I'm not sure that $20 for a single piece of downloadable content counts as a microtransaction (although the study I am referencing apparently thinks it's ok, so I guess it's a moot point).
Your Fujitsu might be a fairly capable little machine, but the battery life, cpu speed, and storage space are abysmal. My phone has a much faster (dual-core) processor, 4 times the RAM, more than half again the storage, and roughly 5 times the battery life. I'd wager that my phone is at least as capable as your netbook, as well. Admittedly, I have a high-end smartphone, but the tablets need to be at least as good as the phones in order for them to have a shot at people's money (barring, of course, the iDevice trendy factor). Otherwise, why wouldn't I use my phone for the portability, and dock it into a WebTop when I want a hardware keyboard and a larger display... or for that matter, plug in to a 35" TV via HDMI and use BlueTooth peripherals, turning it into a low-end PC?
With the addition of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology, a smartphone also has the potential to replace a wallet in a cash-less society. I'm not saying I expect that to happen by Christmas, but the possibility is now public knowledge. With the apps for controlling your vehicle, and the ability to interface with (and uniquely identify itself to) your security system, I can see tablets/phones becoming indispensable, used as wallet, key ring, internet connectivity, calendar, "little black book", journal, and general communication device, replacing at least half a dozen other objects adult humans tend to wander around with.
I'll support your cpu commentary with the following anecdote:
My Motorola Atrix feels significantly faster than any netbook I've played with so far, and the only downsides in the comparison are that the phone doesn't have a 7" screen, nor a hardware keyboard.
Here you can just pay a couple of dollars a month (2c/MB) through resellers - unless you like to watch youtube on the train every day.
In the US, the pricing seems to be closer to a penny per MB ($10/GB) for every major provider, it's just a larger chunk at a time that you have to pay for. The last "unlimited internet" 3G provider I was aware dropped their "unlimited" plan last month, so if you have the unlimited, do NOT give up your data plan.
As for 256mb, well, it was good enough for the "revolutionary" iPad -- hell, the iPad2 only has 512. What more do you want?
My phone is a dual-core 1Ghz with 1GB of RAM and 48GB (with SD expansion) of storage space. It outputs 1080p video via HDMI. It has BlueTooth, Wireless-N, 2 cameras... oh, and it is able to utilize the cellular network not only for data, but also to make phone calls.
I want my media-consumption device to be something that has enough oomph to run more than the retro clock on the home screen without dropping frames. I especially want my media consumption device to outperform my phone, since I'll be paying as much for that tablet as I did for the phone, and expecting less functionality from it.
That is, I expect it to do fewer things, but better.
No, really. Microtransactions seem to be where the money is, right now, in the market space. "Goofy little phone games" are cleaning up, making millions per month for doing almost nothing, now that their product is on the appropriate app stores.
"Free game, that you spend $5-10 a month on microtransactions" makes much more money (eventually) than "$60 game that you buy once and then never pay the publisher again".
So how does Lenovo guy know much about Samsung sales?
Samsung published its sales figures. They recently (about a month ago) decided to halt that practice, possibly because it was giving their competitors an advantage in the market.
The problem is not that tablets aren't PCs, nor is it that they are not cellphones.
Essentially, a tablet is a $500 input/output system for media consumption and "light productivity".
My cellphone is about as capable as a tablet, but doesn't have a 7-10 inch screen. On the other hand, it has an HDMI-out, and is capable of displaying 1080p on a connected audio/video output device, such as a 60" plasma TV.
HP's only issue, in my opinion, was that they dragged the tablet market in yet another OS direction. This is why I didn't bother to snatch up a WebOS tablet, even at firesale pricing. I want to run the same apps on my phone as I do on my tablet, and the same thing should be able to run on my PC. This is why iOS devices are leading the pack amongst those for whom portable productivity is the key feature.
The hardware technology is racing ahead, while the software struggles to keep up because the market for "intelligent" entertainment devices is exploding, but in fragmented directions.
First of all, the "ported phone apps" you describe aren't ported, they simply run natively on the same OS. Apple's success can largely be thought of in the same light, if you wanna make a big deal out of it. Apps written for one iOS device run on any of them.
There are too many Galaxy tabs in too many sizes, it has suffered total brand confusion. With Apple you just need to decide the Wifi or 3G, Balck or White and GB ammount. With Samsung you got the 7.0, 7.7, 8.9, 10.0, 10.1 and "note" 5.5 and "Player" 3.8, plus they are in legal limbo with Apple which gives you a risk of being stranded with a "banned" product.
Yeah, I hate having to choose a size in addition to deciding that I want a media playing device.
I mean, who needs a 7" tablet, when there's a 10" tablet? Nevermind that I can't slip a 10" tablet into a jacket pocket, whereas the 7" fits just fine...
Now when you get down to the less-than-four-inches tablet, you might have a point - my phone has a 4" screen and plays avi and mp4 video just fine. On the other hand, if the price point is $150 or so, and it's got plenty of storage space, then I might reconsider - my phone was $500 without a contract.
Wow, you responded to a discussion of the sales numbers of tablets with an exceedingly brief (3 sentences) "article" with the headline "Samsung Stops Reporting Phone Sales Data". Better yet, the article says that analysts speculates that the reason they did so was because of their continuing legal battles with Apple.
Way to go, champ. You've really got some good information, there. Meaty article, solid reasoning... supported the heck out of your tablet snobbery with an article about phones.
The only differences between BetaMax and BetaCam are the speed of the rollers (BetaCam is faster, because that allows a higher bandwidth) and the number of heads.
BetaCam is actually an extension of BetaMax. It is the C++ to C. Consider it BetaMax++.
Therefore, your argument is that "professionals" used higher-quality gear than consumers, although it was essentially the same technology.
I never suggested any solutions, so you're still barking up the wrong tree. All I did was correct a fallacious statement that banks and other businesses didn't operate at the hours of their own choosing. Better luck next time, thanks for playing.
And as a matter of fact, if I worked at that fire department, I'd have been fired for disobeying a superior's direct order, because I would have saved that man's house, fee or no. We can always go to court later to settle up the bill.
If I worked for that fire department right now, I'd be ashamed to leave my house, for fear my neighbors would see me.
This is like a doctor refusing to perform a life-saving operation because you don't have insurance. I hope the man and his family sue the fire department, all of its employees, and most especially the fire chief for deliberate and malicious dereliction of duty.
Good business would have been to show up, tell the guy he didn't pay for the fire protection, and give him a dollar figure he would need to cough up before they would put out the fire... not to show up and stand there with your thumb up your ass while you watch his house burn.
I'm willing to bet that the private fire department has a hard time getting *anyone* to pay their "protection fee" next year. I know I wouldn't... I'd instead invest in a few fire extinguishers, and maybe a hose connection at that tree in the backyard, so I could deal with it myself instead of paying some thugs' extortion racket.
it was a fee levied by the fire department for "protection". Any other "protection" schemes ring bells?
Yeah. The EXACT SAME THING a private fire department would levy on people. Do you honestly think that a private fire company would not do the same?
Actually, I was referring to the infamous mafia line of "it would be awful if something were to happen to your store", spoken by one of the pair of thugs or goons standing in said store with an expensive object balanced precariously on the edge of a shelf.
Imagine how that felt, to see the fire trucks pull up, sirens and lights blaring, and then all the firefighters get out and stand there watching everything you own burn down, while you beg and plead with them to save some fraction of it.
I would imagine it'd feel the exact same as when a private fire company does it. Oh wait, because they're private, they're saintly and holy, and would put the fire out for free.
I never said they should put the fire out "for free"... and as a matter of fact, the guy in the story offered to pay "whatever it took" for them to put the fire out.
Also, as other posters in this thread have pointed out, by not putting the guy's house out, they allowed other paying customers' property to become endangered, and even damaged. They stood there and not only watched his house burn, they watched it light his neighbor's house on fire, as well... and that guy DID pay the "tax".
Search and rescue will cheerfully charge you after the fact for being dumb enough to need rescued. They don't require you to be paid up on some sort of "life saving" insurance to do so, and they don't stand there and argue with you about how much it's going to cost to bring your broken body down from the ledge on the side of the cliff.
Is it really your point of view that a FIRE DEPARTMENT should stand by and let someone's house burn down while that someone stands there and offers to give them whatever they want in return for saving it?
Is it really your point of view that it's ok for them to let someone else's house catch on fire because they're not going to save the first house? Even if the second house was owned by someone who DID pay for "protection"?
You're a terrible human being, with no sense of duty to your community, and no sense of right vs wrong. Sorry for being ad hominem, but... wow. You take the cake, and knock the rest on to the floor because the other dinner guests didn't pay you for it. Good job.
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This means that getting together with your friends to hang out, and then deciding together that it would be nice to acquire a small amount of marijuana is not a misdemeanor, as the law books state, but a felony because you involved your friends. The best part? You don't even have to actually acquire the green stuff, simply planning with someone else to go buy some makes you a felon.
Probably wise to choose your friends carefully then if you're going to do something (however trivially) illegal with them. It's called common sense.
Please forgive the late reply, I've been somewhat busy for the past week.
The issue I was describing has nothing to do with choosing your friends carefully (everyone knows "it's only illegal if you get caught"). The base problem is that it is illegal to discuss perpetrating a crime in the first place, and the "criminality" of that discussion is higher than the actual crime.
Think about it this way: If you get pulled over for speeding, you get a citation. If the laws concerning conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor were applied to moving violations, you would go to jail (instead of being issued a ticket) if the officer who pulled you over had a reasonable suspicion that you intended to exceed the posted speed limit.
Rather than the maximum sentences for cyber crimes have failed to keep pace with the severity of the threats, it seems that in many cases the problem is that hacked party's network security has failed to keep pace with the value of the data.
If a thief breaks a company's car window (where there's a sign that says "Credit card numbers stored here!") and steals a printout with a million credit card numbers, everyone will say the company was stupid for leaving the printout sitting on the car seat.
Yet when a hacker exploits a well known (and easily eliminated) SQL injection vulnerability to do the same thing, suddenly the hacker is escalated to "organized crime" level?
I think the main issue here is that anyone with an IQ of 80+ can smash a car window to grab something they want from a car's seat or floorboard, whereas the hackers have "specialized information" that allows them to do things like injecting malicious SQL.
The issue is about being able to punish the hackers when they get caught. Of course, it's not enough to simply prove they did it; they want to prove some sort of criminal conspiracy to escalate the charges - never mind that there are already laws on the books that escalate charges if the authorities can prove collusion (it is a felony in most jurisdictions to conspire to commit a misdemeanor (among other things)).
Interestingly enough, we already have something that could be used to increase the penalties for illegal activity.
Conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor is a felony.
This means that getting together with your friends to hang out, and then deciding together that it would be nice to acquire a small amount of marijuana is not a misdemeanor, as the law books state, but a felony because you involved your friends. The best part? You don't even have to actually acquire the green stuff, simply planning with someone else to go buy some makes you a felon.
Therefore, being asked or told to do something one is aware is illegal, and then doing it, could result in being charged with a felony instead of a misdemeanor charge. This could turn graffiti, stealing a pack of gum, spitting on the sidewalk, etc, into a felony charge... simply because it was done by more than one person.
--
Remember, kids, it's only illegal if you get caught!
That totally pales in comparison to several other presidents. The worst one in my book was Lyndon Johnson, who's responsible for destroying the American economy in the 70s because of the Vietnam War, plus the deaths of over 50,000 American citizens in that atrocity, plus countless Vietnamese. He's not quite as bad as Stalin who's responsible for 20-30 million deaths, but the Vietnam war probably killed about 1 million total, and most of the blood of those are on LBJ's hands.
Maybe it's time we humans figured out that being the aggressor in any multi-national conflict is a good way to ruin the economy...
Now they are doing simple b&e and being 'praised' for it. If this same group had smashed open a door and stole the information and spray painted the walls would we still be applauding them? No we would throw their asses in jail.
Actually, I would call them Shadowrunners, and welcome the new era that I've seen coming for many years now.
I think I managed to wander off-topic in my rambling, but the gist of what I was attempting to put forth was that a small subset of the people willing to make micro-purchases are responsible for a large amount of the actual currency flow. The study's main thrust was that it appears it is not the price of the additional content that drives the purchase decisions, but some other factor; while the price point does have an impact, it is not as great an impact as whatever drives people to spend money on a game's downloadable content in the first place.
If I recall correctly, the study was attempting to correlate data on what drives microtransaction-style purchasing in the first place. More to the point, it was an attempt to discover whether price actually meant anything to the consumers who were actually making the purchases. The conclusion was that some users seem to just be bigger spenders than others, by enormous margins. They considered those users to be the "cash cows", so to speak, because once they decided to purchase additional content for a given game, they seemed to purchase almost indiscriminately... as opposed to the remaining 80% of the users, who (by and large) only purchased specific content.
They didn't appear to have a clue what made those users purchase orders of magnitude more of the additional content than the other users, although they seemed highly interested in obtaining that information...
Ok, I think we're talking about two separate ideas, here. I was actually talking about the phone game market (which I guess is slightly off-topic), where microtransactions account for something like 80% of certain software houses' income. The question, apparently, isn't whether someone is willing to pay $5.00 vs $0.50, it's more whether an individual is willing to make a microtransaction in the first place. The numbers I was reading (sorry, can't find the link now) said something like 20% of the people making microtransactions are worth %70 of the microtransaction income. If that subset of people is willing to spend any money whatsoever on the microtransactions, then they haven't got any qualms with dropping twenty, fifty, or even more on a single game's purchasable content.
You're giving specific numbers on specific content on a specific platform, whereas the data I was working with suggested that it was an overarching study (at least, they were talking about multiple phone platforms, rather than one specific OS).
Oh, and just so we can stay on the same page, I'm not sure that $20 for a single piece of downloadable content counts as a microtransaction (although the study I am referencing apparently thinks it's ok, so I guess it's a moot point).
... and the giant purple MSDOS book by Microsoft that nobody remembers...
... except for the people who still have one, sitting in a dark corner of the "storage area"...
Your Fujitsu might be a fairly capable little machine, but the battery life, cpu speed, and storage space are abysmal. My phone has a much faster (dual-core) processor, 4 times the RAM, more than half again the storage, and roughly 5 times the battery life. I'd wager that my phone is at least as capable as your netbook, as well. Admittedly, I have a high-end smartphone, but the tablets need to be at least as good as the phones in order for them to have a shot at people's money (barring, of course, the iDevice trendy factor). Otherwise, why wouldn't I use my phone for the portability, and dock it into a WebTop when I want a hardware keyboard and a larger display... or for that matter, plug in to a 35" TV via HDMI and use BlueTooth peripherals, turning it into a low-end PC?
With the addition of NFC (Near Field Communications) technology, a smartphone also has the potential to replace a wallet in a cash-less society. I'm not saying I expect that to happen by Christmas, but the possibility is now public knowledge. With the apps for controlling your vehicle, and the ability to interface with (and uniquely identify itself to) your security system, I can see tablets/phones becoming indispensable, used as wallet, key ring, internet connectivity, calendar, "little black book", journal, and general communication device, replacing at least half a dozen other objects adult humans tend to wander around with.
I'll support your cpu commentary with the following anecdote:
My Motorola Atrix feels significantly faster than any netbook I've played with so far, and the only downsides in the comparison are that the phone doesn't have a 7" screen, nor a hardware keyboard.
Here you can just pay a couple of dollars a month (2c/MB) through resellers - unless you like to watch youtube on the train every day.
In the US, the pricing seems to be closer to a penny per MB ($10/GB) for every major provider, it's just a larger chunk at a time that you have to pay for. The last "unlimited internet" 3G provider I was aware dropped their "unlimited" plan last month, so if you have the unlimited, do NOT give up your data plan.
As for 256mb, well, it was good enough for the "revolutionary" iPad -- hell, the iPad2 only has 512. What more do you want?
My phone is a dual-core 1Ghz with 1GB of RAM and 48GB (with SD expansion) of storage space. It outputs 1080p video via HDMI. It has BlueTooth, Wireless-N, 2 cameras... oh, and it is able to utilize the cellular network not only for data, but also to make phone calls.
I want my media-consumption device to be something that has enough oomph to run more than the retro clock on the home screen without dropping frames. I especially want my media consumption device to outperform my phone, since I'll be paying as much for that tablet as I did for the phone, and expecting less functionality from it.
That is, I expect it to do fewer things, but better.
DLC sales are tiny in comparison to game sales.
[citation needed]
No, really. Microtransactions seem to be where the money is, right now, in the market space. "Goofy little phone games" are cleaning up, making millions per month for doing almost nothing, now that their product is on the appropriate app stores.
"Free game, that you spend $5-10 a month on microtransactions" makes much more money (eventually) than "$60 game that you buy once and then never pay the publisher again".
So how does Lenovo guy know much about Samsung sales?
Samsung published its sales figures. They recently (about a month ago) decided to halt that practice, possibly because it was giving their competitors an advantage in the market.
The problem is not that tablets aren't PCs, nor is it that they are not cellphones.
Essentially, a tablet is a $500 input/output system for media consumption and "light productivity".
My cellphone is about as capable as a tablet, but doesn't have a 7-10 inch screen. On the other hand, it has an HDMI-out, and is capable of displaying 1080p on a connected audio/video output device, such as a 60" plasma TV.
HP's only issue, in my opinion, was that they dragged the tablet market in yet another OS direction. This is why I didn't bother to snatch up a WebOS tablet, even at firesale pricing. I want to run the same apps on my phone as I do on my tablet, and the same thing should be able to run on my PC. This is why iOS devices are leading the pack amongst those for whom portable productivity is the key feature.
The hardware technology is racing ahead, while the software struggles to keep up because the market for "intelligent" entertainment devices is exploding, but in fragmented directions.
First of all, the "ported phone apps" you describe aren't ported, they simply run natively on the same OS. Apple's success can largely be thought of in the same light, if you wanna make a big deal out of it. Apps written for one iOS device run on any of them.
--
Don't be retarded in public, please.
There are too many Galaxy tabs in too many sizes, it has suffered total brand confusion. With Apple you just need to decide the Wifi or 3G, Balck or White and GB ammount. With Samsung you got the 7.0, 7.7, 8.9, 10.0, 10.1 and "note" 5.5 and "Player" 3.8, plus they are in legal limbo with Apple which gives you a risk of being stranded with a "banned" product.
Yeah, I hate having to choose a size in addition to deciding that I want a media playing device.
I mean, who needs a 7" tablet, when there's a 10" tablet? Nevermind that I can't slip a 10" tablet into a jacket pocket, whereas the 7" fits just fine...
Now when you get down to the less-than-four-inches tablet, you might have a point - my phone has a 4" screen and plays avi and mp4 video just fine. On the other hand, if the price point is $150 or so, and it's got plenty of storage space, then I might reconsider - my phone was $500 without a contract.
Wow, you responded to a discussion of the sales numbers of tablets with an exceedingly brief (3 sentences) "article" with the headline "Samsung Stops Reporting Phone Sales Data". Better yet, the article says that analysts speculates that the reason they did so was because of their continuing legal battles with Apple.
Way to go, champ. You've really got some good information, there. Meaty article, solid reasoning... supported the heck out of your tablet snobbery with an article about phones.
Lemme guess, you're an iDiot?
This one might be more relevant to the discussion: what tablets looked like before and after the iPad.
And if you found that interesting, check out what Apple thought tablets should look like before they came up with the iPad.
Also, Knight-Ridder invented the iPad in 1994... 16 years before Apple did (Apple released the first iPad in April 2010, according to Wikipedia).
If Google is all about openness, where's the public repository for the search engine?
It is accessible via web browser at www.google.com
Just sayin'.
The only differences between BetaMax and BetaCam are the speed of the rollers (BetaCam is faster, because that allows a higher bandwidth) and the number of heads.
BetaCam is actually an extension of BetaMax. It is the C++ to C. Consider it BetaMax++.
Therefore, your argument is that "professionals" used higher-quality gear than consumers, although it was essentially the same technology.
Congratulations on your critical thinking skills?
I never suggested any solutions, so you're still barking up the wrong tree. All I did was correct a fallacious statement that banks and other businesses didn't operate at the hours of their own choosing. Better luck next time, thanks for playing.
And as a matter of fact, if I worked at that fire department, I'd have been fired for disobeying a superior's direct order, because I would have saved that man's house, fee or no. We can always go to court later to settle up the bill.
If I worked for that fire department right now, I'd be ashamed to leave my house, for fear my neighbors would see me.
This is like a doctor refusing to perform a life-saving operation because you don't have insurance.
I hope the man and his family sue the fire department, all of its employees, and most especially the fire chief for deliberate and malicious dereliction of duty.
Good business would have been to show up, tell the guy he didn't pay for the fire protection, and give him a dollar figure he would need to cough up before they would put out the fire... not to show up and stand there with your thumb up your ass while you watch his house burn.
I'm willing to bet that the private fire department has a hard time getting *anyone* to pay their "protection fee" next year. I know I wouldn't... I'd instead invest in a few fire extinguishers, and maybe a hose connection at that tree in the backyard, so I could deal with it myself instead of paying some thugs' extortion racket.
it was a fee levied by the fire department for "protection". Any other "protection" schemes ring bells?
Yeah. The EXACT SAME THING a private fire department would levy on people. Do you honestly think that a private fire company would not do the same?
Actually, I was referring to the infamous mafia line of "it would be awful if something were to happen to your store", spoken by one of the pair of thugs or goons standing in said store with an expensive object balanced precariously on the edge of a shelf.
Imagine how that felt, to see the fire trucks pull up, sirens and lights blaring, and then all the firefighters get out and stand there watching everything you own burn down, while you beg and plead with them to save some fraction of it.
I would imagine it'd feel the exact same as when a private fire company does it. Oh wait, because they're private, they're saintly and holy, and would put the fire out for free.
I never said they should put the fire out "for free"... and as a matter of fact, the guy in the story offered to pay "whatever it took" for them to put the fire out.
Also, as other posters in this thread have pointed out, by not putting the guy's house out, they allowed other paying customers' property to become endangered, and even damaged. They stood there and not only watched his house burn, they watched it light his neighbor's house on fire, as well... and that guy DID pay the "tax".
Search and rescue will cheerfully charge you after the fact for being dumb enough to need rescued. They don't require you to be paid up on some sort of "life saving" insurance to do so, and they don't stand there and argue with you about how much it's going to cost to bring your broken body down from the ledge on the side of the cliff.
Is it really your point of view that a FIRE DEPARTMENT should stand by and let someone's house burn down while that someone stands there and offers to give them whatever they want in return for saving it?
Is it really your point of view that it's ok for them to let someone else's house catch on fire because they're not going to save the first house? Even if the second house was owned by someone who DID pay for "protection"?
You're a terrible human being, with no sense of duty to your community, and no sense of right vs wrong. Sorry for being ad hominem, but... wow. You take the cake, and knock the rest on to the floor because the other dinner guests didn't pay you for it. Good job.