Except that this was generally in opposition to totalitarian East Bloc countries with a proven track record of repression, up to and including killing of their own citizens for political purposes.
Despite the occasionally deplorable "war on terror", I'm not of the opinion that the US government has reached the depths of the USSR in its glory days (or even the Russia of today!).
Even better, we are one of the few nations able to issue sovereign debt denominated in our own currency. I don't know all of the advantages to this, but one I do know is that it allows us to basically print money to pay off our debt obligations.
That's a pretty powerful counterbalance to the "China owns too many US securities" argument.
The ACLU only defends the parts of the constitution they like. They refused to recognize the individual right to keep and bear arms for a long time. I haven't checked their web site post-Heller, but it wouldn't surprise me if they still held this position.
I've long appreciated their position on freedom of speech and other civil liberties, but found their lack of support for the 2nd Amendment as an individual right a fairly troubling sign of partisanship.
I went to an estate sale recently and bought a 5 gallon tub filled with Legos for my son. The owners were moving and many of the Legos appeared to be circa 1980 vintage blocks that their kids had (eg, the old-style wheels with the metal axle that snaps into the 4x2 brick with the 4 holes and the innards for snapping in the wheel axles).
While most of the bricks were pretty much the same as in some of the new "generic" brick sets, a few pieces like some windows and doors are not. I'm not a big Lego hobbyist, but my understanding is that a number of bricks (styles, colors, shapes, etc) are no longer made, and given the number of Star Wars sets I've helped my son assemble, there's probably an awful lot of oddball bricks only used in a handful of sets that would be handy to have without buying an entire set.
Given the rise of rapid prototyping machines, will Lego ever allow anyone to custom-make bricks no longer made? I'm not sure how well the materials used in rapid protoyping would work as Legos (there's a certain springyness required, it seems) but it also seems like a market that could operate pretty quietly even if Lego didn't agree with it.
When did nerds stop saying "wow, technically impressive" and start saying "ooh, shiny?" I always thought it was the artsy types that went for Apple, not nerds.
About 1998, when the Internet picked up steam and the computing universe became filled primarily with people accomplishing non-computing (ie, not math, engineering, science or data processing) tasks.
Now the computing universe if full of people who apparently "do things" with computers who have no idea how they work, just how to accomplish things with them.
Not to mention that in spite of the recession, there's an awful lot of "computer" jobs out there and it's attracted a lot of people to the field who in past decades (say, the 1980s) would have done some other job than "data processing."
I own a Series2 and two HDTivos and all three devices have been among the most reliable things I've owned. The Series2 is semi-obsolete but surprisingly still going strong (until the soon to be implemented switch of Comcast's analog channels to encrypted digital).
Both of my HDTivos have multistream cable cards and have since I bought them. I'd like to bitch about Comcast, but about the only complaint I had was being required to have an "installer" install the CableCards. In both cases the installer knew what they were doing and the cards worked the first time -- I doubt the installers were on site more than 30 minutes total between both boxes. No problems at all with them in the 2-3 years I've had both boxes.
I haven't run into any issues with switched digital video but from what I can tell, it's a "solved" problem with the addition of a tuning adapter (per Tivo's web site).
I have to believe that most "overages" are nothing more than pure, 100% profit for the carrier and it's probably accepted policy to allow CSRs to void overages if customers get huffy.
I'm sure there's more stolen power than we're aware of, especially in urban areas or industrial areas.
It gets reported on when people steal it to run pot grow houses, but it probably doesn't even get noticed in high density urban areas with old, legacy wiring and many connections. A pizzeria oven run off electricity has to cost thousands of dollars a year (it'd be run, what, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day?).
The same is true for high-density industrial areas -- lots of power supplies and a great temptation to power that arc welder for free.
And possibly even rural areas -- how hard would it be for a farmer to have a tap ahead of the meter? Even if it was a semi-annual, short-term setup for running a corn dryer or some other high-energy application? The savings could run into the thousands of dollars and it could be easily removed when the need for power was done.
But this is probably meant to reduce manpower overall, so it's conceivable that several of these could be tricked into false positive detection, resulting in the remaining humans being forced to go on a wild goose chase and leaving the site more vulnerable.
...for the right reason -- the owner of the car was being issued a criminal citation regardless who was driving the car, shifting the burden of proof to the owner rather than the state to prove the owner committed the violation or permitted the violation to take place.
I think some states don't issue citations with their traffic cameras unless they have a good photo of the driver in case someone challenges the citation.
HTML5 -- is it a new language? Is it a set of extensions to HTML, Javascript, or is it more of a concept/phenomenon, like "Web 2.0"?
I read it as an extension of the HTML standard, but quite often its treated as a "new language" as opposed to an extension, upgrade, etc. I wonder if that's half the problem -- I think generally speaking, people are a little weary of many new things, technology wise, and failure to cast this as more of an upgrade than a wholly new entity (even if the new features make it so) probably has a lot to do with some of the scaremongering associated with it.
My Tag Heuer watch has a sapphire crystal and it has ZERO scratches on it after 3+ years of continuous wear. I wear this watch all the time, including times where one might question the wisdom of wearing a $2500 watch (ie, crawling in the crawlspace working on a lighting/wiring project).
I think all carriers hate to be "just" carriers and fear a day in the future when their only product is commoditized and forced into head-head competition with other carriers.
The strategy seems to have always been with Verizon to restrict phone capabilities to force the use of Verizon products or services (eg, bluetooth restrictions on file sharing, photo downloads via USB, etc).
I can't believe there has been a time in recent memory when Apple would have ever agreed to crippling their product or surrendering their user experience to Verizon's fairly naked profit motives.
I'd like to see the FCC require a common wireless standard that all carriers had to use and prohibit locking of a handset to any particular carrier network.
This would automatically void carrier exclusivity and basically eliminate hardware lock-in.
What happens when you can't buy more land or more seeds, or the cost of more land and more seeds exceeds the return on investment? Or perhaps, more darkly, what happens when you follow more-land-more-seeds iteratively and then the market for beans collapses?
I can only guess, but I suspect that adding cell sites isn't quite like plugging in low-budget wifi boxes around a large building until you can get a signal everywhere. Just siting the equipment can be a challenge, especially in a crowded and expensive urban area. Adding backhaul links isn't cheap and I suspect the more sites you add in a narrow geographic area, the more complex it gets meshing them.
I also suspect that LTE plays into this as well -- large investments in 3G could delay LTE rollout further, making it slower to launch and complicating consumer decisions about handsets not to mention manufacturer commitment to producing them.
It's really not that difficult. A waste-energy plant I have as a client already separates out glass, copper, brass, zinc, ferrous metal, and aluminum, and this is an old plant, built in the late 1980s that was really only designed to produce power plant fuel. The material separation is more about protecting the furnaces at the generating plant with a refined fuel product than recycling. I think most of the metal separation is targeted at cash value.
OK, I get why the FCC began investigating this -- regulating VZW is part of their turf. But criminal fraud is usually investigated by the FBI, and isn't that what this is?
Surely "accidental" data access & billing was known and if not explicitly planned for, was greenlighted anyway by high level people with that kind of authority. At a minimum, it spanned many devices, so it wasn't a one-off "oops" with the LG Butterfinger and bad programming. It certainly looks like a deliberate, intentional attempt to defraud customers.
Why is this corporate overcharging never considered an organized criminal conspiracy? Even though it may not be totally "fair", why isn't at least one executive (or more!) considered personally liable and hauled in front of a criminal court? At worst it's always a "corporate" crime, the settlement involves at best a check for $5, at worst a coupon for discounts on future purchases (which is really a negative benefit).
And the reality is that the "fine" or "settlement amount" comes out of some contingency account that's funded through higher rates charged to everyone; it's not like the damn government even has the cajones to require the executive bonus pool pay the fines.
Why does it have to be a $500+ million Ponzi scheme before anyone goes to jail?
It seems even more desperate than that. I think the smell of death has taken hold at MS -- they're toast in search, Windows Mobile went from pervasive to MIA in very short time span, they actually had tablets out years ago and now Apple seems to have a massive lead (at least in mindshare).
My guess is they figured they HAD to do this because a flop with WinMo7 would be highly embarrassing and possibly cost Ballmer his job.
Business users identify with luxury goods. There's a crossover point between cool, high tech, trendy and luxury goods that attracts business people. The iPhone is seen as high end, and this naturally draws in business people.
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Except that this was generally in opposition to totalitarian East Bloc countries with a proven track record of repression, up to and including killing of their own citizens for political purposes.
Despite the occasionally deplorable "war on terror", I'm not of the opinion that the US government has reached the depths of the USSR in its glory days (or even the Russia of today!).
Even better, we are one of the few nations able to issue sovereign debt denominated in our own currency. I don't know all of the advantages to this, but one I do know is that it allows us to basically print money to pay off our debt obligations.
That's a pretty powerful counterbalance to the "China owns too many US securities" argument.
The ACLU only defends the parts of the constitution they like. They refused to recognize the individual right to keep and bear arms for a long time. I haven't checked their web site post-Heller, but it wouldn't surprise me if they still held this position.
I've long appreciated their position on freedom of speech and other civil liberties, but found their lack of support for the 2nd Amendment as an individual right a fairly troubling sign of partisanship.
I went to an estate sale recently and bought a 5 gallon tub filled with Legos for my son. The owners were moving and many of the Legos appeared to be circa 1980 vintage blocks that their kids had (eg, the old-style wheels with the metal axle that snaps into the 4x2 brick with the 4 holes and the innards for snapping in the wheel axles).
While most of the bricks were pretty much the same as in some of the new "generic" brick sets, a few pieces like some windows and doors are not. I'm not a big Lego hobbyist, but my understanding is that a number of bricks (styles, colors, shapes, etc) are no longer made, and given the number of Star Wars sets I've helped my son assemble, there's probably an awful lot of oddball bricks only used in a handful of sets that would be handy to have without buying an entire set.
Given the rise of rapid prototyping machines, will Lego ever allow anyone to custom-make bricks no longer made? I'm not sure how well the materials used in rapid protoyping would work as Legos (there's a certain springyness required, it seems) but it also seems like a market that could operate pretty quietly even if Lego didn't agree with it.
When did nerds stop saying "wow, technically impressive" and start saying "ooh, shiny?" I always thought it was the artsy types that went for Apple, not nerds.
About 1998, when the Internet picked up steam and the computing universe became filled primarily with people accomplishing non-computing (ie, not math, engineering, science or data processing) tasks.
Now the computing universe if full of people who apparently "do things" with computers who have no idea how they work, just how to accomplish things with them.
Not to mention that in spite of the recession, there's an awful lot of "computer" jobs out there and it's attracted a lot of people to the field who in past decades (say, the 1980s) would have done some other job than "data processing."
I own a Series2 and two HDTivos and all three devices have been among the most reliable things I've owned. The Series2 is semi-obsolete but surprisingly still going strong (until the soon to be implemented switch of Comcast's analog channels to encrypted digital).
Both of my HDTivos have multistream cable cards and have since I bought them. I'd like to bitch about Comcast, but about the only complaint I had was being required to have an "installer" install the CableCards. In both cases the installer knew what they were doing and the cards worked the first time -- I doubt the installers were on site more than 30 minutes total between both boxes. No problems at all with them in the 2-3 years I've had both boxes.
I haven't run into any issues with switched digital video but from what I can tell, it's a "solved" problem with the addition of a tuning adapter (per Tivo's web site).
I have to believe that most "overages" are nothing more than pure, 100% profit for the carrier and it's probably accepted policy to allow CSRs to void overages if customers get huffy.
I'm sure there's more stolen power than we're aware of, especially in urban areas or industrial areas.
It gets reported on when people steal it to run pot grow houses, but it probably doesn't even get noticed in high density urban areas with old, legacy wiring and many connections. A pizzeria oven run off electricity has to cost thousands of dollars a year (it'd be run, what, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day?).
The same is true for high-density industrial areas -- lots of power supplies and a great temptation to power that arc welder for free.
And possibly even rural areas -- how hard would it be for a farmer to have a tap ahead of the meter? Even if it was a semi-annual, short-term setup for running a corn dryer or some other high-energy application? The savings could run into the thousands of dollars and it could be easily removed when the need for power was done.
But this is probably meant to reduce manpower overall, so it's conceivable that several of these could be tricked into false positive detection, resulting in the remaining humans being forced to go on a wild goose chase and leaving the site more vulnerable.
...for the right reason -- the owner of the car was being issued a criminal citation regardless who was driving the car, shifting the burden of proof to the owner rather than the state to prove the owner committed the violation or permitted the violation to take place.
I think some states don't issue citations with their traffic cameras unless they have a good photo of the driver in case someone challenges the citation.
Will it support the E1000 NIC? Most of the more modern VMware versions will support a virtualized Intel E1000 network card.
Isn't this the whole TCO thing, all over again?
HTML5 -- is it a new language? Is it a set of extensions to HTML, Javascript, or is it more of a concept/phenomenon, like "Web 2.0"?
I read it as an extension of the HTML standard, but quite often its treated as a "new language" as opposed to an extension, upgrade, etc. I wonder if that's half the problem -- I think generally speaking, people are a little weary of many new things, technology wise, and failure to cast this as more of an upgrade than a wholly new entity (even if the new features make it so) probably has a lot to do with some of the scaremongering associated with it.
Considering I had worn the same Timex digital watch since 1986 when I got it, I questioned it, too, but it was a 40th birthday present from my wife.
Thusfar I've been happy with it. It keeps good time, the chronograph works and it has that status cachet I've always longed for (ha!).
My Tag Heuer watch has a sapphire crystal and it has ZERO scratches on it after 3+ years of continuous wear. I wear this watch all the time, including times where one might question the wisdom of wearing a $2500 watch (ie, crawling in the crawlspace working on a lighting/wiring project).
...did you get the living shit beat out of you in school?
This looks like what I'd like -- do you ever have it play DVDs from ISOs over SMB shares, and does it do it OK without barfing/freezing/etc?
That's what I'd like.
I think all carriers hate to be "just" carriers and fear a day in the future when their only product is commoditized and forced into head-head competition with other carriers.
The strategy seems to have always been with Verizon to restrict phone capabilities to force the use of Verizon products or services (eg, bluetooth restrictions on file sharing, photo downloads via USB, etc).
I can't believe there has been a time in recent memory when Apple would have ever agreed to crippling their product or surrendering their user experience to Verizon's fairly naked profit motives.
Exactly. Drag you in, extort you to go deeper and deeper, and then hang you out to dry.
Before involving one's self in espionage, it might make sense to read up on the exploits of James Jesus Angleton and the tradecraft.
I'd like to see the FCC require a common wireless standard that all carriers had to use and prohibit locking of a handset to any particular carrier network.
This would automatically void carrier exclusivity and basically eliminate hardware lock-in.
What happens when you can't buy more land or more seeds, or the cost of more land and more seeds exceeds the return on investment? Or perhaps, more darkly, what happens when you follow more-land-more-seeds iteratively and then the market for beans collapses?
I can only guess, but I suspect that adding cell sites isn't quite like plugging in low-budget wifi boxes around a large building until you can get a signal everywhere. Just siting the equipment can be a challenge, especially in a crowded and expensive urban area. Adding backhaul links isn't cheap and I suspect the more sites you add in a narrow geographic area, the more complex it gets meshing them.
I also suspect that LTE plays into this as well -- large investments in 3G could delay LTE rollout further, making it slower to launch and complicating consumer decisions about handsets not to mention manufacturer commitment to producing them.
It's really not that difficult. A waste-energy plant I have as a client already separates out glass, copper, brass, zinc, ferrous metal, and aluminum, and this is an old plant, built in the late 1980s that was really only designed to produce power plant fuel. The material separation is more about protecting the furnaces at the generating plant with a refined fuel product than recycling. I think most of the metal separation is targeted at cash value.
OK, I get why the FCC began investigating this -- regulating VZW is part of their turf. But criminal fraud is usually investigated by the FBI, and isn't that what this is?
Surely "accidental" data access & billing was known and if not explicitly planned for, was greenlighted anyway by high level people with that kind of authority. At a minimum, it spanned many devices, so it wasn't a one-off "oops" with the LG Butterfinger and bad programming. It certainly looks like a deliberate, intentional attempt to defraud customers.
Why is this corporate overcharging never considered an organized criminal conspiracy? Even though it may not be totally "fair", why isn't at least one executive (or more!) considered personally liable and hauled in front of a criminal court? At worst it's always a "corporate" crime, the settlement involves at best a check for $5, at worst a coupon for discounts on future purchases (which is really a negative benefit).
And the reality is that the "fine" or "settlement amount" comes out of some contingency account that's funded through higher rates charged to everyone; it's not like the damn government even has the cajones to require the executive bonus pool pay the fines.
Why does it have to be a $500+ million Ponzi scheme before anyone goes to jail?
It seems even more desperate than that. I think the smell of death has taken hold at MS -- they're toast in search, Windows Mobile went from pervasive to MIA in very short time span, they actually had tablets out years ago and now Apple seems to have a massive lead (at least in mindshare).
My guess is they figured they HAD to do this because a flop with WinMo7 would be highly embarrassing and possibly cost Ballmer his job.
Business users identify with luxury goods. There's a crossover point between cool, high tech, trendy and luxury goods that attracts business people. The iPhone is seen as high end, and this naturally draws in business people.