As long as locations can be stored forever, and retrieved at a whim, abuse will be significant.
And let's not forget that every database like this seems to get hacked, so this means that stalkers/burglars/whoever will also end up with the information.
Having traffic plate scanners all over the place seems like an extension of case #2 where the police are checking license plates on their own... but simply using technology to speed up the process.
No, having license plate scanners is like having tracking devices on vehicles...it means that tracking can be done with little to no effort on the part of the government.
If the police want to task some officers to follow you 24/7, that's fine, since they have to figure out a way to do that within the budget and without disrupting their ability to support the rest of the community. Likewise, if they want to task officers to sit at corners and record license plate numbers, that's fine, too. Or, if they need to review the traffic cameras for a specific incident, that's OK, but having those cameras that were installed with the promise that it would help drivers manage their commute with no mention of long-term storage of the data also automatically create a database of license plates is wrong.
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil never made much sense in the book and would have been a huge plot hole to movie audiences.
Much like how Dobby had to die before the final battle in the final Harry Potter book, Tom Bombadil needed to be gone in such a way that he couldn't help (and the "not wanting to" from the book doesn't really hold up). This way, we avoid having a being of essentially limitless power alive and doing nothing while our much less powerful heroes struggle with their quest. The easiest way to do this in the LotR movies was to just not introduce him in the first place.
Like you, I have swapped out controller boards (quite a few times, actually), and it seems to work even on fairly modern drives. I have also removed platters and transplanted them with success, but only on 5-1/4" drives. Today, it's much easier to swap the controller card. Although I haven't done it recently, since everything I have runs RAID and is backed up, I don't see how the three years or so since I last resorted to these methods would make that much difference.
I have also done the freezer trick to recover data from drives, but this only seems to work on drives that boot OK and work for a while and then give you issues. I don't know what on the drive is most affected by the heat, but I suppose that must be the problem if the freezer works.
I would never recommend hitting with a hammer, but if a drive doesn't spin up at all, plugging it in and dropping it about 1" onto a carpeted surface might get the drive going. For such sticky drives, I have also opened the drive up and manually spun it to move it off any "flat spot", then closed it back up and recovered data.
Unless the data is worth a lot of money and you don't have a backup, a drive recovery service isn't worth it. All these other tricks work just fine for the "I've got backups of everything but the last day/week/whatever and just need it working for a few minutes" scenario. Also, it kind of goes without saying that booting off a different drive when doing the recovery is smart, as any OS errors should be avoided that way.
Also, a.223 is not a "high powered" rifle, it's actually on the low end.
Whether a round is "high-powered" or not depends entirely on the round, not the weapon (assuming the weapon is chambered to handle a particular round).
Compared to a.44 magnum ("the most powerful handgun in the world", according to Dirty Harry), the average.223 Remington is more powerful than most.44 magnum loads. Only the 340 grain.44 mag is more powerful (2000 joules of energy vs. around 1800 for the.223). And, compared to the 700J or so for the.40 S&W Glocks he was carrying, the.223 was a lot more powerful.
As for other rifles, the.223 is on the low side, but the bullet does tumble a bit, and thus causes some pretty serious wounds regardless of the raw energy of the bullet. The advantage is in the low recoil compared to something like a.30-30.
It's not subsidized...that's why it's $10/month (or more) and isn't included in any "basic" package. The ESPN networks are the most expensive non-premium channel, and they are subsidized (by being included in more basic packages), so it's only $3 or so that it costs the cable company.
The reason cable companies generally force you to buy some "basic" package before they sell you HBO isn't because they can't afford to sell you just HBO...it's because they have to have a basic package that includes the local over-the-air channels. Of course, the cable company does want to sell you a big package, because they get more cash flow that way. Even if the percentage profit is the same for all packages, the bigger cash flow is desireable.
Last, they want you to have a cable box that easily allows you to get every add-on extra (PPV, etc.), so that those offerings are visible to you every day, and maybe you'll buy them.
Only if you want to slow charge via USB. Otherwise, you carry the Apple charger.
If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd say that Apple is going for the trifecta with this new connector:
It's still proprietary.
it's not directly compatible with the old connector (although an adapter might work).
It still allows you to charge the battery very quickly, which is not good for rechargeable batteries if done regularly, and the battery on the iPhone is not user-replaceable (i.e., the back of the phone is not intended to be opened by the user).
So HBO + Syfy + Food would be $10 + $2 + $2 plus the $7 hookup fee I discussed above. About $21 per month.....
Except all three channels will cost more because fewer people will be paying for them.
In the long run HBO should cost less with a la carte, while the others may or may not go up. HBO would go down because there would only be the "pay for HBO" requirement, instead of the "pay for all the other channels first to be allowed to pay for HBO" model that currently exists.
On the old C-Band satellite (big dish), the uptake of premium channels was a lot higher than on current "first you pay for our basic service" providers because it was all a la carte (although you could find bundles of channels that saved you money, but you didn't have to buy them). Also, Dish Network used to have a really bare bones package that was something like $10/month, and it was enough of a "basic service" to allow you to pay for premiums. People would subscribe to that so that they could get sports packages and other premium channels without having to pay for all the other channels. I don't know if that package still exists.
i don't know about the rest of you but I'd happily take a phone that's a little fatter that gives me 30% more time.
Before I got a 4G Android, I had a Nokia dumb phone for nearly 10 years. The primary reason I was reluctant to upgrade was the battery life...50 hours of continuous talk, and over a month just turned on and doing nothing. This was with an extended battery, but it still fit in my pants pocket.
I get about 3 days of normal use from my current phone, but I'm lucky that I don't have signal issues where I normally am. My wife was about the same with her phone until her company moved to a new building, and now she can't leave her phone on at the office because of the terrible signal that drains the battery in about 7 hours.
Both of which will drop the fuel efficiency down to the point that you might as well be driving a larger vehicle. Just having a roof rack (with nothing on it) is good for about a 10% drop in mileage, and loading it will give you anywhere from 20%-40% loss. If you're doing any driving that strains the car with just a driver (e.g., does cruise control not maintain speed when climbing hills?) then with 5 people plus their luggage, plus the rack/trailer, you'll be really straining, and really getting out of the sweet spot.
BTW, if you start with the 3.6 liter engine, the Outback (which is what the Legacy wagon is now officially called) already is a "large vehicle" as far as mileage is concerned, but with far less capacity.
Because politicians feel they have to make rules to be perceived as "doing something".
If a politician spent several years of time cleaning up existing laws (and removing "duplicates" or old laws against carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket) so they were more logical and readable to regular people, they'd be seen as not having "done" anything during that time. Add to that the fact that there are so many special interest groups, and you get lots of laws passed just to help win some votes.
Try a Subaru Legacy Wagon. My parents have been driving those since '82, and not only can you fit just about anything in them (including a five person family)
Make sure you have a GPS that gives you the locations of laundromats if you want to spend two weeks in something that small with 5 people and their luggage, since that would be the only way it would actually fit. If you are travelling with any sort of sporting equipment (golf, skiing, bowling, etc.), just forget it...you can either fit equipment for four people or the four people, but not both.
I resell stuff on ebay, and yes it's been used, but you will get a lot more money if you can advertise it as "new" in appearance.
Not really, since the only effective difference between "Like New" and "Very Good" on eBay's grading scale is that "Like New" must include everything that came with the item when it was purchased. The actual condition of the item in both cases needs to be identical, even though the description for "Very Good" is much more long-winded. Basically, if you have a "scuff, scratch, hole or crack" on the exterior of an item, it technically doesn't even qualify as "Very Good", yet nobody will care about most pieces of electronics having a scuff, especially if it is hidden from view during normal use.
I've got a lot of historical auction data that my sniping program keeps, and it shows that even "brand new" doesn't give you much of a boost over "very good", unless the new item has a valid warranty of decent length. For items like optical disks that are at least "Good", the only thing that really matters is the current retail availability and price. Except for the fact that I don't have every bit that came with all my DVDs and Blu-Rays (those advertising inserts get recycled), every on of them would qualify as "Like New", since they've only been "played" once (to rip to my media server). I'm not alone in this, so it's not hard to find "Like New" DVDs.
I see things like this a lot; what exactly do you have against the ribbon?/quote>
For casual or new users, the ribbon is likely an easier interface.
For power users or users very experienced with the old menu structure (it's basics are unchanged for nearly 20 years), the ribbon is a nightmare. Offering users a choice of interface would have been the logical thing for Microsoft to do, but because of forced lock-in (like that described in TFA), MS doesn't have to care about existing users all that much.
Do you have a source for this? Not that I specifically disbelieve, but to decide to go down that route a TV manufacturer would be actively deciding to screw the picture up.
No specific pages, just manufacturer's sites.
I'm looking to replace my 10-year-old HDTV (no HDMI input is starting to be a real problem), and was looking mostly at Panasonic plasmas. The fact that only the most expensive sets they sell have this feature (which they call "24p cinematic playback") was a surprise to me. It is becoming available on less expensive TVs as time goes on, but the majority of TVs from all manufacturers either apply 2:3 pulldown to display at 30Hz (or a multiple thereof) or do some sort of frame interpolation (which Panasonic calls either "Intelligent Frame Creation" if the target is 30Hz or "24p Smooth" if the target is a multiple of 24Hz).
For LCDs, it's really silly, though, as there is no "refresh" at all if the picture doesn't change. So, there shouldn't be any issue if the LCD chemicals can respond fast enough to deal with a 120Hz input...the display would then just refresh whenever a new picture came along. The problem is that TV manufacturers haven't figured out that what they are actually selling is combo box with a monitor, TV tuner, and video switcher inside. If the hardware was divided up that way, then you could easily see that the monitor portion would act just like a computer monitor, which doesn't really care how fast the video is playing, but instead just changes pixels whenever the input signal changes.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
Most "120 Hz" TVs process 24fps input by performing 3:2 pulldown. After that, each frame is shown 4 times. This will give you some judder as some frames are visible for longer than others. You can overcome this a bit by interlacing or blending frames in some other way, but then you lose resolution.
There are only a few TVs that support 24fps directly by showing each frame the same number of times. If you had one of those TVs, then you wouldn't notice an issue.
Fly: ~$300 per person round trip. You get one carry-on bag per person. 1.5 hrs each way + 4 hrs of transit/wait time.
Train: ~$250 per person round trip. You can carry more on. 8 hrs each way + 2 hrs of transit/wait time.
Car: ~$75 per car round trip. You can carry even more. 6 hrs each way; no wait time.
By "NYC area", you mean "an hour south of New York City", right, since it's at least a 7-hour drive from within the city to Norfolk. Yes, you can drive faster than the speed limit (which is what MapQuest and Google use in their 7+ hour calculations), but you need to drive a lot faster to make up for the traffic you will likely hit unless you drive at night.
There is a considerable hypocrisy in DirectTV's CEO looping a video on the down channels complaining about how awful it is that Viacom is forcing them to take all the channels as one package.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
There's no hypocrisy at all here. The reason DirecTV won't let you pick individual channels is because their contacts with the channel owners won't let them.
Companies like Viacom know that in order to allow providers like DirecTV to sell a la carte, they would have to price individual channels realistically, and they would get a lot less uptake, and thus advertising dollars (which are based on both actual and possible viewers) would go down. The affected channel list shows just how badly Viacom would lose possible viewers based on a la carte. Of the 17 channels, only about 4 could be considered "general viewership": 1 is gay/lesbian interest, 2 are aimed at African Americans, 4 primarily at children, 6 are music channels (well, maybe not MTV) with several aimed at specific types (Hispanic, country, etc.) of music.
I did 66 credits in two semesters studying at full throttle, which was probably a little extreme. If you want to be casual about it 20 is ok, but 12?
The rule of thumb is that a "normal" course will require at least 2.5x as many hours outside classroom time for study, projects, etc., while "hard" courses (major projects, etc.) will be 4x or more.
So, that means for 20 credit hours, it would require 20 * 3.5 = 70 hours per week for "average" courses. For 33 credits, that would leave you with just 7.5 hours/day to do stuff like eat, sleep, etc. If you didn't have to spend as much time on course work, then those are pretty easy courses.
Because you're forgetting the biggest problem with mobile devices: The battery. Without energy, it doesn't matter how much whiz-bang you can do. It's still just a paperweight.
I have a portable, external battery that is about 3"x3"x1" and runs my phone for normal use (which is 4G always on, background data always enabled, bluetooth and GPS always on) for a week. It's also pretty easy to be near a USB port, and these days that's enough for every decent phone.
If the pirate sites can't get ad money, donation money, or subscription money, how are they meant to survive?
You can run a pretty busy tracker off a $100/month VPS. I'm fairly certain there are people who would run such a tracker just to avoid spending money on cable TV. Or, there could be people who just think that sharing copyrighted material isn't wrong, and $100/month isn't a big deal to "keep up the fight".
BUT, a person looking at my snapshots can EASILY figure out when I get up, when I go to sleep, my days off, etc.
And, what's important is that the people who claim "but the electric company already knows this" are completely wrong.
The electric company generally knows nothing on an individual account other than how much power was used between readings (usually monthly). That's one reason why they are pushing the smart meters...to see if the aggregate data they do have really does correlate to lots of people doing similar things.
The best part is all of this can be mined and viewed right from someone's desk. No need to stalk me to figure all of this out.
And this is the other reason. If the power company can make money by selling or using your data (like grocery stores), that's a revenue stream that they never had before.
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As long as locations can be stored forever, and retrieved at a whim, abuse will be significant.
And let's not forget that every database like this seems to get hacked, so this means that stalkers/burglars/whoever will also end up with the information.
Having traffic plate scanners all over the place seems like an extension of case #2 where the police are checking license plates on their own... but simply using technology to speed up the process.
No, having license plate scanners is like having tracking devices on vehicles...it means that tracking can be done with little to no effort on the part of the government.
If the police want to task some officers to follow you 24/7, that's fine, since they have to figure out a way to do that within the budget and without disrupting their ability to support the rest of the community. Likewise, if they want to task officers to sit at corners and record license plate numbers, that's fine, too. Or, if they need to review the traffic cameras for a specific incident, that's OK, but having those cameras that were installed with the promise that it would help drivers manage their commute with no mention of long-term storage of the data also automatically create a database of license plates is wrong.
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil never made much sense in the book and would have been a huge plot hole to movie audiences.
Much like how Dobby had to die before the final battle in the final Harry Potter book, Tom Bombadil needed to be gone in such a way that he couldn't help (and the "not wanting to" from the book doesn't really hold up). This way, we avoid having a being of essentially limitless power alive and doing nothing while our much less powerful heroes struggle with their quest. The easiest way to do this in the LotR movies was to just not introduce him in the first place.
I think I'm getting old. I much rather be at a 80dB concert (if that) ...
80dB average would be fine for a concert, but peaks at 80dB wouldn't be loud at all.
It's not unusual for a movie on a well-calibrated home theater to hit peaks over 90dB when normal speech is at "just right" volume.
One word: Yes.
Like you, I have swapped out controller boards (quite a few times, actually), and it seems to work even on fairly modern drives. I have also removed platters and transplanted them with success, but only on 5-1/4" drives. Today, it's much easier to swap the controller card. Although I haven't done it recently, since everything I have runs RAID and is backed up, I don't see how the three years or so since I last resorted to these methods would make that much difference.
I have also done the freezer trick to recover data from drives, but this only seems to work on drives that boot OK and work for a while and then give you issues. I don't know what on the drive is most affected by the heat, but I suppose that must be the problem if the freezer works.
I would never recommend hitting with a hammer, but if a drive doesn't spin up at all, plugging it in and dropping it about 1" onto a carpeted surface might get the drive going. For such sticky drives, I have also opened the drive up and manually spun it to move it off any "flat spot", then closed it back up and recovered data.
Unless the data is worth a lot of money and you don't have a backup, a drive recovery service isn't worth it. All these other tricks work just fine for the "I've got backups of everything but the last day/week/whatever and just need it working for a few minutes" scenario. Also, it kind of goes without saying that booting off a different drive when doing the recovery is smart, as any OS errors should be avoided that way.
Also, a .223 is not a "high powered" rifle, it's actually on the low end.
Whether a round is "high-powered" or not depends entirely on the round, not the weapon (assuming the weapon is chambered to handle a particular round).
Compared to a .44 magnum ("the most powerful handgun in the world", according to Dirty Harry), the average .223 Remington is more powerful than most .44 magnum loads. Only the 340 grain .44 mag is more powerful (2000 joules of energy vs. around 1800 for the .223). And, compared to the 700J or so for the .40 S&W Glocks he was carrying, the .223 was a lot more powerful.
As for other rifles, the .223 is on the low side, but the bullet does tumble a bit, and thus causes some pretty serious wounds regardless of the raw energy of the bullet. The advantage is in the low recoil compared to something like a .30-30.
It's not subsidized...that's why it's $10/month (or more) and isn't included in any "basic" package. The ESPN networks are the most expensive non-premium channel, and they are subsidized (by being included in more basic packages), so it's only $3 or so that it costs the cable company.
The reason cable companies generally force you to buy some "basic" package before they sell you HBO isn't because they can't afford to sell you just HBO...it's because they have to have a basic package that includes the local over-the-air channels. Of course, the cable company does want to sell you a big package, because they get more cash flow that way. Even if the percentage profit is the same for all packages, the bigger cash flow is desireable.
Last, they want you to have a cable box that easily allows you to get every add-on extra (PPV, etc.), so that those offerings are visible to you every day, and maybe you'll buy them.
Only if you want to slow charge via USB. Otherwise, you carry the Apple charger.
If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd say that Apple is going for the trifecta with this new connector:
So HBO + Syfy + Food would be $10 + $2 + $2 plus the $7 hookup fee I discussed above. About $21 per month.....
Except all three channels will cost more because fewer people will be paying for them.
In the long run HBO should cost less with a la carte, while the others may or may not go up. HBO would go down because there would only be the "pay for HBO" requirement, instead of the "pay for all the other channels first to be allowed to pay for HBO" model that currently exists.
On the old C-Band satellite (big dish), the uptake of premium channels was a lot higher than on current "first you pay for our basic service" providers because it was all a la carte (although you could find bundles of channels that saved you money, but you didn't have to buy them). Also, Dish Network used to have a really bare bones package that was something like $10/month, and it was enough of a "basic service" to allow you to pay for premiums. People would subscribe to that so that they could get sports packages and other premium channels without having to pay for all the other channels. I don't know if that package still exists.
i don't know about the rest of you but I'd happily take a phone that's a little fatter that gives me 30% more time.
Before I got a 4G Android, I had a Nokia dumb phone for nearly 10 years. The primary reason I was reluctant to upgrade was the battery life...50 hours of continuous talk, and over a month just turned on and doing nothing. This was with an extended battery, but it still fit in my pants pocket.
I get about 3 days of normal use from my current phone, but I'm lucky that I don't have signal issues where I normally am. My wife was about the same with her phone until her company moved to a new building, and now she can't leave her phone on at the office because of the terrible signal that drains the battery in about 7 hours.
Both of which will drop the fuel efficiency down to the point that you might as well be driving a larger vehicle. Just having a roof rack (with nothing on it) is good for about a 10% drop in mileage, and loading it will give you anywhere from 20%-40% loss. If you're doing any driving that strains the car with just a driver (e.g., does cruise control not maintain speed when climbing hills?) then with 5 people plus their luggage, plus the rack/trailer, you'll be really straining, and really getting out of the sweet spot.
BTW, if you start with the 3.6 liter engine, the Outback (which is what the Legacy wagon is now officially called) already is a "large vehicle" as far as mileage is concerned, but with far less capacity.
Then why do we spend so much energy making rules?
Because politicians feel they have to make rules to be perceived as "doing something".
If a politician spent several years of time cleaning up existing laws (and removing "duplicates" or old laws against carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket) so they were more logical and readable to regular people, they'd be seen as not having "done" anything during that time. Add to that the fact that there are so many special interest groups, and you get lots of laws passed just to help win some votes.
Most cars cannot fit more than two child seats (properly secured).
I guess it depends on the car seats.
Technically, the middle seat at the link is not "properly secured", as a seat belt alone is not enough in many states.
Try a Subaru Legacy Wagon. My parents have been driving those since '82, and not only can you fit just about anything in them (including a five person family)
Make sure you have a GPS that gives you the locations of laundromats if you want to spend two weeks in something that small with 5 people and their luggage, since that would be the only way it would actually fit. If you are travelling with any sort of sporting equipment (golf, skiing, bowling, etc.), just forget it...you can either fit equipment for four people or the four people, but not both.
I resell stuff on ebay, and yes it's been used, but you will get a lot more money if you can advertise it as "new" in appearance.
Not really, since the only effective difference between "Like New" and "Very Good" on eBay's grading scale is that "Like New" must include everything that came with the item when it was purchased. The actual condition of the item in both cases needs to be identical, even though the description for "Very Good" is much more long-winded. Basically, if you have a "scuff, scratch, hole or crack" on the exterior of an item, it technically doesn't even qualify as "Very Good", yet nobody will care about most pieces of electronics having a scuff, especially if it is hidden from view during normal use.
I've got a lot of historical auction data that my sniping program keeps, and it shows that even "brand new" doesn't give you much of a boost over "very good", unless the new item has a valid warranty of decent length. For items like optical disks that are at least "Good", the only thing that really matters is the current retail availability and price. Except for the fact that I don't have every bit that came with all my DVDs and Blu-Rays (those advertising inserts get recycled), every on of them would qualify as "Like New", since they've only been "played" once (to rip to my media server). I'm not alone in this, so it's not hard to find "Like New" DVDs.
I see things like this a lot; what exactly do you have against the ribbon?/quote>
For casual or new users, the ribbon is likely an easier interface.
For power users or users very experienced with the old menu structure (it's basics are unchanged for nearly 20 years), the ribbon is a nightmare. Offering users a choice of interface would have been the logical thing for Microsoft to do, but because of forced lock-in (like that described in TFA), MS doesn't have to care about existing users all that much.
Do you have a source for this? Not that I specifically disbelieve, but to decide to go down that route a TV manufacturer would be actively deciding to screw the picture up.
No specific pages, just manufacturer's sites.
I'm looking to replace my 10-year-old HDTV (no HDMI input is starting to be a real problem), and was looking mostly at Panasonic plasmas. The fact that only the most expensive sets they sell have this feature (which they call "24p cinematic playback") was a surprise to me. It is becoming available on less expensive TVs as time goes on, but the majority of TVs from all manufacturers either apply 2:3 pulldown to display at 30Hz (or a multiple thereof) or do some sort of frame interpolation (which Panasonic calls either "Intelligent Frame Creation" if the target is 30Hz or "24p Smooth" if the target is a multiple of 24Hz).
For LCDs, it's really silly, though, as there is no "refresh" at all if the picture doesn't change. So, there shouldn't be any issue if the LCD chemicals can respond fast enough to deal with a 120Hz input...the display would then just refresh whenever a new picture came along. The problem is that TV manufacturers haven't figured out that what they are actually selling is combo box with a monitor, TV tuner, and video switcher inside. If the hardware was divided up that way, then you could easily see that the monitor portion would act just like a computer monitor, which doesn't really care how fast the video is playing, but instead just changes pixels whenever the input signal changes.
What other reality that you know of looks anything like HD film – where in reality can you see people's pores without a magnifying glass?
Film has always had better than HD resolution. It is great that we can now finally appreciate that in our homes without spending a fortune.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
Most "120 Hz" TVs process 24fps input by performing 3:2 pulldown. After that, each frame is shown 4 times. This will give you some judder as some frames are visible for longer than others. You can overcome this a bit by interlacing or blending frames in some other way, but then you lose resolution.
There are only a few TVs that support 24fps directly by showing each frame the same number of times. If you had one of those TVs, then you wouldn't notice an issue.
Trip to Norfolk, VA from NYC area.
Fly: ~$300 per person round trip. You get one carry-on bag per person. 1.5 hrs each way + 4 hrs of transit/wait time.
Train: ~$250 per person round trip. You can carry more on. 8 hrs each way + 2 hrs of transit/wait time.
Car: ~$75 per car round trip. You can carry even more. 6 hrs each way; no wait time.
By "NYC area", you mean "an hour south of New York City", right, since it's at least a 7-hour drive from within the city to Norfolk. Yes, you can drive faster than the speed limit (which is what MapQuest and Google use in their 7+ hour calculations), but you need to drive a lot faster to make up for the traffic you will likely hit unless you drive at night.
There is a considerable hypocrisy in DirectTV's CEO looping a video on the down channels complaining about how awful it is that Viacom is forcing them to take all the channels as one package.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
There's no hypocrisy at all here. The reason DirecTV won't let you pick individual channels is because their contacts with the channel owners won't let them.
Companies like Viacom know that in order to allow providers like DirecTV to sell a la carte, they would have to price individual channels realistically, and they would get a lot less uptake, and thus advertising dollars (which are based on both actual and possible viewers) would go down. The affected channel list shows just how badly Viacom would lose possible viewers based on a la carte. Of the 17 channels, only about 4 could be considered "general viewership": 1 is gay/lesbian interest, 2 are aimed at African Americans, 4 primarily at children, 6 are music channels (well, maybe not MTV) with several aimed at specific types (Hispanic, country, etc.) of music.
I did 66 credits in two semesters studying at full throttle, which was probably a little extreme. If you want to be casual about it 20 is ok, but 12?
The rule of thumb is that a "normal" course will require at least 2.5x as many hours outside classroom time for study, projects, etc., while "hard" courses (major projects, etc.) will be 4x or more.
So, that means for 20 credit hours, it would require 20 * 3.5 = 70 hours per week for "average" courses. For 33 credits, that would leave you with just 7.5 hours/day to do stuff like eat, sleep, etc. If you didn't have to spend as much time on course work, then those are pretty easy courses.
Because you're forgetting the biggest problem with mobile devices: The battery. Without energy, it doesn't matter how much whiz-bang you can do. It's still just a paperweight.
I have a portable, external battery that is about 3"x3"x1" and runs my phone for normal use (which is 4G always on, background data always enabled, bluetooth and GPS always on) for a week. It's also pretty easy to be near a USB port, and these days that's enough for every decent phone.
If the pirate sites can't get ad money, donation money, or subscription money, how are they meant to survive?
You can run a pretty busy tracker off a $100/month VPS. I'm fairly certain there are people who would run such a tracker just to avoid spending money on cable TV. Or, there could be people who just think that sharing copyrighted material isn't wrong, and $100/month isn't a big deal to "keep up the fight".
BUT, a person looking at my snapshots can EASILY figure out when I get up, when I go to sleep, my days off, etc.
And, what's important is that the people who claim "but the electric company already knows this" are completely wrong.
The electric company generally knows nothing on an individual account other than how much power was used between readings (usually monthly). That's one reason why they are pushing the smart meters...to see if the aggregate data they do have really does correlate to lots of people doing similar things.
The best part is all of this can be mined and viewed right from someone's desk. No need to stalk me to figure all of this out.
And this is the other reason. If the power company can make money by selling or using your data (like grocery stores), that's a revenue stream that they never had before.