His statement has been proven demonstrably false by multiple FBI investigations into influence peddling in congress which resulted in hidden camera cash exchanges. (One was referred to as "Koreagate" by the media, and the other was something like "Arabgate", both referring the to nationality of the donors).
Furthermore there is a long historical record of influence peddling and graft in American politics, dating back over a hundred years, at all levels of government.
Furthermore, it just doesn't stand the stink test. If the billions of dollars collectively donated to PACs, parties and candidates (along with in-kind donations of travel, "book deals", and so on) was truly not considered effective, why would it be happening? The guys that hand out checks for big corporations are REALLY hardheaded and don't throw money unless it gets them something.
You or I, after winning PowerBall, may not be able to waltz into Tom DeLay's office with a $10M check and demand he vote "NO" on House File 6923 in a neat and tidy exchange, but you can't tell me that Tom's decide-o-meter doesn't shift proportionality in my favor.
Norm Coleman's big political break was getting elected as Mayor in St. Paul, Minnesota as a *democrat*. During his first term he switched to being a Republican and was elected to a second term.
He was a major booster of St. Paul during his terms, which really had slid downhill in terms of its downtown. He worked hard to get a stadium built to ensure an NHL expansion franchise and to provide subsidies for new buildings to entice major corporations to relocate there, his biggest success being the luring of Lawson Software. I think he was also involved with the new science museum built on the downtown bluffs overlooking the river.
To his credit, the St. Paul waterfront and downtown are much more attractive and vibrant, and have less of a "where'd everybody go?" run down feeling, and the hockey franchise has done good things for the bar and restaurant situation near the stadium.
A number of people have condemned his boosterism as corporate welfare built on the backs of St. Paul taxpayers, since much of his generosity was funded by city-issued bonds, along with the usual arguments about the financial 'returns' of a sports franchise.
Strangely fewer people are critical of his political chameleon act than his economic boosterism. Personally I find this the scariest and most telling, as it demonstrates a willingness to do or say anything for political advantage.
However, a reasonable person may argue that the DFL (as the democrats are known in Minnesota) party of St. Paul and Minneapolis is *radically* liberal, and Norm may have made a reasonable decision that the party no longer supported his values.
I'm sure that economists and capitalists will disagree with me, and perhaps I am naive, but what's wrong with selling your widgets at a fair market price to all customers?
I guess I see business as putting too much intellectual capital into market manipulation -- be it discriminatory pricing, intellectual property machinations, accounting manipulation -- and not putting enough intellectual capital into making better products that people want.
It seems that it's become perfectly legitimate -- if not *more* legitimate -- to sell inferior products through manipulative means than it is to simply sell a good product in a straightforward way.
I'd love to be able to use some of the newer high-res laptop LCD panels as desktop LCD displays.
The laptop panels have much more pixels/cm^2 than the desktop ones. With a decent dual-head desktop card you could have a pretty sweet highres dual-head setup for even less desk space than an equivilent desktop LCD panels, let alone glass tubes.
NiMH rechargables. You should have no problem finding 1800mAh AA cells, and these hold up quite well to frequent charge/discharge cycles. I've been using them for about 4 years and they can take quite a pounding.
What's even better is that a lot of cordless stuff with NiCads can be converted to NiMH by making your own battery packs. Internally many of the packs are just a few AA cells soldered together.
If you do this, look for places that sell flat-top and soldertab batteries. Some of the cartridge-type battery packs won't fit the normal button-top batteries, and soldering can be hard on the cells if you try to solder directly to the cell itself.
I did this with my Uniden 900 Mhz DSS phone. Before it would go ~90 minutes on a fresh (new and fully charged) NiCad pack. Now I can get over 2 hours of talk time, leave the phone out of the charger over night, and still have it be perfectly usable the next day.
I was concerned about the charging system, but not any more. A friend has done this for a long time (NiCad->NiMH conversions) and hasn't had any problems, and neither have I.
Rather than delete the information, I'd like to see a process similar to but much more streamlined than the one we have for dealing with the credit reporting agencies.
Basically, walk into any place I think has information on me and ask to see it ALL. I then get to validate it for accuracy, and if I find parts inaccurate I get to say so. They then would have 30 days to prove me wrong, and if they can't, what I say is inaccurate gets deleted from my file automatically.
And validation needs to be based on something more than just "It says the same thing in this other computer we got here". Paper records, something tracable to a real human situation, not just bits on disk.
They have to be able to hold some info on you for the modern economy to work. My beef with this is that these systems are considered tautological and the burden of proof is on individuals to prove the information invalid. "I'm sorry sir, but the computer says you're an 87 year old woman, and it wouldn't be in the computer if it wasn't true.."
I'll vouch for #4. It's not bad for home users or areas where you have real limited interconnection with other networks. But it's a royal pain if you use NAT and RFC1918 addresses on a large network and have to do frequent interconnection with other networks who also do the same.
ASPs and others offering network interconnectivity services on a regular basis shouldn't ever use it in a way visible to customers, as it will result in a lot of address collision and annoying NAT-NAT double conversions that are a PITA to debug.
I've had ASPs vehemently insist that 10.0.0.0/8 was *their* block.
If massive lawsuits were their approach, why not build an in-house firm?
If you presume that a typical lawyer bills 100 hours per week (since hours billed > hours worked), that's 5200 per year or only 89 lawyer-years to handle your 465375 lawyer-hours.
Hiring 45 staff lawyers at $300,000 per year will cost you about $35 million (assuming their salary x 3 for all costs including support and facilities). You can then hire out 45 lawyers @ $93 million per year, yielding a tidy savings of around $50 million dollars.
I'd imagine there's even greater economies of scale from staff lawyers being able to handle a lot of this via form letters or other kinds of economies that hired lawyers would try to re-do froms scratch; you might even be able to get the lawyer-billable-hours up to 120 hours per week with these efficiencies, further cutting outside council costs by about $30 million dollars.
I'd also assume that a healthy victory-loss margin for the RIAA would cut the hours necessary to win a victory or a settlement substantially since there will be a large body of case law which will be hard to challenge.
You may even see after a couple of years a sub-$50 million legal cost to all of this.
The market as a *whole*, though, is somewhat predictive of the *economy*. The stock selloffs started in the second half of 2000; the economy eroded after that point.
The same is said of stock market recoveries and the overall economy; the market recovers before other economic indicators recover.
That's probably what this is for, to provide an indicator. The problem is they're not likely sampling people active in the terrorism market.
Much of the ballyhoo about music and filesharing is among a group of people under 30. Much of the NRA's strength is with people over 40. Once the people who are now wrapped up in the whole filesharing/RIAA/music issues get to be married, kids, house, dog, etc, it just won't be a germane issue to them. They probably will buy fewer than 10 albums a year.
I'm not saying that the intellectual property issues aren't important, but they're subtle and hard to grasp in terms of everyday importance for people with a lot of other responsibilities.
Gun rights are (whether you agree or not), constitutionally protected, impactful on a large number of people, and seen as far more core to traditional freedoms than whether or not you can copy a track from a CD to an MP3 player.
To make an NRA-style boycott work, you need to be able to engage older people (aka "mature adults") and possibly connect the RIAA to issues that effect day-day life. Otherwise the issue plays out much like it plays out now: spoiled kids stealing music. Then you will be able to raise money, and once you can raise money, you can 'target' unfriendly legislators and make your presence felt.
[IBM is] also better diversified into the "service" sector. Microsoft has a consulting division, but they are only geared toward helping to sell Microsoft solutions, they quickly show themselves to be nothing more than technical sales reps.
I think part of reason for that is that IBM's highly diverse product line and long-standing role in the datacenter and availability of major enterprise software (think hospitals, banks, etc) requires a consulting arm.
What's the most complicated MS enterprise system you can think of? I can only really think of a web/SQL cluster environment, which is probably complicated enough to require some kind of consulting service, but its also such a roll-your-own product that the Microsoft portion of the consulting kind of begins and ends with the OS and server configuration. The rest seems to be third party for application development.
I'd also bet their consulting group deals with just trying to make Windows 2000 + AD + policies *work* in a large enterprise.
The distinction probably is that MS sells software. IBM sells total *solutions*.
I think the issue was Indiana University having some kind of free speech concerns. Indiana University being a public, government-funded institution I believe they have a higher standard with regard to First Ammendment protections.
Although I'm at a loss why even these elevated concerns would impact COMMERCIAL speech. You have to get a permit to sell stuff on campus, and I've never heard of the ACLU getting involved with a University over sales calls from vendors.
Maybe they get a lot of University-specific spam above and beyond viagra/porn that would otherwise be considered political/educational/protected. Or maybe just the APPEARANCE of limitation on speech at a University, even if it is a legitimate attempt to control noxious speech, is the problem.
Forgot about the daisy-chain aspect of firewire and the idea of just chaining the individual components -- I was still thinking a hub-and-spoke kind of connection.
That would be easier. I think we could probably get by with cheap, reliable 100mbit wireless, though.
Wireless does make more sense, especially considering the idea is integrating more than just AV components which are physically adjacent.
I'd even go so far as to say I wish that you could do components wireless to each other, not just for room-room. I have a dead-simple AV setup (Reciever, Power Amp, DVD player, Tivo, VCR, Digital Cable box, TV, 6 pair of speakers throughout the house), and I found it to be a PAIN IN THE ASS to hook this stuff up*.
I wonder if there's spectrum available for such an application. You'd want to be able to simultaneously do 2-3 hidef video and 5.1 audio streams, 3-4 audio streams, plus maybe 2-3 standard def composite audio streams (cameras) per household. And with the idea that it could be usable in higher-density housing like close houses or townhouse-style developments without interfering. That's a shedload of bandwidth, and I'm not sure 802.11 handle it.
* It would have been trivial to hook up if I didn't have to fit it into spousal-approved furniture, where you cram everything into the front and try to keep the cables coming out the little hole in the back from getting hopelessly knotted.
Zip archives support the functionality of archiving (TAR) and compressing (GZ) in the same file with a single step.
All of the implementations of Winzip-type applications I've used on Windows don't treat.tgz files as a unified compressed archive the way tar does (tar -xzf foo.tgz). They decompress the tar file and make you open the archive seperately after decompressing it.
Which to the 15% of the non-technical computer user base that's actually figured out what ZIP does and how to use it would mean a flood of calls complaining to their senders that "the archive was empty, all it had was a.tar file".
Hyperbole? Maybe, but until the major Windows zipfile applications treat a.tgz the same way they treat a.zip file, as a single compressed entity containing one or more files, opened and accessed simultaneously, it'll be an unfortunately too-true hyperbole.
It's not a terrible idea, and I think most corporations were originally supposed to be structured that way, with the board of directors, elected by shareholders, overseeing senior management. Bad performance? Boot senior management.
There's no reason you couldn't do that now, but you'd have to structure the business in such a way that you really could ditch managers easily. I think the definition of "management" would have to be clearer, too -- I don't think it means the Lumbergh at the end of the hall, unfortunately.
I'm sure I'll get modded into oblivion by the Macintosh Jihad, but is anyone else amazed by the way that Apple apologists come out of the woodwork to defend Apple whenever one of the usual Slashdot hot button issues arise in conjunction with Apple?
If this story had run in relation to BuyMusic.Com, there would be an army of raging Slashdotters cutting Buy.Com into tiny bits and incinerating them, but when it's Apple/Mac/iTunes, there's this chorus of Apple defenders that comes out of the woodwork.
The only way I can explain this is that the Mac users aren't the ones griping in regard to most DRM issues, they're actually supportive of "soft" DRM. Although whenever there's a negative story about Windows DRM, we hear a lot of people chanting "iTunes, Mix, Rip Burn" in the background, so maybe that's not true.
As other followups have pointed out, the recorded music marketplace isn't what I would call a terribly free and open marketplace.
Most of the production, distribution and publicity channels are held by a small number of influential corporations. Most artists, even dominant popular artists, rely heavily on the marketing, publicity and distribution channels the dominant players provide.
Since there are no viable massmarket alternatives, the industry heavyweights effectively set the market terms.
I picked $5 because it more closely aligns with the actual production and manufacturing costs associated with recording and producing a compact disc. Perhaps I'm low by a dollar or two, but not much more.
You can do the math yourself and see -- a record that cost $500,000 to record, mix, and master with $1 million of marketing and a production run of 500,000 copies at $2 per copy (packaging, shipping and associated overhead costs) could sell for $7 per copy with a 40% profit margin.
And I'm sure those costs are out of line; I'd imagine the recording/mix/master costs would be half or less than half of that. Cutting production costs to $250,000 leaves a $7 CD with a 67% profit margin, at 2-3 times what many other industries expect.
I've actually thought of something similar for a traditional RV; a pontoon-type platform that the RV could drive onto; a special differential would connect the RV power plant to the pontoon's prop, and the rudder would be directed from the RV's cabin.
The challenge I run into is getting the RV on and off the pontoon. You'd almost need a special dock, ala ferry boats. I also think it would be a shitty boat -- poor control other than forwards and real wide turns.
I think there's another assumption burined in there that would require your payment-to-download ration to never dip below 1:10 or something to prevent the leech effect, since, presumably to get the music they'd have to buy at least one.
I'd be more than willing to buy music at 10% of its existing cost, which, theoretically, could be another potential business model -- bulk purchasing/discounting.
Which may get to the root of the the REAL problem, the outrageous cost of music. I think people would purchase if it wasn't so ridiculously priced. I think even "poor college kids" would buy CDs if they were $5.
I don't know, but between Steve Irwin, Olivia Newton John, "Maybe the Dingo Ate Your Baby", Men At Work, AC/DC and penal colony jokes, there's a lot of good material to dig at the Aussies about.
A guy I know was standing in line at immigration control in Sydney after a delayed flight from Hong Kong. The guy in front of him was British business man and handed the customs person his passport. The Brit was giving terse, unfriendly answers to the questions he was being asked. When asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, the British businessman was pushed over his limit of bureaucratic annoyance and replied "I didn't think it was a requirement anymore." He was refused entry!
Anyway, if you had to live with Irwin, Newton-John, et al, you'd be pissy, too!
I've been told by a PhD prof friend of mine that passports generally were abolished in Europe in the mid 19th century and only really came back into widespread use during/after WW I when national security and immigration control became more important political issues.
I can't imagine what pre-1860 passports would have been like, considering the cost and state of photo technology and the lack of real secure printing technologies.
Personally I think they should embed in your body a RFID tag that cryptographically matches one in your passport.
Altavista's biggest advantage at the time was the ability to do "advanced" searches (why are boolean operators considered advanced, anyway?) AND the fact that the web was so new that the sleazeball/MLM/marketing/fraud crowd hadn't yet figured out how to rig their pages to skew the search results. So not only could you do a pretty precise search, the corpus of
I'm pretty sure Google makes an ongoing attempt to counteract the attempts to skew their search results without adversely harming the results themselves. However, I'm not sure that the quality of results is what it was back in the good ol' altavista.digital.com days.
I kind of wish they'd implement some optional filters that would peform potentially 'negative' filtering on results to eliminate commercial or otherwise questionable results.
Most cats don't fetch. My cousin had one that would fetch most any object it could get into its mouth, although its favorite was a comb.
We sat around one afternoon and played fetch with the comb and the cat -- it'd grab it from almost anywhere, and would actually bring it back to us. I thought it was rather unusual, and my cousin said that they don't remember doing anything specific to condition the cat to fetch -- one day they tossed something and the cat grabbed it and brought it to them. Lather, rinse, repeat and the cat is a retriever.
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His statement has been proven demonstrably false by multiple FBI investigations into influence peddling in congress which resulted in hidden camera cash exchanges. (One was referred to as "Koreagate" by the media, and the other was something like "Arabgate", both referring the to nationality of the donors).
Furthermore there is a long historical record of influence peddling and graft in American politics, dating back over a hundred years, at all levels of government.
Furthermore, it just doesn't stand the stink test. If the billions of dollars collectively donated to PACs, parties and candidates (along with in-kind donations of travel, "book deals", and so on) was truly not considered effective, why would it be happening? The guys that hand out checks for big corporations are REALLY hardheaded and don't throw money unless it gets them something.
You or I, after winning PowerBall, may not be able to waltz into Tom DeLay's office with a $10M check and demand he vote "NO" on House File 6923 in a neat and tidy exchange, but you can't tell me that Tom's decide-o-meter doesn't shift proportionality in my favor.
Norm Coleman's big political break was getting elected as Mayor in St. Paul, Minnesota as a *democrat*. During his first term he switched to being a Republican and was elected to a second term.
He was a major booster of St. Paul during his terms, which really had slid downhill in terms of its downtown. He worked hard to get a stadium built to ensure an NHL expansion franchise and to provide subsidies for new buildings to entice major corporations to relocate there, his biggest success being the luring of Lawson Software. I think he was also involved with the new science museum built on the downtown bluffs overlooking the river.
To his credit, the St. Paul waterfront and downtown are much more attractive and vibrant, and have less of a "where'd everybody go?" run down feeling, and the hockey franchise has done good things for the bar and restaurant situation near the stadium.
A number of people have condemned his boosterism as corporate welfare built on the backs of St. Paul taxpayers, since much of his generosity was funded by city-issued bonds, along with the usual arguments about the financial 'returns' of a sports franchise.
Strangely fewer people are critical of his political chameleon act than his economic boosterism. Personally I find this the scariest and most telling, as it demonstrates a willingness to do or say anything for political advantage.
However, a reasonable person may argue that the DFL (as the democrats are known in Minnesota) party of St. Paul and Minneapolis is *radically* liberal, and Norm may have made a reasonable decision that the party no longer supported his values.
I'm sure that economists and capitalists will disagree with me, and perhaps I am naive, but what's wrong with selling your widgets at a fair market price to all customers?
I guess I see business as putting too much intellectual capital into market manipulation -- be it discriminatory pricing, intellectual property machinations, accounting manipulation -- and not putting enough intellectual capital into making better products that people want.
It seems that it's become perfectly legitimate -- if not *more* legitimate -- to sell inferior products through manipulative means than it is to simply sell a good product in a straightforward way.
Am I just overly naive?
I'd love to be able to use some of the newer high-res laptop LCD panels as desktop LCD displays.
The laptop panels have much more pixels/cm^2 than the desktop ones. With a decent dual-head desktop card you could have a pretty sweet highres dual-head setup for even less desk space than an equivilent desktop LCD panels, let alone glass tubes.
NiMH rechargables. You should have no problem finding 1800mAh AA cells, and these hold up quite well to frequent charge/discharge cycles. I've been using them for about 4 years and they can take quite a pounding.
What's even better is that a lot of cordless stuff with NiCads can be converted to NiMH by making your own battery packs. Internally many of the packs are just a few AA cells soldered together.
If you do this, look for places that sell flat-top and soldertab batteries. Some of the cartridge-type battery packs won't fit the normal button-top batteries, and soldering can be hard on the cells if you try to solder directly to the cell itself.
I did this with my Uniden 900 Mhz DSS phone. Before it would go ~90 minutes on a fresh (new and fully charged) NiCad pack. Now I can get over 2 hours of talk time, leave the phone out of the charger over night, and still have it be perfectly usable the next day.
I was concerned about the charging system, but not any more. A friend has done this for a long time (NiCad->NiMH conversions) and hasn't had any problems, and neither have I.
Rather than delete the information, I'd like to see a process similar to but much more streamlined than the one we have for dealing with the credit reporting agencies.
Basically, walk into any place I think has information on me and ask to see it ALL. I then get to validate it for accuracy, and if I find parts inaccurate I get to say so. They then would have 30 days to prove me wrong, and if they can't, what I say is inaccurate gets deleted from my file automatically.
And validation needs to be based on something more than just "It says the same thing in this other computer we got here". Paper records, something tracable to a real human situation, not just bits on disk.
They have to be able to hold some info on you for the modern economy to work. My beef with this is that these systems are considered tautological and the burden of proof is on individuals to prove the information invalid. "I'm sorry sir, but the computer says you're an 87 year old woman, and it wouldn't be in the computer if it wasn't true.."
I'll vouch for #4. It's not bad for home users or areas where you have real limited interconnection with other networks. But it's a royal pain if you use NAT and RFC1918 addresses on a large network and have to do frequent interconnection with other networks who also do the same.
ASPs and others offering network interconnectivity services on a regular basis shouldn't ever use it in a way visible to customers, as it will result in a lot of address collision and annoying NAT-NAT double conversions that are a PITA to debug.
I've had ASPs vehemently insist that 10.0.0.0/8 was *their* block.
If massive lawsuits were their approach, why not build an in-house firm?
If you presume that a typical lawyer bills 100 hours per week (since hours billed > hours worked), that's 5200 per year or only 89 lawyer-years to handle your 465375 lawyer-hours.
Hiring 45 staff lawyers at $300,000 per year will cost you about $35 million (assuming their salary x 3 for all costs including support and facilities). You can then hire out 45 lawyers @ $93 million per year, yielding a tidy savings of around $50 million dollars.
I'd imagine there's even greater economies of scale from staff lawyers being able to handle a lot of this via form letters or other kinds of economies that hired lawyers would try to re-do froms scratch; you might even be able to get the lawyer-billable-hours up to 120 hours per week with these efficiencies, further cutting outside council costs by about $30 million dollars.
I'd also assume that a healthy victory-loss margin for the RIAA would cut the hours necessary to win a victory or a settlement substantially since there will be a large body of case law which will be hard to challenge.
You may even see after a couple of years a sub-$50 million legal cost to all of this.
The market as a *whole*, though, is somewhat predictive of the *economy*. The stock selloffs started in the second half of 2000; the economy eroded after that point.
The same is said of stock market recoveries and the overall economy; the market recovers before other economic indicators recover.
That's probably what this is for, to provide an indicator. The problem is they're not likely sampling people active in the terrorism market.
Much of the ballyhoo about music and filesharing is among a group of people under 30. Much of the NRA's strength is with people over 40. Once the people who are now wrapped up in the whole filesharing/RIAA/music issues get to be married, kids, house, dog, etc, it just won't be a germane issue to them. They probably will buy fewer than 10 albums a year.
I'm not saying that the intellectual property issues aren't important, but they're subtle and hard to grasp in terms of everyday importance for people with a lot of other responsibilities.
Gun rights are (whether you agree or not), constitutionally protected, impactful on a large number of people, and seen as far more core to traditional freedoms than whether or not you can copy a track from a CD to an MP3 player.
To make an NRA-style boycott work, you need to be able to engage older people (aka "mature adults") and possibly connect the RIAA to issues that effect day-day life. Otherwise the issue plays out much like it plays out now: spoiled kids stealing music. Then you will be able to raise money, and once you can raise money, you can 'target' unfriendly legislators and make your presence felt.
[IBM is] also better diversified into the "service" sector. Microsoft has a consulting division, but they are only geared toward helping to sell Microsoft solutions, they quickly show themselves to be nothing more than technical sales reps.
I think part of reason for that is that IBM's highly diverse product line and long-standing role in the datacenter and availability of major enterprise software (think hospitals, banks, etc) requires a consulting arm.
What's the most complicated MS enterprise system you can think of? I can only really think of a web/SQL cluster environment, which is probably complicated enough to require some kind of consulting service, but its also such a roll-your-own product that the Microsoft portion of the consulting kind of begins and ends with the OS and server configuration. The rest seems to be third party for application development.
I'd also bet their consulting group deals with just trying to make Windows 2000 + AD + policies *work* in a large enterprise.
The distinction probably is that MS sells software. IBM sells total *solutions*.
I think the issue was Indiana University having some kind of free speech concerns. Indiana University being a public, government-funded institution I believe they have a higher standard with regard to First Ammendment protections.
Although I'm at a loss why even these elevated concerns would impact COMMERCIAL speech. You have to get a permit to sell stuff on campus, and I've never heard of the ACLU getting involved with a University over sales calls from vendors.
Maybe they get a lot of University-specific spam above and beyond viagra/porn that would otherwise be considered political/educational/protected. Or maybe just the APPEARANCE of limitation on speech at a University, even if it is a legitimate attempt to control noxious speech, is the problem.
Forgot about the daisy-chain aspect of firewire and the idea of just chaining the individual components -- I was still thinking a hub-and-spoke kind of connection.
That would be easier. I think we could probably get by with cheap, reliable 100mbit wireless, though.
Wireless does make more sense, especially considering the idea is integrating more than just AV components which are physically adjacent.
I'd even go so far as to say I wish that you could do components wireless to each other, not just for room-room. I have a dead-simple AV setup (Reciever, Power Amp, DVD player, Tivo, VCR, Digital Cable box, TV, 6 pair of speakers throughout the house), and I found it to be a PAIN IN THE ASS to hook this stuff up*.
I wonder if there's spectrum available for such an application. You'd want to be able to simultaneously do 2-3 hidef video and 5.1 audio streams, 3-4 audio streams, plus maybe 2-3 standard def composite audio streams (cameras) per household. And with the idea that it could be usable in higher-density housing like close houses or townhouse-style developments without interfering. That's a shedload of bandwidth, and I'm not sure 802.11 handle it.
* It would have been trivial to hook up if I didn't have to fit it into spousal-approved furniture, where you cram everything into the front and try to keep the cables coming out the little hole in the back from getting hopelessly knotted.
1) Inflate earnings
2) Falsify expenses
3) Slam 'n Cram Customers
4) Cheat business partners
5) Profit!!!
Looking back, was the monolithic monopoly of the Bell System REALLY that bad?
Zip archives support the functionality of archiving (TAR) and compressing (GZ) in the same file with a single step.
.tgz files as a unified compressed archive the way tar does (tar -xzf foo.tgz). They decompress the tar file and make you open the archive seperately after decompressing it.
.tar file".
.tgz the same way they treat a .zip file, as a single compressed entity containing one or more files, opened and accessed simultaneously, it'll be an unfortunately too-true hyperbole.
All of the implementations of Winzip-type applications I've used on Windows don't treat
Which to the 15% of the non-technical computer user base that's actually figured out what ZIP does and how to use it would mean a flood of calls complaining to their senders that "the archive was empty, all it had was a
Hyperbole? Maybe, but until the major Windows zipfile applications treat a
It's not a terrible idea, and I think most corporations were originally supposed to be structured that way, with the board of directors, elected by shareholders, overseeing senior management. Bad performance? Boot senior management.
There's no reason you couldn't do that now, but you'd have to structure the business in such a way that you really could ditch managers easily. I think the definition of "management" would have to be clearer, too -- I don't think it means the Lumbergh at the end of the hall, unfortunately.
I'm sure I'll get modded into oblivion by the Macintosh Jihad, but is anyone else amazed by the way that Apple apologists come out of the woodwork to defend Apple whenever one of the usual Slashdot hot button issues arise in conjunction with Apple?
If this story had run in relation to BuyMusic.Com, there would be an army of raging Slashdotters cutting Buy.Com into tiny bits and incinerating them, but when it's Apple/Mac/iTunes, there's this chorus of Apple defenders that comes out of the woodwork.
The only way I can explain this is that the Mac users aren't the ones griping in regard to most DRM issues, they're actually supportive of "soft" DRM. Although whenever there's a negative story about Windows DRM, we hear a lot of people chanting "iTunes, Mix, Rip Burn" in the background, so maybe that's not true.
But it is kind of ironic.
As other followups have pointed out, the recorded music marketplace isn't what I would call a terribly free and open marketplace.
Most of the production, distribution and publicity channels are held by a small number of influential corporations. Most artists, even dominant popular artists, rely heavily on the marketing, publicity and distribution channels the dominant players provide.
Since there are no viable massmarket alternatives, the industry heavyweights effectively set the market terms.
I picked $5 because it more closely aligns with the actual production and manufacturing costs associated with recording and producing a compact disc. Perhaps I'm low by a dollar or two, but not much more.
You can do the math yourself and see -- a record that cost $500,000 to record, mix, and master with $1 million of marketing and a production run of 500,000 copies at $2 per copy (packaging, shipping and associated overhead costs) could sell for $7 per copy with a 40% profit margin.
And I'm sure those costs are out of line; I'd imagine the recording/mix/master costs would be half or less than half of that. Cutting production costs to $250,000 leaves a $7 CD with a 67% profit margin, at 2-3 times what many other industries expect.
I've actually thought of something similar for a traditional RV; a pontoon-type platform that the RV could drive onto; a special differential would connect the RV power plant to the pontoon's prop, and the rudder would be directed from the RV's cabin.
The challenge I run into is getting the RV on and off the pontoon. You'd almost need a special dock, ala ferry boats. I also think it would be a shitty boat -- poor control other than forwards and real wide turns.
I think there's another assumption burined in there that would require your payment-to-download ration to never dip below 1:10 or something to prevent the leech effect, since, presumably to get the music they'd have to buy at least one.
I'd be more than willing to buy music at 10% of its existing cost, which, theoretically, could be another potential business model -- bulk purchasing/discounting.
Which may get to the root of the the REAL problem, the outrageous cost of music. I think people would purchase if it wasn't so ridiculously priced. I think even "poor college kids" would buy CDs if they were $5.
I don't know, but between Steve Irwin, Olivia Newton John, "Maybe the Dingo Ate Your Baby", Men At Work, AC/DC and penal colony jokes, there's a lot of good material to dig at the Aussies about.
A guy I know was standing in line at immigration control in Sydney after a delayed flight from Hong Kong. The guy in front of him was British business man and handed the customs person his passport. The Brit was giving terse, unfriendly answers to the questions he was being asked. When asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, the British businessman was pushed over his limit of bureaucratic annoyance and replied "I didn't think it was a requirement anymore." He was refused entry!
Anyway, if you had to live with Irwin, Newton-John, et al, you'd be pissy, too!
Does anyone know how passports originated?
I've been told by a PhD prof friend of mine that passports generally were abolished in Europe in the mid 19th century and only really came back into widespread use during/after WW I when national security and immigration control became more important political issues.
I can't imagine what pre-1860 passports would have been like, considering the cost and state of photo technology and the lack of real secure printing technologies.
Personally I think they should embed in your body a RFID tag that cryptographically matches one in your passport.
Altavista's biggest advantage at the time was the ability to do "advanced" searches (why are boolean operators considered advanced, anyway?) AND the fact that the web was so new that the sleazeball/MLM/marketing/fraud crowd hadn't yet figured out how to rig their pages to skew the search results. So not only could you do a pretty precise search, the corpus of
I'm pretty sure Google makes an ongoing attempt to counteract the attempts to skew their search results without adversely harming the results themselves. However, I'm not sure that the quality of results is what it was back in the good ol' altavista.digital.com days.
I kind of wish they'd implement some optional filters that would peform potentially 'negative' filtering on results to eliminate commercial or otherwise questionable results.
Cats do not fetch.
Most cats don't fetch. My cousin had one that would fetch most any object it could get into its mouth, although its favorite was a comb.
We sat around one afternoon and played fetch with the comb and the cat -- it'd grab it from almost anywhere, and would actually bring it back to us. I thought it was rather unusual, and my cousin said that they don't remember doing anything specific to condition the cat to fetch -- one day they tossed something and the cat grabbed it and brought it to them. Lather, rinse, repeat and the cat is a retriever.