Bush himself has stated point blank that he ordered the monitoring of American's communications for this specific purpose. The press was all over it until Bush said, I ordered it and that's that.
I'd be more outraged if there was a US citizen at both ends of the call. There is no constitutional expectation of privacy on an international call anyway, so it's hard to get too upset about the Bush wiretapping. If he didn't do it, that wouldn't mean somebody at the other end wasn't. It sucks, but that's how it is. If you call outside the US, just assume somebody is listening. If you're lucky, it's just the US government.
It's all because the majority of people in the US are clueless idiots like you.
Be careful who you call clueless. You're so fixated on Bush, but you'd have to be fairly naive to think this wasn't going on long before Bush. What, exactly, do you think the NSA does?
It's almost certainly not *all* the data. There are filters that could easily be applied... Port, protocol, IP, etc. They *could* just watch data that they have a tap order for...
It doesn't seem too far fetched that they could handle, say, all data on port 25.
Oh, and I do think the person with the vision is definately the better person for CEO. He's going to have to go in front of customers and sell them on his vision, he's going to set the direction of the company
I agree with that.
But call him the 'Acting CEO' or something. That way you show you have the intention of hiring a real CEO at some point and you can avoid some of the hard feelings.
You're right about the CFO part, but wrong about the CTO part. Once you bring VCs in the company isn't just your baby anymore. Nothing sucks more than getting canned from your own company. Make the finance friend the CFO, make the CS guy the CTO, and hire a different guy neither of you know to be CEO. That way, you control the technical and financial parts of the company, you get the contacts of a guy who has (hopefully) been a CEO before, and you have somebody to blame if things don't go right.
It doesn't matter who's idea something is. That has nothing to do with the CEO's function. Also, you don't even need a CEO right away...
I will admit, that's cheaper than I expected, but it's still not $600. After shipping or at retail, it really starts at $800 according to the quick Froogling I just did.
Seriously though. Gzip can compress down to 98%... if your data is mostly redundant. The chance that they're doing this on the random data they claim in the article is nil.
What do y'all think? Is this price point as huge a blunder by Sony as it appears to be on the surface?
It depends.
It depends on what comes in the box. It depends on if it's $499, or if it's $599.
Really, you're not going to the store for an Xbox 360 and spending less that $550. I know two guys who went out and bought one yesterday, and they each spent $800. You need extra controllers, the right cable, memory, games, etc...
If the $499 price is the real price, and it's in 'Value Pack' form like they did with the PSP (doesn't seem too unlikely), then no, it's the same price as the Xbox 360 essentially. If the price is $599, and it comes with nothing, then yes. They're stupid. If it comes out at $399, and this little "slip" turns out to be a marketing stunt, well... I wouldn't be surprised. That would be just like Sony.
We're still at a point where nobody can make an informed decision about this stuff.
Personally, I wouldn't really care how much storage my Tivo had if I could easily remove shows from it and save them to my computer. That way, I could keep on hard disk, or archive to DVD if I wanted... it would be up to me.
Try MFS_FTP. You can ftp shows off your Tivo with it.
Physical inventions are granted protection because there is a material cost to it's development. Were there no protection, there would be little incentive for smaller entities to make that investment in new product development.
Business methods have no material cost to development, and as such the ideas will continue to be plentiful even without patent protection.
Given those two things, can you explain to me how business model patents benefit the citizens at large? Remember, we have the patent system to benefit society through a steady flow of new ideas and inventions, not to benefit the patent holders, commerce, or even the economy.
You're right. Nobody is under any obligation to be courteous to others. Nobody is under any obligation not to tell you how much of an asshole you are either.
Speed doesn't cause accidents. Smart-assed self-centered drivers cause accidents.
With how cheap storage is, there is no reason not to have hundreds if not thousands of hours of shows hanging around indefinitely.
Sure there is. DVD storage is cheaper than HDD storage by an order of magnitude...
Also, I'd rather not have archival data cluttering up the listings... Though that problem could be addressed in software I suppose.
But the biggest reason of all is that DVDs don't use any power when you're not watching them. I don't know about you, but there's no single hard drive that could store all of my video data without lossier compression than it's using already. I'd rather not keep a multi-drive device powered up all the time.
People would eventually want to have more than 40/80/160/300 hours' worth of capacity as time goes on. I know I'd want all nine seasons' worth of Stargate, all four (five? four?) seasons of Futurama on it
That practically defeates the purpose of a DVR. Think of it as a cache, not as an archive. It saves the shows for you until you watch them, then you delete. If you want to archive them, save them off to DVD or VHS.
Your city and state taxes are deductable from your federal tax, so you can't just add up the percentages.
Your federal tax rate is *not* 35%. You would have to make an infinite amount of money to pay 35% to the federal gavernment. Only the income you make over $326,450 is taxed at 35%. The vast majority of people make less than $150k and pay less than 28%. It you're making enough money to be paying over 28%, you've hit the FICA cap, and you're not going to see any FICA savings from your deductions.
Don't think of the US as having low taxes. We probably have the highest in the industrialized world even though the rates have dropped in recent history.
Tell that to most europeans.
Most of the taxes you pay are by choice. Most cities don't have an income tax. Many states don't have an income tax. Taxes are still too high, but they're not as high as you and the grandparent are saying.
(since I'm paid contract)
That really explains your entire post. Every contract worker I know always blows the tax benefits out of proportion when explaining to non-contract workers how great it is not to be a full-time employee.
US income taxes asymtotically aproach 35% as your income goes up (for 2005 at least...). Nobody saves 40% because something is a tax write off in the US. What country are you talking about?
Shift clicking the map puts a marker there. Putting a marker anywhere else removes the previous marker. That's a far cry from leaving notes anywhere you'd like on the map, which you could do in Morrowind with as much text as you'd like so you could read it at any time in the future, and was clearly what the parent poster was talking about.
Things like "I've already been in there"...
At least the world in Oblivion is pathetically tiny when compared to Morrowind, so you're less likely to forget a place without a marker... if that's any consolation anyway.
The more I play Oblivion, the more I wish it was Morrowind. It's so far inferior... Luckily Morrowind was excelent, so Oblivion can be inferior and still be fun.
I don't think they'd lie, I think the blog that's reporting on it may not have their facts straight. It seems more likely it would be plated. Castings of gold would be pointless and heavy.
Hmm, 63 diamonds that add up to 1 carat... 1/63 carat diamonds are not rare, artificially so or otherwise. There are about $4 worth of diamonds in this MP3 player, if that.
It never ceases to amaze me how much people will pay for things that have tiny chips of diamond on them if they're told the chips add up to a carat. If the size of the diamond is less than a half carat, and you're paying multiple digits of dollars for it, you got ripped off. (I mean moreso than if you buy a multi-carat diamond at the going rate.)
If this MP3 player is gold-plated and has diamond chips in it, it's likely that they raised the manufacture cost by $20 or so... If it's cast in gold (like the article says, but I don't believe them), that's another story, but we'd have to know how much it weighed before we could jump to price judgement.
The labels already do control the 'popularity'. The top 10 lists weight radio plays the same as sales. Play counts far exceed sales, and the number of times a song is played is directly proportional to the amount the label 'paid' the broadcaster to play it. Thus the charts are organized exactly how the labels paid to have them.
Haggling is way better than in Morrowind where you had to haggle over every single item. Here you set "haggle level" per shopkeeper.
That's not how Morrowind worked though... You picked all the stuff you wanted to sell, and then you haggled over the whole lot. And the haggling was all done on the same screen with two clicks.
The 'haggle level' method is dumb, and the selling of items individually instead of being able to do it in one lot is stupid (and annoying from a voice-acting perspective).
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Bush himself has stated point blank that he ordered the monitoring of American's communications for this specific purpose. The press was all over it until Bush said, I ordered it and that's that.
I'd be more outraged if there was a US citizen at both ends of the call. There is no constitutional expectation of privacy on an international call anyway, so it's hard to get too upset about the Bush wiretapping. If he didn't do it, that wouldn't mean somebody at the other end wasn't. It sucks, but that's how it is. If you call outside the US, just assume somebody is listening. If you're lucky, it's just the US government.
It's all because the majority of people in the US are clueless idiots like you.
Be careful who you call clueless. You're so fixated on Bush, but you'd have to be fairly naive to think this wasn't going on long before Bush. What, exactly, do you think the NSA does?
It's almost certainly not *all* the data. There are filters that could easily be applied... Port, protocol, IP, etc. They *could* just watch data that they have a tap order for...
It doesn't seem too far fetched that they could handle, say, all data on port 25.
(They've been handling it since the mid-90s)
Oh, and I do think the person with the vision is definately the better person for CEO. He's going to have to go in front of customers and sell them on his vision, he's going to set the direction of the company
I agree with that.
But call him the 'Acting CEO' or something. That way you show you have the intention of hiring a real CEO at some point and you can avoid some of the hard feelings.
You're right about the CFO part, but wrong about the CTO part. Once you bring VCs in the company isn't just your baby anymore. Nothing sucks more than getting canned from your own company. Make the finance friend the CFO, make the CS guy the CTO, and hire a different guy neither of you know to be CEO. That way, you control the technical and financial parts of the company, you get the contacts of a guy who has (hopefully) been a CEO before, and you have somebody to blame if things don't go right.
It doesn't matter who's idea something is. That has nothing to do with the CEO's function. Also, you don't even need a CEO right away...
I will admit, that's cheaper than I expected, but it's still not $600. After shipping or at retail, it really starts at $800 according to the quick Froogling I just did.
420p isn't HD.
If the PS3 costs $499 you won't walk out of the store with out buying all of the same shit you have to buy for the Xbox 360 and you know it.
Actually, I don't know it. And you don't know it. Nobody knows it. That's the whole point.
Read more closely. You're saying the same thing I did.
The article says:
it can compress anything: email, databases, archives, mp3's, encrypted data or whatever weird data format your favorite program uses.
In other words, they're full of crap.
Company breaks Shannon Limit. Debunking at 11!
Seriously though. Gzip can compress down to 98%... if your data is mostly redundant. The chance that they're doing this on the random data they claim in the article is nil.
What do y'all think? Is this price point as huge a blunder by Sony as it appears to be on the surface?
It depends.
It depends on what comes in the box. It depends on if it's $499, or if it's $599.
Really, you're not going to the store for an Xbox 360 and spending less that $550. I know two guys who went out and bought one yesterday, and they each spent $800. You need extra controllers, the right cable, memory, games, etc...
If the $499 price is the real price, and it's in 'Value Pack' form like they did with the PSP (doesn't seem too unlikely), then no, it's the same price as the Xbox 360 essentially. If the price is $599, and it comes with nothing, then yes. They're stupid. If it comes out at $399, and this little "slip" turns out to be a marketing stunt, well... I wouldn't be surprised. That would be just like Sony.
We're still at a point where nobody can make an informed decision about this stuff.
Personally, I wouldn't really care how much storage my Tivo had if I could easily remove shows from it and save them to my computer. That way, I could keep on hard disk, or archive to DVD if I wanted ... it would be up to me.
Try MFS_FTP. You can ftp shows off your Tivo with it.
Physical inventions are granted protection because there is a material cost to it's development. Were there no protection, there would be little incentive for smaller entities to make that investment in new product development.
Business methods have no material cost to development, and as such the ideas will continue to be plentiful even without patent protection.
Given those two things, can you explain to me how business model patents benefit the citizens at large? Remember, we have the patent system to benefit society through a steady flow of new ideas and inventions, not to benefit the patent holders, commerce, or even the economy.
You're right. Nobody is under any obligation to be courteous to others. Nobody is under any obligation not to tell you how much of an asshole you are either.
Speed doesn't cause accidents. Smart-assed self-centered drivers cause accidents.
I call bullshit.
Maybe it takes 1080i and downsamples?
Show me a link.... But you can't, because you can't get a 32" 1080i display for $600.
I'll bet money your display has only 768 lines of resolution at that price.
With how cheap storage is, there is no reason not to have hundreds if not thousands of hours of shows hanging around indefinitely.
Sure there is. DVD storage is cheaper than HDD storage by an order of magnitude...
Also, I'd rather not have archival data cluttering up the listings... Though that problem could be addressed in software I suppose.
But the biggest reason of all is that DVDs don't use any power when you're not watching them. I don't know about you, but there's no single hard drive that could store all of my video data without lossier compression than it's using already. I'd rather not keep a multi-drive device powered up all the time.
People would eventually want to have more than 40/80/160/300 hours' worth of capacity as time goes on. I know I'd want all nine seasons' worth of Stargate, all four (five? four?) seasons of Futurama on it
That practically defeates the purpose of a DVR. Think of it as a cache, not as an archive. It saves the shows for you until you watch them, then you delete. If you want to archive them, save them off to DVD or VHS.
Your city and state taxes are deductable from your federal tax, so you can't just add up the percentages.
Your federal tax rate is *not* 35%. You would have to make an infinite amount of money to pay 35% to the federal gavernment. Only the income you make over $326,450 is taxed at 35%. The vast majority of people make less than $150k and pay less than 28%. It you're making enough money to be paying over 28%, you've hit the FICA cap, and you're not going to see any FICA savings from your deductions.
Don't think of the US as having low taxes. We probably have the highest in the industrialized world even though the rates have dropped in recent history.
Tell that to most europeans.
Most of the taxes you pay are by choice. Most cities don't have an income tax. Many states don't have an income tax. Taxes are still too high, but they're not as high as you and the grandparent are saying.
(since I'm paid contract)
That really explains your entire post. Every contract worker I know always blows the tax benefits out of proportion when explaining to non-contract workers how great it is not to be a full-time employee.
US income taxes asymtotically aproach 35% as your income goes up (for 2005 at least...). Nobody saves 40% because something is a tax write off in the US. What country are you talking about?
Shift clicking the map puts a marker there. Putting a marker anywhere else removes the previous marker. That's a far cry from leaving notes anywhere you'd like on the map, which you could do in Morrowind with as much text as you'd like so you could read it at any time in the future, and was clearly what the parent poster was talking about.
Things like "I've already been in there"...
At least the world in Oblivion is pathetically tiny when compared to Morrowind, so you're less likely to forget a place without a marker... if that's any consolation anyway.
The more I play Oblivion, the more I wish it was Morrowind. It's so far inferior... Luckily Morrowind was excelent, so Oblivion can be inferior and still be fun.
Look at the picture. 1 carat diamonds are *way* bigger than that. (63 times bigger I'd wager. :) Either that, or it's a huge MP3 player.
With a round cut, 1 carat diamonds are about 6mm across.
I don't think they'd lie, I think the blog that's reporting on it may not have their facts straight. It seems more likely it would be plated. Castings of gold would be pointless and heavy.
Hmm, 63 diamonds that add up to 1 carat... 1/63 carat diamonds are not rare, artificially so or otherwise. There are about $4 worth of diamonds in this MP3 player, if that.
It never ceases to amaze me how much people will pay for things that have tiny chips of diamond on them if they're told the chips add up to a carat. If the size of the diamond is less than a half carat, and you're paying multiple digits of dollars for it, you got ripped off. (I mean moreso than if you buy a multi-carat diamond at the going rate.)
If this MP3 player is gold-plated and has diamond chips in it, it's likely that they raised the manufacture cost by $20 or so... If it's cast in gold (like the article says, but I don't believe them), that's another story, but we'd have to know how much it weighed before we could jump to price judgement.
The labels already do control the 'popularity'. The top 10 lists weight radio plays the same as sales. Play counts far exceed sales, and the number of times a song is played is directly proportional to the amount the label 'paid' the broadcaster to play it. Thus the charts are organized exactly how the labels paid to have them.
Haggling is way better than in Morrowind where you had to haggle over every single item. Here you set "haggle level" per shopkeeper.
That's not how Morrowind worked though... You picked all the stuff you wanted to sell, and then you haggled over the whole lot. And the haggling was all done on the same screen with two clicks.
The 'haggle level' method is dumb, and the selling of items individually instead of being able to do it in one lot is stupid (and annoying from a voice-acting perspective).
From what I heard, everywhere inside 495 was supposed to be online by June...
:)
Move out of the city a little ways! All the 'burbs have it already.