"Very often, if fact in almost every conversation more than a few minutes, the connection is broken and either she or I have to redial the call"
If someone's going to replace a home phone with a cellphone you have to use a carrier that has good signal *at home*. My Verizon wireless phone has good signal at home. It has never dropped a call at home and the sound quality is practically as good as a landline. I've also tried AT&T wireless at home. It has almost no signal and it's pretty much impossible to have a conversation on it. Every carrier has dead spots in different parts of town. If your home happens to be in a dead spot I suggest making use of the 30 day return policy.
You're lucky to be paying that little. When I had a landline from Verizon it was $17.25 + $10 in taxes and fees. So try $336 a year. This was for unmetered local calls since I had dialup at the time.
There's always alternatives for emergencies. Any unactivated cellphone can still dial 911. And there's always payphones if it's close enough.
I don't know about Hong Kong, but there's a whole bunch of flash-based dating sims out of Japan. They're mildly amusing if you're bored of all the other flash games out there. Like anything they can be pathetic if you take them too seriously.
$3000 is a lot of money to the poor sap getting sued, but it's only worth probably 20 hours of lawyer time. I don't think a $3000 settlement is profitable to the RIAA for what they're spending on lawyers especially after Verizon fought the subpoena. The point is to make an example out of people.
It's easy to say boycott all RIAA label music, but there's a balancing act you have to do here. For every sellout like Metallica suing their fans on Napster, there are lots of bands out there fucking with The Man like:
- Korn's Y'all Want A Single? video where they smashed up a record store. Ironically their anti-single became so popular it's one of the singles now. I'm not sure if they played it on MTV yet though.
- Offspring wanted to post their whole Americana CD on their website, but their label shut them down. They ended up posting one track. And who could forget them selling Napster logo caps and t-shirts (without permission) from their website?
- After fulfilling their recording contract the Smashing Pumpkins gave away their last album (a few hundred vinyl pressings to friends) with instructions to share it with the world.
- Many singers and bands like Bono, Public Enemy and Moby have said they don't mind fans sharing their music for free.
I know that supporting major label artists is supporting the RIAA lawsuits, but there's a more important issue here. The popularity of a major label recording contract is an unbeatable soapbox for getting the message out. The fact that anti-establishment acts sell mean the record labels won't stop selling them, at least until Clear Channel takes over the other 60% of radio.:-/
"You can build a computer capable of running Mac OS without resorting to buying one at apple. It's hard though. The hardware that meets Apple's specs is pretty rare."
Look, I don't disagree with most of your arguments, but this is where you lose me. I know MacOS supports open standards and interoperates well with Windows and *nix networks. I know Macs use standard peripherals like USB and Firewire. I know Macs use standard hardware components like DDR RAM and SATA drives. However, Apple is the only company that sells a complete computer system that runs MacOS. That makes them a hardware monopoly. Where the hell am I supposed to buy a non-Apple PowerPC motherboard that boots MacOS natively (not through something like MaconLinux on LinuxPPC)? The last company that tried to sell complete systems sourced their motherboards by buying real Apple boards as spare parts from Apple repair centers, and Apple wasted no time in releasing the hounds (lawyers) on them.
The issue isn't about opening Fairplay and risking its security by obscurity. The issue is allowing other copy protected music to play on iPods (whether that's a good thing or not) and Apple protecting its iTunes/iPod vendor lock in.
BTW, I'm shopping for an iPod now, and I wouldn't touch Real Rhapsody with a 10ft pole.
Seriously, this isn't a stake through the heard of OpenVMS. It's being ported to Intel Itanium, but this isn't very popular with the users. TheReg article here about HP World.
Ain't that the truth. Apple makes some nice products, but the fanboys are too much. They don't care about proprietary vs. open standards. I've heard many of them defend Apple's hardware monopoly as good for quality, compatibility, user experience, and even necessary for the survival of Apple itself. If you look at it that way, their defense of Apple's monopolizing is not surprising.
Fortunately I missed that one, but I can easily say the worst movie I paid full price to see in the theater was Universal Solder: The Return. I paid $10 in NYC too (ouch).
Sure, it used to be you could always sell a lot of tickets for a crappy blockbuster by advertising the hell out of it before opening weekend, but customers have technology working for them too, like this: Movie Industry Blames Texting for Bad Box Office.
Ditching it isn't free either, unless you're talking about an uncontrolled reentry. From one proposal it would cost $300M (not including launch costs) to build an automated booster to attach to Hubble and safely deorbit it.
There's two kinds of mountain passes on the highways. I-5 through the Tejon Pass (4000 ft) has both. Rolling hills on the south side where you could coast on the downhills to recharge and a big, long, continuous climb on the north side. Not fun in an underpowered car.
Hybrids are very efficient in heavy stop and go traffic, but not much better than a regular car on long freeway trips. A diesel would be better for that. The VW TDI gets over 40MPG freeway. The extra power from the electric motor is good for accelerating from stop lights, but if you're climbing a long highway mountain pass, the battery never has a chance to recharge and you're left with just the power from a somewhat undersized gas engine.
You couldn't just wire up a regular starter motor to a bigger battery. They're made to be very powerful for their size, but they'll overheat and wear out if run for long periods.
Yes, your broadband connection is valuable to a spammer or DDoS'er, but how valuable? According to this article you could rent a botnet of tens of thousands of computers for $100/hour. So one owned zombie by itself is worth maybe $.01/hour. Not very valuable compared stealing a presidential election. That could be done by tampering with as little as a few thousand votes in a swing state with many electoral votes.
That's what that so called Speedbooster 108Mb/s gear does. It uses two non-overlapping WiFi channels simultaneously to double the speed. It also effectively monopolizes all the 2.4GHz channels in the area. As long as your neighbors aren't complaining...
"As long as we accept computers making LEGAL DECISIONS for us, then we will never get our fair use rights back."
The reason people haven't complained about these laws against petty crimes is because traditionally it was impossible or impractical to enforce them perfectly. How the hell do you stop people from taping songs off the radio or lending VHS tapes of shows they recorded off the air or driving a few mph over the speed limit. Well now with computers it's possible to build recorders that refuse to record off the air or a computer for the car that prints out a speeding ticket every time you go over the speed limit even by 1 mph.
There's an old saying: The best way to repeal an unpopular law is to enforce it strictly.
TVs and monitors can sure give a big shock. We had an old Sun monitor that would shock me every time I picked it up. At first I thought it was static, but then we figured the shield must have been broken and we put in on the shelf with a big warning not to use it. This thing gave me a big shock across a pretty big gap through vents in a plastic case. I wouldn't want to imagine touching the high voltage circuits inside.
The reason you need that speed is because the whole bus of up to 6 srives shares that 320MB/s just like ATA shares its bandwidth between master and slave. Multiply 6 x 55MB/s and you have 330MB/s.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I can see their reasons behind this. On the road, cars are like anonymous machines. When people hide behind their cars it enables a lot of aggressive or inconsiderate behavior that they wouldn't do in a face to face situation. I've seen this before with online behavior too. You've probably known a few rude online assholes who act polite and mild mannered in person.
The desk jockeys, mechanics, rocket scientists and assorted other button pushers outnumber the pilots in the air force by a huge margin. It's not like WWII when the factories were cranking out tens of thousands of P-47s and P-51s.
Nah, they wouldn't want an uppity human for a slave. We need food, water, oxygen, are easily bored, and generally are a pain in the ass. Then again maybe robots will get just as uppity once they're intelligent enough.
"No custoner would pay for spam messages, and verizon would have to foot the bill."
It's not so much that. It's because text messaging would become so useless with spam that no one would bother paying for it period. VZW charges a few dollars extra for text messaging, and it's still not as popular in the US as in other parts of the world. It's in their best interest as well as the customers' to keep text messaging useful and spam free.
Slashdot Mirror
"when I'm dictator it will be legal to punch people in the face for doing stupid shit like that"
And once someone invents a way to punch people through the Internet your plan will be complete.
"Very often, if fact in almost every conversation more than a few minutes, the connection is broken and either she or I have to redial the call"
If someone's going to replace a home phone with a cellphone you have to use a carrier that has good signal *at home*. My Verizon wireless phone has good signal at home. It has never dropped a call at home and the sound quality is practically as good as a landline. I've also tried AT&T wireless at home. It has almost no signal and it's pretty much impossible to have a conversation on it. Every carrier has dead spots in different parts of town. If your home happens to be in a dead spot I suggest making use of the 30 day return policy.
You're lucky to be paying that little. When I had a landline from Verizon it was $17.25 + $10 in taxes and fees. So try $336 a year. This was for unmetered local calls since I had dialup at the time.
There's always alternatives for emergencies. Any unactivated cellphone can still dial 911. And there's always payphones if it's close enough.
I don't know about Hong Kong, but there's a whole bunch of flash-based dating sims out of Japan. They're mildly amusing if you're bored of all the other flash games out there. Like anything they can be pathetic if you take them too seriously.
$3000 is a lot of money to the poor sap getting sued, but it's only worth probably 20 hours of lawyer time. I don't think a $3000 settlement is profitable to the RIAA for what they're spending on lawyers especially after Verizon fought the subpoena. The point is to make an example out of people.
It's easy to say boycott all RIAA label music, but there's a balancing act you have to do here. For every sellout like Metallica suing their fans on Napster, there are lots of bands out there fucking with The Man like:
:-/
- Korn's Y'all Want A Single? video where they smashed up a record store. Ironically their anti-single became so popular it's one of the singles now. I'm not sure if they played it on MTV yet though.
- Offspring wanted to post their whole Americana CD on their website, but their label shut them down. They ended up posting one track. And who could forget them selling Napster logo caps and t-shirts (without permission) from their website?
- After fulfilling their recording contract the Smashing Pumpkins gave away their last album (a few hundred vinyl pressings to friends) with instructions to share it with the world.
- Many singers and bands like Bono, Public Enemy and Moby have said they don't mind fans sharing their music for free.
I know that supporting major label artists is supporting the RIAA lawsuits, but there's a more important issue here. The popularity of a major label recording contract is an unbeatable soapbox for getting the message out. The fact that anti-establishment acts sell mean the record labels won't stop selling them, at least until Clear Channel takes over the other 60% of radio.
"but isn't it obvious that the power cable for those might be an eye irritant?"
We already have inductance loop connections for transmitting power. The EV1 electric car had them. Some medical implants use them too.
"You can build a computer capable of running Mac OS without resorting to buying one at apple. It's hard though. The hardware that meets Apple's specs is pretty rare."
Look, I don't disagree with most of your arguments, but this is where you lose me. I know MacOS supports open standards and interoperates well with Windows and *nix networks. I know Macs use standard peripherals like USB and Firewire. I know Macs use standard hardware components like DDR RAM and SATA drives. However, Apple is the only company that sells a complete computer system that runs MacOS. That makes them a hardware monopoly. Where the hell am I supposed to buy a non-Apple PowerPC motherboard that boots MacOS natively (not through something like MaconLinux on LinuxPPC)? The last company that tried to sell complete systems sourced their motherboards by buying real Apple boards as spare parts from Apple repair centers, and Apple wasted no time in releasing the hounds (lawyers) on them.
The issue isn't about opening Fairplay and risking its security by obscurity. The issue is allowing other copy protected music to play on iPods (whether that's a good thing or not) and Apple protecting its iTunes/iPod vendor lock in.
BTW, I'm shopping for an iPod now, and I wouldn't touch Real Rhapsody with a 10ft pole.
Mmmmm... Steak....
Seriously, this isn't a stake through the heard of OpenVMS. It's being ported to Intel Itanium, but this isn't very popular with the users. TheReg article here about HP World.
Ain't that the truth. Apple makes some nice products, but the fanboys are too much. They don't care about proprietary vs. open standards. I've heard many of them defend Apple's hardware monopoly as good for quality, compatibility, user experience, and even necessary for the survival of Apple itself. If you look at it that way, their defense of Apple's monopolizing is not surprising.
Fortunately I missed that one, but I can easily say the worst movie I paid full price to see in the theater was Universal Solder: The Return. I paid $10 in NYC too (ouch).
Sure, it used to be you could always sell a lot of tickets for a crappy blockbuster by advertising the hell out of it before opening weekend, but customers have technology working for them too, like this: Movie Industry Blames Texting for Bad Box Office.
Ditching it isn't free either, unless you're talking about an uncontrolled reentry. From one proposal it would cost $300M (not including launch costs) to build an automated booster to attach to Hubble and safely deorbit it.
There's two kinds of mountain passes on the highways. I-5 through the Tejon Pass (4000 ft) has both. Rolling hills on the south side where you could coast on the downhills to recharge and a big, long, continuous climb on the north side. Not fun in an underpowered car.
Hybrids are very efficient in heavy stop and go traffic, but not much better than a regular car on long freeway trips. A diesel would be better for that. The VW TDI gets over 40MPG freeway. The extra power from the electric motor is good for accelerating from stop lights, but if you're climbing a long highway mountain pass, the battery never has a chance to recharge and you're left with just the power from a somewhat undersized gas engine.
You couldn't just wire up a regular starter motor to a bigger battery. They're made to be very powerful for their size, but they'll overheat and wear out if run for long periods.
Yes, your broadband connection is valuable to a spammer or DDoS'er, but how valuable? According to this article you could rent a botnet of tens of thousands of computers for $100/hour. So one owned zombie by itself is worth maybe $.01/hour. Not very valuable compared stealing a presidential election. That could be done by tampering with as little as a few thousand votes in a swing state with many electoral votes.
That's what that so called Speedbooster 108Mb/s gear does. It uses two non-overlapping WiFi channels simultaneously to double the speed. It also effectively monopolizes all the 2.4GHz channels in the area. As long as your neighbors aren't complaining...
"As long as we accept computers making LEGAL DECISIONS for us, then we will never get our fair use rights back."
The reason people haven't complained about these laws against petty crimes is because traditionally it was impossible or impractical to enforce them perfectly. How the hell do you stop people from taping songs off the radio or lending VHS tapes of shows they recorded off the air or driving a few mph over the speed limit. Well now with computers it's possible to build recorders that refuse to record off the air or a computer for the car that prints out a speeding ticket every time you go over the speed limit even by 1 mph.
There's an old saying: The best way to repeal an unpopular law is to enforce it strictly.
TVs and monitors can sure give a big shock. We had an old Sun monitor that would shock me every time I picked it up. At first I thought it was static, but then we figured the shield must have been broken and we put in on the shelf with a big warning not to use it. This thing gave me a big shock across a pretty big gap through vents in a plastic case. I wouldn't want to imagine touching the high voltage circuits inside.
The reason you need that speed is because the whole bus of up to 6 srives shares that 320MB/s just like ATA shares its bandwidth between master and slave. Multiply 6 x 55MB/s and you have 330MB/s.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I can see their reasons behind this. On the road, cars are like anonymous machines. When people hide behind their cars it enables a lot of aggressive or inconsiderate behavior that they wouldn't do in a face to face situation. I've seen this before with online behavior too. You've probably known a few rude online assholes who act polite and mild mannered in person.
The desk jockeys, mechanics, rocket scientists and assorted other button pushers outnumber the pilots in the air force by a huge margin. It's not like WWII when the factories were cranking out tens of thousands of P-47s and P-51s.
Nah, they wouldn't want an uppity human for a slave. We need food, water, oxygen, are easily bored, and generally are a pain in the ass. Then again maybe robots will get just as uppity once they're intelligent enough.
"Didn't that happen with 2.4?"
Only when it was in its "VM of the Week" phase.
"No custoner would pay for spam messages, and verizon would have to foot the bill."
It's not so much that. It's because text messaging would become so useless with spam that no one would bother paying for it period. VZW charges a few dollars extra for text messaging, and it's still not as popular in the US as in other parts of the world. It's in their best interest as well as the customers' to keep text messaging useful and spam free.