PS: I remember MFM dries. I mail-ordered a 20MB hard drive for my old 8088 (my first hard drive, sigh) then bought an MFM controller to tweak it up to 30MB.
Heh, that wouldn't even serve as a disk cache for my current 1TB hard drive any more. LOL!!!!
Actually, one of my computers was an Athlon 1.33Ghz Thunderbird with 384MB RAM, and it has no problems whatsoever with Linux Mint 8 (the latest). The old video card on it only has 32MB of RAM, so it won't run the eye candy (compiz), but it runs a 19" LCD panel with no problems whatsoever. That motherboard eventually died of old age, but I've got it running on an Intel Celeron 1.2GHz with the same 384MB of RAM and it's still relatively snappy.
And that's running Gnome. The XFCE desktop absolutely screams on that machine (I just like the look of Gnome better).
Firefox starts faster either machine running Mint than it did on my 2.2 GHz Athlon64 with 1GB RAM running Windows XP. Not that that's a particularly valid benchmark, but still...
Removing XP and installing Mint 8 on my Athlon64 2.2Ghz made me almost not do my latest hardware upgrade. It was that fast. But it's been over five years, it was time for a refresh. (grin)
If you have an old beast that you want to try it out on, you can boot straight from the CD and run it right from there. That's a good way to know if your hardware is going to be happy with it.
WGA was the beginning of the end with my relationship with Microsoft, and I've been using it pretty much exclusively since DOS 3.0.
After the dust settled, I started looking into cross platform software that could do what I wanted to in Windows, with a goal of eventually replacing everything with an open source alternative. It really opened my eyes about open source software and what it can (and cannot) do.
I can now say that, as of two weeks ago, my household became Redmond-free. All three computers in the household are now running Linux Mint, and loving it.
No, but chances are (assuming your copy of Windows is legitimate) it will install fine and unlock access to real updates you really do need to have. Of course, there's always the chance WGA will "go off" accidentally, but that was relatively rare, and I think in the intervening years Microsoft has loosened their policies on WGA activations. I ran into it, and it was a pain, but that was back when it first came out and Microsoft hadn't expected the flood of support calls (even a small minority of people being tripped up by it means a LOT of call volume!).
This is all assuming you have a legitimate copy, of course. If you're pirating it... no offense but you should really uninstall it and use something else.
It "enables" it, but only because Microsoft requires it, not because there's some underlying technology in WGA that adds any value to the update process. It becomes an artificial prerequisite, not a technical one.
That's the problem with WGA. It didn't fix any security problems with Windows at the time, it was introduced as a gatekeeper to make sure that only verified legitimate copies of Windows were allowed to get updates from that point forward. Though their verification system was pretty good, it was far from perfect so one side effect of this is that a number of legitimate copies of Windows could not be verified as legitimate, and the people who bought and paid for Windows had to buy it again, or call Microsoft and try to prove something they should not have had to waste their time proving. Plus, Microsoft failed to ramp up their call center, so a lot of people wasted a lot of time on hold waiting to talk to a Microsoft rep so they could prove they bought what they had already paid for. Early reports also had a number of Microsoft reps unaware of the nature of the problem and calling people pirates and hanging up on them, without even bothering to ask for proof of purchase.
Fortunately, in my case, I had a legitimate copy, I still had my original install disc, and I got a relatively nice rep after only an hour of waiting on the line. I had to drive down to a local shop to FAX an image of my original install disc with a long number written on the FAX sheet, then the rep got back to me about a day later with the activation code. It only cost me about 3 hours and $2 not including gasoline. But that was for a single copy installed at my home, and it was still three hours of my life wasted to, in my view, no good purpose. I found out later that some people were only asked to read off the code, or describe some small detail of the disc. Others had to produce a receipt (as if most people would keep one!). A few were even charged for a standard support call. So the internal procedures at Microsoft appeared ridiculously inconsistent.
But the REAL complaint about WGA is that it was not disclosed. Microsoft just listed it as a "critical security update" and didn't explain to people what it was or what it could do. WGA, in and of itself, was not a security update, and Microsoft artificially made it "critical" by tying all future security updates to it. You just installed the update and, if you got unlucky, you got the "this copy of Windows will self-destruct in 30 days" message.
Why would pirates have free access to updates too?
They shouldn't. That was the goal of WGA, and that's all well and good, but Microsoft failed to account for the collateral damage they'd cause.
All Microsoft had to do was tell their customers what WGA was, why they were deploying it, and warn people that their machines may come up with the "Your Windows will die in 30 Days if you don't call us and ask permission to keep running it" prompt. Put a dedicated 800# on the lockdown message, and have that number route to a call center with people who know what the hell is going on and have the authority to approve activations.
Throwing it on there as a "critical security update" along with a bunch of other "critical security updates" was reckless and irresponsible. It was neither critical, nor was it a security update. Not telling their internal reps who would start getting angry calls from customers about it.. I don't have a polite word to describe that so I won't.
Law firms initiate class action suits, by and large, to make money. Some of them also happen to contribute to the public good by punishing companies for bad behavior, but the core reason most class action suits go forward is because large law firms have found the formula (forgive the./ meme):
1. Find an injustice or perceived injustice with enough victims to qualify as a "class". 2. Get a judge to certify it as a class action. 3. Win a judgment (or better yet convince the defendant company to settle) 4. Profit (usually about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total settlement)!
Basically, class action law firms are mostly comprised of ambulance chasers who decided the exhaust fumes were getting to them.
Some people have the ability to quit their job so they can get out of their union. Not everyone has the luxury.
Some can choose to stop doing business with their cell carrier because their carrier is taking a political stance they disagree with, but the cell carrier is just going to get the $300 disconnect fee anyway.
Some can choose to close their bank accounts because their bank is funding a campaign, but that means paying off all their debt, and if it's because the bank is buying ads to try and overturn bank legislation, their own service charges are being spent to help ensure those service charges increase.
The amounts of money a corporation or a union can bring to bear change the political game into something entirely new. The leaders of those organizations are only beholden to the sources of their money in a delayed fashion, and are not directly accountable at all. And they have access to gigantic pools of people, money, and lawyers. Once corporations can fully engage in the political process, they can change the rules entirely.
In the current political landscape, we have the opportunity to know who is saying something, so we can check sources and find out why they might say it, what their agenda is. That's because political speech happens through registered political organizations (PAC, SIG, etc), and they have to put that little "this ad paid for by friends of fluffy bunnies and sunshine" at the end. We can research who the friends of fluffy bunnies and sunshine really are, and try to figure out the intent behind the ads.
When corporations buy advertising, they are not required to identify who bought it, or what their agenda might be. And they'll have more money than any candidate, any PAC, any SIG, anybody. We will be flooded with information that will tend to drown out all else.
And American companies aren't the biggest any more. Do you really want lots of advertising, advertorials, letters to the editor, etc. that "Joe Winkler means JOBS", having people react favorably to that en masse, then find out afterward that "jobs" really meant "H1B visas" and maybe never find out that the advertising was purchased by WiPro and TaTa?
Someone like Microsoft or Toyota or Bank of America or Verizon could bring more money to bear than all of the candidates of any campaign combined.
Every PAC and SIG is going to dissolve and form a corporation that makes no money as a front-end, because they'll be able to get money from anyone they damned well please, say anything they want without accountability, and not have to identify themselves.
I hope you're right. Recent history seems to demonstrate otherwise. We like our politicians like we like our operating systems, flashy, lots of style, but we don't really want to know the substance behind it.
Remember, the current system works because "political" speech has to be made by people who identify themselves so we know their agenda and who backs them. Corporations are not subject to those same rules and regs, so if they are to be treated as private citizens they can just buy the ads - they don't have to say who bought them.
And it probably won't be an American company doing it. Well, not exclusively anyway.
I wonder how long it will be before TaTa and Wipro start buying up ad space in support of politicians who find lots of H1B slots favorable. Only they'll form a shadow corporation to do it.
And how many media outlets are going to have the integrity any more to break a story that will cost them a major advertiser during a political season? It'd be like Toys'r'Us saying they hate children on the first day of December - it would ruin their income during their most profitable time.
Or maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age.
My only caveat on the coverage maps is the level of detail in their "accuracy".
I live in Maine. Your mileage may vary.
I'm an AT&T customer. AT&T's coverage maps around here are like swiss cheese - full of little holes and pockets of "no coverage". If you drive to one of those places, you will in fact frequently get no coverage. If you stay in areas that claim coverage, you'll almost invariably have it. The actual signal and that depicted on the maps are almost eerily similar, and they seem to err on the side of caution. It's almost like they put some actual thought into what hills might block what towers or applied some intelligence to the process. It's far from perfect, but it really does depict a relatively honest view of actual coverage.
My wife was a Verizon customer. Verizon's maps pretty much consist of circles drawn around towers, and while their actual coverage in Maine is better than AT&T's, it's nowhere near as thorough as their maps would have you believe. My wife would routinely lose signal in areas Verizon said they covered.
Example:
Do a search for "Brooklin, Maine" on both sites. There are no towers whatsoever on the peninsula (not enough population density to justify them, though someone is building a new tower - it's under construction but I don't know who it will be for).
Signal coverage on both companies is pretty much identical across the entire peninsula - decent on the northern portion where Blue Hill has a tower, spotty on the southwestern portion where you can get a signal across the water, and miserable to nonexistent in the central and southeast portions (the extreme tip of the southeast portion does get good "skip across the water" coverage). AT&T shows no coverage for almost all of the peninsula, Verizon has painted the whole thing as having "Extended Enhanced Digital" coverage.
My AT&T phone actually works better across most of the peninsula than my wife's Verizon phone used to, even though Verizon claims coverage and AT&T does not.
This may be a local phenomenon to Maine, but my observation is that AT&T tends to be much more conservative with their maps (erring on the side of having signal where none is claimed), and Verizon seems to claim a lot of coverage areas that just ain't so. I've seen this in a number of places across the state.
My wife, who shares an account with her parents, eventually switched to AT&T.
A coworker lives in Pownal, and when our company converted us to Blackberries a couple of years ago we were given the choice between Verizon and AT&T. He and several others were "forced" to choose Verizon because that was the only company they could get a signal from at home. Others, sometimes even in the same towns, were "forced" to choose AT&T for the same reason - no signal at all from Verizon.
I think you mean dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO for short).
hydrogen dioxide is also known as "hydrogen peroxide", which is a relatively harmless bleaching agent, and it contains more oxygen than DHMO, so it's got to be healthy.
Agreed. The whole concept of "corporation as a separate entity" is a bad compromise at best.
Eliminating that concept would make shareholders more responsible in their input into how the company is run, and might keep company sizes under control.
"Too Big To Fail" should be synonymous with "Too Big To Exist".
I draw a distinction because "political speech" is speech that is "free" for citizens and voluntary collectives of citizens only as things stand today.
And, yes, our founding fathers certainly did. That was the point of the first amendment. However, the concept of a corporation as a proto-individual did not exist at that time, so it's hard to say what they would have thought of a corporation having its own voice politically. That's why they were smart enough to come up with a system that could adapt for things they never heard of or knew about.
I see your point, but there is (unfortunately) a relationship between advertising money and the ability of a candidate to get elected.
You can't even make it through the primaries if you can't get your name out there. A large corporation could simply buy all available prime-time advertising space and bash their opponents. They could send thousands of employees from across the country to canvass the neighborhoods with political materials, put up 100 signs for every sign their opponent puts up, etc.
PACs and SIGs do this today, but their speech is regulated, their donations are regulated, their organizations have to be relatively transparent, their power is limited, and they have to identify themselves on every ad they buy.
We currently have this problem anyway - candidates and even currently-elected officials have to spend WAY too much time and give WAY too many promises just to get enough money in their campaign funds to stand a chance of getting elected.
This will just make that existing problem FAR worse.
And, no, I don't have a good fix for it. But a corporation or a union is not necessarily a good reflection of the opinions of the individuals that constitute it.
We are a democratic republic of individual citizens. Corporations are not citizens. When citizens decide to act collectively, they can do so in a voluntary fashion already today.
Corporations exist to separate the individuals from the corporation for liability reasons. The concept of the "corporation as individual" was to make up a collective "person" so anyone suing the corporation would not need to sue the individual shareholders of that corporation for their individual responsibility for damages. It protects the shareholders of the corporation. In return, since the corporation is now seen as a separate legal entity, its income is taxed before proceeds are distributed to individual shareholders.
Incorporation was not originally intended to give corporations the same rights as individuals. It was intended to help ensure continuity of the corporation, and to separate the liability of the corporation from the income to reduce risk to people investing in that corporation.
What you are referring to is an existing construct. A PAC (Political Action Committee), SIG (Special Interest Group) or other political collective. The names and rules surrounding such organizations vary by state, but by and large they are formed around a goal and their members have bought into the goal. Those groups DO have the right to free speech, specifically their political speech is not regulated, simply because their governance structures are required to be transparent, and they have to have a clear paper trail as to where their money came from (lists of donors, etc). In other words, these organizations are treated as you describe - a group of individuals who have the right to decide as a group what to do with their collective funds.
However, a PAC/SIG/etc has to be a transparent. They have to be demonstrably a collective that is freely contributed to by individual citizens who have input as to the goals of that collective (even if their only input is "I like your ideals and I wish to give you money.") All members of a political organization have to have voluntarily joined the organization and it cannot be a condition of employment and/or other coercion cannot be applied.
This is vastly different from the organization of a company or a union. Those organizations do not have to be held accountable to the voters as to whether the will of their shareholders or sources of income are comfortable with the money being spent in political campaigns, and do not have to share their sources of income.
Separating "political" from "free" speech is a cast iron bitch, though.
You are correct, but the implications of this get really sticky.
The right of association does not necessarily mean the will of the members of that association will be reflected. It means the will of the LEADERS of that association will be reflected. That may or may not reflect the membership, and the membership may or may not be voluntary unless you like quitting jobs because your boss or union steward does not agree with your political views.
A very large company could basically outright buy an election, any election they wanted, and not just limited to one election at a time. Don't like the way the legislature is writing antitrust law? Find the candidates in each state Senate election that are the least likely to want to have antitrust legislation and spend a few billion dollars on massive ad blitzes attacking their opponents. I think you'd find a very large majority of very large companies that could support such an effort, and they could spend tens of millions of dollars on even local elections without flinching. It wouldn't even match their current spending on Superbowl ads, fercrissake. There would be no opportunity for anyone to hear an opposing credible view, because a sufficiently large coalition of companies can buy ALL of the available airtime for an election.
On the other hand, drawing the line on what constitutes "free" versus "political" speech is difficult.
And when you use that energy, what do you get? Heat. All energy eventually becomes heat. This will be a net heat increase on Earth.
Fortunately, it's a net heat increase that doesn't also release heat-trapping pollutants or heat-absorbing particulates like fossil fuels do, so the excess heat will have the opportunity to radiate out of the atmosphere.
Well, yes and no. They are going to have SOME parasitic losses, but certainly not the same ones.
Let's assume they do this in the desert somewhere, where there are only exceptionally rare clouds in the way and parasitic losses are relatively low (both for land-based solar and orbital solar). The parasitic losses attributable to the atmosphere would be approximately the same, except that the satellite doing the actual transmission to Earth would likely be in a geosynchronous orbit exactly over the receiving target, which means you'll have minimal atmospheric interference. I'm not an atmospheric expert, but I thought there was also some benefit to having a stronger/denser beam trying to penetrate the atmosphere (tended to have lower loss than a less-coherent beam).
Add to that the fact that the actual collector (or collectors) can be in a different orbit where there is no loss of sunlight, ever, and can be positioned so that the solar panels are getting maximum solar efficiency continuously. The best of Earth-based solar arrays need some sort of motorized mechanism to keep them pointed at the Sun during the course of the day, and will get maybe 10-11 hours of decent sun and only a few hours of peak sun in a given day. You easily double, or more, your yield from such a system as opposed to building it on Earth. Solar collector arrays can be built with almost no support materials and can be made FAR larger than you could possibly do practically on Earth. And, other than a collecting station here and there, no one has to give up viable, farmable, or environmentally sensitive land.
Sure, it's going to be expensive to put the little devils in orbit, but you can build them using fewer materials, they'll run at peak capacity continuously, and no one ever complained that the Great Left-Pawed Spotted Marmaset was found only at Lagrange-2 so you'll have to stop construction.
I don't care if I pay $45 for delivery and $0 for content or $25 for delivery and $20 for content, as long as I only pay $45.
Your ISP is charging for connection only. My point was if they started paying newspapers, etc, for content, your charge would NOT be $45. It would be $45 for the connection *PLUS* whatever they paid to get you content.
With enough replacements you could turn my original post into Mein Kampf, but that does not make me Adolph Hitler.
Wow. Two posts and you Godwined me. Again, my apologies for what was obviously a poorly-chosen word.
I already pay $45/month for my internet connection, a price I find acceptable in part because I can get my news through it at no extra cost.
You pay $45 a month for your internet connection, and fortunately you've found outlets who are willing to give you news for free.
Unfortunately, none of the money that funds the news you enjoy comes from the money you pay your ISP, it comes from advertising revenues, subscription fees, etc.
Your current news sources are under absolutely no obligation to continue to offer you free content just because you've paid for a connection to the Internet. But, thankfully, most news outlets found that advertising gives them enough money to justify putting their content out there.
At least for now.
I can't figured out were you got this entitlement thing from, I never used that word.
"Entitlement" came from your comment "so I feel justified to expect some free content to come with that". Please grep/"entitlement"/"expectation", and I will avoid the use of that specific word. My apologies for distracting the conversation with an apparently poorly-chosen word.
Your ISP provides you with a high-speed connection to the Internet, usually an email account, and sometimes a little web space or a few perks. That is what you are justified in expecting to receive from your ISP, and is the limit to the legal obligation of any corporation to provide to you in return for your $45.
Lots of other companies, who are unrelated to your ISP, provide you with content, and in large part do so freely. They usually do it because they make money on advertising. When they stop making enough money to justify doing it based on advertising income, they'll stop doing it solely based on advertising income. They'll find another business model, or they'll go out of business.
Back in the days when I had print subscriptions and no internet connection, I was spending about $250/year on news. Doesn't look good now, does it?
It's even worse because none of your $45 is really going to generate news. You're paying that money solely for delivery charges, not for the content that gets delivered. But it's a free market, you get to choose whether to keep buying it.
And by the way, this kind of cost analysis is not entitlement, but rather the free market at work.
Agreed. It's a good cost/benefit analysis.
Your ISP is charging what they think the market will bear, and your current actions (paying them) indicate that their price point is appropriate.
Only you can determine whether a connection to the Internet is worth $45 to you, and whether you are willing to pay the price for it.
But your news is coming from other companies, who also operate on a free market. And you aren't the only one with freedom in a free market.
Your currently free (as in price) news comes from other companies, who make money on advertising. Some of them are starting to find that the advertising is not making them as much money as they'd like, so they are exercising THEIR free (as in freedom) market rights to stop offering it to you for free (as in price).
Now, maybe this will end up being a bad move for NYT, since they have lots of competition that will not be making this move.
But they are, first and foremost, a for-profit corporation. If they aren't making money off ad revenues any more, they are beholden to their shareholders and employees (and even their customers who expect them to remain in business and provide services) to figure out a way to make money.
That's the way the free market works.
The entire current news collection system might go the way of buggy-whip manufacturers. Or someone might invent an acceptable paywall service for quality content. Or something else entirely might happen. That's the fun part of a free market, everyone's always innovating.
It doesn't necessarily have to be one company. The New York Times could easily set up accounts with a half-dozen aggregators and you, as the consumer, could choose the one you wanted.
Google was merely a personal example, since I use it as my aggregator today. Hell, Reuters already does similar things by aggregating stories from multiple news sources, pablumizing them, and reselling them to world news services. If they could offer complete access to the original stories from the local sources behind their aggregation service, I'd pay THEM for it.
As long as someone developed an aggregation service that has a significant number of newspapers and other news sources, and everything there includes access to quality services without having to individually make financial arrangements to support each and every one of those services, I'd be happy.
Great, and if those people are willing to report it for free (or in return for advertising) then you've found someone willing to fill your connection with useful data, and all is well with the world.
My point is that your subscription does not include any money to go to the newspapers or other reporters, therefore you are not "entitled" to any free content whatsoever. Fortunately for all of us, advertising pays for a lot of content and a few of us even run web sites we shell out our own bucks for and give out access for free. I run a half-dozen sites, including a couple of small-time discussion boards, and I neither expect payment nor use advertising.
If the newspapers managed to start getting money from your ISP to support them, it would be a complete clusterfuck. Your $45 would go up, probably considerably, as every news outlet wanted a piece of the pie. How'd you like to be paying for both the Denver Gazette AND the North Ottawa Journal as part of your ISP bill?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that was an attempt at humor, comparing it to the funny websites that talk about DHMO. I guess I was just a touch too subtle. ;)
PS: I remember MFM dries. I mail-ordered a 20MB hard drive for my old 8088 (my first hard drive, sigh) then bought an MFM controller to tweak it up to 30MB.
Heh, that wouldn't even serve as a disk cache for my current 1TB hard drive any more. LOL!!!!
Actually, one of my computers was an Athlon 1.33Ghz Thunderbird with 384MB RAM, and it has no problems whatsoever with Linux Mint 8 (the latest). The old video card on it only has 32MB of RAM, so it won't run the eye candy (compiz), but it runs a 19" LCD panel with no problems whatsoever. That motherboard eventually died of old age, but I've got it running on an Intel Celeron 1.2GHz with the same 384MB of RAM and it's still relatively snappy.
And that's running Gnome. The XFCE desktop absolutely screams on that machine (I just like the look of Gnome better).
Firefox starts faster either machine running Mint than it did on my 2.2 GHz Athlon64 with 1GB RAM running Windows XP. Not that that's a particularly valid benchmark, but still...
Removing XP and installing Mint 8 on my Athlon64 2.2Ghz made me almost not do my latest hardware upgrade. It was that fast. But it's been over five years, it was time for a refresh. (grin)
If you have an old beast that you want to try it out on, you can boot straight from the CD and run it right from there. That's a good way to know if your hardware is going to be happy with it.
WGA was the beginning of the end with my relationship with Microsoft, and I've been using it pretty much exclusively since DOS 3.0.
After the dust settled, I started looking into cross platform software that could do what I wanted to in Windows, with a goal of eventually replacing everything with an open source alternative. It really opened my eyes about open source software and what it can (and cannot) do.
I can now say that, as of two weeks ago, my household became Redmond-free. All three computers in the household are now running Linux Mint, and loving it.
No, but chances are (assuming your copy of Windows is legitimate) it will install fine and unlock access to real updates you really do need to have. Of course, there's always the chance WGA will "go off" accidentally, but that was relatively rare, and I think in the intervening years Microsoft has loosened their policies on WGA activations. I ran into it, and it was a pain, but that was back when it first came out and Microsoft hadn't expected the flood of support calls (even a small minority of people being tripped up by it means a LOT of call volume!).
This is all assuming you have a legitimate copy, of course. If you're pirating it... no offense but you should really uninstall it and use something else.
It "enables" it, but only because Microsoft requires it, not because there's some underlying technology in WGA that adds any value to the update process. It becomes an artificial prerequisite, not a technical one.
That's the problem with WGA. It didn't fix any security problems with Windows at the time, it was introduced as a gatekeeper to make sure that only verified legitimate copies of Windows were allowed to get updates from that point forward. Though their verification system was pretty good, it was far from perfect so one side effect of this is that a number of legitimate copies of Windows could not be verified as legitimate, and the people who bought and paid for Windows had to buy it again, or call Microsoft and try to prove something they should not have had to waste their time proving. Plus, Microsoft failed to ramp up their call center, so a lot of people wasted a lot of time on hold waiting to talk to a Microsoft rep so they could prove they bought what they had already paid for. Early reports also had a number of Microsoft reps unaware of the nature of the problem and calling people pirates and hanging up on them, without even bothering to ask for proof of purchase.
Fortunately, in my case, I had a legitimate copy, I still had my original install disc, and I got a relatively nice rep after only an hour of waiting on the line. I had to drive down to a local shop to FAX an image of my original install disc with a long number written on the FAX sheet, then the rep got back to me about a day later with the activation code. It only cost me about 3 hours and $2 not including gasoline. But that was for a single copy installed at my home, and it was still three hours of my life wasted to, in my view, no good purpose. I found out later that some people were only asked to read off the code, or describe some small detail of the disc. Others had to produce a receipt (as if most people would keep one!). A few were even charged for a standard support call. So the internal procedures at Microsoft appeared ridiculously inconsistent.
But the REAL complaint about WGA is that it was not disclosed. Microsoft just listed it as a "critical security update" and didn't explain to people what it was or what it could do. WGA, in and of itself, was not a security update, and Microsoft artificially made it "critical" by tying all future security updates to it. You just installed the update and, if you got unlucky, you got the "this copy of Windows will self-destruct in 30 days" message.
Why would pirates have free access to updates too?
They shouldn't. That was the goal of WGA, and that's all well and good, but Microsoft failed to account for the collateral damage they'd cause.
All Microsoft had to do was tell their customers what WGA was, why they were deploying it, and warn people that their machines may come up with the "Your Windows will die in 30 Days if you don't call us and ask permission to keep running it" prompt. Put a dedicated 800# on the lockdown message, and have that number route to a call center with people who know what the hell is going on and have the authority to approve activations.
Throwing it on there as a "critical security update" along with a bunch of other "critical security updates" was reckless and irresponsible. It was neither critical, nor was it a security update. Not telling their internal reps who would start getting angry calls from customers about it.. I don't have a polite word to describe that so I won't.
Law firms initiate class action suits, by and large, to make money. Some of them also happen to contribute to the public good by punishing companies for bad behavior, but the core reason most class action suits go forward is because large law firms have found the formula (forgive the ./ meme):
1. Find an injustice or perceived injustice with enough victims to qualify as a "class".
2. Get a judge to certify it as a class action.
3. Win a judgment (or better yet convince the defendant company to settle)
4. Profit (usually about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total settlement)!
Basically, class action law firms are mostly comprised of ambulance chasers who decided the exhaust fumes were getting to them.
Some people have the ability to quit their job so they can get out of their union. Not everyone has the luxury.
Some can choose to stop doing business with their cell carrier because their carrier is taking a political stance they disagree with, but the cell carrier is just going to get the $300 disconnect fee anyway.
Some can choose to close their bank accounts because their bank is funding a campaign, but that means paying off all their debt, and if it's because the bank is buying ads to try and overturn bank legislation, their own service charges are being spent to help ensure those service charges increase.
The amounts of money a corporation or a union can bring to bear change the political game into something entirely new. The leaders of those organizations are only beholden to the sources of their money in a delayed fashion, and are not directly accountable at all. And they have access to gigantic pools of people, money, and lawyers. Once corporations can fully engage in the political process, they can change the rules entirely.
In the current political landscape, we have the opportunity to know who is saying something, so we can check sources and find out why they might say it, what their agenda is. That's because political speech happens through registered political organizations (PAC, SIG, etc), and they have to put that little "this ad paid for by friends of fluffy bunnies and sunshine" at the end. We can research who the friends of fluffy bunnies and sunshine really are, and try to figure out the intent behind the ads.
When corporations buy advertising, they are not required to identify who bought it, or what their agenda might be. And they'll have more money than any candidate, any PAC, any SIG, anybody. We will be flooded with information that will tend to drown out all else.
And American companies aren't the biggest any more. Do you really want lots of advertising, advertorials, letters to the editor, etc. that "Joe Winkler means JOBS", having people react favorably to that en masse, then find out afterward that "jobs" really meant "H1B visas" and maybe never find out that the advertising was purchased by WiPro and TaTa?
Someone like Microsoft or Toyota or Bank of America or Verizon could bring more money to bear than all of the candidates of any campaign combined.
Every PAC and SIG is going to dissolve and form a corporation that makes no money as a front-end, because they'll be able to get money from anyone they damned well please, say anything they want without accountability, and not have to identify themselves.
China is going to have a field day with this.
I hope you're right. Recent history seems to demonstrate otherwise. We like our politicians like we like our operating systems, flashy, lots of style, but we don't really want to know the substance behind it.
Remember, the current system works because "political" speech has to be made by people who identify themselves so we know their agenda and who backs them. Corporations are not subject to those same rules and regs, so if they are to be treated as private citizens they can just buy the ads - they don't have to say who bought them.
And it probably won't be an American company doing it. Well, not exclusively anyway.
I wonder how long it will be before TaTa and Wipro start buying up ad space in support of politicians who find lots of H1B slots favorable. Only they'll form a shadow corporation to do it.
And how many media outlets are going to have the integrity any more to break a story that will cost them a major advertiser during a political season? It'd be like Toys'r'Us saying they hate children on the first day of December - it would ruin their income during their most profitable time.
Or maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age.
My only caveat on the coverage maps is the level of detail in their "accuracy".
I live in Maine. Your mileage may vary.
I'm an AT&T customer. AT&T's coverage maps around here are like swiss cheese - full of little holes and pockets of "no coverage". If you drive to one of those places, you will in fact frequently get no coverage. If you stay in areas that claim coverage, you'll almost invariably have it. The actual signal and that depicted on the maps are almost eerily similar, and they seem to err on the side of caution. It's almost like they put some actual thought into what hills might block what towers or applied some intelligence to the process. It's far from perfect, but it really does depict a relatively honest view of actual coverage.
My wife was a Verizon customer. Verizon's maps pretty much consist of circles drawn around towers, and while their actual coverage in Maine is better than AT&T's, it's nowhere near as thorough as their maps would have you believe. My wife would routinely lose signal in areas Verizon said they covered.
Example:
Do a search for "Brooklin, Maine" on both sites. There are no towers whatsoever on the peninsula (not enough population density to justify them, though someone is building a new tower - it's under construction but I don't know who it will be for).
Signal coverage on both companies is pretty much identical across the entire peninsula - decent on the northern portion where Blue Hill has a tower, spotty on the southwestern portion where you can get a signal across the water, and miserable to nonexistent in the central and southeast portions (the extreme tip of the southeast portion does get good "skip across the water" coverage). AT&T shows no coverage for almost all of the peninsula, Verizon has painted the whole thing as having "Extended Enhanced Digital" coverage.
My AT&T phone actually works better across most of the peninsula than my wife's Verizon phone used to, even though Verizon claims coverage and AT&T does not.
This may be a local phenomenon to Maine, but my observation is that AT&T tends to be much more conservative with their maps (erring on the side of having signal where none is claimed), and Verizon seems to claim a lot of coverage areas that just ain't so. I've seen this in a number of places across the state.
My wife, who shares an account with her parents, eventually switched to AT&T.
Sounds like an excellent reason to go there to me. On an irrelevant side note, was the food any good? :)
Cheers from your old stomping grounds. :)
A coworker lives in Pownal, and when our company converted us to Blackberries a couple of years ago we were given the choice between Verizon and AT&T. He and several others were "forced" to choose Verizon because that was the only company they could get a signal from at home. Others, sometimes even in the same towns, were "forced" to choose AT&T for the same reason - no signal at all from Verizon.
I think you mean dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO for short).
hydrogen dioxide is also known as "hydrogen peroxide", which is a relatively harmless bleaching agent, and it contains more oxygen than DHMO, so it's got to be healthy.
Agreed. The whole concept of "corporation as a separate entity" is a bad compromise at best.
Eliminating that concept would make shareholders more responsible in their input into how the company is run, and might keep company sizes under control.
"Too Big To Fail" should be synonymous with "Too Big To Exist".
I draw a distinction because "political speech" is speech that is "free" for citizens and voluntary collectives of citizens only as things stand today.
And, yes, our founding fathers certainly did. That was the point of the first amendment. However, the concept of a corporation as a proto-individual did not exist at that time, so it's hard to say what they would have thought of a corporation having its own voice politically. That's why they were smart enough to come up with a system that could adapt for things they never heard of or knew about.
I see your point, but there is (unfortunately) a relationship between advertising money and the ability of a candidate to get elected.
You can't even make it through the primaries if you can't get your name out there. A large corporation could simply buy all available prime-time advertising space and bash their opponents. They could send thousands of employees from across the country to canvass the neighborhoods with political materials, put up 100 signs for every sign their opponent puts up, etc.
PACs and SIGs do this today, but their speech is regulated, their donations are regulated, their organizations have to be relatively transparent, their power is limited, and they have to identify themselves on every ad they buy.
We currently have this problem anyway - candidates and even currently-elected officials have to spend WAY too much time and give WAY too many promises just to get enough money in their campaign funds to stand a chance of getting elected.
This will just make that existing problem FAR worse.
And, no, I don't have a good fix for it. But a corporation or a union is not necessarily a good reflection of the opinions of the individuals that constitute it.
We are a democratic republic of individual citizens. Corporations are not citizens. When citizens decide to act collectively, they can do so in a voluntary fashion already today.
Corporations exist to separate the individuals from the corporation for liability reasons. The concept of the "corporation as individual" was to make up a collective "person" so anyone suing the corporation would not need to sue the individual shareholders of that corporation for their individual responsibility for damages. It protects the shareholders of the corporation. In return, since the corporation is now seen as a separate legal entity, its income is taxed before proceeds are distributed to individual shareholders.
Incorporation was not originally intended to give corporations the same rights as individuals. It was intended to help ensure continuity of the corporation, and to separate the liability of the corporation from the income to reduce risk to people investing in that corporation.
What you are referring to is an existing construct. A PAC (Political Action Committee), SIG (Special Interest Group) or other political collective. The names and rules surrounding such organizations vary by state, but by and large they are formed around a goal and their members have bought into the goal. Those groups DO have the right to free speech, specifically their political speech is not regulated, simply because their governance structures are required to be transparent, and they have to have a clear paper trail as to where their money came from (lists of donors, etc). In other words, these organizations are treated as you describe - a group of individuals who have the right to decide as a group what to do with their collective funds.
However, a PAC/SIG/etc has to be a transparent. They have to be demonstrably a collective that is freely contributed to by individual citizens who have input as to the goals of that collective (even if their only input is "I like your ideals and I wish to give you money.") All members of a political organization have to have voluntarily joined the organization and it cannot be a condition of employment and/or other coercion cannot be applied.
This is vastly different from the organization of a company or a union. Those organizations do not have to be held accountable to the voters as to whether the will of their shareholders or sources of income are comfortable with the money being spent in political campaigns, and do not have to share their sources of income.
Separating "political" from "free" speech is a cast iron bitch, though.
You are correct, but the implications of this get really sticky.
The right of association does not necessarily mean the will of the members of that association will be reflected. It means the will of the LEADERS of that association will be reflected. That may or may not reflect the membership, and the membership may or may not be voluntary unless you like quitting jobs because your boss or union steward does not agree with your political views.
A very large company could basically outright buy an election, any election they wanted, and not just limited to one election at a time. Don't like the way the legislature is writing antitrust law? Find the candidates in each state Senate election that are the least likely to want to have antitrust legislation and spend a few billion dollars on massive ad blitzes attacking their opponents. I think you'd find a very large majority of very large companies that could support such an effort, and they could spend tens of millions of dollars on even local elections without flinching. It wouldn't even match their current spending on Superbowl ads, fercrissake. There would be no opportunity for anyone to hear an opposing credible view, because a sufficiently large coalition of companies can buy ALL of the available airtime for an election.
On the other hand, drawing the line on what constitutes "free" versus "political" speech is difficult.
And when you use that energy, what do you get? Heat. All energy eventually becomes heat. This will be a net heat increase on Earth.
Fortunately, it's a net heat increase that doesn't also release heat-trapping pollutants or heat-absorbing particulates like fossil fuels do, so the excess heat will have the opportunity to radiate out of the atmosphere.
Well, yes and no. They are going to have SOME parasitic losses, but certainly not the same ones.
Let's assume they do this in the desert somewhere, where there are only exceptionally rare clouds in the way and parasitic losses are relatively low (both for land-based solar and orbital solar). The parasitic losses attributable to the atmosphere would be approximately the same, except that the satellite doing the actual transmission to Earth would likely be in a geosynchronous orbit exactly over the receiving target, which means you'll have minimal atmospheric interference. I'm not an atmospheric expert, but I thought there was also some benefit to having a stronger/denser beam trying to penetrate the atmosphere (tended to have lower loss than a less-coherent beam).
Add to that the fact that the actual collector (or collectors) can be in a different orbit where there is no loss of sunlight, ever, and can be positioned so that the solar panels are getting maximum solar efficiency continuously. The best of Earth-based solar arrays need some sort of motorized mechanism to keep them pointed at the Sun during the course of the day, and will get maybe 10-11 hours of decent sun and only a few hours of peak sun in a given day. You easily double, or more, your yield from such a system as opposed to building it on Earth. Solar collector arrays can be built with almost no support materials and can be made FAR larger than you could possibly do practically on Earth. And, other than a collecting station here and there, no one has to give up viable, farmable, or environmentally sensitive land.
Sure, it's going to be expensive to put the little devils in orbit, but you can build them using fewer materials, they'll run at peak capacity continuously, and no one ever complained that the Great Left-Pawed Spotted Marmaset was found only at Lagrange-2 so you'll have to stop construction.
I don't care if I pay $45 for delivery and $0 for content or $25 for delivery and $20 for content, as long as I only pay $45.
Your ISP is charging for connection only. My point was if they started paying newspapers, etc, for content, your charge would NOT be $45. It would be $45 for the connection *PLUS* whatever they paid to get you content.
With enough replacements you could turn my original post into Mein Kampf, but that does not make me Adolph Hitler.
Wow. Two posts and you Godwined me. Again, my apologies for what was obviously a poorly-chosen word.
I'm being unclear, I apologize. Let me try again.
I already pay $45/month for my internet connection, a price I find acceptable in part because I can get my news through it at no extra cost.
You pay $45 a month for your internet connection, and fortunately you've found outlets who are willing to give you news for free.
Unfortunately, none of the money that funds the news you enjoy comes from the money you pay your ISP, it comes from advertising revenues, subscription fees, etc.
Your current news sources are under absolutely no obligation to continue to offer you free content just because you've paid for a connection to the Internet. But, thankfully, most news outlets found that advertising gives them enough money to justify putting their content out there.
At least for now.
I can't figured out were you got this entitlement thing from, I never used that word.
"Entitlement" came from your comment "so I feel justified to expect some free content to come with that". Please grep/"entitlement"/"expectation", and I will avoid the use of that specific word. My apologies for distracting the conversation with an apparently poorly-chosen word.
Your ISP provides you with a high-speed connection to the Internet, usually an email account, and sometimes a little web space or a few perks. That is what you are justified in expecting to receive from your ISP, and is the limit to the legal obligation of any corporation to provide to you in return for your $45.
Lots of other companies, who are unrelated to your ISP, provide you with content, and in large part do so freely. They usually do it because they make money on advertising. When they stop making enough money to justify doing it based on advertising income, they'll stop doing it solely based on advertising income. They'll find another business model, or they'll go out of business.
Back in the days when I had print subscriptions and no internet connection, I was spending about $250/year on news. Doesn't look good now, does it?
It's even worse because none of your $45 is really going to generate news. You're paying that money solely for delivery charges, not for the content that gets delivered. But it's a free market, you get to choose whether to keep buying it.
And by the way, this kind of cost analysis is not entitlement, but rather the free market at work.
Agreed. It's a good cost/benefit analysis.
Your ISP is charging what they think the market will bear, and your current actions (paying them) indicate that their price point is appropriate.
Only you can determine whether a connection to the Internet is worth $45 to you, and whether you are willing to pay the price for it.
But your news is coming from other companies, who also operate on a free market. And you aren't the only one with freedom in a free market.
Your currently free (as in price) news comes from other companies, who make money on advertising. Some of them are starting to find that the advertising is not making them as much money as they'd like, so they are exercising THEIR free (as in freedom) market rights to stop offering it to you for free (as in price).
Now, maybe this will end up being a bad move for NYT, since they have lots of competition that will not be making this move.
But they are, first and foremost, a for-profit corporation. If they aren't making money off ad revenues any more, they are beholden to their shareholders and employees (and even their customers who expect them to remain in business and provide services) to figure out a way to make money.
That's the way the free market works.
The entire current news collection system might go the way of buggy-whip manufacturers. Or someone might invent an acceptable paywall service for quality content. Or something else entirely might happen. That's the fun part of a free market, everyone's always innovating.
It doesn't necessarily have to be one company. The New York Times could easily set up accounts with a half-dozen aggregators and you, as the consumer, could choose the one you wanted.
Google was merely a personal example, since I use it as my aggregator today. Hell, Reuters already does similar things by aggregating stories from multiple news sources, pablumizing them, and reselling them to world news services. If they could offer complete access to the original stories from the local sources behind their aggregation service, I'd pay THEM for it.
As long as someone developed an aggregation service that has a significant number of newspapers and other news sources, and everything there includes access to quality services without having to individually make financial arrangements to support each and every one of those services, I'd be happy.
Great, and if those people are willing to report it for free (or in return for advertising) then you've found someone willing to fill your connection with useful data, and all is well with the world.
My point is that your subscription does not include any money to go to the newspapers or other reporters, therefore you are not "entitled" to any free content whatsoever. Fortunately for all of us, advertising pays for a lot of content and a few of us even run web sites we shell out our own bucks for and give out access for free. I run a half-dozen sites, including a couple of small-time discussion boards, and I neither expect payment nor use advertising.
If the newspapers managed to start getting money from your ISP to support them, it would be a complete clusterfuck. Your $45 would go up, probably considerably, as every news outlet wanted a piece of the pie. How'd you like to be paying for both the Denver Gazette AND the North Ottawa Journal as part of your ISP bill?