For the curious, it usually takes a hot 357 magnum to penetrate and clear most modern drives. 9mm and 45acp either bounce off, or don't exit the drive.
Dude... If you're being serious, you should really check your ammo / pistol or something. I've shot a _lot_ drives and.45's (from plain jane handguns) and 9mm's will penetrate 100% of the time - heck, 380s from my 2" barrel keltec P3at will go right through a drive unless you hit the motor asssembly (at which point "interesting things happen")
If you stack 10+ drives, a single shot from an 8mm milsurp bullet out of a turkish mauser will usually take them all down and still have enough energy to go into the backstop.
But probably far less than they cost the British taxpayers. Maybe, but Canada really only got 3 subs (for the price of 4) since one had to be stripped for parts. One man also died and 8 were injured when a fire broke out a couple miles off the coast of the UK. Pretty sure we got "proper fucked" on that one.
Linux configured laptops, etc, were more expensive on the Dell website. IIRC, prices were more or less the same between the windows and linux versions, but the linux configs got you less ram, hard drive space, etc.
Basically the majority of all Canadian government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but by a lot - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in virtually every government project. Corruption too.
One famous example is the gun registry - now I don't want to start a flame war about the registry, but I feel it is the best example of complete incompetence on the part of a Canadian government project and "how stuff like this can happen", so bear with me for a bit.
The registry was supposed to cost 2 million (with a M) dollars when it was "sold" in 2000. They've so far spent well over a billion (with a B) and the CBC was leaked documents from a reputable source that place the cost at 2 billion dollars. BTW, there are still fairly significant fees for the license and registration portion - paid by the person who wants to own the firearm.
I'm honestly not sure who got / gets the money, but clearly, a (2?) billion (plus?) dollars goes to someone, and they are getting a sweet, sweet deal. It's basically a complete failure too - while numbers vary, there is a significant discrepancy between the number of guns registered and the number believed to be in Canada. A frequently quoted statistic is "just under 7 million registered while estimates from the '70s indicated ~10 million firearms in Canada" At this point, only one province (Quebec) will prosecute people who didn't register their firearms (the decision to prosecute is left to the province), there are substantial problems with the quality of the data in the database (to the point where a number of high profile police chiefs have called for it's abolishment). Yes, we have 3 territories too, where firearm laws are pretty much ignored.
Tying it in with this article - there are allegations that either the registry has been hacked - or (far more likely) some people with access to the registry are using the registry to find gun owners with large collections to rob. We've had a number of robberies of collectors homes recently.
Other wonderful Canadian projects include buying dented (one apparantly hit a whale) and leaking submarines from the UK for far more than they were worth, a quarter-million dollars for a sculpture made of guns, $100,000 for a book about dumb blondes, and $250,000 to sculpt the face of St. Jean the Baptist on a hillside in Quebec by cutting and planting trees - the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, the Canadian government feels that it can just piss away public money without any repercussion - which it can. Nobody will get fired for this, and the folks who designed the passport site will continue to get contracts. I'd be willing to bet the same folks that did the gun registry worked on this project.
Doesn't ANYONE know what they're doing No. Basically the majority of all Canadian government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but a whole metric fuckload - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in virtually every government project. Possibly even corruption.
One famous example is the gun registry - now I don't want to start a flame war about the registry, but I feel it is the best example of complete incompetence on the part of a Canadian government project and "how stuff like this can happen", so bear with me for a bit.
The registry was supposed to cost 2 million (with a M) dollars when it was "sold" in 2000. They've so far spent well over a billion (with a B) and the CBC was leaked documents from a reputable source that place the cost at 2 billion dollars. BTW, there are still fairly significant fees for the license and registration portion - paid by the person who wants to own the firearm.
I'm honestly not sure who got / gets the money, but clearly, a (2?) billion (plus?) dollars goes to someone, and they are getting a sweet, sweet deal. It's basically a complete failure too - while numbers vary, there is a significant discrepancy between the number of guns registered and the number believed to be in Canada. A frequently quoted number is "just under 7 million registered while estimates from the '70s indicated ~10 million in Canada. At this point, only one province will prosecute people who didn't register their firearms (the decision to prosecute is left to the province), there are substantial problems with the quality of the data in the database (to the point where a number of high profile police chiefs have called for it's abolishment). Yes, we have 3 territories too, where firearm laws are pretty much ignored.
Tying it in with this article - there are allegations that either the registry has been hacked - or (far more likely) some people with access to the registry are using the registry to find gun owners with large collections to rob. We've had a number of robberies of collectors homes recently.
Other wonderful Canadian projects include buying dented (one apparantly hit a whale) and leaking submarines from the UK for far more than they were worth, a quarter-million dollars for a sculpture made of guns, $100,000 for a book about dumb blondes, and $250,000 to sculpt the face of St. Jean the Baptist on a hillside in Quebec by cutting and planting trees - the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, the Canadian government feels that it can just piss away public money without any repercussion - which it can. Nobody will get fired for this, and the folks who designed the passport site will continue to get contracts. I'd be willing to bet the same folks that did the gun registry worked on this project.
True story. A few years old, but completely true and verifiable.
Anniston, AL has a chemical weapons disposal facility - basically, they burn nerve gas and have ~150,000 shells of VX (more VX than any other site in the USA) onsite, as well as ~300k shells of sarin and a bunch of other nasty shit. Something like 2000 tons total. The edge of the army depot where this stuff is disposed / stored is a whopping 6 miles west from "as downtown as you can be" Anniston. Residential areas are much, much closer.
Residents of Anniston - I shit you not - were happy that they were given gas masks by the government. I stayed there for a few days about 5 years ago and every home I went to had several gas masks, ready to be used. Some people even bought extra masks from the surplus store and other sources.
For those of you new to chemical weapons, VX is a nerve agent, which works (extremely) well through the skin and does not have to be inhaled - a gas mask is completely useless unless you have a full body suit. Also, it's LD50 (50% of people will die when exposed to this dose) is 10 micrograms, which is an amount so small that it's actually difficult find a good comparison - much, much lighter than a snowflake.
Feel free to rag on NJ, but I'm pretty sure the folks in Alabama have you beat by a fair bit. I know this might be a bit inflammatory - but that's my job as a damn yankee;)
Actually, if you pack a firearm in with your luggage and declare it, your luggage gets the white glove treatment the entire route. A suitcase w/ a firearm does not get lost.
Those are all just lies! The coroner has absolutely no conflict of interest, and just because his paychecks come from basically the same place, there is no pressure to provide the city with a nice and easy way to avoid a lawsuit./cue Iraqi Propaganda Minister
While it isn't quite a 80 year old, wheelchair-bound schizophrenic woman Portland cops tazered a seventy-one-year-old blind woman 5 times Crappy source for the taser apologist crowd, but google her name and you should still find a few news articles around.
Parent was modded funny, but the 50mb is essentially a glorified downloader. The full download / redistributable pack will run several hundred mb, but should fit on a CD.
BTW - Discover - the card with the most worthless chargeback policy in the industry (amex is the best) will automatically reject any claim that has to do with a purchase more than 6 months ago. While other cards have limits, the "clock restarts" in certain circumstances - for instance, if the product was sold with a 2 year warranty and they refuse warranty service, you're covered for x months after the claimed warranty expires to file a claim regarding warranty. So, despite what the wonderful people at MLB claim, you'll probably be able to file a successful chargeback. If you get resistance from phone CSRs, file a written chargeback (crappy banks (chase, etc) can jerk you around a lot more over the phone) BTW - Successful chargebacks are punitive to the merchants and a large number can significantly affect them financially, so this is the best way to get back at them.
Chargeback policies vary by issuing bank as well. I have had different (better) experiences with my Target visa than my Chase one.
Amex is the best, Discover sort of universally sucks for chargebacks (they refuse to even open a claim if it's been more than 6 months since the date of purchase - which, if you pre-pay for a service a year in advance and the company stops providing them 7 months after you pay, you're SOL in terms of a chargeback w/ Discover - not so with most other cards.)
Perhaps you haven't been to New York lately, there aren't any places to park in the city. What few slots remaining are either auctioned off for well over a hundred grand (highest I've heard was 225k with a waiting list) or run by shady theiving assholes like impark.
While 5-10MW isn't all that much for a city, it is - especially when it is uninterruptible, continuous power - something that a FOB would really appreciate.
Trucking in fuel takes a large amount of additional fuel, additional equipment, additional manpower, additional man hours/days - in short, it's a huge problem for isolated units who intend to hold a fairly remote location.
By giving a company sized unit (or in a pinch even a infantry battalion) this amount of energy, you're significantly decreasing their logistical requirements - which allows for other resources to be delivered, a dramatic decrease in the deployment requirements for units in both time and materiel and / or an increase in the flexibility of movement for a unit.
5-10MW is a good amount of energy and I would not be surprised to see a weapon capable of killing or at least harassing a good number of enemy infantry forces in under a decade. The Army already has "pain beam" / active denial technology, and while I can't find power reqs for it, it runs off the power provided by a humvee (actually *all* of the power of a humvee, the thing sort of rolls to a halt when the beam is on). Pretty sure a humvee doesn't generate anywhere near 1MW, let alone 5-10;) (500 horsepower is about 0.3 MW)
Heck, if we wanted to ignore the "laser ban" and didn't mind blinding people, 1MW would be more than enough to repel an enemy force.
This is also useful even without a receiving station - even if you don't zap enemy forces a la "ion cannon" from orbit, 10MW can still fry electronics and do all sorts of fairly useful things that can make an enemy's life miserable. If you tuned it, I wonder if you could melt snow in a fairly small area, turning a snowy mountain hideout into a miserable wet swampy area that encourages hypothermia...
You're ignoring the costs of bringing in either batteries or fuel and a generator to a remote location. Which isn't trivial by any means - Trucking in supplies takes additional fuel, equipment, manpower, time (days) and can be intercepted by hostile forces. Heck, the US Army says delivery of 1 gallon of fuel costs up to $300 Source
Having even a meager 1800W supplied to you with virtually no risk of interception by hostile forces (which, assuming you're fighting people whose technical knowledge ends at "make a cone out of copper and fill it with HE" is pretty much guaranteed) can be incredibly helpful and allow for greater flexibility in deployment and selection of areas for FOBs, etc.
Sure, 1.8 KW isn't really enough to be used a power source to kill your enemies (yet, at least), but it is a decent amount of power and you can do a number of fairly useful things w/ it.
Granted, you're going to have to truck / pack in some supplies anyways, but food / water isn't nearly as much of a logistical challenge as fuel is. We're already pretty good at making drinkable water out of some pretty nasty stuff and MREs don't weigh that much.
Just curious, how long did it take you to do the downgrade? When Vista came out, it used to take hours and our company just refused to do any more downgrades, so I'm wondering if Microsoft finally has a way to do this in a timely manner.
I don't know. I slightly agree that it's "high", but I also can't really argue that it's appropiate.
Let me tell you a story... A photographer I know submitted a number of photos to a publishing company for potential use in a book. His picture was used. He was never contacted. He was never paid.
He discovered this completely by accident a few months after the book had been published and contacted them. They first claimed he didn't have rights to the picture. The copyright office disagreed (he registered the photo months before).
When they finally "accepted" that he owned the image, they offered $500 to settle. When he sent them a letter saying $500 was insufficient, they told him to take the $500 or fuck off - or, in their own words
"In fact, if you continue with this unsupported demand for payments which are due to you, you will never be able to do business with [redacted] again." (this is after they received a copy of the registration) and "We will simply refuse to communicate with you on this matter any further."
When (very) large publishing companies offers "$500 or fuck off" for illegal, commercial use of a picture, yes, $220,000 for distribution of 24 songs is actually rather high and inappropriate.
And even though the photo was registered with the copyright office, not a single lawyer was willing to speak with him. He has contacted literally dozens of lawyers, none of whom are willing to take the case on without him putting a heck of a lot of money up front.
This is what you get when you have a jury of "your peers" - something that in the United States means "people not smart enough to get out of jury duty", "people who are ok with getting paid $8 a day, while parking at the courthouse costs $17 and isn't covered" and "people who weren't excluded by either side's lawyers for showing a hint of intellect"
The lack of intelligence in your average juror has turned the legal system into a joke, which allows for rulings like this to happen. Stroll out some "expert witnesses", dazzle the morons in the jury box with some bullshit (and do it better than the other guy) and you have yourself a win, regardless of the actual facts of the case.
Just paid? Try "paid a shitload". Educational contracts are highly lucrative because a.) the librarian who managed the computers before doesn't know her ass from her elbow and is easily wowed by salesmen b.) it's just taxpayer money anyways. Which is why you have a retarded limit like 100mb.
Also, it being Frys, you're probably looking at a DOA component somewhere, so it will save you a drive of a few miles as well as a stint in the return line. I've built a lot of systems from Fry's components, well over half required a return on at least one component.
Last, but not least, it may seem like a bargain to buy a $200 five-year extended warranty on a $2000 computer. But in five years, what will that computer really be worth? If you're lucky, maybe $100 on eBay. You can get a replacement cheaper than you can ship the durn thing.
In 5 years, there won't be parts available for it (or techs won't know how to service it and will lemon the unit) and you'll get something comparable - pricewise - to what you originally purchased. Of course, if they store you buy the warranty is scummy, you'll probably have more problems getting them to honor it.
The companies also count on you losing your documentation / forgetting about the warranty in addition to the other side. Read the fine print, make sure they honor their side of the bargain (this may take a bit of time on the phone, but it pays off in the end)
Slashdot Mirror
For the curious, it usually takes a hot 357 magnum to penetrate and clear most modern drives. 9mm and 45acp either bounce off, or don't exit the drive.
.45's (from plain jane handguns) and 9mm's will penetrate 100% of the time - heck, 380s from my 2" barrel keltec P3at will go right through a drive unless you hit the motor asssembly (at which point "interesting things happen")
Dude... If you're being serious, you should really check your ammo / pistol or something.
I've shot a _lot_ drives and
If you stack 10+ drives, a single shot from an 8mm milsurp bullet out of a turkish mauser will usually take them all down and still have enough energy to go into the backstop.
Not many Jane and Joe consumers would dish out $2100+ for a decked out T61p when a Ideapad would be half the cost.
True. But lenovo's "3000" series aren't exactly awesome either.
Can someone start permabanning these idiots?
But probably far less than they cost the British taxpayers.
Maybe, but Canada really only got 3 subs (for the price of 4) since one had to be stripped for parts. One man also died and 8 were injured when a fire broke out a couple miles off the coast of the UK.
Pretty sure we got "proper fucked" on that one.
Linux configured laptops, etc, were more expensive on the Dell website.
IIRC, prices were more or less the same between the windows and linux versions, but the linux configs got you less ram, hard drive space, etc.
Basically the majority of all Canadian government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but by a lot - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in virtually every government project. Corruption too.
One famous example is the gun registry - now I don't want to start a flame war about the registry, but I feel it is the best example of complete incompetence on the part of a Canadian government project and "how stuff like this can happen", so bear with me for a bit.
The registry was supposed to cost 2 million (with a M) dollars when it was "sold" in 2000. They've so far spent well over a billion (with a B) and the CBC was leaked documents from a reputable source that place the cost at 2 billion dollars. BTW, there are still fairly significant fees for the license and registration portion - paid by the person who wants to own the firearm.
I'm honestly not sure who got / gets the money, but clearly, a (2?) billion (plus?) dollars goes to someone, and they are getting a sweet, sweet deal. It's basically a complete failure too - while numbers vary, there is a significant discrepancy between the number of guns registered and the number believed to be in Canada. A frequently quoted statistic is "just under 7 million registered while estimates from the '70s indicated ~10 million firearms in Canada"
At this point, only one province (Quebec) will prosecute people who didn't register their firearms (the decision to prosecute is left to the province), there are substantial problems with the quality of the data in the database (to the point where a number of high profile police chiefs have called for it's abolishment).
Yes, we have 3 territories too, where firearm laws are pretty much ignored.
Tying it in with this article - there are allegations that either the registry has been hacked - or (far more likely) some people with access to the registry are using the registry to find gun owners with large collections to rob. We've had a number of robberies of collectors homes recently.
Other wonderful Canadian projects include buying dented (one apparantly hit a whale) and leaking submarines from the UK for far more than they were worth, a quarter-million dollars for a sculpture made of guns, $100,000 for a book about dumb blondes, and $250,000 to sculpt the face of St. Jean the Baptist on a hillside in Quebec by cutting and planting trees - the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, the Canadian government feels that it can just piss away public money without any repercussion - which it can. Nobody will get fired for this, and the folks who designed the passport site will continue to get contracts. I'd be willing to bet the same folks that did the gun registry worked on this project.
Doesn't ANYONE know what they're doing
No. Basically the majority of all Canadian government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but a whole metric fuckload - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in virtually every government project. Possibly even corruption.
One famous example is the gun registry - now I don't want to start a flame war about the registry, but I feel it is the best example of complete incompetence on the part of a Canadian government project and "how stuff like this can happen", so bear with me for a bit.
The registry was supposed to cost 2 million (with a M) dollars when it was "sold" in 2000. They've so far spent well over a billion (with a B) and the CBC was leaked documents from a reputable source that place the cost at 2 billion dollars. BTW, there are still fairly significant fees for the license and registration portion - paid by the person who wants to own the firearm.
I'm honestly not sure who got / gets the money, but clearly, a (2?) billion (plus?) dollars goes to someone, and they are getting a sweet, sweet deal. It's basically a complete failure too - while numbers vary, there is a significant discrepancy between the number of guns registered and the number believed to be in Canada. A frequently quoted number is "just under 7 million registered while estimates from the '70s indicated ~10 million in Canada.
At this point, only one province will prosecute people who didn't register their firearms (the decision to prosecute is left to the province), there are substantial problems with the quality of the data in the database (to the point where a number of high profile police chiefs have called for it's abolishment).
Yes, we have 3 territories too, where firearm laws are pretty much ignored.
Tying it in with this article - there are allegations that either the registry has been hacked - or (far more likely) some people with access to the registry are using the registry to find gun owners with large collections to rob. We've had a number of robberies of collectors homes recently.
Other wonderful Canadian projects include buying dented (one apparantly hit a whale) and leaking submarines from the UK for far more than they were worth, a quarter-million dollars for a sculpture made of guns, $100,000 for a book about dumb blondes, and $250,000 to sculpt the face of St. Jean the Baptist on a hillside in Quebec by cutting and planting trees - the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, the Canadian government feels that it can just piss away public money without any repercussion - which it can. Nobody will get fired for this, and the folks who designed the passport site will continue to get contracts. I'd be willing to bet the same folks that did the gun registry worked on this project.
True story. A few years old, but completely true and verifiable.
;)
Anniston, AL has a chemical weapons disposal facility - basically, they burn nerve gas and have ~150,000 shells of VX (more VX than any other site in the USA) onsite, as well as ~300k shells of sarin and a bunch of other nasty shit. Something like 2000 tons total.
The edge of the army depot where this stuff is disposed / stored is a whopping 6 miles west from "as downtown as you can be" Anniston. Residential areas are much, much closer.
Residents of Anniston - I shit you not - were happy that they were given gas masks by the government. I stayed there for a few days about 5 years ago and every home I went to had several gas masks, ready to be used. Some people even bought extra masks from the surplus store and other sources.
For those of you new to chemical weapons, VX is a nerve agent, which works (extremely) well through the skin and does not have to be inhaled - a gas mask is completely useless unless you have a full body suit.
Also, it's LD50 (50% of people will die when exposed to this dose) is 10 micrograms, which is an amount so small that it's actually difficult find a good comparison - much, much lighter than a snowflake.
Feel free to rag on NJ, but I'm pretty sure the folks in Alabama have you beat by a fair bit. I know this might be a bit inflammatory - but that's my job as a damn yankee
Actually, if you pack a firearm in with your luggage and declare it, your luggage gets the white glove treatment the entire route. A suitcase w/ a firearm does not get lost.
Those are all just lies! The coroner has absolutely no conflict of interest, and just because his paychecks come from basically the same place, there is no pressure to provide the city with a nice and easy way to avoid a lawsuit. /cue Iraqi Propaganda Minister
While it isn't quite a 80 year old, wheelchair-bound schizophrenic woman Portland cops tazered a seventy-one-year-old blind woman 5 times
Crappy source for the taser apologist crowd, but google her name and you should still find a few news articles around.
Parent was modded funny, but the 50mb is essentially a glorified downloader. The full download / redistributable pack will run several hundred mb, but should fit on a CD.
Almost - They flew into a box canyon (well, the end of it, if you want to be technical), not a mountain.
linky
BTW - Discover - the card with the most worthless chargeback policy in the industry (amex is the best) will automatically reject any claim that has to do with a purchase more than 6 months ago.
While other cards have limits, the "clock restarts" in certain circumstances - for instance, if the product was sold with a 2 year warranty and they refuse warranty service, you're covered for x months after the claimed warranty expires to file a claim regarding warranty.
So, despite what the wonderful people at MLB claim, you'll probably be able to file a successful chargeback. If you get resistance from phone CSRs, file a written chargeback (crappy banks (chase, etc) can jerk you around a lot more over the phone)
BTW - Successful chargebacks are punitive to the merchants and a large number can significantly affect them financially, so this is the best way to get back at them.
Chargeback policies vary by issuing bank as well. I have had different (better) experiences with my Target visa than my Chase one.
Amex is the best, Discover sort of universally sucks for chargebacks (they refuse to even open a claim if it's been more than 6 months since the date of purchase - which, if you pre-pay for a service a year in advance and the company stops providing them 7 months after you pay, you're SOL in terms of a chargeback w/ Discover - not so with most other cards.)
Unless you live / travel through a shitpot state that demands "court fees" which cost more than the ticket.
Just to park the damn Bentley!
Perhaps you haven't been to New York lately, there aren't any places to park in the city. What few slots remaining are either auctioned off for well over a hundred grand (highest I've heard was 225k with a waiting list) or run by shady theiving assholes like impark.
While 5-10MW isn't all that much for a city, it is - especially when it is uninterruptible, continuous power - something that a FOB would really appreciate.
;) (500 horsepower is about 0.3 MW)
Trucking in fuel takes a large amount of additional fuel, additional equipment, additional manpower, additional man hours/days - in short, it's a huge problem for isolated units who intend to hold a fairly remote location.
By giving a company sized unit (or in a pinch even a infantry battalion) this amount of energy, you're significantly decreasing their logistical requirements - which allows for other resources to be delivered, a dramatic decrease in the deployment requirements for units in both time and materiel and / or an increase in the flexibility of movement for a unit.
5-10MW is a good amount of energy and I would not be surprised to see a weapon capable of killing or at least harassing a good number of enemy infantry forces in under a decade.
The Army already has "pain beam" / active denial technology, and while I can't find power reqs for it, it runs off the power provided by a humvee (actually *all* of the power of a humvee, the thing sort of rolls to a halt when the beam is on). Pretty sure a humvee doesn't generate anywhere near 1MW, let alone 5-10
Heck, if we wanted to ignore the "laser ban" and didn't mind blinding people, 1MW would be more than enough to repel an enemy force.
This is also useful even without a receiving station - even if you don't zap enemy forces a la "ion cannon" from orbit, 10MW can still fry electronics and do all sorts of fairly useful things that can make an enemy's life miserable. If you tuned it, I wonder if you could melt snow in a fairly small area, turning a snowy mountain hideout into a miserable wet swampy area that encourages hypothermia...
You're ignoring the costs of bringing in either batteries or fuel and a generator to a remote location. Which isn't trivial by any means - Trucking in supplies takes additional fuel, equipment, manpower, time (days) and can be intercepted by hostile forces.
Heck, the US Army says delivery of 1 gallon of fuel costs up to $300 Source
Having even a meager 1800W supplied to you with virtually no risk of interception by hostile forces (which, assuming you're fighting people whose technical knowledge ends at "make a cone out of copper and fill it with HE" is pretty much guaranteed) can be incredibly helpful and allow for greater flexibility in deployment and selection of areas for FOBs, etc.
Sure, 1.8 KW isn't really enough to be used a power source to kill your enemies (yet, at least), but it is a decent amount of power and you can do a number of fairly useful things w/ it.
Granted, you're going to have to truck / pack in some supplies anyways, but food / water isn't nearly as much of a logistical challenge as fuel is. We're already pretty good at making drinkable water out of some pretty nasty stuff and MREs don't weigh that much.
Just curious, how long did it take you to do the downgrade? When Vista came out, it used to take hours and our company just refused to do any more downgrades, so I'm wondering if Microsoft finally has a way to do this in a timely manner.
I don't know. I slightly agree that it's "high", but I also can't really argue that it's appropiate.
Let me tell you a story...
A photographer I know submitted a number of photos to a publishing company for potential use in a book. His picture was used. He was never contacted. He was never paid.
He discovered this completely by accident a few months after the book had been published and contacted them. They first claimed he didn't have rights to the picture. The copyright office disagreed (he registered the photo months before).
When they finally "accepted" that he owned the image, they offered $500 to settle.
When he sent them a letter saying $500 was insufficient, they told him to take the $500 or fuck off - or, in their own words
"In fact, if you continue with this unsupported demand for payments which are due to you, you will never be able to do business with [redacted] again." (this is after they received a copy of the registration)
and
"We will simply refuse to communicate with you on this matter any further."
When (very) large publishing companies offers "$500 or fuck off" for illegal, commercial use of a picture, yes, $220,000 for distribution of 24 songs is actually rather high and inappropriate.
And even though the photo was registered with the copyright office, not a single lawyer was willing to speak with him. He has contacted literally dozens of lawyers, none of whom are willing to take the case on without him putting a heck of a lot of money up front.
This is what you get when you have a jury of "your peers" - something that in the United States means "people not smart enough to get out of jury duty", "people who are ok with getting paid $8 a day, while parking at the courthouse costs $17 and isn't covered" and "people who weren't excluded by either side's lawyers for showing a hint of intellect"
The lack of intelligence in your average juror has turned the legal system into a joke, which allows for rulings like this to happen. Stroll out some "expert witnesses", dazzle the morons in the jury box with some bullshit (and do it better than the other guy) and you have yourself a win, regardless of the actual facts of the case.
And then there is the $220,000 in "damages"...
Wow, somebody got paid for this...
Just paid? Try "paid a shitload". Educational contracts are highly lucrative because a.) the librarian who managed the computers before doesn't know her ass from her elbow and is easily wowed by salesmen b.) it's just taxpayer money anyways.
Which is why you have a retarded limit like 100mb.
Also, it being Frys, you're probably looking at a DOA component somewhere, so it will save you a drive of a few miles as well as a stint in the return line. I've built a lot of systems from Fry's components, well over half required a return on at least one component.
Last, but not least, it may seem like a bargain to buy a $200 five-year extended warranty on a $2000 computer. But in five years, what will that computer really be worth? If you're lucky, maybe $100 on eBay. You can get a replacement cheaper than you can ship the durn thing.
In 5 years, there won't be parts available for it (or techs won't know how to service it and will lemon the unit) and you'll get something comparable - pricewise - to what you originally purchased.
Of course, if they store you buy the warranty is scummy, you'll probably have more problems getting them to honor it.
The companies also count on you losing your documentation / forgetting about the warranty in addition to the other side.
Read the fine print, make sure they honor their side of the bargain (this may take a bit of time on the phone, but it pays off in the end)