Considering that most of the rumors ended with "The company won't comment on it, but it might happen" kind of responses, the article is mostly useless anyway.
Then again, why am I reading it? I don't even have a PS or a PS2, nor do I have much interest in getting one.
There have been some recent efforts in the California Legislature to overturn the music industry's exemption to the Seven Year Rule, which allows for a maximum length of seven years for personal service contracts. The exemption is for the music industry, and there are serious considerations on whether the exemption, enacted around 1987, should be removed. This will allow the artists more flexibility in negotiating, since they won't be tied to one label for two decades to finish out a deal for six albums. With new technologies, this may allow for a change to the structure of the music industry as groups make it under a label, and then renegotiate their contracts or, failing that, carry enough momentum forward to allow them to form independent labels to recoup more of the money involved in sales.
I've gotten fast food in California, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Maryland, and Arizona, and to my recollection, I have paid tax on all of them. Sales tax on prepared foods is pretty common.
Like most things that seem bad, they have their upsides. In this particular case, the labels can afford to spend money on advertising and support for a group, making them known throughout a wider area. There are a few stations around that provide better coverage to unsigned or independent artists (Los Angeles's KLOS does this with their weekly Local Licks program), but by and large, major stations don't supply a lot of coverage to unknowns without a label or a trusted agent behind them.
It's possible to get noticed and get publicity without labels, yes, but it's not easy, and if it flops can easily bankrupt a group (and their families).
Point me to the research showing that people who experience declining positive effects from a given dose give it up rather than taking more of the drug to get the desired effect and I'll believe you.
From the last link: "Although we havenâ(TM)t yet conducted longitudinal studies in human MDMA users, we know that brain serotonin innervations in monkeys treated with MDMA still isnâ(TM)t normal 7 years later."
This link provides information on Ecstasy pills that are not MDMA, but instead PMA, which can be lethal: http://www.uiowa.edu/~shs/ecstasy.htm
I'm all for letting people do pretty much what they want with their bodies, and MDMA certainly isn't as bad as some of the available chemicals out there, but to outright deny the effects of a drug like this is pretty weak. Also, if you think declining effects are a reason people put down a drug, then maybe you should do a little research into drug behavior, as increasing resistance is often a reason for increased uptake of a drug. Psychological addictions can occur with just about anything, including Ecstasy.
You aren't charged a single cent to use this free massive multiplayer network
Exactly.
A friend of mine works for Blizzard, and once got to see the rows of cabinets for B.Net-West. Between servers, network gear, and bandwidth, they have millions of dollars tied up in the system -- and it's all free of charge to those who have purchased their games. In addition, they still pay a fair amount of attention to older games, periodically releasing patches with some of them containing gameplay enhancements, as with the coming 1.10 patch for Diablo II.
Unless you refer to interest on accounts, all votes are interest-based. I've considered buying stock in some media companies from time to time just for the opportunity to vote "no" to the re-election of those board members who support extending copyright law, because I believe it is in my interest for material 75 years old should to be in the public domain. Other people believe it's better for money from royalties and sales to be in their bank account. Everyone has their own interests.
Yes, we do need it, because the airports in place now are at or above capacity and the region is still growing. At this point, even if El Toro becomes an airport and reaches the planned 25 million passenger capacity by 2020, we're still going to be short of capacity by something like 10 million passengers, and that's including the planned expansion at LAX.
Orange County home owners have little to fear about loss of property values. An article in the LA Times today suggested that there is room for no more than another 50,000 or so homes, and the region is still popular. Even an airport isn't going to do anything more than slow the rate of ascent, and might even jump-start another rise for them as airport and airline management and pilots based out of that airport look for local homes.
I live 40 miles from the base. I, too, will be affected by it. I'm underneath one of the flight paths for John Wayne Airport as it is, and there are some days I wish I wasn't. I'm not about to petition for the change of the flight path, though, because I know that the minor inconvenience to me is outweighed by the public good of the airport.
As has been pointed out a couple of times, things like wind farms are not so easily moved. Whereas a youth center can reside in almost any building of a reasonable size, a wind farm has certain required geographic characteristics. As I understand it, there aren't many places where one can find an average 18mph wind in a spot where it's both relatively easy to build and shielded from severe weather.
I'm trying to figure out why anyone would want to live in a place like that anyway. I've never been to the region, so maybe I'm missing out on the natural local beauty, but I prefer somewhat quieter breezes than a brisk wind like that all the time.
Re:I'm sorry, but I fail to see the contradiction
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
I mean, do proponents of "clean coal power" or "clean nuclear power" want coal or nuclear power plants in their back yard (you know, the people who run the ads about "Americans for sensible energy choices")?
Not that I'm one of those running the ads, but yes, I do want a nuclear plant here, and I live near a fault line. If Diablo Canyon can be built and operated safely virtually on a fault line, I think we can handle a plant near one.
Hell, I'd chip in a C-note in an effort to get a local pebble bed or other new-technology reactor underway.
You're speaking there of an easily-handled issue, wherein a youth center could be moved a mile down the road. This would be an airport miles from an area that was a boom town when F/A-18 fighters and C-130 transports used it on a daily basis, and they're both a LOT noisier than modern commercial planes are. Hook up some rail lines, and much of the cargo would stay off of the roads. This is ignoring the thousands of jobs that would come from the conversion to an airport, not to mention the tens of thousands of jobs an airport with a capacity of 25 million passengers would support.
Fortunately, the company that runs LA International, Ontario, and Van Nuys Airports is looking into having the DoT take over the base and lease it to them for airport conversion. Don't know if it will work, but I will laugh at the south county people if it does, since county voters managed to TWICE approve the airport before the initiative lumping jail and airport zoning was passed in a very underhanded manner.
Re:As much as I have amired Cronkite...
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, in the last five years or so, Walter Cronkite has become very outspoken in some disappointing ways. The person once called "the most trusted man in America" has become yet another liberal mouthpiece seemingly more interested in preserving the status quo than in doing anything really helpful, as the interview with him in this article shows. It's nearly to the point where I don't pay attention to him anymore.
You sound very much like the people in the Irvine area of Orange County, CA, who have managed to shoot down the conversion of El Toro MCAS to an airport, despite the regional needs for another large international airport. Their claimed concerns? Noise pollution, traffic overload, and decreased property values. Mind you, that's in the reverse order that they originally protested.
However, once the county initiatives were finally defeated, they managed to set it up so that they can build several tens of thousands of new homes, most of them in the $500K or more block. This is in addition to the several tens of thousands of new homes planned or being built in the region, effectively negating their second argument. Noise considerations would be ameliorated by the fact that the airport will be several miles from most homes, and new anti-noise generators could be used for those that are closer.
Almost every time I've talked to someone from that area, the first thing they bring up about it is the loss of property values. Completely NIMBY activism. Your purchase did not contain a permanent guarantee that you would be happy with development in the area. Sometimes your needs must be subordinate to the rest of the area.
"Coal is one of the most impure of fuels. Its impurities range from trace quantities of many metals, including uranium and thorium, to much larger quantities of aluminum and iron to still larger quantities of impurities such as sulfur. Products of coal combustion include the oxides of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; carcinogenic and mutagenic substances; and recoverable minerals of commercial value, including nuclear fuels naturally occurring in coal.
Even containing 99.5% of the waste (the target in 1993 when the article was written) means an awful lot of material gets out into the air, some of it not too pleasant. The same article goes into some detail about the amount of material, particularly uranium and thorium, that have been released into the environment worldwide from burning coal for power.
There are ways to make sure that other people know how skilled I am, helping to protect me. It's politics, and I hate to play them, but I've survived cuts before because of it -- including one that saw my manager cut. I also save virtually every e-mail I have, which provides a paper trail of sorts.
It's not perfect, no, but I can't stand slackers who don't pull their own weight. I'll take my chances.
My dad used to work for McDonnell-Douglas in Long Beach, CA, until he was hurt on the job. He went from having the strength to carry 200 pounds on each shoulder at the same time to having a 15-pound lift limit on his right arm. The union gave token help at the civil suit, and refused to help him locate around $3000 in tools that he was not able to recover from the plant following his injury. He has never been compensated for them, even though the union and McDonnell-Douglas both acknowledged that he had them the day he was hurt, he did not take them home, and that they had not paid for almost all of them.
He hates flying on civilian aircraft. He knows what the people who built the planes were like, how they slacked off. It was a constant complaint that he had to redo much of their work so that things didn't fall apart in flight (I don't know how much of this was true, but I know he was selected to move from the DC-10 lines to the KC-10 lines, and survived at least five layoffs there, so his quality of work had to be reasonably good).
Unions work for some, but not for all. I'd rather stand on my own merits and get pay raises dictated by my performance than by a contract negotiated by someone who knows nothing about my job and the difficulty of it. I've never gotten a raise of less than 5%, which is more than most union contracts typically call for.
Could be worse -- they could all be using Lotus Notes. I know people that work in all Notes shops that would give a spare testacle or ovary for a chance to switch to something as user-friendly as Outlook. Amen. I've turned down two jobs (obviously during better times) because I learned during interviews or walkthroughs that they used Notes for e-mail. I dealt with it for six months at one place. I don't know what crime I committed, but I've done my time, thank you.
Not to mention that Outlook has become considerably safer in recent versions, with the default set to block most executable files. It doesn't even allow you to double-click these items to open them by default.
Between Norton and Outlook 2002, I've never had to worry much about. Then again, I only get about one virus or so a month on an address I've used for three years now. Those who are getting thousands of spams a day kind of surprise me, as I get only 2-3 per week, not including my Hotmail account.
I also noticed that a lot of the responses to the article indicated very minimal observed activity of the vulnerability on the part of most people who posted their own results. Looks like something that, while potentially troubling, is getting blown out of proportion.
Re:This really doesn't make sense....
on
C&W Bails Out
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· Score: 1
An OC3 runs 12-15 thousand a month, minimum, now imagine a company that has 10 datacenters with 4 or 5 of those into -each-, and each one has multi-million dollar security systems, 3 dozen employees, etc. I can easily see C&W losing a million bucks a day.
The data center at which I work has fewer than 20 employees, we're at about 20% of capacity, and have a few OC3 connections and a couple dozen individual DS1 connections, though we have something like another 14Gbps of dark fiber, which we light up only as necessary. We've got guys that know what the hell they're doing, with three CNE's who have been in the business for more than 10 years each, plus a guy who has about 15 years of experience on data-only telecomm lines. We figure we can get up to between 50% and 75% of capacity with the addition of only one or two more people.
A couple of other people here have mentioned the biggest problem: overbuilding, something the owner of my company has been smart enough to avoid. We're actually in close proximity to two C&W centers (one of which hosts one of my sites, so I'm thinking about suggesting to them they look a bit south), and hoping to pick up some of that business on the basis that we can fit their needs and we run a profit, not just the former.
For telephone, Verizon are already required to interconnect with other telcos, at regulated rates: the only monopoly element would be line rental/local calls.
There is still the question of how much. There was a recent article in the LA Times about this, where AT&T and others were arguing the PUC should lower the leasing fees SBC charges, and SBC was arguing to raise them. SBC suggested that it cost them about $22 per month per customer to provide equipment and service and accounting for depreciation over 10-15 years, and AT&T, et al, claimed about $13 per month with depreciation over 30 years. I found SBC's claim amusing, since their own prices start at about $20 per month for a residential line. I pay AT&T $15 a month now, though, for what SBC would like to charge me $22 or more a month.
I dunno... My brother had his license suspended for six months for speeding (105mph), and the car stayed in his driveway except for when he had to move it to avoid the mower throwing rocks up that might scratch it. He got a ride to and from work, and he even resorted to taking the bus a couple of times. Since then, he's been an exceptionally careful driver.
Might only be one case, but it still worked fairly well in this one.
but they can always lie and say their fiber maintanance cost as $200.
Reminds me of the time the SBC rep told me what a deal I was getting on voice-mail, since it cost SBC 'almost $100' for each account to be set up with it. That must be one very expensive technician doing that work to set it up.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that most of the rumors ended with "The company won't comment on it, but it might happen" kind of responses, the article is mostly useless anyway.
Then again, why am I reading it? I don't even have a PS or a PS2, nor do I have much interest in getting one.
I hate it when I do that.
There have been some recent efforts in the California Legislature to overturn the music industry's exemption to the Seven Year Rule, which allows for a maximum length of seven years for personal service contracts. The exemption is for the music industry, and there are serious considerations on whether the exemption, enacted around 1987, should be removed. This will allow the artists more flexibility in negotiating, since they won't be tied to one label for two decades to finish out a deal for six albums. With new technologies, this may allow for a change to the structure of the music industry as groups make it under a label, and then renegotiate their contracts or, failing that, carry enough momentum forward to allow them to form independent labels to recoup more of the money involved in sales.
MTV plays music? When did this start?
I've gotten fast food in California, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Maryland, and Arizona, and to my recollection, I have paid tax on all of them. Sales tax on prepared foods is pretty common.
Like most things that seem bad, they have their upsides. In this particular case, the labels can afford to spend money on advertising and support for a group, making them known throughout a wider area. There are a few stations around that provide better coverage to unsigned or independent artists (Los Angeles's KLOS does this with their weekly Local Licks program), but by and large, major stations don't supply a lot of coverage to unknowns without a label or a trusted agent behind them.
It's possible to get noticed and get publicity without labels, yes, but it's not easy, and if it flops can easily bankrupt a group (and their families).
Point me to the research showing that people who experience declining positive effects from a given dose give it up rather than taking more of the drug to get the desired effect and I'll believe you.
Can you cite the research, or at least the results of the research from an authoritative site?
t tp://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_research 1.pdfC ontent/ mccann.pdf
http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofax/ecstasy.html
h
http://www.psychiatry.ufl.edu/newsletters/
From the last link:
"Although we havenâ(TM)t yet conducted longitudinal studies in human MDMA users, we know that brain serotonin innervations in monkeys treated with MDMA still isnâ(TM)t normal 7 years later."
This link provides information on Ecstasy pills that are not MDMA, but instead PMA, which can be lethal:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~shs/ecstasy.htm
I'm all for letting people do pretty much what they want with their bodies, and MDMA certainly isn't as bad as some of the available chemicals out there, but to outright deny the effects of a drug like this is pretty weak. Also, if you think declining effects are a reason people put down a drug, then maybe you should do a little research into drug behavior, as increasing resistance is often a reason for increased uptake of a drug. Psychological addictions can occur with just about anything, including Ecstasy.
You aren't charged a single cent to use this free massive multiplayer network
Exactly.
A friend of mine works for Blizzard, and once got to see the rows of cabinets for B.Net-West. Between servers, network gear, and bandwidth, they have millions of dollars tied up in the system -- and it's all free of charge to those who have purchased their games. In addition, they still pay a fair amount of attention to older games, periodically releasing patches with some of them containing gameplay enhancements, as with the coming 1.10 patch for Diablo II.
Unless you refer to interest on accounts, all votes are interest-based. I've considered buying stock in some media companies from time to time just for the opportunity to vote "no" to the re-election of those board members who support extending copyright law, because I believe it is in my interest for material 75 years old should to be in the public domain. Other people believe it's better for money from royalties and sales to be in their bank account. Everyone has their own interests.
Yes, we do need it, because the airports in place now are at or above capacity and the region is still growing. At this point, even if El Toro becomes an airport and reaches the planned 25 million passenger capacity by 2020, we're still going to be short of capacity by something like 10 million passengers, and that's including the planned expansion at LAX.
Orange County home owners have little to fear about loss of property values. An article in the LA Times today suggested that there is room for no more than another 50,000 or so homes, and the region is still popular. Even an airport isn't going to do anything more than slow the rate of ascent, and might even jump-start another rise for them as airport and airline management and pilots based out of that airport look for local homes.
I live 40 miles from the base. I, too, will be affected by it. I'm underneath one of the flight paths for John Wayne Airport as it is, and there are some days I wish I wasn't. I'm not about to petition for the change of the flight path, though, because I know that the minor inconvenience to me is outweighed by the public good of the airport.
As has been pointed out a couple of times, things like wind farms are not so easily moved. Whereas a youth center can reside in almost any building of a reasonable size, a wind farm has certain required geographic characteristics. As I understand it, there aren't many places where one can find an average 18mph wind in a spot where it's both relatively easy to build and shielded from severe weather.
I'm trying to figure out why anyone would want to live in a place like that anyway. I've never been to the region, so maybe I'm missing out on the natural local beauty, but I prefer somewhat quieter breezes than a brisk wind like that all the time.
I mean, do proponents of "clean coal power" or "clean nuclear power" want coal or nuclear power plants in their back yard (you know, the people who run the ads about "Americans for sensible energy choices")?
Not that I'm one of those running the ads, but yes, I do want a nuclear plant here, and I live near a fault line. If Diablo Canyon can be built and operated safely virtually on a fault line, I think we can handle a plant near one.
Hell, I'd chip in a C-note in an effort to get a local pebble bed or other new-technology reactor underway.
You're speaking there of an easily-handled issue, wherein a youth center could be moved a mile down the road. This would be an airport miles from an area that was a boom town when F/A-18 fighters and C-130 transports used it on a daily basis, and they're both a LOT noisier than modern commercial planes are. Hook up some rail lines, and much of the cargo would stay off of the roads. This is ignoring the thousands of jobs that would come from the conversion to an airport, not to mention the tens of thousands of jobs an airport with a capacity of 25 million passengers would support.
Fortunately, the company that runs LA International, Ontario, and Van Nuys Airports is looking into having the DoT take over the base and lease it to them for airport conversion. Don't know if it will work, but I will laugh at the south county people if it does, since county voters managed to TWICE approve the airport before the initiative lumping jail and airport zoning was passed in a very underhanded manner.
Unfortunately, in the last five years or so, Walter Cronkite has become very outspoken in some disappointing ways. The person once called "the most trusted man in America" has become yet another liberal mouthpiece seemingly more interested in preserving the status quo than in doing anything really helpful, as the interview with him in this article shows. It's nearly to the point where I don't pay attention to him anymore.
You sound very much like the people in the Irvine area of Orange County, CA, who have managed to shoot down the conversion of El Toro MCAS to an airport, despite the regional needs for another large international airport. Their claimed concerns? Noise pollution, traffic overload, and decreased property values. Mind you, that's in the reverse order that they originally protested.
However, once the county initiatives were finally defeated, they managed to set it up so that they can build several tens of thousands of new homes, most of them in the $500K or more block. This is in addition to the several tens of thousands of new homes planned or being built in the region, effectively negating their second argument. Noise considerations would be ameliorated by the fact that the airport will be several miles from most homes, and new anti-noise generators could be used for those that are closer.
Almost every time I've talked to someone from that area, the first thing they bring up about it is the loss of property values. Completely NIMBY activism. Your purchase did not contain a permanent guarantee that you would be happy with development in the area. Sometimes your needs must be subordinate to the rest of the area.
You have to achieve 100% containment of the coal or else you let out some annoying things into the atmosphere. From this article in the Oak Ridge National Laboratories Review:
"Coal is one of the most impure of fuels. Its impurities range from trace quantities of many metals, including uranium and thorium, to much larger quantities of aluminum and iron to still larger quantities of impurities such as sulfur. Products of coal combustion include the oxides of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; carcinogenic and mutagenic substances; and recoverable minerals of commercial value, including nuclear fuels naturally occurring in coal.
Even containing 99.5% of the waste (the target in 1993 when the article was written) means an awful lot of material gets out into the air, some of it not too pleasant. The same article goes into some detail about the amount of material, particularly uranium and thorium, that have been released into the environment worldwide from burning coal for power.
There are ways to make sure that other people know how skilled I am, helping to protect me. It's politics, and I hate to play them, but I've survived cuts before because of it -- including one that saw my manager cut. I also save virtually every e-mail I have, which provides a paper trail of sorts.
It's not perfect, no, but I can't stand slackers who don't pull their own weight. I'll take my chances.
My dad used to work for McDonnell-Douglas in Long Beach, CA, until he was hurt on the job. He went from having the strength to carry 200 pounds on each shoulder at the same time to having a 15-pound lift limit on his right arm. The union gave token help at the civil suit, and refused to help him locate around $3000 in tools that he was not able to recover from the plant following his injury. He has never been compensated for them, even though the union and McDonnell-Douglas both acknowledged that he had them the day he was hurt, he did not take them home, and that they had not paid for almost all of them.
He hates flying on civilian aircraft. He knows what the people who built the planes were like, how they slacked off. It was a constant complaint that he had to redo much of their work so that things didn't fall apart in flight (I don't know how much of this was true, but I know he was selected to move from the DC-10 lines to the KC-10 lines, and survived at least five layoffs there, so his quality of work had to be reasonably good).
Unions work for some, but not for all. I'd rather stand on my own merits and get pay raises dictated by my performance than by a contract negotiated by someone who knows nothing about my job and the difficulty of it. I've never gotten a raise of less than 5%, which is more than most union contracts typically call for.
Could be worse -- they could all be using Lotus Notes. I know people that work in all Notes shops that would give a spare testacle or ovary for a chance to switch to something as user-friendly as Outlook.
Amen. I've turned down two jobs (obviously during better times) because I learned during interviews or walkthroughs that they used Notes for e-mail. I dealt with it for six months at one place. I don't know what crime I committed, but I've done my time, thank you.
Not to mention that Outlook has become considerably safer in recent versions, with the default set to block most executable files. It doesn't even allow you to double-click these items to open them by default.
Between Norton and Outlook 2002, I've never had to worry much about. Then again, I only get about one virus or so a month on an address I've used for three years now. Those who are getting thousands of spams a day kind of surprise me, as I get only 2-3 per week, not including my Hotmail account.
I also noticed that a lot of the responses to the article indicated very minimal observed activity of the vulnerability on the part of most people who posted their own results. Looks like something that, while potentially troubling, is getting blown out of proportion.
An OC3 runs 12-15 thousand a month, minimum, now imagine a company that has 10 datacenters with 4 or 5 of those into -each-, and each one has multi-million dollar security systems, 3 dozen employees, etc.
I can easily see C&W losing a million bucks a day.
The data center at which I work has fewer than 20 employees, we're at about 20% of capacity, and have a few OC3 connections and a couple dozen individual DS1 connections, though we have something like another 14Gbps of dark fiber, which we light up only as necessary. We've got guys that know what the hell they're doing, with three CNE's who have been in the business for more than 10 years each, plus a guy who has about 15 years of experience on data-only telecomm lines. We figure we can get up to between 50% and 75% of capacity with the addition of only one or two more people.
A couple of other people here have mentioned the biggest problem: overbuilding, something the owner of my company has been smart enough to avoid. We're actually in close proximity to two C&W centers (one of which hosts one of my sites, so I'm thinking about suggesting to them they look a bit south), and hoping to pick up some of that business on the basis that we can fit their needs and we run a profit, not just the former.
For telephone, Verizon are already required to interconnect with other telcos, at regulated rates: the only monopoly element would be line rental/local calls.
There is still the question of how much. There was a recent article in the LA Times about this, where AT&T and others were arguing the PUC should lower the leasing fees SBC charges, and SBC was arguing to raise them. SBC suggested that it cost them about $22 per month per customer to provide equipment and service and accounting for depreciation over 10-15 years, and AT&T, et al, claimed about $13 per month with depreciation over 30 years. I found SBC's claim amusing, since their own prices start at about $20 per month for a residential line. I pay AT&T $15 a month now, though, for what SBC would like to charge me $22 or more a month.
I dunno... My brother had his license suspended for six months for speeding (105mph), and the car stayed in his driveway except for when he had to move it to avoid the mower throwing rocks up that might scratch it. He got a ride to and from work, and he even resorted to taking the bus a couple of times. Since then, he's been an exceptionally careful driver.
Might only be one case, but it still worked fairly well in this one.
but they can always lie and say their fiber maintanance cost as $200.
:P
Reminds me of the time the SBC rep told me what a deal I was getting on voice-mail, since it cost SBC 'almost $100' for each account to be set up with it. That must be one very expensive technician doing that work to set it up.
Does that make selling them illegal?
Maybe I should pull the Yankees off the market then...