I certainly hope not. I have yet to see an LCD TV that had brightness and contrast controls that worked worth a dang. Every LCD panel I've ever had has been too bright, and ended up a grey washed out mess when I tried to dim the picture. When you tack in the viewing angle issues (my living room, like many, doesn't even HAVE chairs pointed at the TV, so EVERYONE views "off-angle"), LCD technology leaves a bit to be desired. I've bought four of them now, and have returned all four to the store within two days. The loss of quality when moving from my CRT HDTV to a flat panel LCD was highly noticeable, and certainly outweighed any space advantage they might have.
Of course, plasma displays have their own problems and aren't exactly a solution either, with their burn in and power consumption issues. This is why many of us were looking forward to SED. I guess I'll just have to hang onto my CRT a bit longer and hope something else comes down the pipe.
Depends on where its at. This particular island lies within the already recognized territorial waters of Tonga, so it belongs to them. Since most new islands would form in volcanic chains with pre-existing atolls and islands, this is likely to be the case the vast majority of the time.
If you did manage to spot an island forming outside of the territorial waters of another nation, the biggest gun rule generally applies. You can claim it yourself and try to create your own nation, but good luck defending it when someone with bigger guns than you decides to grab it. Until you have a settled population on the island, nobody is going to care that some lone nut got kicked off a speck of rock in the middle of the ocean. He who had the biggest guns wins. Until you actually get a population, nobody is going to recognize you as a nation. As a example, the Republic of Minerva was set up in the 1970's on infill located on an unclaimed atoll...basically, a bunch of dirt was piled on an atoll to create an artificial island. Nobody paid much attention to the island or the builders claims, and eventually Tonga sent their army over, evicted the guy, and claimed the island for themselves. Since there was no actual population living on the island, little attention was paid to the "invasion". The people involved in building the island still whine about their claim and call themselves the "government in exile", but without a population to represent or an army to defend themselves, they're little more than a paper organization. The island, as I understand it, was allowed to erode back into the sea. Only a few narrow spits of land ringing the reefs remain.
The brain matches patterns faster than it processes words. When I glance at a watch, I just need to look at it for a split second to understand what time it is, or how much relative time has passed since my last glance at it. If I look at an LCD readout with the time, I have to read the numbers, process it mentally (a process that takes about half a second in most people), and then do any math needed to calculate relative times. There was a lot of press on research in this area when LCD watches first came onto the market, but digitals won out anyway because they are so much cheaper to produce. Still, once you learn them, handed watches are more convenient than digital readouts.
And, as others have mentioned, I don't have to dig it out of my pockets.
There's also a timeless (no pun intended) quality to watches. Buy a good one, and it will last you the rest of your life. Quality watches work with just about any fashion style, and never fail if maintained right. How many cellphones can you say that about?
Harder yes, but still not impossible. In fact, it only takes about 5 minutes. Go to Click&Buy and purchase some credits (Click&Buy is a reputable American company that's been around a while). Now go to XROST and charge up your account using your Click&Buy credits. Now go to AllOfMp3 and recharge your account using XROST credits. Done.
They added a step or two, but the process is still fairly quick.
I started doing this before Visa had dropped them. Chronopay sells your info to porn spammers so I refuse to do business with them. By using Click&Buy, your info stays with an American company regulated by American privacy and financial laws. XRost and AllOfMP3 just get an ID number and money. This will be fairly important if the RIAA succeeds in getting Russian law changed and AllOfMP3 gets raided. I don't want my personal info in their customer lists if that happens.
Yep, that's how I've always done it. I'm a bit paranoid about handing my CC number over to a foreign group that has already shown a propensity towards "creative" interpretations of what's legal, but wanted to pick up some CD's from them. I bought the credit from Click&Buy with my Visa (Click&Buy is a reputable American company), buy XROST credits using my Click&Buy credits, and then pay for my AllOfMP3 account through XROST. It's a bit of a chore to recharge the account, but worthwhile IMO just for the peace of mind involved.
I have about $50 sitting in my AllOfMP3 account right now, and this article has me a bit paranoid about it. I think I'll be going on a CD shopping spree tonight...just in case.
Yes, the spammer MIGHT be able to recover part of their 11+ million dollar judgment this way. I'll bet those servers might be worth a whole $5000 on eBay!
Spamhaus, in turn, will merely need to set up a new mirror in Canada to serve the US. If they're smart, they should already be contemplating such a move. A Canadian mirror would still serve their US customers just as quickly, but would put the servers out of the courts reach.
There was the typical scaremongering, with the implication that people who needed to call 911 couldn't if they were relying on VOIP, while AT&T customers were "safe" because AT&T has generators at the switching stations.
Does it still count as scaremongering if it is true? I know that in my area (central California), the network equipment owned by our local cable company runs on 30 minute UPS's. The central station runs just fine, but all of the repeating boxes go dark during an extended outage. We had a blackout during the heatwave last month, and ALL of the VOIP users in my area ended up without any kind of connectivity (911 or otherwise) for hours.
Few people have UPS's in their homes anyway...I don't know the real numbers, but from personal experience I'd bet that 90% of the people out there aren't relying on anything more than a surge strip and wall outlet to power their home equipment. When the wall power fails, their VOIP goes too simply because their home equipment is unpowered (to be fair, this isn't a VOIP problem...I have the same issue with my cordless phones).
Not exactly. I know two registered sex offenders. When one of them was 16, he was at a party and groped a girl. Turned out later that she was 13 (what she was doing at a party with a bunch of drunk high-schoolers is a mystery). She told her parents, he was arrested, and spent a year on probation. About a decade later, in the late 1990's, he got a letter informing him of the states new sex offender laws and requiring him to register. It's been almost 10 years since, and his life is screwed bigtime because of it. He lost one fiance who ran when she heard the words "registered sex offender", he gets turned down for jobs all the time, and the people in his apartment complex consider him to be some kind of child molester because one of his neighbors found his name on a website. All because he got drunk as a teenager and grabbed a girls boob...long before any of this "registered sex offender" stuff came along.
Oh, the other guy was a bit unjust too, though I do consider him to be a bit more culpable in his case. He went into a bar with a few friends (one of which was my brother) and picked up on a girl. He never asked how old she was, but since the bar carded EVERYONE as they came in, he assumed that she was 21. He was 22 at the time. He and the girl hit it off, they went back to his place, and went at it. They went out a couple more times, hooked up each time, and she ended up pregnant. It was at that point that he found out she was actually 17. Her dad started pushing to have him arrested, and the police finally gave in. The thing is, he PROBABLY would have won if he hadn't been an idiot. She came over to his house while he was on trial, and they had sex AGAIN. Everyone was telling him that he would walk on the charges, and she was ALREADY almost 6 months pregnant with his child at that point, so he got overconfident. Her parents found out, they relayed it to the prosecutor, and it was that one encounter that put him in jail. He spent six months behind bars, several years on probation, and will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. And his "victim"? He's married to her.
The comment said Office, and didn't specify Live or Client. You're assuming that they meant live because it makes sense on the surface, but MS is going to need to justify the expense of the project and getting ads into the productivity suite on the client side promises the largest ROI. You'll pardon me if I don't automatically assume that MS will pass up on profitability to do the right thing:)
As for the time taken to disable these distractions: if an Office installation takes 30 additional seconds because the installer has to disable a bunch of useless junk, that will add up to real money when the number of installations in large companies are factored into the equation. Every minute that a tech wastes configuring useless "features" is a minute taken away from that techs normal job duties, and another extra minute that his next repair is going to have to wait.
Oh, I can just imagine how well that's going to go over in our large site. How does MS expect to sell this to the corporate market? "Yes, MS Office is the most popular productivity suite in the world! And as an added bonus, we'll kill YOUR companies productivity by distracting all of your employees with tempting ads! Think about the boon to the economy! Instead of all those employees wasting time working for YOU, they can be promoting commerce and boosting the economy by spending their working hours shopping online!"
Even making it easy to disable wouldn't assuage many CTO's, because there is still a productivity loss as the IT guys disable the ads. It may be simple for one, but when you have thousands of installations, sometimes spread out over multiple locations, it's going to cost real money to fix.
The old adage "Cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind here. They're going to anger the majority of their customers, just to make it look like they're "competing" with Google. MS really has fallen...they're transforming themselves from the largest software company in the world into freaking Doubleclick.
No, they proved on Mythbusters that an MRI wouldn't rip an iron-laced tatoo out of your body. Their finding was that there simply wasn't enough iron in the average tatoo to be affected by the field.
Having a hunk of metal in your body is a completely different story. A good friend of mine has several metal pins in his arm from a college prank gone wrong. A couple of years ago he was KO'd pretty bad in a car accident and the ER doctor, not knowing the pins were there, ordered an MRI. It didn't rip the pins from his arm, but it was painful enough that it brought him back to full conciousness screaming his bloody head off.
Yes, you should ignore that. We're not talking politics, we're talking science. Scientific findings should always be permitted to be analyzed and supported or refuted on their own merits, irregardless of who delivers them. Ignoring research simply because you don't like the messenger is unscientific, ignorant, and narrow minded.
I was unaware of that, as I haven't used GMail since its Beta days. Still, that solution isn't practical or efficient either. Rather than maintain one website, keeping an alternate "compatability" site functional merely doubles the work for the developers by requiring that all site changes be implemented twice. It's a throwback to the days when we had to maintain seperate Netscape and IE versions of our "bleeding edge" websites simply to make sure they worked in both browsers.
Many of us do web development in environments that REQUIRE accessibility and nonvisual functionality. Most major corporations and media sites, all government sites, and most non-profits require that their web properties be open and functional for all of the webs users. Unlike traditional websites...or even traditional applications...AJAX webapps are typically unusuable for anyone with any kind of disability that requires assistive software. Even worse, there appears to be very little interest among the major players in correcting these problems despite the fact that a rapidly increasing number of websites are making use of AJAX.
AJAX has potential, but it isn't mature enough to be used on mass market websites that provide essential services or information that is intended for a global audience. Microsoft knows this, which is why their AJAX apps typically have a non-AJAX clone that can be used instead. Google, OTOH, simply slams the door on noncompatible users. Neither model is particularly efficient or acceptable for most companies.
If you are taking other peoples property and selling it at auction, you are acting as an auctioneer. That some states require autctioneers to be bonded is nothing new.
Around where I live, we have a number of large commercial businesses that sell stuff for you on EBay. You drop your items off with them, they sell it on EBay for you, and take a 20%-30% cut off the top. There's nothing wrong with requiring bonding for these kinds of businesses to prevent fraud (i.e. seller says item sold for $50 and keeps $10 to cover his 20% fee, when item actually sold for $70). Because this kind of business involves a trust relationship, bonding is called for.
Plastic lens mounts vs metal lens mounts. Plastic gears vs metal gears. Glass lenses vs plastic lenses. The differences between "consumer" quality gear and "professional" quality gear is quite large. The biggest difference, though, is in the quality of the engineering. Consumer quality electronics tend to be low margin goods, so the emphasis in the engineering phase is for the product to be easy and cheap to manufacture in large quantities...allowing the low margins to be offset by higher volumes. With professional quality equipment, production runs tend to be smaller but margins are far higher. To keep up sales, purchasers have to be assured of the products quality, resulting in better engineering and a better quality product. Canon, Nikon, et al are willing to invest in higher quality components and more involved manufacturing processes for their higher end cameras because they know that they will ultimately reclaim those costs from the buyers.
This emphasis on improved engineering and component quality with the higher end cameras results in a more reliable product. I have, and still have, many cameras, both digital and film. The cheap ones invariably break. The good ones rarely do.
The solution to that nowadays is digitization of your slides or print negatives. A decent quality film scanned through a quality scanner can yield 9-11 megapixels of effective resolution. When printed using the same equipment used for digital photography printing, there is zero effective difference between them.
A $250 digital camera, for all practical purposes, is the equivalent of a $50 35mm film camera (technically the $50 film camera has a higher resolution, but that's another discussion). These low end digitals replace the snapshot cameras of yore, but shouldn't be confused with actual professional quality cameras. If you know that you're going to be shooting a "once in a lifetime" event like a wedding, first birthday, or something along those lines, you should either be shooting it in higher quality (and more reliable) film, or invest in a higher end digital.
If you lose that once in a lifetime shot because you trusted it to a cheap snapshot camera, that's as much your fault as the vendors.
NSA isn't a real collections agency. About four years ago I was a member of the Scientific American Book Club when I received a bill for three books I never received. I called them up and disputed the bill, but they claimed that it was valid and refused to drop it. I even offered to pay the bill if they'd reship the books (they were good physics texts), but couldn't get them to budge. Since I was already well past my required minimum buy, I just told them to cancel my account.
Almost immediately I started receiving nasty collections letters from the precursor to the North Shore Agency. When I demanded that they stop contacting me, they REFUSED. It turns out that these guys aren't actually a collections agency...they're a billing clearinghouse used by several of the big publishing outfits. They ARE NOT legally a CRA, they CAN NOT place negative information on your credit report, and because they don't actually assume the debt, they can't even sue you for the bill.
Four years later, these idiots still send me nasty letters threatening undefined impending dire consequences every three months or so, but absolutely nothing has happened. I have no negative hits on my credit report, I have never recived a collections call, and no legal action has been attempted by anybody. These guys can bark a lot, but they are completely toothless when it comes time to back up their threats. Considering that my alleged $121 bill is far larger than those being levied against Wired subscribers, I'd guess that they'd go after me long before they go after them.
I quit caring about NSA collection letters a long time ago. My opinion nowadays is that if they want to waste the postage sending me a few letters a year, I'm perfectly content to throw them away with the rest of my junkmail.
I said useable, not ideal. Besides, a product like this is going to be targeted at users who want to "use the Internet", and not much else. If people have a need for a more powerful PC, the odds are that they either already own one or they wouldn't use this one in the first place.
Linux actually represents a great platform for building a dedicated Internet PC. By stripping K or Gnome down to a minimalist interface with only a few generic links for "Email", "Web", "IP Phone", and "Instant Messaging", you can actually provide the low end, untrained user with an experience superior to that found on a Windows equipped PC.
The computers they offered cost them too much, and they spent far too much maintaining their network. Basically, their massive overhead destroyed their profitability.
Fast forward to 2005: The cost of hardware has dropped substantially, and Linux has matured enough to be useable for the average person. Couple that with the minimal overhead involved in connecting these users to the existing Earthlink network, and the possibility of profitability is far higher.
Of course, many people have been saying for years that computers would one fday be like cellphones. When I bought my first one, I spent $1500 on the phone and another $100 a month for fuzzy local service. Last year I replaced both mine and my wifes phones for $0 and a promise to maintain $50 monthly service for two years. The phones themselves have become a commodity and are no longer a profit center...they're simply used to drive subscriptions.
There's a reason why CCSF, and many other public colleges, uses the SSN. Most public colleges are funded by the state based on enrollment, and are required to regularly submit enrollment and financial aid reports to their funding agencies (in the case of CCSF, the CCC Chancellors Office). These reports are legally required to include the SSN for each listed student (used for a wide array of purposes ranging from fraud prevention to tax reporting). Since the basic structures of most school record databases have their origins in the mainframe days, they were created when having TWO unique identifiers for each record was considered wasteful and identity theft was virtually unknown. Though the databases themselves have been updated, the data structures themselves have simply been crosswalked, retaining that SSN dependence.
Changing to a student ID means retooling databases that may have 30 years worth of records in them. On top of that, it usually requires replacing or rewriting whatever software they use to interface with that database to support the new key (my own college recently spent over three million bucks and spent two years to do exactly this).
Hey, I just shut one of those down the other day. One of our faculty slapped up a public query form and was writing the students results, which contained their SSN, name, and address, to a publically accessible Access db. When I contacted the instructor his response was, "But how can anyone download it if I don't link to it?"
And therein lies the crux of the problem. On most college and uni campuses, the publishing of data isn't controlled by a "webmaster" or other campus employee. In our case, we give our faculty unfettered access to a Frontpage server and pretty much allow them to publish whatever they want. The upside is that the college isn't responsible for objectionable material, because it's owned by the instructor and posted under the auspices of "academic freedom". The downside is that, when someone does something stupid like this, it's typically the college, and not the instructor, who takes the heat. People fail to realize that for most college web content, the college is acting more like an ISP than a publisher.
It sounds like this Chicago incident is much the same. It wasn't that the university put up a security free server, but rather that some faculty member or staffer shoved some private data onto a public server without realizing that it became publically accessible.
Minerals, chemicals, and enough food to support nations that are unable to grow enough to support their own populations.
Minerals? IIRC, every major gold mine in the US is foreign owned. Environmental protection laws are also driving up the cost and regulatory burden on mines so steeply that very few new major mines have opened in the past several decades, while dozens have closed. Mineral extraction is a fading industry in the US...the number of mines and miners continue to dwindle, and the profits from those mines rarely benefit this country anyway.
Chemicals? When was the last time a major new petrochemical plant was built in the US? Most American chemical companies are now putting their production facilities in Mexico and other neighboring countries where environmental and safety laws are less stringent. While the profits of this industry flow back into the US, it's arguable whether Mexican produced chemicals are really US products anymore...we're more of a middle man at this point (and we all know who gets cut first when budgets get tight).
Food? I live in the California Central Valley, arguably one of the most productive agricultural areas on the planet. You know what I see? Every year, countless thousands of acres of irreplaceable farmland being paved over for suburbs and strip malls. I see the government in an all-out attack to end pesticide use, stop cow flatulence, and restore irrigation water to their source rivers. While these may be laudable goals, their result is the same...farming is dying here. Nationally, the US is losing farmland at an incredible rate as fields are abandoned and built over. In fact, there is less production farmland in the US today than there was 100 years ago. We are rapidly becoming a food IMPORTER, not an exporter.
Economically, the US is becoming a net importer in just about every category, and is basing its continued economic dominance on the theory that its citizens can own and manage the resources being produced by other countries. Eventually the citizens of those countries are going to grow tired of American domination and either nationalize those assets or begin producing the same products with their own money and management...and put us out of business because their lower CEO salaries and the fact that they aren't beholden to stockholders will give them a HUGE price advantage.
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I certainly hope not. I have yet to see an LCD TV that had brightness and contrast controls that worked worth a dang. Every LCD panel I've ever had has been too bright, and ended up a grey washed out mess when I tried to dim the picture. When you tack in the viewing angle issues (my living room, like many, doesn't even HAVE chairs pointed at the TV, so EVERYONE views "off-angle"), LCD technology leaves a bit to be desired. I've bought four of them now, and have returned all four to the store within two days. The loss of quality when moving from my CRT HDTV to a flat panel LCD was highly noticeable, and certainly outweighed any space advantage they might have.
Of course, plasma displays have their own problems and aren't exactly a solution either, with their burn in and power consumption issues. This is why many of us were looking forward to SED. I guess I'll just have to hang onto my CRT a bit longer and hope something else comes down the pipe.
Depends on where its at. This particular island lies within the already recognized territorial waters of Tonga, so it belongs to them. Since most new islands would form in volcanic chains with pre-existing atolls and islands, this is likely to be the case the vast majority of the time.
If you did manage to spot an island forming outside of the territorial waters of another nation, the biggest gun rule generally applies. You can claim it yourself and try to create your own nation, but good luck defending it when someone with bigger guns than you decides to grab it. Until you have a settled population on the island, nobody is going to care that some lone nut got kicked off a speck of rock in the middle of the ocean. He who had the biggest guns wins. Until you actually get a population, nobody is going to recognize you as a nation. As a example, the Republic of Minerva was set up in the 1970's on infill located on an unclaimed atoll...basically, a bunch of dirt was piled on an atoll to create an artificial island. Nobody paid much attention to the island or the builders claims, and eventually Tonga sent their army over, evicted the guy, and claimed the island for themselves. Since there was no actual population living on the island, little attention was paid to the "invasion". The people involved in building the island still whine about their claim and call themselves the "government in exile", but without a population to represent or an army to defend themselves, they're little more than a paper organization. The island, as I understand it, was allowed to erode back into the sea. Only a few narrow spits of land ringing the reefs remain.
The brain matches patterns faster than it processes words. When I glance at a watch, I just need to look at it for a split second to understand what time it is, or how much relative time has passed since my last glance at it. If I look at an LCD readout with the time, I have to read the numbers, process it mentally (a process that takes about half a second in most people), and then do any math needed to calculate relative times. There was a lot of press on research in this area when LCD watches first came onto the market, but digitals won out anyway because they are so much cheaper to produce. Still, once you learn them, handed watches are more convenient than digital readouts.
And, as others have mentioned, I don't have to dig it out of my pockets.
There's also a timeless (no pun intended) quality to watches. Buy a good one, and it will last you the rest of your life. Quality watches work with just about any fashion style, and never fail if maintained right. How many cellphones can you say that about?
'Pandora's box' comes to mind.
Pandoras box? How about Andromeda Strain?
Harder yes, but still not impossible. In fact, it only takes about 5 minutes. Go to Click&Buy and purchase some credits (Click&Buy is a reputable American company that's been around a while). Now go to XROST and charge up your account using your Click&Buy credits. Now go to AllOfMp3 and recharge your account using XROST credits. Done.
They added a step or two, but the process is still fairly quick.
I started doing this before Visa had dropped them. Chronopay sells your info to porn spammers so I refuse to do business with them. By using Click&Buy, your info stays with an American company regulated by American privacy and financial laws. XRost and AllOfMP3 just get an ID number and money. This will be fairly important if the RIAA succeeds in getting Russian law changed and AllOfMP3 gets raided. I don't want my personal info in their customer lists if that happens.
Yep, that's how I've always done it. I'm a bit paranoid about handing my CC number over to a foreign group that has already shown a propensity towards "creative" interpretations of what's legal, but wanted to pick up some CD's from them. I bought the credit from Click&Buy with my Visa (Click&Buy is a reputable American company), buy XROST credits using my Click&Buy credits, and then pay for my AllOfMP3 account through XROST. It's a bit of a chore to recharge the account, but worthwhile IMO just for the peace of mind involved.
I have about $50 sitting in my AllOfMP3 account right now, and this article has me a bit paranoid about it. I think I'll be going on a CD shopping spree tonight...just in case.
Yes, the spammer MIGHT be able to recover part of their 11+ million dollar judgment this way. I'll bet those servers might be worth a whole $5000 on eBay!
Spamhaus, in turn, will merely need to set up a new mirror in Canada to serve the US. If they're smart, they should already be contemplating such a move. A Canadian mirror would still serve their US customers just as quickly, but would put the servers out of the courts reach.
There was the typical scaremongering, with the implication that people who needed to call 911 couldn't if they were relying on VOIP, while AT&T customers were "safe" because AT&T has generators at the switching stations.
Does it still count as scaremongering if it is true? I know that in my area (central California), the network equipment owned by our local cable company runs on 30 minute UPS's. The central station runs just fine, but all of the repeating boxes go dark during an extended outage. We had a blackout during the heatwave last month, and ALL of the VOIP users in my area ended up without any kind of connectivity (911 or otherwise) for hours.
Few people have UPS's in their homes anyway...I don't know the real numbers, but from personal experience I'd bet that 90% of the people out there aren't relying on anything more than a surge strip and wall outlet to power their home equipment. When the wall power fails, their VOIP goes too simply because their home equipment is unpowered (to be fair, this isn't a VOIP problem...I have the same issue with my cordless phones).
Not exactly. I know two registered sex offenders. When one of them was 16, he was at a party and groped a girl. Turned out later that she was 13 (what she was doing at a party with a bunch of drunk high-schoolers is a mystery). She told her parents, he was arrested, and spent a year on probation. About a decade later, in the late 1990's, he got a letter informing him of the states new sex offender laws and requiring him to register. It's been almost 10 years since, and his life is screwed bigtime because of it. He lost one fiance who ran when she heard the words "registered sex offender", he gets turned down for jobs all the time, and the people in his apartment complex consider him to be some kind of child molester because one of his neighbors found his name on a website. All because he got drunk as a teenager and grabbed a girls boob...long before any of this "registered sex offender" stuff came along.
Oh, the other guy was a bit unjust too, though I do consider him to be a bit more culpable in his case. He went into a bar with a few friends (one of which was my brother) and picked up on a girl. He never asked how old she was, but since the bar carded EVERYONE as they came in, he assumed that she was 21. He was 22 at the time. He and the girl hit it off, they went back to his place, and went at it. They went out a couple more times, hooked up each time, and she ended up pregnant. It was at that point that he found out she was actually 17. Her dad started pushing to have him arrested, and the police finally gave in. The thing is, he PROBABLY would have won if he hadn't been an idiot. She came over to his house while he was on trial, and they had sex AGAIN. Everyone was telling him that he would walk on the charges, and she was ALREADY almost 6 months pregnant with his child at that point, so he got overconfident. Her parents found out, they relayed it to the prosecutor, and it was that one encounter that put him in jail. He spent six months behind bars, several years on probation, and will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. And his "victim"? He's married to her.
The comment said Office, and didn't specify Live or Client. You're assuming that they meant live because it makes sense on the surface, but MS is going to need to justify the expense of the project and getting ads into the productivity suite on the client side promises the largest ROI. You'll pardon me if I don't automatically assume that MS will pass up on profitability to do the right thing :)
As for the time taken to disable these distractions: if an Office installation takes 30 additional seconds because the installer has to disable a bunch of useless junk, that will add up to real money when the number of installations in large companies are factored into the equation. Every minute that a tech wastes configuring useless "features" is a minute taken away from that techs normal job duties, and another extra minute that his next repair is going to have to wait.
Oh, I can just imagine how well that's going to go over in our large site. How does MS expect to sell this to the corporate market? "Yes, MS Office is the most popular productivity suite in the world! And as an added bonus, we'll kill YOUR companies productivity by distracting all of your employees with tempting ads! Think about the boon to the economy! Instead of all those employees wasting time working for YOU, they can be promoting commerce and boosting the economy by spending their working hours shopping online!"
Even making it easy to disable wouldn't assuage many CTO's, because there is still a productivity loss as the IT guys disable the ads. It may be simple for one, but when you have thousands of installations, sometimes spread out over multiple locations, it's going to cost real money to fix.
The old adage "Cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind here. They're going to anger the majority of their customers, just to make it look like they're "competing" with Google. MS really has fallen...they're transforming themselves from the largest software company in the world into freaking Doubleclick.
No, they proved on Mythbusters that an MRI wouldn't rip an iron-laced tatoo out of your body. Their finding was that there simply wasn't enough iron in the average tatoo to be affected by the field.
Having a hunk of metal in your body is a completely different story. A good friend of mine has several metal pins in his arm from a college prank gone wrong. A couple of years ago he was KO'd pretty bad in a car accident and the ER doctor, not knowing the pins were there, ordered an MRI. It didn't rip the pins from his arm, but it was painful enough that it brought him back to full conciousness screaming his bloody head off.
Yes, you should ignore that. We're not talking politics, we're talking science. Scientific findings should always be permitted to be analyzed and supported or refuted on their own merits, irregardless of who delivers them. Ignoring research simply because you don't like the messenger is unscientific, ignorant, and narrow minded.
I was unaware of that, as I haven't used GMail since its Beta days. Still, that solution isn't practical or efficient either. Rather than maintain one website, keeping an alternate "compatability" site functional merely doubles the work for the developers by requiring that all site changes be implemented twice. It's a throwback to the days when we had to maintain seperate Netscape and IE versions of our "bleeding edge" websites simply to make sure they worked in both browsers.
Many of us do web development in environments that REQUIRE accessibility and nonvisual functionality. Most major corporations and media sites, all government sites, and most non-profits require that their web properties be open and functional for all of the webs users. Unlike traditional websites...or even traditional applications...AJAX webapps are typically unusuable for anyone with any kind of disability that requires assistive software. Even worse, there appears to be very little interest among the major players in correcting these problems despite the fact that a rapidly increasing number of websites are making use of AJAX.
AJAX has potential, but it isn't mature enough to be used on mass market websites that provide essential services or information that is intended for a global audience. Microsoft knows this, which is why their AJAX apps typically have a non-AJAX clone that can be used instead. Google, OTOH, simply slams the door on noncompatible users. Neither model is particularly efficient or acceptable for most companies.
If you are taking other peoples property and selling it at auction, you are acting as an auctioneer. That some states require autctioneers to be bonded is nothing new.
Around where I live, we have a number of large commercial businesses that sell stuff for you on EBay. You drop your items off with them, they sell it on EBay for you, and take a 20%-30% cut off the top. There's nothing wrong with requiring bonding for these kinds of businesses to prevent fraud (i.e. seller says item sold for $50 and keeps $10 to cover his 20% fee, when item actually sold for $70). Because this kind of business involves a trust relationship, bonding is called for.
Plastic lens mounts vs metal lens mounts. Plastic gears vs metal gears. Glass lenses vs plastic lenses. The differences between "consumer" quality gear and "professional" quality gear is quite large. The biggest difference, though, is in the quality of the engineering. Consumer quality electronics tend to be low margin goods, so the emphasis in the engineering phase is for the product to be easy and cheap to manufacture in large quantities...allowing the low margins to be offset by higher volumes. With professional quality equipment, production runs tend to be smaller but margins are far higher. To keep up sales, purchasers have to be assured of the products quality, resulting in better engineering and a better quality product. Canon, Nikon, et al are willing to invest in higher quality components and more involved manufacturing processes for their higher end cameras because they know that they will ultimately reclaim those costs from the buyers.
This emphasis on improved engineering and component quality with the higher end cameras results in a more reliable product. I have, and still have, many cameras, both digital and film. The cheap ones invariably break. The good ones rarely do.
The solution to that nowadays is digitization of your slides or print negatives. A decent quality film scanned through a quality scanner can yield 9-11 megapixels of effective resolution. When printed using the same equipment used for digital photography printing, there is zero effective difference between them.
A $250 digital camera, for all practical purposes, is the equivalent of a $50 35mm film camera (technically the $50 film camera has a higher resolution, but that's another discussion). These low end digitals replace the snapshot cameras of yore, but shouldn't be confused with actual professional quality cameras. If you know that you're going to be shooting a "once in a lifetime" event like a wedding, first birthday, or something along those lines, you should either be shooting it in higher quality (and more reliable) film, or invest in a higher end digital.
If you lose that once in a lifetime shot because you trusted it to a cheap snapshot camera, that's as much your fault as the vendors.
NSA isn't a real collections agency. About four years ago I was a member of the Scientific American Book Club when I received a bill for three books I never received. I called them up and disputed the bill, but they claimed that it was valid and refused to drop it. I even offered to pay the bill if they'd reship the books (they were good physics texts), but couldn't get them to budge. Since I was already well past my required minimum buy, I just told them to cancel my account.
Almost immediately I started receiving nasty collections letters from the precursor to the North Shore Agency. When I demanded that they stop contacting me, they REFUSED. It turns out that these guys aren't actually a collections agency...they're a billing clearinghouse used by several of the big publishing outfits. They ARE NOT legally a CRA, they CAN NOT place negative information on your credit report, and because they don't actually assume the debt, they can't even sue you for the bill.
Four years later, these idiots still send me nasty letters threatening undefined impending dire consequences every three months or so, but absolutely nothing has happened. I have no negative hits on my credit report, I have never recived a collections call, and no legal action has been attempted by anybody. These guys can bark a lot, but they are completely toothless when it comes time to back up their threats. Considering that my alleged $121 bill is far larger than those being levied against Wired subscribers, I'd guess that they'd go after me long before they go after them.
I quit caring about NSA collection letters a long time ago. My opinion nowadays is that if they want to waste the postage sending me a few letters a year, I'm perfectly content to throw them away with the rest of my junkmail.
I said useable, not ideal. Besides, a product like this is going to be targeted at users who want to "use the Internet", and not much else. If people have a need for a more powerful PC, the odds are that they either already own one or they wouldn't use this one in the first place.
Linux actually represents a great platform for building a dedicated Internet PC. By stripping K or Gnome down to a minimalist interface with only a few generic links for "Email", "Web", "IP Phone", and "Instant Messaging", you can actually provide the low end, untrained user with an experience superior to that found on a Windows equipped PC.
PeoplePC was just too early to market.
The computers they offered cost them too much, and they spent far too much maintaining their network. Basically, their massive overhead destroyed their profitability.
Fast forward to 2005: The cost of hardware has dropped substantially, and Linux has matured enough to be useable for the average person. Couple that with the minimal overhead involved in connecting these users to the existing Earthlink network, and the possibility of profitability is far higher.
Of course, many people have been saying for years that computers would one fday be like cellphones. When I bought my first one, I spent $1500 on the phone and another $100 a month for fuzzy local service. Last year I replaced both mine and my wifes phones for $0 and a promise to maintain $50 monthly service for two years. The phones themselves have become a commodity and are no longer a profit center...they're simply used to drive subscriptions.
There's a reason why CCSF, and many other public colleges, uses the SSN. Most public colleges are funded by the state based on enrollment, and are required to regularly submit enrollment and financial aid reports to their funding agencies (in the case of CCSF, the CCC Chancellors Office). These reports are legally required to include the SSN for each listed student (used for a wide array of purposes ranging from fraud prevention to tax reporting). Since the basic structures of most school record databases have their origins in the mainframe days, they were created when having TWO unique identifiers for each record was considered wasteful and identity theft was virtually unknown. Though the databases themselves have been updated, the data structures themselves have simply been crosswalked, retaining that SSN dependence.
Changing to a student ID means retooling databases that may have 30 years worth of records in them. On top of that, it usually requires replacing or rewriting whatever software they use to interface with that database to support the new key (my own college recently spent over three million bucks and spent two years to do exactly this).
Hey, I just shut one of those down the other day. One of our faculty slapped up a public query form and was writing the students results, which contained their SSN, name, and address, to a publically accessible Access db. When I contacted the instructor his response was, "But how can anyone download it if I don't link to it?"
And therein lies the crux of the problem. On most college and uni campuses, the publishing of data isn't controlled by a "webmaster" or other campus employee. In our case, we give our faculty unfettered access to a Frontpage server and pretty much allow them to publish whatever they want. The upside is that the college isn't responsible for objectionable material, because it's owned by the instructor and posted under the auspices of "academic freedom". The downside is that, when someone does something stupid like this, it's typically the college, and not the instructor, who takes the heat. People fail to realize that for most college web content, the college is acting more like an ISP than a publisher.
It sounds like this Chicago incident is much the same. It wasn't that the university put up a security free server, but rather that some faculty member or staffer shoved some private data onto a public server without realizing that it became publically accessible.
What does the USA have to offer? Resources.
Minerals, chemicals, and enough food to support nations that are unable to grow enough to support their own populations.
Minerals? IIRC, every major gold mine in the US is foreign owned. Environmental protection laws are also driving up the cost and regulatory burden on mines so steeply that very few new major mines have opened in the past several decades, while dozens have closed. Mineral extraction is a fading industry in the US...the number of mines and miners continue to dwindle, and the profits from those mines rarely benefit this country anyway.
Chemicals? When was the last time a major new petrochemical plant was built in the US? Most American chemical companies are now putting their production facilities in Mexico and other neighboring countries where environmental and safety laws are less stringent. While the profits of this industry flow back into the US, it's arguable whether Mexican produced chemicals are really US products anymore...we're more of a middle man at this point (and we all know who gets cut first when budgets get tight).
Food? I live in the California Central Valley, arguably one of the most productive agricultural areas on the planet. You know what I see? Every year, countless thousands of acres of irreplaceable farmland being paved over for suburbs and strip malls. I see the government in an all-out attack to end pesticide use, stop cow flatulence, and restore irrigation water to their source rivers. While these may be laudable goals, their result is the same...farming is dying here. Nationally, the US is losing farmland at an incredible rate as fields are abandoned and built over. In fact, there is less production farmland in the US today than there was 100 years ago. We are rapidly becoming a food IMPORTER, not an exporter.
Economically, the US is becoming a net importer in just about every category, and is basing its continued economic dominance on the theory that its citizens can own and manage the resources being produced by other countries. Eventually the citizens of those countries are going to grow tired of American domination and either nationalize those assets or begin producing the same products with their own money and management...and put us out of business because their lower CEO salaries and the fact that they aren't beholden to stockholders will give them a HUGE price advantage.