This reminds me of the time we stopped in Jarretsville, MD. Just one piece of advice: don't. Ditto for Sperryville, VA (unless you want to go to what looked like a really fancy sit-down, which I didn't check out). The Sperryville experience actually involved me pulling away from the store, taking a bite of the sandwhich, and spitting it out because the meat tasted spoiled. That almost never happens at nationwide chains, and if it does, and you take it back, you'll get a quality replacement. I knew it was pointless to turn around, because they had pulled this spoiled meat from a big thing. That was their standard of quality. Then there was the raw pork barbecue in South Florida. Don't get me started on that.
Some general advice about mom-n-pops: Tables with square bent metal and vinyl covered chairs are a bad sign. If you've traveled the east coast of the US, you know the kind of chairs I'm talking about. I think whenever a nasty restaurant closes down, the next nasty restaurant picks these chairs up at the close-out.
Next, make sure the food preparation area is either totally obscured, or totally out in the open. My theory on this? If it's totally out in the open, they are proud of their process. If it's totally closed, the place is sufficiently upscale to separate the kitchen from the dining experience. At places where the food preparation is "semi-obscured" it means that they couldn't afford ambience, and they aren't proud of what they're doing.
Next, know your region. I don't think I've ever had bad bar-b-que in Texas. It's probably a capital offense to serve bad bbq there. If you walk into a Salvadoran restaurant, and see Salvadorans eating there, you are probably OK. Ditto for any other ethnic restaurant. Avoid places on "US" or state highways where there is little or no competition. Note, on the interstate system, competition may not exist at an exit, but if it exists 5 miles down the road you are probably OK.
Finally, learn from bad experiences and develop your "sense" of what's going to be good. Use your nose. Ask for a menu, and don't be afraid to turn around if you can't check the place out. Look at the people sitting there. Are they clean people? Dirty restaurants tend to attract dirty people.
Bottom line? When you're on the road and you're hungry, the safe mediocrity of McDonalds can be unbeatable.
You're nuts. If I violate the TOS with my current ISP, I go get another one. If I violate the TOS with the government, I'm ostracized and have nowhere else to turn.
but hardly anyone will vote outside the two parties for fear of "wasting their vote."
People will vote 3rd party when a credible 3rd party comes along. The Whigs got replaced by the Republicans. The Republicans were devestated by Bull Moose for one election. 19% voted for Perot and he was a nut with a senile running mate. Give us a credible 3rd party candidate who is pro-environment, willing to cut government waste, favors maintaining the military, not given to creating special exceptions for corporate wankers, and not prone to stir up hornets nests for no good reason (gays in the military, prayer in schools, federal abortion funding) and you've got a winner. Actually, if the Republicans had gone pro-environment, the Democrats would be pretty much useless... of course, that's just my opinion. The only time I've ever voted Dem was in a local election because the Republican candidate had a record that included allowing a chicken plant to dump raw waste into a river. There was no credible 3rd party candidate in that election. If there was, I'd have voted for him/her.
I half expected to see airborne lasers used for boost-phase antimissile defense in the current war. I guess it's still too experimental. Then again, maybe they were trying to use it as the primary defense and didn't tell us. It seems like a smart approach to combine this with something like the Patriot missile. If the laser fails, then try the missile.
Also, it's probably not a visible laser, but if you really want to burst your enemy's bubble, there'd be nothing like having him launch his most sophisticated missile, and then seeing a friggin laser come out of the sky and shoot it down.
Huh. I had heard of DVI but was mislead into believing it was just for digital video from cameras and stuff, and not for general purpose graphics. Unfortunately, the mini-itx board I was hoping to use doesn't mention DVI. Word on the street is that that the alleged LVDS availability isn't real either--the contacts are there but no socket is soldered onto them!
Of course I could install another video card, but that would defeat the whole purpose of using the mini-itx board to begin with. So, for the time being, my quest continues.
I've been researching info regarding using laptop LCDs with a PC, because I want to build a portable PC. One thing I discovered is that the connector on your monitor is essentially analog, whereas the signal in the video card is digital. A laptop can drive the digitial display directly with a digital signal, using LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) or a similar proprietary standard. Stand-alone LCD monitors take an anlog signal from your PC and convert it to digital. Not only do you have the cost of D/A and A/D conversion, you also have power consumption associated with this.
The prices on the "controllers" that allow you to drive an LCD from a standard VGA connector are around $200 as separate items, mostly because they are low demand specialty items. Such controllers are integrated into stand-alone monitors, and economies of scale keep them from adding too much to the bottom line.
So, while there is some justification for the increased cost of stand-alone displays, I tend to agree that the controller, case, and associated parts don't explain the entire difference.
I'm less bothered by the prices, and more bothered by the fact that low-power technology is simply not available. For that matter, the entire laptop industry is full of artificial controls. However, it's encouraging to note that you can at least get laptop form-factor hard drives. Given time, I think some of the other tight controls will break down too, and we will start to see "screwdriver shops" building laptops from commodity parts. I eagerly anticipate the day that happens, as much as every incumbent laptop maker dreads it.
No smaller than a US nickel please. Dimes are my least favorite coin for this very reason--small enough to lose quite easily, yet way more valuable than pennies. Pennies are easy to lose too, but who cares? I routinely give them back to the cashiers for "penny karma".
My data, of course, is worth more than a nickel. Ideally, the flash should be as cheap as a nickel, or better yet the nickel should be replaced as a national currency with however much flash fits in a nickel-shaped package.
I mean, money that was intrinsicly valuable would be way cool. US coins could be pre-loaded with great works that had passed into the Public Domain. Stick a quarter in your PC, watch Steamboat Willie... oh... wait.
Why Would I Want In Now? I mean, "to google" is already a verb. How much more growth can this thing possible have left in it? Sorry folks, the money (if there is any to be made) has already been made, but then, that was the dirty secret of IPOs that nobody knew in 1999, but anybody with half a brain should know now.
I've never used VPN, but IIRC, doesn't Windows 98 and later have VPN support built in? I know it has modem sharing built in, so does this make your Windows CD a circumvention device? Personally, if all the lawyers want to go off and circle jerk themselves into oblivion over this, that's fine by me. Those of us who produce useful work will just have to change our addresses every 6 months like work-at-home envelope-stuffing scammers.
If I remember just one thing from ECON courses, it's this: "economics is, in part, the study of producers attempts to supply the insatiable demand of consumers".
The OP exemplifies that insatiable demand, and is perhaps (but probably not) a member of a class of customers that I labled "The Insatiables" when I was in customer service. The Insatiables will always ask for more, not stopping short until the producer becomes an absolute slave. True Insatiables are a rare breed. Most people recognize at some point that commerce is bargaining, and bargaining means compromise. While I was in CR I think I may have heard about 2 or 3 insatiables. The definition that I used was that the manager of the department had cut them pro-rated refund checks and disconnected them from service because they were actually generating negative revenue for the company--slavery on our part, even if only in a minor fashion.
The concerns of the OP could be addressed in a rational fashion by allowing users to view and compile source, but not to redistribute it, and not to receive support for versions compiled with tools and/or configurations other than the "official release". In fact, just about all of RMS's concerns could be addressed in this manner, including his pesky printer problem. The GPL is an effort to address legitimate concerns, but like many such efforts, it goes too far in the other direction.
So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?"
Because aliens drive Bugs. "Meteor the size of a Volkswagen" is code for "another arrival". Most astronomers drive old, beat-up bugs too, but not because they are poor. The loud motorcycle like engine noise of the beetle has a soothing, almost sexual effect on the aliens. Kept in thrall by a highly addictive psychoactive drug laced alien produce that looks like a common Earth food known as a "twinkie" the astronomers have been pressed into service to alien races, driving their bugs around town to produce the soothing, erotic melody with their engines while ship after ship lands, their arrival heralded only by announcements such as the preceding.
Either that, or it's an object that everybody has seen.
Actually, the real reason you've forgotten OQO is that they were supposed to have a really cool product so they did an enormous press-release blitz that directed people to their website. Then people got mired in Flash on the site, just to find out the product wasn't even out yet. Then the product missed the deadline. They still haven't released a product. I can't really explain why that happened, except that perhaps they were still partying like 1999 while everybody else was watching for terror alerts.
Sir, I was bashing the GPL before Bill Gates even heard of Linux. I first read Stallman's manifesto over gopher from a Sun workstation in 1992. I was pleased to see that the GNU project had no kernel, and felt a sense of foreboding about Linux because I forsaw it as heralding the day when independant "garage" developers would be eliminated by the integrated hardware/service companies who are the only ones that can afford to vend software as a loss-leader. I'm sick and tired of people like you accusing the rest of us of not having any original thoughts, and of not being able to analyze arguments and arrive at our own conclusions... In other words: Oooo looks like somebody bought the FSF FUD, and doesn't want to part with it.
I never cared for the Borg icon--I think the GPL is just as Borg-like as MS. The new icon is too dark. It looks like a box with some features on it that are difficult to make out. I had to read the alt in the image tag to figure out it was "Windows". I don't see anything wrong with using a window as the icon for Windows, just find one that's lighter. I'm not sure what restrictions MS places on use of the Windows logo, but if they can use it than that's what they should use--just like they do for Apple. That would seem fair enough to me.
A distinction needs to be made between Flash navigation, and Flash for other purposes. Cartoons and games in Flash are great. If I hear about some cartoon or game or whatever, I go to the website, wait for it to download, and have a good time. OTOH, if I hear about some new product I don't want to hit their website, wait 30 seconds for crap to download, and then have a popup telling me to upgrade Flash. Bite me. Remember OQO? The Flash on their site was such an impediment to obtaining information that they actually had to re-do the site. In the end, most people on the web want information and Flash navigation lowers the signal/noise ratio to sometimes unacceptable levels... unless of course a Flash animation was the signal you were seeking, in which case you should link it from a normal HTML page, thank-you very much.
Well, in many areas you can't start a fire outdoors without the fire department's permission, and wheels? Don't get me started on the DMV. Regulations aren't the same as "royaltis", but they still take your time and sometimes your money. As for the Bible, anybody who really cares about it has to pay twice to educate their children, and translations can be copyrighted. So what's new?
Unless they use some kind of low-grade DSL with a special modem, it's pure snake oil. What do they expect to happen when you run a GIF through this thing? It's already compressed, and if they had a compression algorithm that was 5 times better than LZW, they'd have already... (close your eyes a second) patented it (open them again).
Maybe some HTML would benefit from this, but the bulk of what makes pages slow to load is graphics and craplets (a catch-all term coined by a former co-worker that was originally applied to useless Java animations, but could be extended to include Flash, embedded media-player MIDI, etc). Most of that stuff is already compressed.
Your first point is valid--I have no clear logical path to conclude the prof is a bitter liberal, only suspicion which has often been born out. Your second statement makes no sense at all. I made no expression of contempt for students who attend every lecture. I was simply stating a fact about the behavior of the average college student.
You *have* to look at the system requirement anyway, and you don't need to be "certified" to say that your software runs on Windows.
For that matter, who makes major software purchases at Office Depot anyway? Getting the best price is so much easier online, and unless you woke up and suddenly decided that your office had to use the next version or you were all going to die, the wait for delivery is no problem. I mean, it's one thing when a monitor goes out and you have to have it right now, but I can't conceive of any situation where you would suddenly have to go to OD and buy a shrink-wrapped title.
At any rate, I wager that this is no harm to OD because most of the software they sell is probably "big name brand" stuff. Smaller vendors that don't cert will just keep selling online and through other outlets.
1. It imposes hurles on first-time contacts. Posted your resume and got a response? HR person doesn't have time to answer questions like "what color is the sky" or whatever they use to verify you're human.
2. Spammers can use it! If they get a challenge they know the e-mail is valid. Then, they can forge senders. If they forge the right sender the spam gets through. If they forge the wrong sender a challenge goes out to the 3rd party. The challenge has to carry a subject doesn't it? Voila! The spammer has hijacked your box and used it to send quickie text messages to 3rd parties. OK, well, maybe you change the subject so that it simply gives the time of the message or something... but then the sender is less likely to recall if he actually sent the message.
Even if it works, C-R floods the network with with little micro-spams. I for one do not look forward to having my inbox flooded with messages with subjects like "SpamMaster response requested for message you sent 3/24/03" because I never sent the message and some lousy spammer just forged my address in the Sender.
Maybe they've come up with some ingenious way to fix these problems, but I doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the time we stopped in Jarretsville, MD. Just one piece of advice: don't. Ditto for Sperryville, VA (unless you want to go to what looked like a really fancy sit-down, which I didn't check out). The Sperryville experience actually involved me pulling away from the store, taking a bite of the sandwhich, and spitting it out because the meat tasted spoiled. That almost never happens at nationwide chains, and if it does, and you take it back, you'll get a quality replacement. I knew it was pointless to turn around, because they had pulled this spoiled meat from a big thing. That was their standard of quality. Then there was the raw pork barbecue in South Florida. Don't get me started on that.
Some general advice about mom-n-pops: Tables with square bent metal and vinyl covered chairs are a bad sign. If you've traveled the east coast of the US, you know the kind of chairs I'm talking about. I think whenever a nasty restaurant closes down, the next nasty restaurant picks these chairs up at the close-out.
Next, make sure the food preparation area is either totally obscured, or totally out in the open. My theory on this? If it's totally out in the open, they are proud of their process. If it's totally closed, the place is sufficiently upscale to separate the kitchen from the dining experience. At places where the food preparation is "semi-obscured" it means that they couldn't afford ambience, and they aren't proud of what they're doing.
Next, know your region. I don't think I've ever had bad bar-b-que in Texas. It's probably a capital offense to serve bad bbq there. If you walk into a Salvadoran restaurant, and see Salvadorans eating there, you are probably OK. Ditto for any other ethnic restaurant. Avoid places on "US" or state highways where there is little or no competition. Note, on the interstate system, competition may not exist at an exit, but if it exists 5 miles down the road you are probably OK.
Finally, learn from bad experiences and develop your "sense" of what's going to be good. Use your nose. Ask for a menu, and don't be afraid to turn around if you can't check the place out. Look at the people sitting there. Are they clean people? Dirty restaurants tend to attract dirty people.
Bottom line? When you're on the road and you're hungry, the safe mediocrity of McDonalds can be unbeatable.
You're nuts. If I violate the TOS with my current ISP, I go get another one. If I violate the TOS with the government, I'm ostracized and have nowhere else to turn.
but hardly anyone will vote outside the two parties for fear of "wasting their vote."
People will vote 3rd party when a credible 3rd party comes along. The Whigs got replaced by the Republicans. The Republicans were devestated by Bull Moose for one election. 19% voted for Perot and he was a nut with a senile running mate. Give us a credible 3rd party candidate who is pro-environment, willing to cut government waste, favors maintaining the military, not given to creating special exceptions for corporate wankers, and not prone to stir up hornets nests for no good reason (gays in the military, prayer in schools, federal abortion funding) and you've got a winner. Actually, if the Republicans had gone pro-environment, the Democrats would be pretty much useless... of course, that's just my opinion. The only time I've ever voted Dem was in a local election because the Republican candidate had a record that included allowing a chicken plant to dump raw waste into a river. There was no credible 3rd party candidate in that election. If there was, I'd have voted for him/her.
I half expected to see airborne lasers used for boost-phase antimissile defense in the current war. I guess it's still too experimental. Then again, maybe they were trying to use it as the primary defense and didn't tell us. It seems like a smart approach to combine this with something like the Patriot missile. If the laser fails, then try the missile.
Also, it's probably not a visible laser, but if you really want to burst your enemy's bubble, there'd be nothing like having him launch his most sophisticated missile, and then seeing a friggin laser come out of the sky and shoot it down.
April Fools!
We invaded Kentucky about 140 years ago.
Huh. I had heard of DVI but was mislead into believing it was just for digital video from cameras and stuff, and not for general purpose graphics. Unfortunately, the mini-itx board I was hoping to use doesn't mention DVI. Word on the street is that that the alleged LVDS availability isn't real either--the contacts are there but no socket is soldered onto them!
Of course I could install another video card, but that would defeat the whole purpose of using the mini-itx board to begin with. So, for the time being, my quest continues.
I've been researching info regarding using laptop LCDs with a PC, because I want to build a portable PC. One thing I discovered is that the connector on your monitor is essentially analog, whereas the signal in the video card is digital. A laptop can drive the digitial display directly with a digital signal, using LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) or a similar proprietary standard. Stand-alone LCD monitors take an anlog signal from your PC and convert it to digital. Not only do you have the cost of D/A and A/D conversion, you also have power consumption associated with this.
The prices on the "controllers" that allow you to drive an LCD from a standard VGA connector are around $200 as separate items, mostly because they are low demand specialty items. Such controllers are integrated into stand-alone monitors, and economies of scale keep them from adding too much to the bottom line.
So, while there is some justification for the increased cost of stand-alone displays, I tend to agree that the controller, case, and associated parts don't explain the entire difference.
I'm less bothered by the prices, and more bothered by the fact that low-power technology is simply not available. For that matter, the entire laptop industry is full of artificial controls. However, it's encouraging to note that you can at least get laptop form-factor hard drives. Given time, I think some of the other tight controls will break down too, and we will start to see "screwdriver shops" building laptops from commodity parts. I eagerly anticipate the day that happens, as much as every incumbent laptop maker dreads it.
"I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see one. And there's Magnetbox, and Sorny."
No smaller than a US nickel please. Dimes are my least favorite coin for this very reason--small enough to lose quite easily, yet way more valuable than pennies. Pennies are easy to lose too, but who cares? I routinely give them back to the cashiers for "penny karma".
My data, of course, is worth more than a nickel. Ideally, the flash should be as cheap as a nickel, or better yet the nickel should be replaced as a national currency with however much flash fits in a nickel-shaped package.
I mean, money that was intrinsicly valuable would be way cool. US coins could be pre-loaded with great works that had passed into the Public Domain. Stick a quarter in your PC, watch Steamboat Willie... oh... wait.
Why Would I Want In Now? I mean, "to google" is already a verb. How much more growth can this thing possible have left in it? Sorry folks, the money (if there is any to be made) has already been made, but then, that was the dirty secret of IPOs that nobody knew in 1999, but anybody with half a brain should know now.
I've never used VPN, but IIRC, doesn't Windows 98 and later have VPN support built in? I know it has modem sharing built in, so does this make your Windows CD a circumvention device? Personally, if all the lawyers want to go off and circle jerk themselves into oblivion over this, that's fine by me. Those of us who produce useful work will just have to change our addresses every 6 months like work-at-home envelope-stuffing scammers.
If I remember just one thing from ECON courses, it's this: "economics is, in part, the study of producers attempts to supply the insatiable demand of consumers".
The OP exemplifies that insatiable demand, and is perhaps (but probably not) a member of a class of customers that I labled "The Insatiables" when I was in customer service. The Insatiables will always ask for more, not stopping short until the producer becomes an absolute slave. True Insatiables are a rare breed. Most people recognize at some point that commerce is bargaining, and bargaining means compromise. While I was in CR I think I may have heard about 2 or 3 insatiables. The definition that I used was that the manager of the department had cut them pro-rated refund checks and disconnected them from service because they were actually generating negative revenue for the company--slavery on our part, even if only in a minor fashion.
The concerns of the OP could be addressed in a rational fashion by allowing users to view and compile source, but not to redistribute it, and not to receive support for versions compiled with tools and/or configurations other than the "official release". In fact, just about all of RMS's concerns could be addressed in this manner, including his pesky printer problem. The GPL is an effort to address legitimate concerns, but like many such efforts, it goes too far in the other direction.
So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?"
Because aliens drive Bugs. "Meteor the size of a Volkswagen" is code for "another arrival". Most astronomers drive old, beat-up bugs too, but not because they are poor. The loud motorcycle like engine noise of the beetle has a soothing, almost sexual effect on the aliens. Kept in thrall by a highly addictive psychoactive drug laced alien produce that looks like a common Earth food known as a "twinkie" the astronomers have been pressed into service to alien races, driving their bugs around town to produce the soothing, erotic melody with their engines while ship after ship lands, their arrival heralded only by announcements such as the preceding.
Either that, or it's an object that everybody has seen.
Really. It's the same question. How about winning that little war thingy first?
Actually, the real reason you've forgotten OQO is that they were supposed to have a really cool product so they did an enormous press-release blitz that directed people to their website. Then people got mired in Flash on the site, just to find out the product wasn't even out yet. Then the product missed the deadline. They still haven't released a product. I can't really explain why that happened, except that perhaps they were still partying like 1999 while everybody else was watching for terror alerts.
Sir, I was bashing the GPL before Bill Gates even heard of Linux. I first read Stallman's manifesto over gopher from a Sun workstation in 1992. I was pleased to see that the GNU project had no kernel, and felt a sense of foreboding about Linux because I forsaw it as heralding the day when independant "garage" developers would be eliminated by the integrated hardware/service companies who are the only ones that can afford to vend software as a loss-leader. I'm sick and tired of people like you accusing the rest of us of not having any original thoughts, and of not being able to analyze arguments and arrive at our own conclusions... In other words: Oooo looks like somebody bought the FSF FUD, and doesn't want to part with it.
I never cared for the Borg icon--I think the GPL is just as Borg-like as MS. The new icon is too dark. It looks like a box with some features on it that are difficult to make out. I had to read the alt in the image tag to figure out it was "Windows". I don't see anything wrong with using a window as the icon for Windows, just find one that's lighter. I'm not sure what restrictions MS places on use of the Windows logo, but if they can use it than that's what they should use--just like they do for Apple. That would seem fair enough to me.
A distinction needs to be made between Flash navigation, and Flash for other purposes. Cartoons and games in Flash are great. If I hear about some cartoon or game or whatever, I go to the website, wait for it to download, and have a good time. OTOH, if I hear about some new product I don't want to hit their website, wait 30 seconds for crap to download, and then have a popup telling me to upgrade Flash. Bite me. Remember OQO? The Flash on their site was such an impediment to obtaining information that they actually had to re-do the site. In the end, most people on the web want information and Flash navigation lowers the signal/noise ratio to sometimes unacceptable levels... unless of course a Flash animation was the signal you were seeking, in which case you should link it from a normal HTML page, thank-you very much.
Well, in many areas you can't start a fire outdoors without the fire department's permission, and wheels? Don't get me started on the DMV. Regulations aren't the same as "royaltis", but they still take your time and sometimes your money. As for the Bible, anybody who really cares about it has to pay twice to educate their children, and translations can be copyrighted. So what's new?
Obviously, the author wants Mexico to leave North America.
Unless they use some kind of low-grade DSL with a special modem, it's pure snake oil. What do they expect to happen when you run a GIF through this thing? It's already compressed, and if they had a compression algorithm that was 5 times better than LZW, they'd have already... (close your eyes a second) patented it (open them again).
Maybe some HTML would benefit from this, but the bulk of what makes pages slow to load is graphics and craplets (a catch-all term coined by a former co-worker that was originally applied to useless Java animations, but could be extended to include Flash, embedded media-player MIDI, etc). Most of that stuff is already compressed.
Your first point is valid--I have no clear logical path to conclude the prof is a bitter liberal, only suspicion which has often been born out. Your second statement makes no sense at all. I made no expression of contempt for students who attend every lecture. I was simply stating a fact about the behavior of the average college student.
You *have* to look at the system requirement anyway, and you don't need to be "certified" to say that your software runs on Windows.
For that matter, who makes major software purchases at Office Depot anyway? Getting the best price is so much easier online, and unless you woke up and suddenly decided that your office had to use the next version or you were all going to die, the wait for delivery is no problem. I mean, it's one thing when a monitor goes out and you have to have it right now, but I can't conceive of any situation where you would suddenly have to go to OD and buy a shrink-wrapped title.
At any rate, I wager that this is no harm to OD because most of the software they sell is probably "big name brand" stuff. Smaller vendors that don't cert will just keep selling online and through other outlets.
1. It imposes hurles on first-time contacts. Posted your resume and got a response? HR person doesn't have time to answer questions like "what color is the sky" or whatever they use to verify you're human.
2. Spammers can use it! If they get a challenge they know the e-mail is valid. Then, they can forge senders. If they forge the right sender the spam gets through. If they forge the wrong sender a challenge goes out to the 3rd party. The challenge has to carry a subject doesn't it? Voila! The spammer has hijacked your box and used it to send quickie text messages to 3rd parties. OK, well, maybe you change the subject so that it simply gives the time of the message or something... but then the sender is less likely to recall if he actually sent the message.
Even if it works, C-R floods the network with with little micro-spams. I for one do not look forward to having my inbox flooded with messages with subjects like "SpamMaster response requested for message you sent 3/24/03" because I never sent the message and some lousy spammer just forged my address in the Sender.
Maybe they've come up with some ingenious way to fix these problems, but I doubt it.