I've read that Disney will charge you some nominal fee (more than $3, less than full price) for a replacement disc.
I don't disagree with your gripe about damaged discs, though, they SHOULD be willing to replace the media -- or just admit that they're selling me the movie and not a license.
I think your argument would be valid if what was coming out on Blue-Ray was the exact same collection of VOB files that existed on the current DVD.
But it's not; on the Blue-Ray disc you get the high definition version of the movie and this is a different product.
The reverse question makes some sense, though -- if you buy a Blue Ray of some movie and it is otherwise identical content-wise to the DVD version of the same movie, shouldn't you be entitled to get a DVD copy of the movie for the cost of the media, or at least *make* a DVD copy yourself? Because in those cases, you're not getting a different product.
It strikes me that the telcos keep having this fantasy about owning the pipes AND the content on the pipes so that they can control the whole enchilada, much the way MS has managed to do so with their OS/application control. But the difference is that MS managed to leave the gate with that advantage and the telcos are trying to get to that point playing catch-up.
AFAIK "dumb pipes" will always be necessary -- the richer the application, the more data it needs, and the laws of physics as I understand them (a key disclaimer!) precludes the practicality of meaningful amounts of data riding over wireless networks (which by and large the dumb pipes guys still run anyway -- Verizon, Sprint, etc).
Since the dumb pipes guys seem to have a lock on most every technology that can realistically deliver any quantity of data now and as far into the future as my crystal ball goes, why not just be satisfied with the money made from controlling that segment? Is it just pure unadulterated greed?
You've managed to keep the cost of cars down, but how much mechanical experience/interest/time do you have invested in your car?
Assuming you've managed to drive one car for 20 years and you paid maybe $5,000 for it, you either never drive a car or you have superior mechanical ability and have a lot of time and money invested in the experience and tools necessary to keep a used car on the road.
I've driven a Honda Accord, bought new, for 7 years. It's paid for and with only 70k on the clock I figure I have at least another 7 years before it's a significant mechanical liability. I figure this is about as good as I can do. I've owned used cars but without the mechanical ability, they've been nothing but a liability. Public transport is really a non-option, too.
Almost all the luxury brands have their entry level cars. What baffles me is why someone would pay so much extra for a small car when they could get almost all the luxury features in a more downmarket brand (VW for Audi, Honda for Accura, etc) and pay less or pay the same and get a bigger car.
I know when I see an Audi A4 or a BMW 3 series, I can't help but laugh at their desperate grab for status, often poorly masked by a desire for "performance".
I think there's two kinds of VMware deployments. There's "utility" deployments to consolidate pesky environments or legacy systems (like BES, OWA front-ends, etc) where flexibility and ease of use matters, and then there's "enterprise" deployments where people actually run Exchange or SQL.
The former benefit more from GSX due to the much easier (at least in Windows) ability to work with GSX user interface and the simpler host operating environment. Grow-based VMDKs make much more sense and allow you a lot more breathing room for adding more VMs.
The "enterprise" VMWare deployments are less about consoldation since there are few x86 platforms that support enough CPU to meaningfully consolidate a high-usage Exchange, SQL or other system on the same box, and I think once those deployments don't change over time as much as GSX ones might. They're planned and deployed and then they're done.
In terms of business strategy, I think VMWare needs to merge workstation and GSX into a single product (which basically amounts to updating GSX with Workstation's new features and making it capable of running as a service as GSX does now), but price it at workstation prices.
ESX needs to come down in price and the high-buck costs needs to be in VMotion, since it presumes multiple deployments on a lot of hardware.
I looked at both GSX and ESX about a year ago to consolidate some pesky systems (all Windows) with aging hardware that needed unique environments. I thought ESX was a big pain. More complicated to manage (half web, half CLI), annoying disk allocation, and I could get it to bomb on a FreeBSD VM.
GSX was easier to manage in terms of the UI, and it was a lot easier to deal with VMDKs as well. Even performance wise I wasn't able to see much if any improvement with ESX vs. GSX on Win2k03.
Anyway, I think GSX is underrated, both in terms of stability and in terms of performance. VMotion of course changes the sitaution, but that's really is a horse of a different breed (and it's expensive, too).
I could have sworn that there was a news story in the past 10 years about a skydiver (in Australia?) whose primary and reserve parachutes did not open. He landed without any significant injuries.
Taught early -- in daycare?
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
My wife and I put our son into daycare at 3 months. After maybe two months, we changed his formula intake -- 2, 8oz bottles instead of 3 4-oz bottles to try to shift his feeding into the daytime and get him off a nighttime bottle.
We got immediate "feedback" from the staff about "cutting" his intake. I had to explain to them that it was actually a net increase for daytime feeding (16 vs. 12 oz) and his overall intake was actually up by 4 oz. They politely disagreed and we said we'd change it back if problems arose. After a week it was a non-issue.
After thinking about it, I realized what the real issue was -- the staff liked to feed him more frequently and we believed they were actually using the feeding as a way to soothe him; the feeding times for the bottles varied quite a bit. By cutting him to two bottles a day, they were "losing" a soothing option.
It was then that I started thinking about the staff; all of them would qualify as overweight, three of them would probably qualify as obese and one of them probably is pushing the morbidly obese standard.
I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I'm probably stretching this a lot, but it doesn't seem entirely unrealistic. Kids in increasingly large numbers since the 1970s have been put into daycares, and they've been subjected to food as a behavior modifier -- soothing babies, calming toddlers, and so on. The fact that daycare providers are, by and large, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder probably also means that the kids are being subjected to the caregivers own poor habits as well.
I know there are other influences (TV, advertising, parental disregard, etc), but I do wonder if bad food choices in daycare doesn't lay the groundwork for a fairly deep-seated set of food/emotion connections that play out as the child gets older and has more opportunity to make their own food choices.
The problem with relativism is that there's no where to draw the line on anything. The Holocaust becomes justifiable since it is an expression of "differences in social structures, values, religions, etc." ANYTHING is justifiable on those terms. Which is why relativism always falls apart.
I think human rights are universally valid; just because they violate some nations particular cultural habits doesn't invalidate them, and just because they've "Western" doesn't invalidate them either. Individual liberty, government by the consent of the governed, equality under the law, and many others -- these are critical values, that when infringed, repress individuals and create tyrany.
China is a tyranical state -- it represses it's people politically, socially, economically. China violates basic human rights. Supporting the Chinese government and political system means supporting tyrany.
The least Google could do would be to disclose what they're censoring; I think if the world knew the things that the Chinese censored specifically, it would be more damaging to the government than not censoring Google at all.
The US has so many elections at so many levels of government that it's a statistical given that there will be some where the process or outcome can be in question. But does that mean that democracy as a whole is at fault since it is flawed?
I'm equally outraged at the surveillance issue, although the tortue issue has seen more movement towards being torture-free than it had in the past. These issues don't get "solved" based on some common-sense and simplistic logic. If by outlawing torture we had lost the war in Europe and allowed the Nazis to exterminate another 5 million people, would you feel better about it?
So how would you define something like the Voting Rights Act? Prior to that act and its subsequent enforcement by the DOJ, Blacks couldn't vote in much of the deep South. Now they can. If that's not an example of self-correction, what is?
Or are you the kind of perfectionist who assumes that any problems must mean the entire system is rotten? Or the kind that assumes that an automatic change must happen, despite the historical dimensions of the problem at hand (eg, voting rights for Blacks)?
You're absolutely right that the US has had its share of corruption and anti-democratic elements.
But by and large, the US system of government has, through the input of its citizenry, been self-correcting and has eliminated many of these problems.
Simply because the U.S. isn't mathematically perfect as a democracy or a society doesn't invalidate criticism of nations we believe to be anti-democratic, nor does it mean that the U.S. is inherently antidemocratic.
I'll go along with the idea that DRM could provide some kind of protection from my kid or my neighbor or someone else of low risk from "stealing" my information.
But I also believe that's about where the benefit ends. I don't think the government will really be stopped by this, especially in the current "war on terror" domestic spying environment; there will always be embedded rights/keys for national security purposes.
I can also see that people we NEED to get stuff from (healthcare providers, banks, etc) will probably also demand the same kind of blanket access and sharing privileges that they make you sign onto right now.
AFAIC, conventional public-key encryption provides all the DRM I'll ever need and since the trust relationships are exclusively under my control, it's the only one you can really rely on.
I would think that if you were in this guy's line of work or other similar occupation, you'd strongly consider buying some rural land under a fake name and burying money in a pvc pipe for later.
The grandparent post is just typical multiculturalist rhetoric. They're unwilling to call most cultures to task for their human rights violations unless the country/nation in question has politics they view as contradictory to their own, typically left-leaning politics.
Nations populated with "people of color" get a special pass -- you don't seem to hear the multiculturalists criticizing female genital mutilation, the aspects of Sharia that treat women like slaves or property, the horrible Indian caste system, and so on.
In the specific case of China, criticizing the Chinese government's policies would be tantamount to admitting that communism is inherently dictatorial, which comes a little too close to home for most leftists.
I wonder how much real-word testing they do to develop the magic formula and how much the magic formula takes into account the actual usage of the machine during its current session.
It would be nice if the magic formula took into account the actual history of the machine in question, kind of a battery consumption/usage log that was more personalized about how the specific user actually uses it.
The hard-core Mac fanboys are really hurt by Apple's switch to Intel processors. I expect at least a few more months of stories dinging the new Macs as a last ditch rear-guard action against the change.
"Young and energetic" translates into "no family responsibilites", "naive", "able to work long hours", "devotes all of self to job."
I work in a small small-biz consulting firm and the first engineer they hired (I'm #5) was divorced and lived in an apartment. The spoken and unspoken assumption about getting certs for new products and/or anything else that doesn't seem like billable work is "..Dan did it."
Well sure he did. Dan doesn't have to mow a lawn, feed a 16 month old, or most any other responsibilities, and this is what employers want -- somebody who is essentially a 24/7 employee.
Older employees have family responsibilities and homes, and they often have also grown old enough to have other interests as well as gaining some perspective beyond their job interests, and thus are less willing to play 24/7 employee.
Depends on how you define mainstream; it's not like the New Republic, the New Yorker and the Economist are in the same league as USA Today, Newsweak, and the local paper.
The Japanese got off easy in terms of war crimes trials and retribution.
But it's not like the Allies were free of nasty behavior; the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo were purely terror oriented; they had no substantive military purpose beyond that. Some claim that the British Air Marshall should have been tried for crimes against humanity for ordering Dresden and Hamburg.
Even after Germany's surrender, American occupation units that took sniper fire (from Werewolf/Nazi resistance units, presumably) in villages were known to have pulled out of the villages and shelled them overnight in reprisal -- can you *imagine* what would happen if the US applied that tactic today in Iraq?
(I can -- I suspect that retaliatory shelling of civilians areas which were the source of insurgent attacks would be extremely cruel, immensely unpopular, but terribly effective at motivating civilians to turn in resistance fighters or breaking their will to resist).
The problem with war fighting is that there really isn't a good, clean way to fight it. You need to inflict terrible deaths and cruelties to defeat your enemies armies and to break their desire to fight.
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I've read that Disney will charge you some nominal fee (more than $3, less than full price) for a replacement disc.
I don't disagree with your gripe about damaged discs, though, they SHOULD be willing to replace the media -- or just admit that they're selling me the movie and not a license.
I think your argument would be valid if what was coming out on Blue-Ray was the exact same collection of VOB files that existed on the current DVD.
But it's not; on the Blue-Ray disc you get the high definition version of the movie and this is a different product.
The reverse question makes some sense, though -- if you buy a Blue Ray of some movie and it is otherwise identical content-wise to the DVD version of the same movie, shouldn't you be entitled to get a DVD copy of the movie for the cost of the media, or at least *make* a DVD copy yourself? Because in those cases, you're not getting a different product.
It strikes me that the telcos keep having this fantasy about owning the pipes AND the content on the pipes so that they can control the whole enchilada, much the way MS has managed to do so with their OS/application control. But the difference is that MS managed to leave the gate with that advantage and the telcos are trying to get to that point playing catch-up.
AFAIK "dumb pipes" will always be necessary -- the richer the application, the more data it needs, and the laws of physics as I understand them (a key disclaimer!) precludes the practicality of meaningful amounts of data riding over wireless networks (which by and large the dumb pipes guys still run anyway -- Verizon, Sprint, etc).
Since the dumb pipes guys seem to have a lock on most every technology that can realistically deliver any quantity of data now and as far into the future as my crystal ball goes, why not just be satisfied with the money made from controlling that segment? Is it just pure unadulterated greed?
You've managed to keep the cost of cars down, but how much mechanical experience/interest/time do you have invested in your car?
Assuming you've managed to drive one car for 20 years and you paid maybe $5,000 for it, you either never drive a car or you have superior mechanical ability and have a lot of time and money invested in the experience and tools necessary to keep a used car on the road.
I've driven a Honda Accord, bought new, for 7 years. It's paid for and with only 70k on the clock I figure I have at least another 7 years before it's a significant mechanical liability. I figure this is about as good as I can do. I've owned used cars but without the mechanical ability, they've been nothing but a liability. Public transport is really a non-option, too.
Would pressure on Paypal lead eBay to do more with Paypal to prevent auction fraud?
Almost all the luxury brands have their entry level cars. What baffles me is why someone would pay so much extra for a small car when they could get almost all the luxury features in a more downmarket brand (VW for Audi, Honda for Accura, etc) and pay less or pay the same and get a bigger car.
I know when I see an Audi A4 or a BMW 3 series, I can't help but laugh at their desperate grab for status, often poorly masked by a desire for "performance".
You have to wonder if it really was a formative moment in how a young Bill saw the marketing of a software product./
I think there's two kinds of VMware deployments. There's "utility" deployments to consolidate pesky environments or legacy systems (like BES, OWA front-ends, etc) where flexibility and ease of use matters, and then there's "enterprise" deployments where people actually run Exchange or SQL.
The former benefit more from GSX due to the much easier (at least in Windows) ability to work with GSX user interface and the simpler host operating environment. Grow-based VMDKs make much more sense and allow you a lot more breathing room for adding more VMs.
The "enterprise" VMWare deployments are less about consoldation since there are few x86 platforms that support enough CPU to meaningfully consolidate a high-usage Exchange, SQL or other system on the same box, and I think once those deployments don't change over time as much as GSX ones might. They're planned and deployed and then they're done.
In terms of business strategy, I think VMWare needs to merge workstation and GSX into a single product (which basically amounts to updating GSX with Workstation's new features and making it capable of running as a service as GSX does now), but price it at workstation prices.
ESX needs to come down in price and the high-buck costs needs to be in VMotion, since it presumes multiple deployments on a lot of hardware.
I'm guessing that for all those complicated reasons it won't really go anywhere.
I looked at both GSX and ESX about a year ago to consolidate some pesky systems (all Windows) with aging hardware that needed unique environments. I thought ESX was a big pain. More complicated to manage (half web, half CLI), annoying disk allocation, and I could get it to bomb on a FreeBSD VM.
GSX was easier to manage in terms of the UI, and it was a lot easier to deal with VMDKs as well. Even performance wise I wasn't able to see much if any improvement with ESX vs. GSX on Win2k03.
Anyway, I think GSX is underrated, both in terms of stability and in terms of performance. VMotion of course changes the sitaution, but that's really is a horse of a different breed (and it's expensive, too).
I could have sworn that there was a news story in the past 10 years about a skydiver (in Australia?) whose primary and reserve parachutes did not open. He landed without any significant injuries.
My wife and I put our son into daycare at 3 months. After maybe two months, we changed his formula intake -- 2, 8oz bottles instead of 3 4-oz bottles to try to shift his feeding into the daytime and get him off a nighttime bottle.
We got immediate "feedback" from the staff about "cutting" his intake. I had to explain to them that it was actually a net increase for daytime feeding (16 vs. 12 oz) and his overall intake was actually up by 4 oz. They politely disagreed and we said we'd change it back if problems arose. After a week it was a non-issue.
After thinking about it, I realized what the real issue was -- the staff liked to feed him more frequently and we believed they were actually using the feeding as a way to soothe him; the feeding times for the bottles varied quite a bit. By cutting him to two bottles a day, they were "losing" a soothing option.
It was then that I started thinking about the staff; all of them would qualify as overweight, three of them would probably qualify as obese and one of them probably is pushing the morbidly obese standard.
I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I'm probably stretching this a lot, but it doesn't seem entirely unrealistic. Kids in increasingly large numbers since the 1970s have been put into daycares, and they've been subjected to food as a behavior modifier -- soothing babies, calming toddlers, and so on. The fact that daycare providers are, by and large, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder probably also means that the kids are being subjected to the caregivers own poor habits as well.
I know there are other influences (TV, advertising, parental disregard, etc), but I do wonder if bad food choices in daycare doesn't lay the groundwork for a fairly deep-seated set of food/emotion connections that play out as the child gets older and has more opportunity to make their own food choices.
The problem with relativism is that there's no where to draw the line on anything. The Holocaust becomes justifiable since it is an expression of "differences in social structures, values, religions, etc." ANYTHING is justifiable on those terms. Which is why relativism always falls apart.
I think human rights are universally valid; just because they violate some nations particular cultural habits doesn't invalidate them, and just because they've "Western" doesn't invalidate them either. Individual liberty, government by the consent of the governed, equality under the law, and many others -- these are critical values, that when infringed, repress individuals and create tyrany.
China is a tyranical state -- it represses it's people politically, socially, economically. China violates basic human rights. Supporting the Chinese government and political system means supporting tyrany.
The least Google could do would be to disclose what they're censoring; I think if the world knew the things that the Chinese censored specifically, it would be more damaging to the government than not censoring Google at all.
The US has so many elections at so many levels of government that it's a statistical given that there will be some where the process or outcome can be in question. But does that mean that democracy as a whole is at fault since it is flawed?
I'm equally outraged at the surveillance issue, although the tortue issue has seen more movement towards being torture-free than it had in the past. These issues don't get "solved" based on some common-sense and simplistic logic. If by outlawing torture we had lost the war in Europe and allowed the Nazis to exterminate another 5 million people, would you feel better about it?
So how would you define something like the Voting Rights Act? Prior to that act and its subsequent enforcement by the DOJ, Blacks couldn't vote in much of the deep South. Now they can. If that's not an example of self-correction, what is?
Or are you the kind of perfectionist who assumes that any problems must mean the entire system is rotten? Or the kind that assumes that an automatic change must happen, despite the historical dimensions of the problem at hand (eg, voting rights for Blacks)?
You're absolutely right that the US has had its share of corruption and anti-democratic elements.
But by and large, the US system of government has, through the input of its citizenry, been self-correcting and has eliminated many of these problems.
Simply because the U.S. isn't mathematically perfect as a democracy or a society doesn't invalidate criticism of nations we believe to be anti-democratic, nor does it mean that the U.S. is inherently antidemocratic.
I'll go along with the idea that DRM could provide some kind of protection from my kid or my neighbor or someone else of low risk from "stealing" my information.
But I also believe that's about where the benefit ends. I don't think the government will really be stopped by this, especially in the current "war on terror" domestic spying environment; there will always be embedded rights/keys for national security purposes.
I can also see that people we NEED to get stuff from (healthcare providers, banks, etc) will probably also demand the same kind of blanket access and sharing privileges that they make you sign onto right now.
AFAIC, conventional public-key encryption provides all the DRM I'll ever need and since the trust relationships are exclusively under my control, it's the only one you can really rely on.
I would think that if you were in this guy's line of work or other similar occupation, you'd strongly consider buying some rural land under a fake name and burying money in a pvc pipe for later.
The grandparent post is just typical multiculturalist rhetoric. They're unwilling to call most cultures to task for their human rights violations unless the country/nation in question has politics they view as contradictory to their own, typically left-leaning politics.
Nations populated with "people of color" get a special pass -- you don't seem to hear the multiculturalists criticizing female genital mutilation, the aspects of Sharia that treat women like slaves or property, the horrible Indian caste system, and so on.
In the specific case of China, criticizing the Chinese government's policies would be tantamount to admitting that communism is inherently dictatorial, which comes a little too close to home for most leftists.
I wonder how much real-word testing they do to develop the magic formula and how much the magic formula takes into account the actual usage of the machine during its current session.
It would be nice if the magic formula took into account the actual history of the machine in question, kind of a battery consumption/usage log that was more personalized about how the specific user actually uses it.
The hard-core Mac fanboys are really hurt by Apple's switch to Intel processors. I expect at least a few more months of stories dinging the new Macs as a last ditch rear-guard action against the change.
"Young and energetic" translates into "no family responsibilites", "naive", "able to work long hours", "devotes all of self to job."
I work in a small small-biz consulting firm and the first engineer they hired (I'm #5) was divorced and lived in an apartment. The spoken and unspoken assumption about getting certs for new products and/or anything else that doesn't seem like billable work is "..Dan did it."
Well sure he did. Dan doesn't have to mow a lawn, feed a 16 month old, or most any other responsibilities, and this is what employers want -- somebody who is essentially a 24/7 employee.
Older employees have family responsibilities and homes, and they often have also grown old enough to have other interests as well as gaining some perspective beyond their job interests, and thus are less willing to play 24/7 employee.
That's kind of cool. You should make them into Quicktime VRs.
Depends on how you define mainstream; it's not like the New Republic, the New Yorker and the Economist are in the same league as USA Today, Newsweak, and the local paper.
The Japanese got off easy in terms of war crimes trials and retribution.
But it's not like the Allies were free of nasty behavior; the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo were purely terror oriented; they had no substantive military purpose beyond that. Some claim that the British Air Marshall should have been tried for crimes against humanity for ordering Dresden and Hamburg.
Even after Germany's surrender, American occupation units that took sniper fire (from Werewolf/Nazi resistance units, presumably) in villages were known to have pulled out of the villages and shelled them overnight in reprisal -- can you *imagine* what would happen if the US applied that tactic today in Iraq?
(I can -- I suspect that retaliatory shelling of civilians areas which were the source of insurgent attacks would be extremely cruel, immensely unpopular, but terribly effective at motivating civilians to turn in resistance fighters or breaking their will to resist).
The problem with war fighting is that there really isn't a good, clean way to fight it. You need to inflict terrible deaths and cruelties to defeat your enemies armies and to break their desire to fight.