4,677 hours of failure in 4,344 hours of time means that at any given time, an average of 1.07 locations were offline.
There are 131 DMV offices in Virignia; I don't know how many other Department of Transportation locations are included in the same bucket. If we assume that it's *only* the 131 DMV offices, 1.07 failures at any given time means that the system means that 130.3 locations are working, meaning that this statewide patchwork of network connections is 99.45% reliable.
If your 'redundant' connections cut the failures in half (which they wouldn't), you'd have 99.59% reliability at more than twice the cost for the network.
Adding 'redundancy' would more than double the network cost (since presumably currently they're using the lowest bidder), and in most places it wouldn't add any real redundancy anyway. Getting actual network redundancy is *fiendishly* difficult, even when you're spending a lot of money and siting a facility in a place that's well-served for networking. In small-town Virginia, you're almost certainly going to wind up paying for having redundant wires hanging on the same poles.
Nah. The OS X girlfriend is very low-maintenance, except for the fact that she'll only consent to live in a house with everything already built in at construction time: a built-in coffee maker, microwave, etc.
Sure, a built-in coffee maker costs $300 while one that sits on the counter is $30. Windows likes the cheap coffee maker, but when it breaks you frequently find that you wind up having to tear down the whole house and build a new one around a replacement coffee maker.
The built-in coffee maker (almost) never breaks, and when it does it's easy to fix. However, it appears to be totally incapable of making cappuccino. You're not really sure, though, because the documentation just pretends that cappuccino doesn't exist. You seem to remember hearing that Steve Jobs thinks that cappuccino is stupid.
The Linux girlfriend waits for someone to deliver coffee for free. Amazingly, this actually works, every morning When you find out that what's in the cup two days out of five is actually tea, you figure that that's close enough.
How about they fire him and he leaves with NO money? That makes even BETTER business sense. I can pretty much guarantee that if I royally screw up at my job I won't be receiving any bonus and I'll be looking for work again.
Yeah, well, that would seem to make sense. But when most people at that level sign on for the CEO job, part of the contract provides for a large payout if they're fired. During the hiring phase, everyone is happy with one another, shaking hands, slapping backs, and toasting one another in the boardroom. I don't think a lot of these boards really think about the fact that, if they eventually come to fire this guy, it'll be because he has screwed up.
If you look at it charitably, you can say that the CEO is putting his own business reputation on the line by taking on the top job, and that the golden-parachute clause is insurance against this. Most geeks have had the experience of taking a job or contract with a company and having things fail miserably through no fault of their own: I once had a contract at a place where they told me that Perl was an 'insecure language', and that thus all their software was to be written in VB, for example. This kind of idiocy impacts the bottom line, and thus the CEO's performance as well -- and there isn't a whole lot he can do about it. If when you were fired, or left a job in disgust, it was going to be discussed in the Wall Street Journal, you'd probably want the contract written to provide for some kind of payoff as compensation for the company's idiocy.
Or you can say that this kind of compensation is itself part of the company's idiocy. The truth is probably that it's both. I don't believe that competent CEOs are anything like as scarce as their paychecks would seem to suggest.
But scarcity isn't the only reason, or even the main reason, why CEOs get paid so much -- it's also because their work is easily measurable: either the stock price goes up, or it goes down. Their job description is 'increase the value of this number', and so everything they do for good or ill comes down to that value. It's easy to write a contract that says, in essence, 'if you increase the shareholders' value by a billion dollars, we'll pay you 1% of that'. $10 million is still a lot of money, but 1% is what you get as a green salesman off the street; so you might consider 1% as a really cheap rate for a competent, experienced CEO.
On the other hand, it's very hard to measure the value to shareholders of a competent sysadmin, which is why sysadmins get paid less than the arguably less-crucial marketing and sales guys. Again: marketing and sales are easy to quantify. A lot of geek work is notoriously hard to quantify: not only is most of it preventative in nature, but it's also invisible if you do it right.
If you want to make the big bucks, find a situation where you can do what you do in a way that the value you add is measurable and quantifiable.
If society values something highly enough, it can be done at a profit; the willingness to pay for a good or service is society's vote for its existence.
Proposing to subsidize transportation and health care will only ensure that the people who actually use the service are not the same as the people who decide whether it gets funded.
A subsidized transit system tends to be one that's bursting at the seams but that doesn't expand, because any increased ridership that results will actually be mean a further *drag* on the system, rather than more revenue and profits. This can be demonstrated in almost every city in the world, and the same thing applies to roads.
A subsidized health-care system means exactly the same thing. If a hospital bed costs the patient $10 a day, but it costs $200 a day to provide that bed: when all the beds are filled, adding 1000 more beds will mean that the hospital will have to come up with $190,000 a day. Since this money has to come from the Board of Governors or whatever source of funding you imagine instead of from the patients, this will tend to ensure that there's always a shortage of beds.
I could use a jacket with pockets better suited to what I'm going to put in them, but this thing -- in all its versions -- is just too ugly for me to wear.
I'd like to see the pockets and 'personal network' features in a jacket that doesn't look so high-tech and awful. The whole point of getting all that garbage off your belt and eliminating the pocket-bulges is to look like less of a goober, after all.
Regardless of the price, no broadcaster is forced to buy American TV shows. And again, if they were only on because they were cheap, people wouldn't watch them; there are things to do other than watch TV, after all. I think that the days of terrible shows like Dynasty and Knight Rider being bafflingly popular outside the US are over, though, and in any case these things were never as popular overseas as the quality home-grown stuff was.
There's no law in the United States about where your programming has to come from. There doesn't have to be; if he can't sell ads (or raise money from pledge drives a la PBS), a broadcaster will go out of business in short order. Americans, by and large, do not like foreign TV shows, so what little we get only gets shown in obscure timeslots, and usually on non-profit stations or on cable and satellite TV.
Here in the Washington area at least, there is one broadcaster who shows nothing but foreign news, movies, etc. At the moment, it's showing Le Journal from France 2. After that we've got Journal from Deutsche Welle, and then it's 'Maigret and the Liberty Bar', a 1960 mystery from France. Looking at the schedule for weekdays, I count seven hours between 9:00 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. that are in languages other than English; the remaining programming, while in English, is also from outside the USA.
BBC a source of 'real' news? I'm not even going to touch that.
Finally you could do away with the BBC, the last source of REAL news and get the bullshit that is on American TV every day. And hey if you dont like the broadcast television in America you are free as in freedom to buy cable or satelite service. You get hundreds more chanels of brain rotting none-sense and if you upgrade to the premium package you get undisputed most fair and balanced TV news on the planet, FOX news.
Obviously American TV, using this horribly flawed model, has never produced anything of value. This is why you never see American TV shows and networks outside the United States; because it's all 'bullshit'. This is why the United States is such a backwater as far as TV production goes, and why American TV has to import so many programs from overseas; it's just impossible for such a horribly, horribly flawed system to produce anything that people will watch. In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
Wake up, pal. I'll admit that much -- most? -- of what's on American TV is tripe, but it's what people want to see. You cannot sell advertising on programs that do not attract an audience, and those programs disappear. It's true, a lot of ads are annoying, and it is disturbing that audiences are attracted to things like Jerry Springer and the endless parade of boring 'reality' shows, but this is apparently what people want.
You, however, appear to favor a model where the TV viewers have much less of a voice in deciding what's going to be on. Fox News shouldn't be available, even though there's a strong demand for it, because you don't agree with it. Jerry Springer shouldn't be on TV -- I am translating your generic 'brain-rotting none-sense' [sic] into specifics here -- because you don't think it's any good.
On page 6 the document says 'freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice'.
I found this odd, too, considering that on page 2 of the same document it's clearly pointed out that the law in the United States at least aims to prevent things like this happening. Texas is, tourism slogans ('It's like a whole other country') aside, certainly part of the United States.
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Things may have changed by now, but when I used AOL's AIM client, I was struck by the fact that all the ads that appeared in the Buddy List menu were for AOL's own products and services.
I use iChat now, so I don't see their ads in any case. But when I still used the AIM client, I noticed that this little ad in the Buddy List was the only advertisement on my screen; I block pretty much all the regular web ads. AOL still managed to get through with their message, though: and they used this singular opportunity to attempt to sell me the AOL service, something I already get for free.
I've long been mystified by AOL's handling of these ads; you'd think that they'd allow and in fact encourage anyone in the universe to distribute AIM clients, as long as those clients displayed and rotated AOL's ads properly. AIM would become even more popular as the clients got better and better, and AOL wouldn't have to invest money developing them.
I have found that it's pretty effective against this kind of thing to look at the average word length. Most legitimate text has a pretty short average word length, because the most common words in many languages are also the shortest. In most English text, the average word length is going to fall somewhere between about 3.75 and 4.5 letters-- though 5 is a better upper limit for short texts.
The spammers are using this random text for the purpose of getting uncommon words into their messages; but because uncommon words tend to be long words, you can use average word length as an 'uncommon word detector' without resorting to using a dictionary.
This text, for instance, to this point averages about 3.85 letters per word, even though I have been using a lot of fifty-cent (or at least forty-cent) words.
Things like V:I:A:G:R:A or HTML tags bring down the score a lot, and this doesn't work well on particularly short messages. If you strip out HTML and punctuation before calculating the average, though, and if you give a discount to short messages' scores -- spam using this technique tends to be pretty long, since the block of longish words are sent in addition to the actual message -- it's another useful and fairly reliable spam marker.
I've had things destroyed by high-end (and very expensive) freight forwarders and air expediters, too. The bottom line is that they just don't really care about the stuff they're shipping -- even if it does have a lot of insurance on it.
Check out http://tinotopia.com/shipping/ for pictures of a largish shipment of Compaq servers that was left out in the rain by one such outfit.
It's not at all like saying that it's good to see convenience-store robbers get away. It's like saying "it's good to see one private entity refusing to act as judge, jury, and executioner without hearing evidence and without due process, in the matter of a civil dispute between two other entities."
Seven-eleven can't order the gun shop not to sell you any more ammunition, or Exxon not to sell you any more fuel, because you have been driving up to their stores and shooting the clerk. Nobody would even think of it.
The law is already stacked very much in favor of the corporate IP interests in these matters; they should just use it. If that's too expensive, or if the bad publicity would cost them too much, maybe they need to re-evaluate their strategies and business plans, rather than attempting to short-circuit the process that will get them what they want while not infringing on anyone else's rights.
The company I work for, a large multinational telecommunications outfit, uses LCD panels primarily in the 'back office', not the front. The receptionists have CRTs, while the operations centers use LCDs.
This is because the receptionist needs only one monitor, while even a small operations center needs, at a minimum, about 40.
Even with 17" LCDs going for four or five times the price of CRTs, it saves money in the long run due solely to the fact that the operations consoles can be shortened by about two feet each.
This might not hold true if you're building a facility in the middle of nowhere, or if all those LCDs wind up having a maximum life of about five years; but where real estate is even moderately expensive, the rental on the floor space CRTs would take up would make their total cost of ownership higher than that of LCDs in about five years.
I expect that the break-even point would come even sooner if one was inclined to figure in the cost differential of powering and cooling the things. CRTs use a lot more power and generate a lot more heat than LCDs. I used to use the back of a Sun 20" monitor to keep my breakfast bagel warm in the mornings until I was ready to eat it. The vents there were so well suited to this task that I think they must have been designed for this purpose.
Of course, the potential problem with this reasoning is that CRTs last almost forever, while all these LCDs might well sputter and die within that five-year period.
First of all, the condition of "adolescence" as distinct from both childhood and adulthood is a relatively recent invention.
In the hundred-odd years that we've seen teenagers as something unto themselves, they have, by and large, not been subject to anything like the kind of scrutiny, surveillance, and distrust that they are subject to today.
And lo, the race has survived.
While I will grant that there are things that are more common among teenagers today than they were thirty years ago -- getting falling-down-drunk on senior skip day comes to mind -- the proper solution to the problem is probably not to make adolescence weirder and more difficult than it already is. Far better to find the cause of what is seen as undesirable behavior on the part of teenagers; then work on solving the problem, rather than just treating kids with less and less and less respect (which -- hey! -- may just be part of the problem in the first place!)
I don't expect anything to be done along those lines anytime soon, though, because actually solving problems requires careful thought, observation, and an open mind. It's much easier to fit kids with shock collars, if necessary.
This is not like DirecTV turning off your service because you haven't paid. It's more analogous to MTV being able to instruct DirecTV to degrade your audio signal to mono because you've got the wrong kind of stereo -- and you can't currently buy a TV reciever that will ever be able to plug into the right kind of stereo.
It also has to do with terms of service that are not published (yet), and that are imposed by an entity (movie studios, presumably) with whom you do not have a direct relationship.
In other words, you are purchasing hardware that may, at a later date, be largely useless not because of actual technical obsolescence, but because copyright holders are developing a philosophy of guilty-until-proven-innocent -- and, further, believing that there is no acceptable proof of innocence.
There's always a penalty for early adopters, but it usually arises out of circumstance, not as deliberate policy.
I don't think that the whole thing was a scheme to get additional bandwidth, but I do agree that HDTV is DOA -- though the patient may be revived in surgery later.
Not only are there technical challenges (mainly involving money, ultimately) and the wailing of copyright holders (which effectively killed DAT as a consumer platform -- and TV, at least in America, is a horrible spaghetti mess of copyright compared to music), there's the artistic problem.
When color first came to TV in a large way, a lot of programs didn't make the switch immediately because it meant new sets, costumes, makeup, etc. -- and new techniques to make use of all these in color.
The impact of the switch to color was quite minor, compared to the changes that HDTV requires -- even if you ignore the enormous cost for new equipment. All of a sudden, the lighting, sets, costumes, actors, and anything else that appears on screen on TV has to be designed/built/made up/etc. to the same standard as used in motion pictures.
This is expensive and everyone has to start working differently. From the producers to the scriptwriters to the gaffers, everyone is now doing a slightly different job.
Pile the cost on top of the copyright fear-mongers on top of the artistic challenges, and nobody's left itching for HDTV except a relatively small group of people who are willing to cough up thousands of dollars for a TV. Everyone else is more than willing to wait, all for their own reasons.
When any one group -- consumers, artists, network business honchos, or copyright profiteers -- reaches a critical mass of demand for HDTV, we'll see meaningful broadcasts. Not before.
Who knows? The copyrightistas might wind up being the driving force, if they decide that it's too risky for them to continue to allow their precious content to go out over unencrypted-to-your-eyeball analog TV.
Business Reply Mail With Postage Affixed
BRM with postage affixed is handled the same as other BRM. No effort is made to identify or separate BRM pieces with postage affixed. The amount of affixed postage is not deducted from the postage or per piece charges owed. The permit holder may request a refund or credit for postage affixed under P014.
P014 is the procedure for getting refunds (of any sort; let's say you bought the Elmer Fudd stamps, but wanted the Daffy Duck ones) from the post office. Getting the money back is a big pain in the ass; you've got to give the post office packages of 100 identical pieces of mail, with identical denominations of postage on them; you've got to pay them $15 an hour to look through them and make sure the postage is really there. There are all sorts of forms to fill out. And then you don't get your per-piece charges (i.e. BRM service fee) back.
My guess would be that few BRMs with postage on them are ever redeemed; only very large organizations could make it worth their while. Small non-profits would actually lose money if they tried to redeem that postage.
This is incorrect in the USA. See the USPS Domestic Mail Manual, 922.3.1. (Available online at http://pe.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/manuals/Dmm/dmmtc.pdf)
The postal service charges the first-class postage for the piece, and then an additional fee for the trouble of handling business reply mail.
Taping the envelopes to a brick won't work, though. Postal regulations consider business reply mail envelopes stuck to other things to be waste -- possibly to eliminate this very problem.
It strikes me that increasing the size of the House over the current 435 is going to make the system even more unwieldly than it is now.
Absolutely true. China is "more representative" than the USA, but China's equivalent to the House of Representatives has over 2900 people in it. It would probably be impossible for such a large legislature to be democratic, even if that were the goal.
If we need to increase the number of representatives to make our system fair, I think the best alternative would be to split up the country.
The country already is split up, into fifty parts. The obvious answer is to give more control back to the states, where representation is higher. We've moved steadily away from that since the Civil War, and "states rights" has long been (usually) a code word for racism, cronyism, and xenophobia.
But there are some very real advantages to allowing states to differ more greatly than they do now, though -- the Founding Fathers foresaw the problems inherent in such a large country as the United States, and came up with a pretty good solution to the problem.
The federal government was never meant to micro-manage the country the way it does now. The system was not designed for the current mode of operation, and it shows.
If by freedom, you mean the ability to affect change as a private citizen, then I think the U.S. is still far and away the most 'free' country on the planet.
I don't know whether this is true any more. The United States, since the size of Congress was frozen in the 1920s, has come to have one of the least representative governments on Earth. The government in the PRC is, at least nominally, a good deal more representative.
In 1790, there was one member of the House of Representatives for about every 40,000 people. Today, in Britain, there's one member of the House of Commons for every 90,000 people. In Germany, France, and Canada, one representative for about every 100,000-120,000 people.
In the United States today, there's less than one member of the House of Representatives for every 600,000 people.
This is why we've got the permament corporate government; it's why we've got laws passed right and left recently to protect the rights of the wealthy and powerful corporations, at the expense, if necessary, of the rights of individuals.
I complain about this in more detail on my web page here.
The Palm VII offers this capability, though only in the U.S.
The problem, though, is that the VII can't receive a message and alert you to its presence autonomously; you've got to explicitly check for messages.
By far the more useful of all the gadgets I carry around in my pockets is the Motorola Pagewriter 2000. There is at least on competing product that offers the same capabilities, and Motorola promises a smaller, cheaper version (the PW2K is a brick) this summer. QWERTY keyboard you can operate with two thumbs, about $60 a month for nationwide unlimited service, etc. It's far better than SMS on the phone; incoming messages can be longer, it's easier to write outgoing messages, and the interface is much better adapted for text messaging use.
Me, I'm waiting anxiously for the unigadget, so I only have one thing to carry and one battery to charge. I do have serious redundancy in my pockets, though, since coverage for the Palm, the pager, and the phone penetrate to different depths in different buildings. That comes in handy, since airports, with their large land area, tend to paradoxically be the worst-covered areas. Typically only two gadgets out of four (including Ricochet modem) will work; which two depends on which airport and which terminal.
Re:"Glassbook reader detection" - what else?
on
King's New eBook
·
· Score: 1
Installing Acrobat generally also installs a plugin that allows you to open PDFs in your web browser window. Your web browser will then tell servers that it's able to accept Acrobat files. You don't have to give permission for the browser to tell the server that, any more than you have to give permission to accept JPEGs or HTML files.
Note that there's also a "GbDetected" field; apparently their reader works the same way.
A lot of people would (and probably will) point out that denying artists the income from recordings will result in the End Of Music, etc., etc., woof woof woof.
The problem with that idea is that music (and all other art) existed for millions of years prior to the rise of the RIAA and the MPAA. And never mind that only a few artists at the top of the recording food chain ever see much money from the sales of their recordings.
mp3s do not pose much of a risk to the income of most recording artists. They pose a risk to the very existence of the recording companies, though. This is why it's the recording companies, not the artists, that are telling you about how much money the artists are losing because of mp3s.
It's important to realize that. If the companies were just interested in maximizing their profits in the face of new technology, they'd eventually face reality and do what was necessary (like distribute their artists' mp3s and sell ads).
But because the recording companies' only reason for existence is that they control the means of physical mass-distribution of the artists' product -- CD-pressing plants, record store supply chains, etc. -- they will fight any new means of mass-distributing that product to the bitter end.
My assessment is that the recording industry, in anything like its present form, is no longer a viable business to be in. Either the companies will go bankrupt attempting to fight technology, or future artists' contracts will not grant exclusive distribution rights to the recording companies, and they'll go bankrupt after the artists discover that they can now effectively self-distribute and still make their money (as they do now) from concert ticket and T-shirt sales.
Slashdot Mirror
4,677 hours of failure in 4,344 hours of time means that at any given time, an average of 1.07 locations were offline.
There are 131 DMV offices in Virignia; I don't know how many other Department of Transportation locations are included in the same bucket. If we assume that it's *only* the 131 DMV offices, 1.07 failures at any given time means that the system means that 130.3 locations are working, meaning that this statewide patchwork of network connections is 99.45% reliable.
If your 'redundant' connections cut the failures in half (which they wouldn't), you'd have 99.59% reliability at more than twice the cost for the network.
Adding 'redundancy' would more than double the network cost (since presumably currently they're using the lowest bidder), and in most places it wouldn't add any real redundancy anyway. Getting actual network redundancy is *fiendishly* difficult, even when you're spending a lot of money and siting a facility in a place that's well-served for networking. In small-town Virginia, you're almost certainly going to wind up paying for having redundant wires hanging on the same poles.
Nah. The OS X girlfriend is very low-maintenance, except for the fact that she'll only consent to live in a house with everything already built in at construction time: a built-in coffee maker, microwave, etc.
Sure, a built-in coffee maker costs $300 while one that sits on the counter is $30. Windows likes the cheap coffee maker, but when it breaks you frequently find that you wind up having to tear down the whole house and build a new one around a replacement coffee maker.
The built-in coffee maker (almost) never breaks, and when it does it's easy to fix. However, it appears to be totally incapable of making cappuccino. You're not really sure, though, because the documentation just pretends that cappuccino doesn't exist. You seem to remember hearing that Steve Jobs thinks that cappuccino is stupid.
The Linux girlfriend waits for someone to deliver coffee for free. Amazingly, this actually works, every morning When you find out that what's in the cup two days out of five is actually tea, you figure that that's close enough.
Yeah, well, that would seem to make sense. But when most people at that level sign on for the CEO job, part of the contract provides for a large payout if they're fired. During the hiring phase, everyone is happy with one another, shaking hands, slapping backs, and toasting one another in the boardroom. I don't think a lot of these boards really think about the fact that, if they eventually come to fire this guy, it'll be because he has screwed up.
If you look at it charitably, you can say that the CEO is putting his own business reputation on the line by taking on the top job, and that the golden-parachute clause is insurance against this. Most geeks have had the experience of taking a job or contract with a company and having things fail miserably through no fault of their own: I once had a contract at a place where they told me that Perl was an 'insecure language', and that thus all their software was to be written in VB, for example. This kind of idiocy impacts the bottom line, and thus the CEO's performance as well -- and there isn't a whole lot he can do about it. If when you were fired, or left a job in disgust, it was going to be discussed in the Wall Street Journal, you'd probably want the contract written to provide for some kind of payoff as compensation for the company's idiocy.
Or you can say that this kind of compensation is itself part of the company's idiocy. The truth is probably that it's both. I don't believe that competent CEOs are anything like as scarce as their paychecks would seem to suggest.
But scarcity isn't the only reason, or even the main reason, why CEOs get paid so much -- it's also because their work is easily measurable: either the stock price goes up, or it goes down. Their job description is 'increase the value of this number', and so everything they do for good or ill comes down to that value. It's easy to write a contract that says, in essence, 'if you increase the shareholders' value by a billion dollars, we'll pay you 1% of that'. $10 million is still a lot of money, but 1% is what you get as a green salesman off the street; so you might consider 1% as a really cheap rate for a competent, experienced CEO.
On the other hand, it's very hard to measure the value to shareholders of a competent sysadmin, which is why sysadmins get paid less than the arguably less-crucial marketing and sales guys. Again: marketing and sales are easy to quantify. A lot of geek work is notoriously hard to quantify: not only is most of it preventative in nature, but it's also invisible if you do it right.
If you want to make the big bucks, find a situation where you can do what you do in a way that the value you add is measurable and quantifiable.
If society values something highly enough, it can be done at a profit; the willingness to pay for a good or service is society's vote for its existence.
Proposing to subsidize transportation and health care will only ensure that the people who actually use the service are not the same as the people who decide whether it gets funded.
A subsidized transit system tends to be one that's bursting at the seams but that doesn't expand, because any increased ridership that results will actually be mean a further *drag* on the system, rather than more revenue and profits. This can be demonstrated in almost every city in the world, and the same thing applies to roads.
A subsidized health-care system means exactly the same thing. If a hospital bed costs the patient $10 a day, but it costs $200 a day to provide that bed: when all the beds are filled, adding 1000 more beds will mean that the hospital will have to come up with $190,000 a day. Since this money has to come from the Board of Governors or whatever source of funding you imagine instead of from the patients, this will tend to ensure that there's always a shortage of beds.
I could use a jacket with pockets better suited to what I'm going to put in them, but this thing -- in all its versions -- is just too ugly for me to wear.
I'd like to see the pockets and 'personal network' features in a jacket that doesn't look so high-tech and awful. The whole point of getting all that garbage off your belt and eliminating the pocket-bulges is to look like less of a goober, after all.
Regardless of the price, no broadcaster is forced to buy American TV shows. And again, if they were only on because they were cheap, people wouldn't watch them; there are things to do other than watch TV, after all. I think that the days of terrible shows like Dynasty and Knight Rider being bafflingly popular outside the US are over, though, and in any case these things were never as popular overseas as the quality home-grown stuff was.
There's no law in the United States about where your programming has to come from. There doesn't have to be; if he can't sell ads (or raise money from pledge drives a la PBS), a broadcaster will go out of business in short order. Americans, by and large, do not like foreign TV shows, so what little we get only gets shown in obscure timeslots, and usually on non-profit stations or on cable and satellite TV.
Here in the Washington area at least, there is one broadcaster who shows nothing but foreign news, movies, etc. At the moment, it's showing Le Journal from France 2. After that we've got Journal from Deutsche Welle, and then it's 'Maigret and the Liberty Bar', a 1960 mystery from France. Looking at the schedule for weekdays, I count seven hours between 9:00 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. that are in languages other than English; the remaining programming, while in English, is also from outside the USA.
Obviously American TV, using this horribly flawed model, has never produced anything of value. This is why you never see American TV shows and networks outside the United States; because it's all 'bullshit'. This is why the United States is such a backwater as far as TV production goes, and why American TV has to import so many programs from overseas; it's just impossible for such a horribly, horribly flawed system to produce anything that people will watch. In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
Wake up, pal. I'll admit that much -- most? -- of what's on American TV is tripe, but it's what people want to see. You cannot sell advertising on programs that do not attract an audience, and those programs disappear. It's true, a lot of ads are annoying, and it is disturbing that audiences are attracted to things like Jerry Springer and the endless parade of boring 'reality' shows, but this is apparently what people want.
You, however, appear to favor a model where the TV viewers have much less of a voice in deciding what's going to be on. Fox News shouldn't be available, even though there's a strong demand for it, because you don't agree with it. Jerry Springer shouldn't be on TV -- I am translating your generic 'brain-rotting none-sense' [sic] into specifics here -- because you don't think it's any good.
On page 6 the document says 'freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice'.
I found this odd, too, considering that on page 2 of the same document it's clearly pointed out that the law in the United States at least aims to prevent things like this happening. Texas is, tourism slogans ('It's like a whole other country') aside, certainly part of the United States.
Doesn't AIM get some money from advertisers[?]
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Things may have changed by now, but when I used AOL's AIM client, I was struck by the fact that all the ads that appeared in the Buddy List menu were for AOL's own products and services.
I use iChat now, so I don't see their ads in any case. But when I still used the AIM client, I noticed that this little ad in the Buddy List was the only advertisement on my screen; I block pretty much all the regular web ads. AOL still managed to get through with their message, though: and they used this singular opportunity to attempt to sell me the AOL service, something I already get for free.
I've long been mystified by AOL's handling of these ads; you'd think that they'd allow and in fact encourage anyone in the universe to distribute AIM clients, as long as those clients displayed and rotated AOL's ads properly. AIM would become even more popular as the clients got better and better, and AOL wouldn't have to invest money developing them.
I have found that it's pretty effective against this kind of thing to look at the average word length. Most legitimate text has a pretty short average word length, because the most common words in many languages are also the shortest. In most English text, the average word length is going to fall somewhere between about 3.75 and 4.5 letters-- though 5 is a better upper limit for short texts.
The spammers are using this random text for the purpose of getting uncommon words into their messages; but because uncommon words tend to be long words, you can use average word length as an 'uncommon word detector' without resorting to using a dictionary.
This text, for instance, to this point averages about 3.85 letters per word, even though I have been using a lot of fifty-cent (or at least forty-cent) words.
Things like V:I:A:G:R:A or HTML tags bring down the score a lot, and this doesn't work well on particularly short messages. If you strip out HTML and punctuation before calculating the average, though, and if you give a discount to short messages' scores -- spam using this technique tends to be pretty long, since the block of longish words are sent in addition to the actual message -- it's another useful and fairly reliable spam marker.
Check out http://tinotopia.com/shipping/ for pictures of a largish shipment of Compaq servers that was left out in the rain by one such outfit.
Seven-eleven can't order the gun shop not to sell you any more ammunition, or Exxon not to sell you any more fuel, because you have been driving up to their stores and shooting the clerk. Nobody would even think of it.
The law is already stacked very much in favor of the corporate IP interests in these matters; they should just use it. If that's too expensive, or if the bad publicity would cost them too much, maybe they need to re-evaluate their strategies and business plans, rather than attempting to short-circuit the process that will get them what they want while not infringing on anyone else's rights.
This is because the receptionist needs only one monitor, while even a small operations center needs, at a minimum, about 40.
Even with 17" LCDs going for four or five times the price of CRTs, it saves money in the long run due solely to the fact that the operations consoles can be shortened by about two feet each.
This might not hold true if you're building a facility in the middle of nowhere, or if all those LCDs wind up having a maximum life of about five years; but where real estate is even moderately expensive, the rental on the floor space CRTs would take up would make their total cost of ownership higher than that of LCDs in about five years.
I expect that the break-even point would come even sooner if one was inclined to figure in the cost differential of powering and cooling the things. CRTs use a lot more power and generate a lot more heat than LCDs. I used to use the back of a Sun 20" monitor to keep my breakfast bagel warm in the mornings until I was ready to eat it. The vents there were so well suited to this task that I think they must have been designed for this purpose.
Of course, the potential problem with this reasoning is that CRTs last almost forever, while all these LCDs might well sputter and die within that five-year period.
In the hundred-odd years that we've seen teenagers as something unto themselves, they have, by and large, not been subject to anything like the kind of scrutiny, surveillance, and distrust that they are subject to today.
And lo, the race has survived.
While I will grant that there are things that are more common among teenagers today than they were thirty years ago -- getting falling-down-drunk on senior skip day comes to mind -- the proper solution to the problem is probably not to make adolescence weirder and more difficult than it already is. Far better to find the cause of what is seen as undesirable behavior on the part of teenagers; then work on solving the problem, rather than just treating kids with less and less and less respect (which -- hey! -- may just be part of the problem in the first place!)
I don't expect anything to be done along those lines anytime soon, though, because actually solving problems requires careful thought, observation, and an open mind. It's much easier to fit kids with shock collars, if necessary.
It also has to do with terms of service that are not published (yet), and that are imposed by an entity (movie studios, presumably) with whom you do not have a direct relationship.
In other words, you are purchasing hardware that may, at a later date, be largely useless not because of actual technical obsolescence, but because copyright holders are developing a philosophy of guilty-until-proven-innocent -- and, further, believing that there is no acceptable proof of innocence.
There's always a penalty for early adopters, but it usually arises out of circumstance, not as deliberate policy.
Not only are there technical challenges (mainly involving money, ultimately) and the wailing of copyright holders (which effectively killed DAT as a consumer platform -- and TV, at least in America, is a horrible spaghetti mess of copyright compared to music), there's the artistic problem.
When color first came to TV in a large way, a lot of programs didn't make the switch immediately because it meant new sets, costumes, makeup, etc. -- and new techniques to make use of all these in color.
The impact of the switch to color was quite minor, compared to the changes that HDTV requires -- even if you ignore the enormous cost for new equipment. All of a sudden, the lighting, sets, costumes, actors, and anything else that appears on screen on TV has to be designed/built/made up/etc. to the same standard as used in motion pictures.
This is expensive and everyone has to start working differently. From the producers to the scriptwriters to the gaffers, everyone is now doing a slightly different job.
Pile the cost on top of the copyright fear-mongers on top of the artistic challenges, and nobody's left itching for HDTV except a relatively small group of people who are willing to cough up thousands of dollars for a TV. Everyone else is more than willing to wait, all for their own reasons.
When any one group -- consumers, artists, network business honchos, or copyright profiteers -- reaches a critical mass of demand for HDTV, we'll see meaningful broadcasts. Not before.
Who knows? The copyrightistas might wind up being the driving force, if they decide that it's too risky for them to continue to allow their precious content to go out over unencrypted-to-your-eyeball analog TV.
P014 is the procedure for getting refunds (of any sort; let's say you bought the Elmer Fudd stamps, but wanted the Daffy Duck ones) from the post office. Getting the money back is a big pain in the ass; you've got to give the post office packages of 100 identical pieces of mail, with identical denominations of postage on them; you've got to pay them $15 an hour to look through them and make sure the postage is really there. There are all sorts of forms to fill out. And then you don't get your per-piece charges (i.e. BRM service fee) back.
My guess would be that few BRMs with postage on them are ever redeemed; only very large organizations could make it worth their while. Small non-profits would actually lose money if they tried to redeem that postage.
The postal service charges the first-class postage for the piece, and then an additional fee for the trouble of handling business reply mail.
Taping the envelopes to a brick won't work, though. Postal regulations consider business reply mail envelopes stuck to other things to be waste -- possibly to eliminate this very problem.
The U.S. Congress can hardly do worse than that.
Absolutely true. China is "more representative" than the USA, but China's equivalent to the House of Representatives has over 2900 people in it. It would probably be impossible for such a large legislature to be democratic, even if that were the goal.
If we need to increase the number of representatives to make our system fair, I think the best alternative would be to split up the country.
The country already is split up, into fifty parts. The obvious answer is to give more control back to the states, where representation is higher. We've moved steadily away from that since the Civil War, and "states rights" has long been (usually) a code word for racism, cronyism, and xenophobia.
But there are some very real advantages to allowing states to differ more greatly than they do now, though -- the Founding Fathers foresaw the problems inherent in such a large country as the United States, and came up with a pretty good solution to the problem.
The federal government was never meant to micro-manage the country the way it does now. The system was not designed for the current mode of operation, and it shows.
I don't know whether this is true any more. The United States, since the size of Congress was frozen in the 1920s, has come to have one of the least representative governments on Earth. The government in the PRC is, at least nominally, a good deal more representative.
In 1790, there was one member of the House of Representatives for about every 40,000 people. Today, in Britain, there's one member of the House of Commons for every 90,000 people. In Germany, France, and Canada, one representative for about every 100,000-120,000 people.
In the United States today, there's less than one member of the House of Representatives for every 600,000 people.
This is why we've got the permament corporate government; it's why we've got laws passed right and left recently to protect the rights of the wealthy and powerful corporations, at the expense, if necessary, of the rights of individuals.
I complain about this in more detail on my web page here.
The problem, though, is that the VII can't receive a message and alert you to its presence autonomously; you've got to explicitly check for messages.
By far the more useful of all the gadgets I carry around in my pockets is the Motorola Pagewriter 2000. There is at least on competing product that offers the same capabilities, and Motorola promises a smaller, cheaper version (the PW2K is a brick) this summer. QWERTY keyboard you can operate with two thumbs, about $60 a month for nationwide unlimited service, etc. It's far better than SMS on the phone; incoming messages can be longer, it's easier to write outgoing messages, and the interface is much better adapted for text messaging use.
Me, I'm waiting anxiously for the unigadget, so I only have one thing to carry and one battery to charge. I do have serious redundancy in my pockets, though, since coverage for the Palm, the pager, and the phone penetrate to different depths in different buildings. That comes in handy, since airports, with their large land area, tend to paradoxically be the worst-covered areas. Typically only two gadgets out of four (including Ricochet modem) will work; which two depends on which airport and which terminal.
Note that there's also a "GbDetected" field; apparently their reader works the same way.
The problem with that idea is that music (and all other art) existed for millions of years prior to the rise of the RIAA and the MPAA. And never mind that only a few artists at the top of the recording food chain ever see much money from the sales of their recordings.
mp3s do not pose much of a risk to the income of most recording artists. They pose a risk to the very existence of the recording companies, though. This is why it's the recording companies, not the artists, that are telling you about how much money the artists are losing because of mp3s.
It's important to realize that. If the companies were just interested in maximizing their profits in the face of new technology, they'd eventually face reality and do what was necessary (like distribute their artists' mp3s and sell ads).
But because the recording companies' only reason for existence is that they control the means of physical mass-distribution of the artists' product -- CD-pressing plants, record store supply chains, etc. -- they will fight any new means of mass-distributing that product to the bitter end.
My assessment is that the recording industry, in anything like its present form, is no longer a viable business to be in. Either the companies will go bankrupt attempting to fight technology, or future artists' contracts will not grant exclusive distribution rights to the recording companies, and they'll go bankrupt after the artists discover that they can now effectively self-distribute and still make their money (as they do now) from concert ticket and T-shirt sales.
Jefferson said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."