I doubt amazon ate the cost, because they can recover the money from the seller's ongoing amazon credit account, or from his personal bank account (reverse the initial deposit). U.S. Law is written in favor of the customer (and biased-against the seller). Basically NO seller is allowed to refuse a mailed return as long as the buyer can provide proof-of-delivery. Here's what I do:
SELLER: "No you may not return the item, even though I mailed you scratched/damaged DVDs. Your problem not mine."
ME: "You're a scam artist."
SELLER: "Too bad."
ME: "Well I'm returning them anyway." (mails DVDs back with tracking)
ME: (later) "Yes amazon (or credit card) I returned some DVDs because they were damaged. Here's my proof-of-delivery... oh great! Thank you for the refund.":-)
SELLER: "You dick."
ME: "I'm not the dick who mailed damaged DVDs that were supposed to be "like new" and then refused to offer a refund when the buyer complained." (I have experienced this scenario on Amazon and Ebay so many times, it makes me sick. But Scam Artists are rampant throughout both services.)
Then an antenna should work, but not if it's indoor (disclaimer: unless you're within 20 miles of the broadcast tower). I have an outdoor antenna called CM4228 which works extremely well.
I didn't put it outside, but instead installed it on my second floor spare room (propped against a chair with wireties). Try that in your home and you will get TV.
By "demos" I mean the programs you would download and run for no other purpose than to see how far your computer could be pushed in the sound & graphics department. It was a fun time (80s and early 90s). Like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg
That's what hackers used to create, in addition to cracking disks and sharing illegal music. Today's hackers rarely create this unique piece of art.
Even though this is a non-issue (not conclusive by the study's authors), the folks over at CNN talked about the cellphone risk as if it was Certain to cause harm. They left me with the impression that cellphones are irradiating my hip, and they are a definite carcinogen. The one guy even compared cellphone to cigarettes ("People say they can't live without cigarettes either, but they should give up both those and cellphones if they are dangerous."). They even had people texting to say, 'No I won't use my cellphone anymore. I'm getting a landline.' or 'I'm using speakerphone from now on. I don't want to hold it against my head.'
Piss-poor reporting (aka fear-mongering). I wonder how MSNBC and FOX News are covering it.
50 million is a ripoff compared to the billions owed in backpay. That's equivalent to your boss saying, "I'll pay your $50 an hour," waiting years for your paycheck, and then he hands you a measly $5 an hour and says "Oops sorry." I would not have accepted it.
Worse - Since there are lawyers involved, the 50 million will probably shrink to 20 million that has to be distributed amongst the ~1 million singers owed money.
And these nonpaying a-holes in RIAA screw the singers, but they have the nerve to demand WE the customers pay for every single song we make a copy of - $1 if we download it, $1 if we burn it to a CD-R, $1 if we duplicate it across a 2nd PC, and so on.
Better to CYA and say, "I don't know if ____ will happen," then to guess and say, "Oh you're safe. Don't worry." The latter will come back to bite you if you're later proved wrong.
The sites merely have to be ACCUSED of being copyright infringers. Remember when Homeland Security yanked thousands of websites off the net, including several that were merely personal blogs or news sites?
This is no good. We have courts for a reason - to protect the citizenry from overzealous leaders assuming guilt and enacting punishment against innocent persons.
The quality is basically perfect, and the laser printer is cheaper overall (the toner lasts 5000 pages, not a mere 100 like inkjet carts). I'll never go back to my old Commodore dot-matrix, or an inkjet like my brother got. It's worth it to get the Laser.
>>>The casks are...a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.
Yes true. I've heard that the explosion threw some of those pellets into the surrounding neighborhood, therefore getting them converted to stable "casks" is certainly better.
But the *safest* place would be somewhere not subject to earthquakes or drownings by tsunami. Like the Nevada or Sahara desert. That's where Japan should be storing its nuclear waste products for the next 1000 years.
More likely customers will start telling ISPs "fuck you" and refuse to pay the overage fees (i.e. $1 per gig over 150GB). Then the ISPs will move to metered billing, just like how water and electricity providers operate, in order to avoid pissing-off their base.
Then customers will eschew HD videos in favor of smaller-sized DVD and VHS-quality vids to cut their costs (like I do). It's a price battle in the making.
Clearly Sony is not a company you can trust with your credit card information. Hell you can't even trust a Sony Music CD (it will install crap on your computer without telling you).
I think Sony was decent when they were the newbie-on-the-block with the PS1, and also the PS2, but sometime around 2004 they turned into a clone of Microsoft. (Meanwhile MS actually improved.) Goodbye sony because PS2 will be the last of your equipment that I ever buy. You shot yourself in the foot, and are headed towards becoming the next Commodore or Atari (fell from #1 to bankruptcy).
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called repeatedly for Internet regulation and more copyright protection.....
I really, really hate these guys. They are censoring our right to free expression of ideas, and hiding it behind copyright and child "protection".
Of course it's really all about control of the masses, in order to silent dissent. Last "great idea" I heard coming out of the US District of Chaos is that citizens will be required to get licenses to log on and speak their minds. Hopefully this idea dies immediately.
The world is confusing enough w/o having multiple formats to deal with. Imagine if, instead of DVD, we would have had another Betamax vs. VHS war. (Call it DVD vs. BetaDVD.) Nothing good comes out of these things, at least not for consumers.
And I don't see any benefit from a JPEG v. Webp war either. GIF, JPEG, and PNG works just fine for us casual web surfers.
I also found this part of the article informative:
Muizelaar's complaints about Google's WebP testing methodology are familiar because they echo some of the concerns that were raised early on by other WebP critics like x264 developer Jason Garret-Glaser. The gist of it is that Google [1] used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as its basis for quality comparisonsâ"a technical benchmark that experts say fails to account for how images are actually perceived. Another problem is that Google [2] recompressed existing JPEG images rather than starting with uncompressed source files..... WebP's lack of basic feature parity with JPEG in areas like metadata handling and ICC color profiles is identified by Muizelaar as another major problem with Google's format..... [Muizelaar says] the time that Google is putting into WebP would be better spent by improving JPEG encoders or contributing to existing next-generation image format efforts.
A patent-based market, by definition, is not a "free" market. A free market would not have any patents/artificial government-created monopolies, and people would copy each other liberally without restriction. i.e. free
More likely LOSE volument. I discovered I don't really need PlayStation Network. I bet other users have also found more productive things they can do (reading, playing solo games, watching hulu.com) during this downtime too.
I sincerely hope you are trolling (bkspc)(bkspc)(bkspc) Joking.
I'm using IE-8 and I've never encountered this SmartScreenWhatever? I've seen it plenty of times on Firefox though, and think it's a good idea. Maybe these warnings would have stopped me from downloading FoxTab (PDF creation tool) and infecting my laptop. Lesson learned.
Of course if users ignore the warnings ("DANGER: Malicious site. Proceed? YES"), then it doesn't do much good. I suppose they deserve whatever they get. Sadly my brother is one of those and I spend a lot of time cleaning-up his computer, because he just clicks "yes" to everything. I don't think he even bothers to read the warning.
- open task manager - goto processes - kill any programs that I don't need (like Compaq Assistant, Adobe Launcher, etc) - kill any services I don't need - make explorer High priority
It frees RAM and makes the computer run faster (less hard drive swapping). Hopefully this internet "IP recorder" service is one of those things I kill off. Although now that I know how to do it permanently, I'll do that instead.
This is good. It means they can no longer say, "Bittorrent is saturating our lines! We need Congress to ban these pirates." Now the blame is falling on LEGAL watching, and there's no way they can get Congress to ban legal usage of videos.
It should be up to each individual person, but speaking for myself, I don't use the second monitor. It starts to hurt my neck when I have to keep moving back-and-forth (or worse: a window popsup and I don't know where it went). I'd rather overlay all the windows, and then use "tab switching" to bring forward different windows as needed.
In fact even as I type this, I'm only using half the screen available to me (the window is shrunk to 2/3rd vertical and 2/3rd horizontal). I like to have everything directly in front of my eyes.
In any case I'd love to have a cellphone-sized Windows PC. I wouldn't run it at 1024x600 (too small) but maybe the older 640x200 standard that I grew-up with (larger icons/text).
All they did was provide the software. Just as a telephone company provided the wire (back then dialup was still popular). Should companies be able to sue the phone company? No. Then neither should they be able to sue limewire, or microsoft, or any other person's software that enabled song downloading/copying/burning to CD.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt amazon ate the cost, because they can recover the money from the seller's ongoing amazon credit account, or from his personal bank account (reverse the initial deposit). U.S. Law is written in favor of the customer (and biased-against the seller). Basically NO seller is allowed to refuse a mailed return as long as the buyer can provide proof-of-delivery. Here's what I do:
SELLER: "No you may not return the item, even though I mailed you scratched/damaged DVDs. Your problem not mine."
ME: "You're a scam artist."
SELLER: "Too bad."
ME: "Well I'm returning them anyway." (mails DVDs back with tracking)
ME: (later) "Yes amazon (or credit card) I returned some DVDs because they were damaged. Here's my proof-of-delivery... oh great! Thank you for the refund." :-)
SELLER: "You dick."
ME: "I'm not the dick who mailed damaged DVDs that were supposed to be "like new" and then refused to offer a refund when the buyer complained." (I have experienced this scenario on Amazon and Ebay so many times, it makes me sick. But Scam Artists are rampant throughout both services.)
.
> we live at the edge town
Then an antenna should work, but not if it's indoor (disclaimer: unless you're within 20 miles of the broadcast tower). I have an outdoor antenna called CM4228 which works extremely well.
I didn't put it outside, but instead installed it on my second floor spare room (propped against a chair with wireties). Try that in your home and you will get TV.
By "demos" I mean the programs you would download and run for no other purpose than to see how far your computer could be pushed in the sound & graphics department. It was a fun time (80s and early 90s). Like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg
That's what hackers used to create, in addition to cracking disks and sharing illegal music. Today's hackers rarely create this unique piece of art.
Even though this is a non-issue (not conclusive by the study's authors), the folks over at CNN talked about the cellphone risk as if it was Certain to cause harm. They left me with the impression that cellphones are irradiating my hip, and they are a definite carcinogen. The one guy even compared cellphone to cigarettes ("People say they can't live without cigarettes either, but they should give up both those and cellphones if they are dangerous."). They even had people texting to say, 'No I won't use my cellphone anymore. I'm getting a landline.' or 'I'm using speakerphone from now on. I don't want to hold it against my head.'
Piss-poor reporting (aka fear-mongering). I wonder how MSNBC and FOX News are covering it.
50 million is a ripoff compared to the billions owed in backpay. That's equivalent to your boss saying, "I'll pay your $50 an hour," waiting years for your paycheck, and then he hands you a measly $5 an hour and says "Oops sorry." I would not have accepted it.
Worse - Since there are lawyers involved, the 50 million will probably shrink to 20 million that has to be distributed amongst the ~1 million singers owed money.
And these nonpaying a-holes in RIAA screw the singers, but they have the nerve to demand WE the customers pay for every single song we make a copy of - $1 if we download it, $1 if we burn it to a CD-R, $1 if we duplicate it across a 2nd PC, and so on.
GRRRR.
(I am a little bitter. Can you tell?)
Better to CYA and say, "I don't know if ____ will happen," then to guess and say, "Oh you're safe. Don't worry." The latter will come back to bite you if you're later proved wrong.
The sites merely have to be ACCUSED of being copyright infringers. Remember when Homeland Security yanked thousands of websites off the net, including several that were merely personal blogs or news sites?
This is no good. We have courts for a reason - to protect the citizenry from overzealous leaders assuming guilt and enacting punishment against innocent persons.
The quality is basically perfect, and the laser printer is cheaper overall (the toner lasts 5000 pages, not a mere 100 like inkjet carts). I'll never go back to my old Commodore dot-matrix, or an inkjet like my brother got. It's worth it to get the Laser.
>>>The casks are...a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.
Yes true. I've heard that the explosion threw some of those pellets into the surrounding neighborhood, therefore getting them converted to stable "casks" is certainly better.
But the *safest* place would be somewhere not subject to earthquakes or drownings by tsunami. Like the Nevada or Sahara desert. That's where Japan should be storing its nuclear waste products for the next 1000 years.
No.
More likely customers will start telling ISPs "fuck you" and refuse to pay the overage fees (i.e. $1 per gig over 150GB). Then the ISPs will move to metered billing, just like how water and electricity providers operate, in order to avoid pissing-off their base.
Then customers will eschew HD videos in favor of smaller-sized DVD and VHS-quality vids to cut their costs (like I do). It's a price battle in the making.
Clearly Sony is not a company you can trust with your credit card information. Hell you can't even trust a Sony Music CD (it will install crap on your computer without telling you).
I think Sony was decent when they were the newbie-on-the-block with the PS1, and also the PS2, but sometime around 2004 they turned into a clone of Microsoft. (Meanwhile MS actually improved.) Goodbye sony because PS2 will be the last of your equipment that I ever buy. You shot yourself in the foot, and are headed towards becoming the next Commodore or Atari (fell from #1 to bankruptcy).
FIGHT!
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called repeatedly for Internet regulation and more copyright protection.....
I really, really hate these guys. They are censoring our right to free expression of ideas, and hiding it behind copyright and child "protection".
Of course it's really all about control of the masses, in order to silent dissent. Last "great idea" I heard coming out of the US District of Chaos is that citizens will be required to get licenses to log on and speak their minds. Hopefully this idea dies immediately.
The world is confusing enough w/o having multiple formats to deal with. Imagine if, instead of DVD, we would have had another Betamax vs. VHS war. (Call it DVD vs. BetaDVD.) Nothing good comes out of these things, at least not for consumers.
And I don't see any benefit from a JPEG v. Webp war either. GIF, JPEG, and PNG works just fine for us casual web surfers.
I also found this part of the article informative:
Muizelaar's complaints about Google's WebP testing methodology are familiar because they echo some of the concerns that were raised early on by other WebP critics like x264 developer Jason Garret-Glaser. The gist of it is that Google [1] used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as its basis for quality comparisonsâ"a technical benchmark that experts say fails to account for how images are actually perceived. Another problem is that Google [2] recompressed existing JPEG images rather than starting with uncompressed source files..... WebP's lack of basic feature parity with JPEG in areas like metadata handling and ICC color profiles is identified by Muizelaar as another major problem with Google's format..... [Muizelaar says] the time that Google is putting into WebP would be better spent by improving JPEG encoders or contributing to existing next-generation image format efforts.
College just isn't the same anymore. ;-)
>>>Weee! Free market at its finest!
A patent-based market, by definition, is not a "free" market. A free market would not have any patents/artificial government-created monopolies, and people would copy each other liberally without restriction. i.e. free
More likely LOSE volument. I discovered I don't really need PlayStation Network. I bet other users have also found more productive things they can do (reading, playing solo games, watching hulu.com) during this downtime too.
I sincerely hope you are trolling (bkspc)(bkspc)(bkspc) Joking.
I'm using IE-8 and I've never encountered this SmartScreenWhatever? I've seen it plenty of times on Firefox though, and think it's a good idea. Maybe these warnings would have stopped me from downloading FoxTab (PDF creation tool) and infecting my laptop. Lesson learned.
Of course if users ignore the warnings ("DANGER: Malicious site. Proceed? YES"), then it doesn't do much good. I suppose they deserve whatever they get. Sadly my brother is one of those and I spend a lot of time cleaning-up his computer, because he just clicks "yes" to everything. I don't think he even bothers to read the warning.
- open task manager
- goto processes
- kill any programs that I don't need (like Compaq Assistant, Adobe Launcher, etc)
- kill any services I don't need
- make explorer High priority
It frees RAM and makes the computer run faster (less hard drive swapping). Hopefully this internet "IP recorder" service is one of those things I kill off. Although now that I know how to do it permanently, I'll do that instead.
This is good. It means they can no longer say, "Bittorrent is saturating our lines! We need Congress to ban these pirates." Now the blame is falling on LEGAL watching, and there's no way they can get Congress to ban legal usage of videos.
So instead they are implementing 150 GB caps. :-|
Bastards.
Powerline broadband also interferes with HD Radio, Digital TV, DAB, and TV Band internet devices.
It's possible it also interferes with cellphones and Wifi, but I'm not certain (the frequencies may be too high).
It should be up to each individual person, but speaking for myself, I don't use the second monitor. It starts to hurt my neck when I have to keep moving back-and-forth (or worse: a window popsup and I don't know where it went). I'd rather overlay all the windows, and then use "tab switching" to bring forward different windows as needed.
In fact even as I type this, I'm only using half the screen available to me (the window is shrunk to 2/3rd vertical and 2/3rd horizontal). I like to have everything directly in front of my eyes.
IMHO.
Thought Atom was supposed to be a lowpower chip?
In any case I'd love to have a cellphone-sized Windows PC. I wouldn't run it at 1024x600 (too small) but maybe the older 640x200 standard that I grew-up with (larger icons/text).
No doubt this is one of the things the US Government is pushing (just like they did before) as part of their strategy to "unify" cyber strategy.
All they did was provide the software. Just as a telephone company provided the wire (back then dialup was still popular). Should companies be able to sue the phone company? No. Then neither should they be able to sue limewire, or microsoft, or any other person's software that enabled song downloading/copying/burning to CD.
So subtracting 10 years off my birthdate is a Facebook offense?
:-|
Ooops.