I don't particularly care what people pay for the phones, but if we're going to be comparing features (which includes price) then we'd better get the numbers right.
As for the plan, featurewise, it's much better than most plans that you get from AT&T when you sign a contract. The biggest advantage you'll get with the Neo is that you aren't locked into a contract, however you'll still probably want phone service, which means you'll still be paying the rates.
At AT&T, this is the cheapest plan I can find: Anytime Minutes 450 Night & Weekend minutes 5000 Mobile to Mobile minutes Unlimited Long Distance $0.00 Roaming Charges $0.00 Additional minutes $.45/minute Monthly cost: $39.99/mo
They also mention it as being a 2 year contract, but I assume that if you don't buy a phone, it won't require a contract.
The iPhone plan looks to have the same features, but includes 200 SMS, unlimited data, and costs $20 more. Just adding the data to the above Cingular plan bumps the price up $39.99. 200 SMS messages is another $4.99. Assuming you'll want these things (and if you're buying the iPhone, you probably at least want the data), it's a very good deal.
I don't think that's ridiculously overpriced, but of course, to each her/his own.
In May, Technojunkie reported that the no-contract versions were $900-$1000. What happens is that you buy the iPhone, but to use it, you must activate it. You activate it by selecting a plan, giving them your credit card, and agreeing to the contract. Instead of using a contract, you can elect to use a prepaid plan. The phone doesn't cost any more, but the minutes themselves cost a bit more. Any other unlocked or no-contract version of the phone is very grey market, with the common price increases that go along with it.
You're behind the times. The iPhone's price was dropped to $399 for the 8 gig version, and they're no longer selling the 4 gig version.
I doubt they did it because of the Neo 1973, but it certainly makes the latter less interesting. If GRPS wasn't enough to kill it for me, the fact that a fantastic UI is available for cheaper will.
I'm not the guy you were having the argument with, but I thought I'd chime in.
The point in the video at which they use the taser is very much a lull in the action. He's on the ground, there are 4 cops on him, and he's screaming, demanding to know why he's being arrested. Now others have pointed out that just being on the ground doesn't mean that the cops are in control, but it's really hard to wrap my head around the idea that tasing him was acceptable at this particular point in the situation. While he may have still been a threat, he was much less active than he was at earlier points in the video when they didn't tase him.
Many new notebooks cannot bypass the firmware password without sending the device back to the manufacturer. It's a measure designed precisely because notebooks are highly targeted for theft.
Set up your notebook so that a password is required to enter the BIOS, but not to boot. Then set up an extremely low privilege guest account that logs in automatically on boot. The guest account should be as promiscuous as possible regarding the APs it will connect to. It should have access to the Internet, but not much of the hard disk. Then set your tracking software to run on boot through Cron, rc scripts, Windows Scheduler, whatever. If you're concerned about privacy, you can instead make the guest account run the tracking software silently.
If your laptop is stolen, the thief will be able to use it, so it won't get dumped automatically. They may not be able to get into the BIOS, but since most theft is opportunistic anyway, it shouldn't be that big of a deal. If they're trying to sell it, you still might get a hit if/when the pawn shop boots it.
Honestly, that's about the best you can do. Advanced users might encrypt their real home directory.
The thing about SoT that was great was the characters. The writing isn't particularly good (there's always a Deus Ex Machina moment at the end of each book) and the stories, while interesting, aren't particularly innovative.
Unfortunately, I think he lost his characters somewhere around book 6. They just dried up. Book 7 (Pillars of Creation) was where he seemingly tried to revitalize the series by having a new protagonist, and he failed miserably.
I put off reading Chainfire, and was glad I did when I found out that it was a cliffhanger. When Phantom came out, and I found out that it was going to be a trilogy, I held off there, too. Once Confessor comes out (being the promised end to this series and arc), I'll probably finish the series for completion's sake, and I really hope they get better, but I'm not holding my breath.
And the truth is, to most people it's irrelevant. 99% of their customers are never going to hit the limit even once, much less several months in a row (which I hear is what it takes to get you kicked to the curb.) Now the uninformed masses might get a little confused, I guess. If there is a known limit, they might not realize that they'll never hit it. So that's something that they gain.
On the other hand, being up front might just get them more customers. In order to compete, other ISPs would have to either publish a significantly higher limit (and face the onslaught of warez/movie/music traders that flock to their network) or publish "unlimited" access, opening themselves up to lawsuits if they ever kick someone for using too much bandwidth.
Just rechecked my math, and I obviously got it wrong--it's $1320/season in my scenario. Apologies, but it really doesn't affect the discussion in this case.
I can't figure the TV distro system out, really. Sure, the powers-that-be are paying millions (or more) to keep the monopoly they have, but as the next generation ages, I'm sure the old system will hit the toilet, to be replaced by what? Hopefully more a la carte. Maybe it's because you have a poor grasp of math?
I think we'd honestly pay $5 for a 30 minute show -- what does it cost in our time preference to sit down for 30 minutes? I'd pay less with ads. If we liked the show,we'd pay for an annual subscription -- giving shows the chance to continue even without massive ad-funding (see: Firefly). Your setup looks pretty high end--at least, it's HD and you have two CableCards. My assumption is that you watch quite a bit of TV.
Most seasons are 22 episodes long. 22*$5 = $110. Assume 12 shows (the average American watches something like 4 hours of TV a day so this isn't unreasonable--in fact, it's probably lowballing it), and we're at $1440 per season.
Around here, at least, the extended cable package (without premium channels like HBO) is around $60/mo. For 12 months, that's $720/year. Almost half. Adding HBO, Showtime, etc. tacks on about $30/mo, bringing it to 1080/year.
So I guess that you're right--the powers that be don't get it at all. They should be milking the hell out of people like you who are willing to pay up to twice as much for their shows.
I'm not passing judgement, but I am genuinely curious to know the general area you live in where cable costs so much more. I live in a town where we have a single provider, so aside from satellite, it's a monopoly. That generally causes prices to/increase/, but maybe we're just lucky and it's lower.
As long as we're involved in intellectual masturbation, I don't think that you considered the fact that not every US citizen uses Bittorrent to download pirated content. I bet it's a fairly small percentage of US citizens.
If you're willing to trust some random stranger on the Internet, I can tell you with great certainty that people have received DMCA complaints over Heroes (an NBC OTA show) and House (a Fox OTA show), both before the respective seasons were released on DVD.
v3 clarifies the intent of "This License" to mean the GPL. Also, if the "license" you're referring to is BSD+GPL (as would be required for the term "this license" to mean both of them) then the original author was violating the FSF's copyright on the GPL, which states: "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
The funny thing is that offering the shows online in an easily downloadable and viewable format, without any DRM (and even without the commercials) would actually help their shows a great deal overall, but they seem to fail to see the big picture. I doubt that enough people miss an ep and then stop watching to even matter, and that's really the only scenario where providing the shows online and commercial-free would help. Including commercials, they'll just be skipped anyway (like they are on DVRs.)
And frankly, if you aren't watching commercials, you don't matter to the network.
Licensing issues aside (it's really all a big mess), I do think that it's crummy that the re-licensor took actions that would prevent later changes from going upstream. But that's what you get with the BSD license. You can't release code into the wild under a license like that and then complain when people do something with it.
That said, I think the argument is mostly semantics. Theo et. al. seem to think that there was one license composed of two parts joined by an exclusive-or. Almost everyone else seems to think that the code was licensed under two licenses, and that it just so happened that both licenses appeared in the same source file. In Theo-world, since you can't just arbitrarily change the license, even of BSD code (because that's not a right granted by the BSD license), distributing the source file under the single GPL license was copyright infringement. In everyone else-world, one license was chosen and extraneous fluff was removed.
Who's right? Who the hell knows. I bet you could easily find two courts which would disagree.
If I choose to distribute under the terms of the GPL, then nothing in those terms requires me to maintain anything but the GPL. The author's license would have to say something like, "You may redistribute using the terms of either license, but you must include both license notices." for it to work the way that Theo thinks it does.
And it gets murkier if there are actual changes. If the re-licensor made substantive changes, would he be required to maintain both licenses still? Since the BSD license isn't supposed to be viral, distributing a derivative work under the GPL SHOULD mean that only the GPL is required for downstream redistribution.
It's really murky. The author should have had separate files, each with its own license.
The GPL doesn't allow additional restrictions beyond the GPL, correct? Then how can the BSD license be compatible if it includes restrictions beyond the GPL?
The BSD licence includes "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." If you're distributing source code, you have to follow that. I believe the complaint was that it was removed.
It depends upon whether the actual first licensing was ANDed or ORed. If it's ANDed, both sets of terms would apply (but then again, redistribution would not be an explicitly granted right, as redistribution would require following both the GPL and the BSD license, which seems to be impossible.)
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I'm sorry, what's not a valid argument. You provided no context, and the general tone of my post was that the iPhone isn't really all that bad.
As for the plan, featurewise, it's much better than most plans that you get from AT&T when you sign a contract. The biggest advantage you'll get with the Neo is that you aren't locked into a contract, however you'll still probably want phone service, which means you'll still be paying the rates.
At AT&T, this is the cheapest plan I can find:
Anytime Minutes 450
Night & Weekend minutes 5000
Mobile to Mobile minutes Unlimited
Long Distance $0.00
Roaming Charges $0.00
Additional minutes $.45/minute
Monthly cost: $39.99/mo
They also mention it as being a 2 year contract, but I assume that if you don't buy a phone, it won't require a contract.
The iPhone plan looks to have the same features, but includes 200 SMS, unlimited data, and costs $20 more. Just adding the data to the above Cingular plan bumps the price up $39.99. 200 SMS messages is another $4.99. Assuming you'll want these things (and if you're buying the iPhone, you probably at least want the data), it's a very good deal.
I don't think that's ridiculously overpriced, but of course, to each her/his own. In May, Technojunkie reported that the no-contract versions were $900-$1000. What happens is that you buy the iPhone, but to use it, you must activate it. You activate it by selecting a plan, giving them your credit card, and agreeing to the contract. Instead of using a contract, you can elect to use a prepaid plan. The phone doesn't cost any more, but the minutes themselves cost a bit more. Any other unlocked or no-contract version of the phone is very grey market, with the common price increases that go along with it.
Actually, MacOS X is the best example of how BSD licensing works.
You're behind the times. The iPhone's price was dropped to $399 for the 8 gig version, and they're no longer selling the 4 gig version.
I doubt they did it because of the Neo 1973, but it certainly makes the latter less interesting. If GRPS wasn't enough to kill it for me, the fact that a fantastic UI is available for cheaper will.
I'm not the guy you were having the argument with, but I thought I'd chime in.
The point in the video at which they use the taser is very much a lull in the action. He's on the ground, there are 4 cops on him, and he's screaming, demanding to know why he's being arrested. Now others have pointed out that just being on the ground doesn't mean that the cops are in control, but it's really hard to wrap my head around the idea that tasing him was acceptable at this particular point in the situation. While he may have still been a threat, he was much less active than he was at earlier points in the video when they didn't tase him.
Many new notebooks cannot bypass the firmware password without sending the device back to the manufacturer. It's a measure designed precisely because notebooks are highly targeted for theft.
Here's the generic trick.
Set up your notebook so that a password is required to enter the BIOS, but not to boot. Then set up an extremely low privilege guest account that logs in automatically on boot. The guest account should be as promiscuous as possible regarding the APs it will connect to. It should have access to the Internet, but not much of the hard disk. Then set your tracking software to run on boot through Cron, rc scripts, Windows Scheduler, whatever. If you're concerned about privacy, you can instead make the guest account run the tracking software silently.
If your laptop is stolen, the thief will be able to use it, so it won't get dumped automatically. They may not be able to get into the BIOS, but since most theft is opportunistic anyway, it shouldn't be that big of a deal. If they're trying to sell it, you still might get a hit if/when the pawn shop boots it.
Honestly, that's about the best you can do. Advanced users might encrypt their real home directory.
That's exactly what I was thinking, but I didn't know for sure whether or not IPv6 had some crazy native support for this.
The thing about SoT that was great was the characters. The writing isn't particularly good (there's always a Deus Ex Machina moment at the end of each book) and the stories, while interesting, aren't particularly innovative.
Unfortunately, I think he lost his characters somewhere around book 6. They just dried up. Book 7 (Pillars of Creation) was where he seemingly tried to revitalize the series by having a new protagonist, and he failed miserably.
I put off reading Chainfire, and was glad I did when I found out that it was a cliffhanger. When Phantom came out, and I found out that it was going to be a trilogy, I held off there, too. Once Confessor comes out (being the promised end to this series and arc), I'll probably finish the series for completion's sake, and I really hope they get better, but I'm not holding my breath.
Spot on.
And the truth is, to most people it's irrelevant. 99% of their customers are never going to hit the limit even once, much less several months in a row (which I hear is what it takes to get you kicked to the curb.) Now the uninformed masses might get a little confused, I guess. If there is a known limit, they might not realize that they'll never hit it. So that's something that they gain.
On the other hand, being up front might just get them more customers. In order to compete, other ISPs would have to either publish a significantly higher limit (and face the onslaught of warez/movie/music traders that flock to their network) or publish "unlimited" access, opening themselves up to lawsuits if they ever kick someone for using too much bandwidth.
Just rechecked my math, and I obviously got it wrong--it's $1320/season in my scenario. Apologies, but it really doesn't affect the discussion in this case.
Most seasons are 22 episodes long. 22*$5 = $110. Assume 12 shows (the average American watches something like 4 hours of TV a day so this isn't unreasonable--in fact, it's probably lowballing it), and we're at $1440 per season.
Around here, at least, the extended cable package (without premium channels like HBO) is around $60/mo. For 12 months, that's $720/year. Almost half. Adding HBO, Showtime, etc. tacks on about $30/mo, bringing it to 1080/year.
So I guess that you're right--the powers that be don't get it at all. They should be milking the hell out of people like you who are willing to pay up to twice as much for their shows.
I'm not passing judgement, but I am genuinely curious to know the general area you live in where cable costs so much more. I live in a town where we have a single provider, so aside from satellite, it's a monopoly. That generally causes prices to
As long as we're involved in intellectual masturbation, I don't think that you considered the fact that not every US citizen uses Bittorrent to download pirated content. I bet it's a fairly small percentage of US citizens.
If you're willing to trust some random stranger on the Internet, I can tell you with great certainty that people have received DMCA complaints over Heroes (an NBC OTA show) and House (a Fox OTA show), both before the respective seasons were released on DVD.
v3 clarifies the intent of "This License" to mean the GPL. Also, if the "license" you're referring to is BSD+GPL (as would be required for the term "this license" to mean both of them) then the original author was violating the FSF's copyright on the GPL, which states:
"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
Unbox has more stringent DRM. I bet NBC wanted $5 unless Apple would increase the annoyance of the DRM.
Glad it works for you. Clicking on an episode just does nothing on my box.
Ubuntu 7.04, most recent Flash player.
You forgot to factor in the possibility of being sued when you pirate.
And frankly, if you aren't watching commercials, you don't matter to the network.
Check out hellanzb.
It's honestly not the greatest solution. You lose all seeking/skipping when you transcode this way, and the colors really looked washed out.
Licensing issues aside (it's really all a big mess), I do think that it's crummy that the re-licensor took actions that would prevent later changes from going upstream. But that's what you get with the BSD license. You can't release code into the wild under a license like that and then complain when people do something with it.
That said, I think the argument is mostly semantics. Theo et. al. seem to think that there was one license composed of two parts joined by an exclusive-or. Almost everyone else seems to think that the code was licensed under two licenses, and that it just so happened that both licenses appeared in the same source file. In Theo-world, since you can't just arbitrarily change the license, even of BSD code (because that's not a right granted by the BSD license), distributing the source file under the single GPL license was copyright infringement. In everyone else-world, one license was chosen and extraneous fluff was removed.
Who's right? Who the hell knows. I bet you could easily find two courts which would disagree.
Ok, but here's the thing.
If I choose to distribute under the terms of the GPL, then nothing in those terms requires me to maintain anything but the GPL. The author's license would have to say something like, "You may redistribute using the terms of either license, but you must include both license notices." for it to work the way that Theo thinks it does.
And it gets murkier if there are actual changes. If the re-licensor made substantive changes, would he be required to maintain both licenses still? Since the BSD license isn't supposed to be viral, distributing a derivative work under the GPL SHOULD mean that only the GPL is required for downstream redistribution.
It's really murky. The author should have had separate files, each with its own license.
It depends upon whether the actual first licensing was ANDed or ORed. If it's ANDed, both sets of terms would apply (but then again, redistribution would not be an explicitly granted right, as redistribution would require following both the GPL and the BSD license, which seems to be impossible.)
If it's ORed, you're absolutely right.