What a pity. The industry can't hoodwink the public any more by slapping PR lipstick on a pig and getting enough early rubes through the door to make back some of their money. Recording sales have been dropping too, and I wonder if the RIAA has the same hyper-fast word-of-mouth problem with CDs, and it isn't the file sharing. That would be sweet, sweet justice...
The bigger an intrusive nuisance you make it in government channels, the more likely it is that you'll drive the homeless to private charitable organizations, which have a much better track record for rehab and treatment.
Post your results here please, I am seriously interested if this is just a localized phenominon here where I live (my gf, her co-workers, my friends, and my co-workers are 100% clueless when it comes to anything privacy related), I would like to know what the rest of the non-geek world sees.
You sound like this is some sort of surprise. Well, it isn't to me; people are clueless in general. Huge swaths of humanity don't know how their car works, which century the Civil War was fought in, that the sun is a star, what the hell the politician for whom they're voting stands for, who the Secretary of State is, or any of a myriad of other things that don't impact their day-to-day lives. They think John Edwards can actually talk to the dead, "government money" is unlimited, and that space aliens are making those crop circles. Why should they be any better on the subject of Patriot I and II?
Really? Maybe you just can't prove you are good at what you do. I've been in that situation: No job, no job history, and no job prospects because you have no job history.
I once knew somebody in that position. He went to a company and offered to work free. They took him up on the offer, and after 3 months, he said, 'hire me or I'm going,' so they hired him. Not the easiest way to break in, but it showed real initiative.
I confess that I made it through 3 semesters of college calculus and an engineering degree pretty much not understanding the underlying concepts of calculus. It's surprising what you can accomplish by rote. This book was a real forehead-slapper for me, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Many years after graduating, I've finally learned what I should have back then. If it were up to me, this would be the first book anyone learning calculus ever read. I wish Sylvanus Thompson were still alive (I think Calculus Made Easy was published in 1919) so I could give him a big smooch.
You cannot substitute one for the other, but is it strange to wonder about the consumer cost of both given the factors that govern/constrain their manufacture?
It's fine to wonder about it. But consider the common wood pencil and all that goes into making it. Metals, artificial rubber, wood, graphite, paint. Stuff that has to be mined, cut, milled, pressed, refined, formed, transported, marketed, inventoried, etc. Not to mention all the stuff that went into making the machines that did the mining, milling, refining, etc. If you think about the entire chain of materials, processes, events, and infrastructure that go into producing even the most mundane object, you start to wonder how in the hell anything ever gets made. It's one of those mental exercises like Zeno's Paradox: fun to ponder, but ultimately you end up proving the impossibility of what lies before your eyes. Same deal with ink vs champagne. One looks "easy" and one looks "hard", but start tugging a thread of the fabric of their manufacture and pretty soon you find the entire world is attached to the other end. In the end we pretty much have to rely on competition in the marketplace to drive the price to its true level; we'll never be able to tell just by looking.
I buy a drink mix that, added to water, yields a liquid that's more expensive than gasoline. Does that say anything about the high cost of the mix, or the low cost of gasoline? NO! They're two different things and thus have two different prices. Telling me that a little tub of ink costs more than champagne on a per-unit basis is similarly useless information, unless I can substitute champagne for the ink.
If we can't screen out millions of illegal aliens who manage to come to the U.S. and present documents that are good enough to let them satisfy the government's requirements to prove to an employer that they are eligible to work in the U.S., how is this going to be better? If the answer is "better documents," how come we aren't requiring those better documents to be presented to the employers?
I'm so confused, conflicted, and concerned. The Democrats own California government, body and soul, and yet the legislature keeps selling out to business. Yesterday it was the shootdown of financial privacy legislation, now this. The only way the pubic is going to get anything useful passed is the initiative process. Or maybe even elect a few more Republicans, just to see if they might do a better job.
Hopefully more people will read that page you linked to, which mentions that similar bills have been killed in California for the last three years, during which time the state government was more bipartisan.
Actually, until the last election, the ratio was even worse for Republicans. They picked up several seats. Not that that matters, since the disparity is so great. If the Democrats had wanted to pass a financial privacy bill, there's nothing that the Republicans could have done to stop it. Whatever gets through CA government is solely their doing these days, good or bad, with the exception of the budget, which requires two-thirds majority to pass. And thank God for that, because there are just enough Republicans to block it, or we'd have had huge tax increases imposed on us. If only the feds had that same requirement, maybe the Democrats could live up to their rhetoric and block the federal budget because of the immense deficits that are being run up.
Right. And the Republicans will just give businesses the finger while protecting the privacy rights of Joe Consumer in California. Riiiiiight.
Like it matters what a Republican would or would not do in California. The California Republican caucus can hold its meetings in a phone booth. The Democrats hold every statewide office and just under two-thirds of both houses of the legislature. If a bill lives or dies, it's them doing it, not Republicans. The Republicans in Congress, however, are another story. A failure at the national level is their fault. That's why I'd love to see a national initiative process.
Kind of contradicted yourself there. You call California democrats corrupt and failed at privacy legislature. Then you say we need this at the national level, but that they are seeking handouts. Well the nation congress is Republican!
No contradiction. Both institutions are donation-whoring sellouts. I thought that most people would be aware that Congress is Republican, but wouldn't necessarily know that California's legislature is heavily Democrat. A pox on both of them, in regards to this matter.
This is why a California Financial Privacy Initiative is going to have to go before the voters. All the attempts to get a financial privacy measure thru the corrupt California legislature have failed due to opposition of big financial institutions and insurers, who are big contributors to the Democrats who run the place. We need something like this at a national level as well, but I'm not going to hold my breath till we get one through a Congress that lives with its hand out continually. A measure like this at the state level is better than nothing, at least.
Besides buying copies of "Mein Kampf" and "The Anarchist's Cookbook," what sort of flags could be construed as putting one's transactions over the limit?
I can cite one possible example. A few months ago, somebody on eBay was selling a genuine U.S. military GPS unit (known as a PLGR). They're supposed to be available only to DoD or other government personnel or contractors because they're not subject to Selective Availability if it's ever turned back on.
Some might think that fuel cell is the greatest thing since Lithium Ion batteries but its really another way of getting money out of the poor consumer.
God damn them to hell for offering products to people. Bloody capitalist swine. We'll immolate them on a stack of their own fuel cells! Power to the people! Or not, in this case.
Cox once sent me a nastygram threatening to pull my service because I had exceeded their (then) limit of 500 MB upload in one day. As it turns out, I hadn't; they had instituted some sort of automated threat generator that was misprogrammed and sent out the message to anyone whose system didn't answer a ping. My firewall blocked it and I got the email. A whole bunch of other people got it too and must have burned down the cox tech support lines, because they later sent out a groveling message apologizing for the episode. But my point (and I do have one) is that if they have a email like that, they presumably monitor at least the upload limits. So, have you ever exceeded that limit with no consequence?
2. A lot of cable modem users are getting bandwidth limits imposed on them. Some companies (like cox) are limiting home users to 3 GB per month down, 1 up... How many hours of this TV Brick thing would that be?
The Cox limits are 30GB down per month, 2GB max per day, and 7.5GB up per month, 1GB max per day.
They're not just giving the hard data away, they're planning to sell it. And TiVo needs to get into the black.
I meant 'give' in the sense of 'furnish' not as in 'make a gift of'. My point was that Tivo on the one hand exhibits squeamishness to the degree that they won't consider putting a 30-second skip feature in, yet they're willing to let the advertisers and producers see actual proof that Tivo users skip commercials using the fast forward. If they're trying to maintain cordial relations, it seems an odd way to do it, even if they need the money.
I thought Tivo was already concerned about the entertainment/advertising biz getting teed off about viewers skipping commercials (hence Tivo's lack of a "30-second-skip" button). So now they're going to give them hard data showing exactly how bad it is? Seems like an odd strategy.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid.
Unfortunately, you can't take flammable liquids like lighter fluid aboard aircraft, so it isn't going to help much on those long flights unless they change the regs. I don't see that hapening in the current security climate.
What's with defining the Christian Coalision as "right wing" and leaving the "left-wing" (a well-deserved designation) off of Schumer's name? The implication is that Schumer is 'normal folks' while the C.C. is so out of the mainstream that you have to add a modifier so people know they're those wacky "right-wing" kooks. Either leave off the modifiers altogether or or give them equal treatment.
I receive some really raw spam, and not just words but pictures. If I were a parent, I'd be in favor of flaying alive anyone sending this kind of stuff to my kid. I can't imagine how parents cope these days.
Well, I can't really say that this surprises me and as much as it may suck that my cable bill would go up, at least the money is going to some somewhat good causes:
I'd like to see the actual records of expenditure before making an assessment like this. The money in government "trust funds" presents an attractive target for money-hungry politicians in search of a funding source for pet projects. The national highway trust fund has many billions on paper, but a big chunk of it has been "borrowed", and will be repaid about the time they're serving snowcones in hell. It's also useful to see how the money that IS spent actually gets used. The universal internet funds have gone to remodeling classrooms (ostensibly because carpet had to be ripped up and walls knocked down to "run the wires" - yeah right). These things have a way of becoming just another slush pile that people will lie their asses off to get. And why not? Nobody really audits how this money is spent.
Slashdot Mirror
What a pity. The industry can't hoodwink the public any more by slapping PR lipstick on a pig and getting enough early rubes through the door to make back some of their money. Recording sales have been dropping too, and I wonder if the RIAA has the same hyper-fast word-of-mouth problem with CDs, and it isn't the file sharing. That would be sweet, sweet justice ...
The bigger an intrusive nuisance you make it in government channels, the more likely it is that you'll drive the homeless to private charitable organizations, which have a much better track record for rehab and treatment.
Thanks for the correction. I'm a little out of practice with his name, since I usually refer to him as 'douche'. /South Park
You sound like this is some sort of surprise. Well, it isn't to me; people are clueless in general. Huge swaths of humanity don't know how their car works, which century the Civil War was fought in, that the sun is a star, what the hell the politician for whom they're voting stands for, who the Secretary of State is, or any of a myriad of other things that don't impact their day-to-day lives. They think John Edwards can actually talk to the dead, "government money" is unlimited, and that space aliens are making those crop circles. Why should they be any better on the subject of Patriot I and II?
I once knew somebody in that position. He went to a company and offered to work free. They took him up on the offer, and after 3 months, he said, 'hire me or I'm going,' so they hired him. Not the easiest way to break in, but it showed real initiative.
I confess that I made it through 3 semesters of college calculus and an engineering degree pretty much not understanding the underlying concepts of calculus. It's surprising what you can accomplish by rote. This book was a real forehead-slapper for me, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Many years after graduating, I've finally learned what I should have back then. If it were up to me, this would be the first book anyone learning calculus ever read. I wish Sylvanus Thompson were still alive (I think Calculus Made Easy was published in 1919) so I could give him a big smooch.
It's fine to wonder about it. But consider the common wood pencil and all that goes into making it. Metals, artificial rubber, wood, graphite, paint. Stuff that has to be mined, cut, milled, pressed, refined, formed, transported, marketed, inventoried, etc. Not to mention all the stuff that went into making the machines that did the mining, milling, refining, etc. If you think about the entire chain of materials, processes, events, and infrastructure that go into producing even the most mundane object, you start to wonder how in the hell anything ever gets made. It's one of those mental exercises like Zeno's Paradox: fun to ponder, but ultimately you end up proving the impossibility of what lies before your eyes. Same deal with ink vs champagne. One looks "easy" and one looks "hard", but start tugging a thread of the fabric of their manufacture and pretty soon you find the entire world is attached to the other end. In the end we pretty much have to rely on competition in the marketplace to drive the price to its true level; we'll never be able to tell just by looking.
I buy a drink mix that, added to water, yields a liquid that's more expensive than gasoline. Does that say anything about the high cost of the mix, or the low cost of gasoline? NO! They're two different things and thus have two different prices. Telling me that a little tub of ink costs more than champagne on a per-unit basis is similarly useless information, unless I can substitute champagne for the ink.
If we can't screen out millions of illegal aliens who manage to come to the U.S. and present documents that are good enough to let them satisfy the government's requirements to prove to an employer that they are eligible to work in the U.S., how is this going to be better? If the answer is "better documents," how come we aren't requiring those better documents to be presented to the employers?
I'm so confused, conflicted, and concerned. The Democrats own California government, body and soul, and yet the legislature keeps selling out to business. Yesterday it was the shootdown of financial privacy legislation, now this. The only way the pubic is going to get anything useful passed is the initiative process. Or maybe even elect a few more Republicans, just to see if they might do a better job.
Actually, until the last election, the ratio was even worse for Republicans. They picked up several seats. Not that that matters, since the disparity is so great. If the Democrats had wanted to pass a financial privacy bill, there's nothing that the Republicans could have done to stop it. Whatever gets through CA government is solely their doing these days, good or bad, with the exception of the budget, which requires two-thirds majority to pass. And thank God for that, because there are just enough Republicans to block it, or we'd have had huge tax increases imposed on us. If only the feds had that same requirement, maybe the Democrats could live up to their rhetoric and block the federal budget because of the immense deficits that are being run up.
Like it matters what a Republican would or would not do in California. The California Republican caucus can hold its meetings in a phone booth. The Democrats hold every statewide office and just under two-thirds of both houses of the legislature. If a bill lives or dies, it's them doing it, not Republicans. The Republicans in Congress, however, are another story. A failure at the national level is their fault. That's why I'd love to see a national initiative process.
No contradiction. Both institutions are donation-whoring sellouts. I thought that most people would be aware that Congress is Republican, but wouldn't necessarily know that California's legislature is heavily Democrat. A pox on both of them, in regards to this matter.
This is why a California Financial Privacy Initiative is going to have to go before the voters. All the attempts to get a financial privacy measure thru the corrupt California legislature have failed due to opposition of big financial institutions and insurers, who are big contributors to the Democrats who run the place. We need something like this at a national level as well, but I'm not going to hold my breath till we get one through a Congress that lives with its hand out continually. A measure like this at the state level is better than nothing, at least.
I can cite one possible example. A few months ago, somebody on eBay was selling a genuine U.S. military GPS unit (known as a PLGR). They're supposed to be available only to DoD or other government personnel or contractors because they're not subject to Selective Availability if it's ever turned back on.
God damn them to hell for offering products to people. Bloody capitalist swine. We'll immolate them on a stack of their own fuel cells! Power to the people! Or not, in this case.
Cox once sent me a nastygram threatening to pull my service because I had exceeded their (then) limit of 500 MB upload in one day. As it turns out, I hadn't; they had instituted some sort of automated threat generator that was misprogrammed and sent out the message to anyone whose system didn't answer a ping. My firewall blocked it and I got the email. A whole bunch of other people got it too and must have burned down the cox tech support lines, because they later sent out a groveling message apologizing for the episode. But my point (and I do have one) is that if they have a email like that, they presumably monitor at least the upload limits. So, have you ever exceeded that limit with no consequence?
The Cox limits are 30GB down per month, 2GB max per day, and 7.5GB up per month, 1GB max per day.
I meant 'give' in the sense of 'furnish' not as in 'make a gift of'. My point was that Tivo on the one hand exhibits squeamishness to the degree that they won't consider putting a 30-second skip feature in, yet they're willing to let the advertisers and producers see actual proof that Tivo users skip commercials using the fast forward. If they're trying to maintain cordial relations, it seems an odd way to do it, even if they need the money.
I thought Tivo was already concerned about the entertainment/advertising biz getting teed off about viewers skipping commercials (hence Tivo's lack of a "30-second-skip" button). So now they're going to give them hard data showing exactly how bad it is? Seems like an odd strategy.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid.
Unfortunately, you can't take flammable liquids like lighter fluid aboard aircraft, so it isn't going to help much on those long flights unless they change the regs. I don't see that hapening in the current security climate.
What's with defining the Christian Coalision as "right wing" and leaving the "left-wing" (a well-deserved designation) off of Schumer's name? The implication is that Schumer is 'normal folks' while the C.C. is so out of the mainstream that you have to add a modifier so people know they're those wacky "right-wing" kooks. Either leave off the modifiers altogether or or give them equal treatment.
www.We'reBrokeSoWe'reRaisingYourTaxes
I receive some really raw spam, and not just words but pictures. If I were a parent, I'd be in favor of flaying alive anyone sending this kind of stuff to my kid. I can't imagine how parents cope these days.
I'd like to see the actual records of expenditure before making an assessment like this. The money in government "trust funds" presents an attractive target for money-hungry politicians in search of a funding source for pet projects. The national highway trust fund has many billions on paper, but a big chunk of it has been "borrowed", and will be repaid about the time they're serving snowcones in hell. It's also useful to see how the money that IS spent actually gets used. The universal internet funds have gone to remodeling classrooms (ostensibly because carpet had to be ripped up and walls knocked down to "run the wires" - yeah right). These things have a way of becoming just another slush pile that people will lie their asses off to get. And why not? Nobody really audits how this money is spent.
...
No, I'm not cynical