Even better, a store of account numbers
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 1
Even better would be a store of time, transaction count or dollar amount limited account numbers usable for situations where you don't trust the vendor or the transaction environment completely.
Going to Moscow? Grab a new account limited for the length of your stay, good for up to $5000. If your number is stolen, they have until the expiry date or your allotment is spent.
Of course, I don't think that Visa/Mastercard care, actually, since they get a cut of the transactions, and limiting transactions would cost them money. They'd sooner nail vendors with chargebacks and take away their MC/Visa privs if they don't like it.
...it's a huge growth opportunity for them, and in many ways is such a natural for their scanning engines that they would have to do very little to even begin supporting it other than adding spyware definitions.
That they haven't makes me speculate that they might fear repercussions from other industry partners that like the spyware concept, albeit slightly less malevolently, and don't want to see it totally mooted by AV companies, or if perhaps they've felt pressure from larger clients who are involved in spyware either directly or indirectly.
It's probably conspiratorial to speculate on that, but there aren't a lot of logical reasons why they *wouldn't* want to do spyware removal, especially in a premium product.
Call yourself African American? Great, if you want to adopt African history as your own. Except that African history is generally much more brutal than European and/or American history.
Speaking of African Americans, a co-worker of my wife's is a white South African. I keep telling him he needs to make sure that his kids always check the boxes on their financial aid applications that indicate that they are African-American.
I'd just love to be able to participate in the debate on that one. When someone challenges their claim to being African American and explains that it's a racial distinction, I'd have to ask why they aren't referred to as Black Americans, since they're line back to Africa is a hell of a lot shorter than any so-called "African American".
As far as I'm concerned, the entire debate on race/racism got seriously mangled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emphasis on "Africa" (which is a continent, not a race, religion or nation), the special bennies for being "disenfranchised", the denial of non-white racism -- basically all the baggage tacked on (ironically) by a bunch of leftist white academics who were more interested in socialistic anti-establishment rhetoric than anything else.
How many 1G sticks of RAM could you put into your standard Firewire/USB2 enclosure? Why couldn't someone make a USB2/Firewire/SCSI enclosure that the host system saw as a mass storage device but was actually just a smaller version of the above? It might be really useful for some DB applications, video editing, etc.
I can't imagine that an enclosure of that type would run more than $500, plus the cost of the RAM that went into it. It might not be consumer cost effective, but it could be worthwhile at the prosumer or low end, where the RAM disks shown on/. are almost never affordable but by the richest organizations.
Fighting Irish isn't considered bad because by and large the Irish accepted their reputation as a badge of honor, in as much as many Italians accept a wiseguy reputation -- both impart a certain toughness and swagger.
What I resent isn't that, for example, idea that Redskins is a degrading team name, but that all kinds of other European ethnic stereotypes are considered acceptable but ANY ethnic stereotype of non-Europeans is considered taboo, even if the stereotype being used (eg, Warriors or Braves) represents a set of characteristics that are by and large seen as noble and courageous.
Either ALL ethnic team names and stereotypes are off limits, or none are.
But all this is part and parcel of the idea that racism is something exclusive to whites. Don't even get me stated on the massive fraud that is the "hate crime". A half-dozen blacks rob, rape and beat a white woman senseless and it's not a hate crime; a white guy uses a racial epithet in the course of cutting somebody off on the freeway and there's a DOJ investigation of his hate crime.
In high school in the early 80s, we had a K-12 academic timesharing system called MECC Timesharing System (which is kind of a proto-GNU acronym structure).
Anyway, this timesharing ran on CDC Cyber series mainframes and had several pre-Internet multi-user applications that were wildly successful among anyone who could get access to the system:
XTALK: Similar to IRC; the output is virtually identical. Supported a series of public channels, private channels, and some admin commands for booting users. Biggest annoyance was the way the Cyber handled lower case letters; they used more bits than uppercase letters and conversations often got cut off. The buffer accepted the typing, but the output got clipped. No binary file transfer or any of that sort of thing. (At 110 baud, what would YOU have wanted to transfer?).
Scepter/Milieu: MUD, pre-mud. Persistent characters, spells, monsters, the whole nine yards. When MTS shut down in 1984, the source got leaked and a high school friend (who is now PhD in Csci and works at google) ported the application by manually re-typing it into a Sage IV micro (Pascal based, as was the original source). That copy got ported to VAX 11/780 by another friend. The original Milieu author ran a payware multiuser BBS that supported a later varient of Milieu after MTS demise; dunno whatever happened to any other versions.
Combat: A text-based space combat game. This was tactical, not strategic and required you to interpret your ships placement versus other ships based on a one or two line numerical positions. When you died, you got kicked back to the command line with the phrase "Congratulations, you just bought the farm.", which became something of a catch-phrase. Quite hard, actually. I sucked at it and couldn't compete with the members of AGCP (A Group of Combat Players).
Email/newsgroups: The email system (which I can't remember if it was written by the college students who admined the system or was a CDC product) was quite good, and feature a multi-topic bulletin board system in addition to private email.
The MTS community, since it was exclusively based in Minnesota, also had a real-life social element to it, with MTHPs (MECC-Type H____ Parties, the H was made up to meet whatever the event was -- House, Hayride, etc). It kind of died off once MTS died off in 1984. There was a multi-user BBS started right after that offered some metro-area die-hards to hang out, but after that it kind of dissolved into the local BBS scene.
Anyway, when the Internet came around for me in 1990 or so, it all seemed so *derivative*, since I'd experienced a multiuser computing phenomena already.
Why is "Fighting Irish" acceptable? Because we know that all Irish are drunken brawlers? And what about the Celtics' logo? Do you think Irish like always being associated with leprechauns?
Of course that doesn't matter, since these debates are only about minorities and their narrow, politically correct agendas where abuse/degredation of whites is OK.
Don't buy a single format burner -- buy one that does +/- R/RW.
My personal opinion is that -R media has a slight edge in compatibility with a few older DVD-ROM drives and a few more older DVD players; DVD-R is endorsed by the DVD Forum and its specification is "official." This distinction is disappearing as new players and -ROM drives almost always support both formats.
I use -R exclusively, but primarily because I got a -R/RW drive dirt cheap, I knew worked in my DVD player, and it's the only write-once format supported by my set-top DVD recorder, the Panasonic DMR-E80H. It also only supports -RAM media for rewritables, which means that my next drive is going to be a +/- R/RW/RAM drive (if I can find one, most of the ones I've seen have been -R/-RW/RAM).
The nicest thing about the -RAM discs are the caddied discs; I can just toss them in a drawer and the caddy keeps them safe with no handling. Other than that, they're expensive and hard to find (especially in a caddy).
My personal guess is that - and + formats will remain "tied" until Blu-Ray or DVD-HD writables become affordable.
I thought they spent their time groping female passengers. Usually their so crowded that you're literally pushed together, making working your iPod tough, let alone doing anything vaguely resembling productive.
The observatory is at one of the lowest levels of the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota. It's open for tours, including a mine tram ride to an ore extraction site, and a quick glimpse of part of the CDMS labs at the bottom of the mine. I wish they offered more extensive tours of the labs, and maybe they do, but not on the weekend I was there.
If you're in the Ely area, it's definitely worth a quick side trip to see the mine.
I see them all the time, but only in places where they're restricted to a very small number of applications, almost a green-screen replacement.
I think the biggest obstacles have been things like multimedia, peripheral access, software compatibility (some of it Windows' fault, some of it the software's fault), cost, and scalability. And then there's *laptops*, which breaks the whole model.
Any one of those things can be a huge showstopper, and then you factor in *politics* where some group of employees simply won't tolerate a "peecee" without a cupholder or some other doo-dad, you can see how far a complex and expensive thin client initiative can go.
I personally would like to see the whole thing re-thaught as "lean client" or something, where a stub PC running a stub OS can interact with USB/1394 peripherals as well as process multimedia streams locally. But then we'd need a real, multi-user based Windows OS and apps that didn't assume they were going to be run as Administrator and shit all over the hard disk.
So educate us. What non-display-related computation do 3270 terminals do? Can you run processes on them? Do independent computing tasks?
The 3270 page at Wikipedia doesn't indicate any of this functionality, other than IBM's unique stream-based interaction between CPU and terminal. If you count these display based processes as processing, then why wouldn't a "dumb" terminal like the DEC VT series count, since they also do "processing" of the serial data stream?
I'll agree with you, but I think you need to push the bandwidth/latency/reliability to the top 5-10% of all possible applications to really justify FC prices. For a large segment of the marketplace, iSCSI can do "good enough" to make it worthwhile, with some the added flexibility to go places FC can't easily go.
Realy if you need those fatures though FC is brobably a better bet because you will need performance and reliability. I shutter to think of how much fun iSCSI becomes when you start dropping packets when a port goes bad.
I don't know about that. What makes an iSCSI SAN different from a FC SAN? AFAICT it's the layer 2 and 3 transport technology, not the overall structure. You can implement a vulnerable iSCSI SAN using your production data network, interfaces and VLANs, or you can dedicate interfaces, VLANs or even entire ethernet switching fabric to iSCSI, increasing its reliability to FC levels without having to pay FC prices. FC products are more mature, but that's just a matter of time. FC devices, ports and switches are as vulnerable to problems as ethernet switches, if not more so due to the lower volume of production and consumption.
Whether I'd build an entire new data center based on iSCSI is debatable, but it's certainly an inexpensive way to get most of the bennies of FC SANs without the FC cost.
Where's that at, anyway? While anyone can "deploy" SMB servers (either canned, home-grown, or otherwise), it doesn't make any sense at all to just add a bunch of new shares willy-nilly, fragmenting your overall storage capacity.
What WOULD make these kinds of devices make more sense would be iSCSI and the ability to dynamically expand an existing volume to use the new space over the network. I know there are some expensive SAN systems that can do this now, but iSCSI would make it a lot less expensive, using an existing or dedicated IP network to connect the devices instead of expensive fiber channel fabric.
My personal favorite is "They can never pay me less than I can work." I forget where I picked that up, but I think it was (no +5 Funny intended) a catchphrase from Soviet Russia, said of incentiveless makework jobs.
I have an HD set (Sony GWIII), HD cable (Sci Atlanta 3250). The SA3250 will output downconverted versions of HD channels, but they don't look any better than their digital channel versions, and in some cases worse since the 3250 makes some icky choices about letter/pillarboxing 16:9 content.
Why would you even bother blocking downconverts via DRM? They look just "OK", you almost never get access to a 5.1 sound track you can do much with besides listen to (some complicated HTPC setups excluded).
Besides, it seems to be a nod to fairness to allow the next level "below" as an allowed copying medium if they're going to get persnickety with the "best" current medium.
I mean, I buy stuff, too, and the Sunday inserts are a great way to check prices on stuff, and see what's generally on sale or otherwise discounted.
I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy, but this is the best kind of advertising -- I can opt-in if I want to, they print prices, have pictures, you can comparison shop on a lot of things, no cookies, spyware, sales associates or other annoyances.
With as much money as Gates' has, and as diverse as his holdings probably are, it seems like it would be *trivial* to oversee some detail or other, particularly when the amounts being traded are almost always at the level where all the most nitpicky SEC rules apply.
With the Powerball lottery getting way up there again, we were talking about what would happen if you won it, and whether we'd quit our jobs or not. I said I'd be inclined to keep my job, just to be bothersome to management ("Sorry I'm late, those Ferrari's just suck in the snow"), but we all kind of agreed that just keeping track of a diversified portfolio of 90-some million dollars would become a full-time job.
You could always hire an accountant, a broker and a lawyer, and then another accountant, lawyer and broker to audit the other three, but even that would be a big job.
At Gates' level of wealth, he almost needs to retain Deloitte or Ernst just to keep his checkbook balanced.
Were any of the development concerns the ease or simplicity of implementing the codec in hardware? Not being anything more than a video codec user, I don't know if this is ever a consideration.
It strikes me that there would be some advantage in factoring in the ease or complexity of hardware implementation of a codec. Since simpler, cheaper hardware might mean broader uptake or implementation by set-top makers.
When the Democrats are in power, you still get fucked in the ass, except you get a reacharound.
When the Republicans are in power you get fucked in the ass, you don't get a reacharound and, in the case of the Bush Jr. administration, you get to suck them off when they're done, too.
It's a subtle difference most of the time, but at the least the Dems see to it I get to come once in a while, too.
The FTC is simply parroting the current administration's pro-business rhetoric and defending any possible "entrepenurial opportunities" against regulation. This, coupled with an ethical zeitgeist that is solely focused on technical definitions of legality and not on philosophical defintions of ethical behavior -- basically, how can I rationalize stealing as OK? -- keeps the FTC from treating MOST basically crooked business behavior for what it is.
What surprises me is that only the fringe elements of the computer industry have responded to most spyware for what it is. You don't see anti-virus software makers putting out versions of their product that will remove spyware as well, despite the fact the most admins would pay handsomely for enhanced AV software that would remove spyware. Microsoft has done nothing to prevent too-easy web-based installation of spyware or other techniques to limit secret background apps from manipulating IE, the process table or the registry.
You get the feeling that there's a collective interest in the corporate community as a whole that spyware is somehow desirable; nobody really wants to get rid of it except users and maintainers of computers. Of course in the current ethical environment, it doesn't surprise me that they would embrace the idea of legitimizing bugging a PC for their own profit, against the will of the owner.
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Even better would be a store of time, transaction count or dollar amount limited account numbers usable for situations where you don't trust the vendor or the transaction environment completely.
Going to Moscow? Grab a new account limited for the length of your stay, good for up to $5000. If your number is stolen, they have until the expiry date or your allotment is spent.
Of course, I don't think that Visa/Mastercard care, actually, since they get a cut of the transactions, and limiting transactions would cost them money. They'd sooner nail vendors with chargebacks and take away their MC/Visa privs if they don't like it.
...it's a huge growth opportunity for them, and in many ways is such a natural for their scanning engines that they would have to do very little to even begin supporting it other than adding spyware definitions.
That they haven't makes me speculate that they might fear repercussions from other industry partners that like the spyware concept, albeit slightly less malevolently, and don't want to see it totally mooted by AV companies, or if perhaps they've felt pressure from larger clients who are involved in spyware either directly or indirectly.
It's probably conspiratorial to speculate on that, but there aren't a lot of logical reasons why they *wouldn't* want to do spyware removal, especially in a premium product.
Call yourself African American? Great, if you want to adopt African history as your own. Except that African history is generally much more brutal than European and/or American history.
Speaking of African Americans, a co-worker of my wife's is a white South African. I keep telling him he needs to make sure that his kids always check the boxes on their financial aid applications that indicate that they are African-American.
I'd just love to be able to participate in the debate on that one. When someone challenges their claim to being African American and explains that it's a racial distinction, I'd have to ask why they aren't referred to as Black Americans, since they're line back to Africa is a hell of a lot shorter than any so-called "African American".
As far as I'm concerned, the entire debate on race/racism got seriously mangled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emphasis on "Africa" (which is a continent, not a race, religion or nation), the special bennies for being "disenfranchised", the denial of non-white racism -- basically all the baggage tacked on (ironically) by a bunch of leftist white academics who were more interested in socialistic anti-establishment rhetoric than anything else.
How many 1G sticks of RAM could you put into your standard Firewire/USB2 enclosure? Why couldn't someone make a USB2/Firewire/SCSI enclosure that the host system saw as a mass storage device but was actually just a smaller version of the above? It might be really useful for some DB applications, video editing, etc.
/. are almost never affordable but by the richest organizations.
I can't imagine that an enclosure of that type would run more than $500, plus the cost of the RAM that went into it. It might not be consumer cost effective, but it could be worthwhile at the prosumer or low end, where the RAM disks shown on
...of problems with libc versions?
Fighting Irish isn't considered bad because by and large the Irish accepted their reputation as a badge of honor, in as much as many Italians accept a wiseguy reputation -- both impart a certain toughness and swagger.
What I resent isn't that, for example, idea that Redskins is a degrading team name, but that all kinds of other European ethnic stereotypes are considered acceptable but ANY ethnic stereotype of non-Europeans is considered taboo, even if the stereotype being used (eg, Warriors or Braves) represents a set of characteristics that are by and large seen as noble and courageous.
Either ALL ethnic team names and stereotypes are off limits, or none are.
But all this is part and parcel of the idea that racism is something exclusive to whites. Don't even get me stated on the massive fraud that is the "hate crime". A half-dozen blacks rob, rape and beat a white woman senseless and it's not a hate crime; a white guy uses a racial epithet in the course of cutting somebody off on the freeway and there's a DOJ investigation of his hate crime.
In high school in the early 80s, we had a K-12 academic timesharing system called MECC Timesharing System (which is kind of a proto-GNU acronym structure).
Anyway, this timesharing ran on CDC Cyber series mainframes and had several pre-Internet multi-user applications that were wildly successful among anyone who could get access to the system:
XTALK: Similar to IRC; the output is virtually identical. Supported a series of public channels, private channels, and some admin commands for booting users. Biggest annoyance was the way the Cyber handled lower case letters; they used more bits than uppercase letters and conversations often got cut off. The buffer accepted the typing, but the output got clipped. No binary file transfer or any of that sort of thing. (At 110 baud, what would YOU have wanted to transfer?).
Scepter/Milieu: MUD, pre-mud. Persistent characters, spells, monsters, the whole nine yards. When MTS shut down in 1984, the source got leaked and a high school friend (who is now PhD in Csci and works at google) ported the application by manually re-typing it into a Sage IV micro (Pascal based, as was the original source). That copy got ported to VAX 11/780 by another friend. The original Milieu author ran a payware multiuser BBS that supported a later varient of Milieu after MTS demise; dunno whatever happened to any other versions.
Combat: A text-based space combat game. This was tactical, not strategic and required you to interpret your ships placement versus other ships based on a one or two line numerical positions. When you died, you got kicked back to the command line with the phrase "Congratulations, you just bought the farm.", which became something of a catch-phrase. Quite hard, actually. I sucked at it and couldn't compete with the members of AGCP (A Group of Combat Players).
Email/newsgroups: The email system (which I can't remember if it was written by the college students who admined the system or was a CDC product) was quite good, and feature a multi-topic bulletin board system in addition to private email.
The MTS community, since it was exclusively based in Minnesota, also had a real-life social element to it, with MTHPs (MECC-Type H____ Parties, the H was made up to meet whatever the event was -- House, Hayride, etc). It kind of died off once MTS died off in 1984. There was a multi-user BBS started right after that offered some metro-area die-hards to hang out, but after that it kind of dissolved into the local BBS scene.
Anyway, when the Internet came around for me in 1990 or so, it all seemed so *derivative*, since I'd experienced a multiuser computing phenomena already.
Why is "Fighting Irish" acceptable? Because we know that all Irish are drunken brawlers? And what about the Celtics' logo? Do you think Irish like always being associated with leprechauns?
Of course that doesn't matter, since these debates are only about minorities and their narrow, politically correct agendas where abuse/degredation of whites is OK.
Don't buy a single format burner -- buy one that does +/- R/RW.
My personal opinion is that -R media has a slight edge in compatibility with a few older DVD-ROM drives and a few more older DVD players; DVD-R is endorsed by the DVD Forum and its specification is "official." This distinction is disappearing as new players and -ROM drives almost always support both formats.
I use -R exclusively, but primarily because I got a -R/RW drive dirt cheap, I knew worked in my DVD player, and it's the only write-once format supported by my set-top DVD recorder, the Panasonic DMR-E80H. It also only supports -RAM media for rewritables, which means that my next drive is going to be a +/- R/RW/RAM drive (if I can find one, most of the ones I've seen have been -R/-RW/RAM).
The nicest thing about the -RAM discs are the caddied discs; I can just toss them in a drawer and the caddy keeps them safe with no handling. Other than that, they're expensive and hard to find (especially in a caddy).
My personal guess is that - and + formats will remain "tied" until Blu-Ray or DVD-HD writables become affordable.
I thought they spent their time groping female passengers. Usually their so crowded that you're literally pushed together, making working your iPod tough, let alone doing anything vaguely resembling productive.
The observatory is at one of the lowest levels of the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota. It's open for tours, including a mine tram ride to an ore extraction site, and a quick glimpse of part of the CDMS labs at the bottom of the mine. I wish they offered more extensive tours of the labs, and maybe they do, but not on the weekend I was there.
If you're in the Ely area, it's definitely worth a quick side trip to see the mine.
...and they said to get back to the store. There's some stocking to be done.
I see them all the time, but only in places where they're restricted to a very small number of applications, almost a green-screen replacement.
I think the biggest obstacles have been things like multimedia, peripheral access, software compatibility (some of it Windows' fault, some of it the software's fault), cost, and scalability. And then there's *laptops*, which breaks the whole model.
Any one of those things can be a huge showstopper, and then you factor in *politics* where some group of employees simply won't tolerate a "peecee" without a cupholder or some other doo-dad, you can see how far a complex and expensive thin client initiative can go.
I personally would like to see the whole thing re-thaught as "lean client" or something, where a stub PC running a stub OS can interact with USB/1394 peripherals as well as process multimedia streams locally. But then we'd need a real, multi-user based Windows OS and apps that didn't assume they were going to be run as Administrator and shit all over the hard disk.
So educate us. What non-display-related computation do 3270 terminals do? Can you run processes on them? Do independent computing tasks?
The 3270 page at Wikipedia doesn't indicate any of this functionality, other than IBM's unique stream-based interaction between CPU and terminal. If you count these display based processes as processing, then why wouldn't a "dumb" terminal like the DEC VT series count, since they also do "processing" of the serial data stream?
I'll agree with you, but I think you need to push the bandwidth/latency/reliability to the top 5-10% of all possible applications to really justify FC prices. For a large segment of the marketplace, iSCSI can do "good enough" to make it worthwhile, with some the added flexibility to go places FC can't easily go.
Realy if you need those fatures though FC is brobably a better bet because you will need performance and reliability. I shutter to think of how much fun iSCSI becomes when you start dropping packets when a port goes bad.
I don't know about that. What makes an iSCSI SAN different from a FC SAN? AFAICT it's the layer 2 and 3 transport technology, not the overall structure. You can implement a vulnerable iSCSI SAN using your production data network, interfaces and VLANs, or you can dedicate interfaces, VLANs or even entire ethernet switching fabric to iSCSI, increasing its reliability to FC levels without having to pay FC prices. FC products are more mature, but that's just a matter of time. FC devices, ports and switches are as vulnerable to problems as ethernet switches, if not more so due to the lower volume of production and consumption.
Whether I'd build an entire new data center based on iSCSI is debatable, but it's certainly an inexpensive way to get most of the bennies of FC SANs without the FC cost.
Where's that at, anyway? While anyone can "deploy" SMB servers (either canned, home-grown, or otherwise), it doesn't make any sense at all to just add a bunch of new shares willy-nilly, fragmenting your overall storage capacity.
What WOULD make these kinds of devices make more sense would be iSCSI and the ability to dynamically expand an existing volume to use the new space over the network. I know there are some expensive SAN systems that can do this now, but iSCSI would make it a lot less expensive, using an existing or dedicated IP network to connect the devices instead of expensive fiber channel fabric.
We saw a similar behavior with Welchia/Nachi; some systems only got partially infected. When rebooted, they lacked the .exe to continue infection.
I like that!
My personal favorite is "They can never pay me less than I can work." I forget where I picked that up, but I think it was (no +5 Funny intended) a catchphrase from Soviet Russia, said of incentiveless makework jobs.
I have an HD set (Sony GWIII), HD cable (Sci Atlanta 3250). The SA3250 will output downconverted versions of HD channels, but they don't look any better than their digital channel versions, and in some cases worse since the 3250 makes some icky choices about letter/pillarboxing 16:9 content.
Why would you even bother blocking downconverts via DRM? They look just "OK", you almost never get access to a 5.1 sound track you can do much with besides listen to (some complicated HTPC setups excluded).
Besides, it seems to be a nod to fairness to allow the next level "below" as an allowed copying medium if they're going to get persnickety with the "best" current medium.
I mean, I buy stuff, too, and the Sunday inserts are a great way to check prices on stuff, and see what's generally on sale or otherwise discounted.
I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy, but this is the best kind of advertising -- I can opt-in if I want to, they print prices, have pictures, you can comparison shop on a lot of things, no cookies, spyware, sales associates or other annoyances.
If only all commerce was this enjoyable.
With as much money as Gates' has, and as diverse as his holdings probably are, it seems like it would be *trivial* to oversee some detail or other, particularly when the amounts being traded are almost always at the level where all the most nitpicky SEC rules apply.
With the Powerball lottery getting way up there again, we were talking about what would happen if you won it, and whether we'd quit our jobs or not. I said I'd be inclined to keep my job, just to be bothersome to management ("Sorry I'm late, those Ferrari's just suck in the snow"), but we all kind of agreed that just keeping track of a diversified portfolio of 90-some million dollars would become a full-time job.
You could always hire an accountant, a broker and a lawyer, and then another accountant, lawyer and broker to audit the other three, but even that would be a big job.
At Gates' level of wealth, he almost needs to retain Deloitte or Ernst just to keep his checkbook balanced.
Were any of the development concerns the ease or simplicity of implementing the codec in hardware? Not being anything more than a video codec user, I don't know if this is ever a consideration.
It strikes me that there would be some advantage in factoring in the ease or complexity of hardware implementation of a codec. Since simpler, cheaper hardware might mean broader uptake or implementation by set-top makers.
When the Democrats are in power, you still get fucked in the ass, except you get a reacharound.
When the Republicans are in power you get fucked in the ass, you don't get a reacharound and, in the case of the Bush Jr. administration, you get to suck them off when they're done, too.
It's a subtle difference most of the time, but at the least the Dems see to it I get to come once in a while, too.
The FTC is simply parroting the current administration's pro-business rhetoric and defending any possible "entrepenurial opportunities" against regulation. This, coupled with an ethical zeitgeist that is solely focused on technical definitions of legality and not on philosophical defintions of ethical behavior -- basically, how can I rationalize stealing as OK? -- keeps the FTC from treating MOST basically crooked business behavior for what it is.
What surprises me is that only the fringe elements of the computer industry have responded to most spyware for what it is. You don't see anti-virus software makers putting out versions of their product that will remove spyware as well, despite the fact the most admins would pay handsomely for enhanced AV software that would remove spyware. Microsoft has done nothing to prevent too-easy web-based installation of spyware or other techniques to limit secret background apps from manipulating IE, the process table or the registry.
You get the feeling that there's a collective interest in the corporate community as a whole that spyware is somehow desirable; nobody really wants to get rid of it except users and maintainers of computers. Of course in the current ethical environment, it doesn't surprise me that they would embrace the idea of legitimizing bugging a PC for their own profit, against the will of the owner.