I doubt that's the answer you wanted to hear though.
Why do you doubt that? The cost of the aircraft is insignificant compared to the operating costs. The price increase you mention would be insignificant. Besides, no matter what the rules are, some looser is going to turn their device on. I want to be safe. It's worth the price... Bring it on.
"You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"
Both. It's a million dollar aircraft, and the ticket is expensive. Figure out how to make it safe. When they find themselves asking questions like this, how can they wonder why they're having a hard time making money?
According to NCO's web site, they appear to be a third-party collection agency. They can't call you to collect a debt unless you've given them permission to do so.
Which you may very well have done by signing a credit application. You are supposed to read those first, you know.
The Medium of Exchange by which music is exchanged is not infringing upon Apple Corps trademark of being the only one that can produce music under that name.
Usually , yes, but this seems to be a contract case, not a trademark law case.
Now either it's my imagination or I haven't seen very many triaxles in the US. What's up with that? Is there no similar tax setup stateside?
Commercial vehicles are taxed and tolled per axle in the US. The taxes are incredibly high, but the average joe here doesn't realize this because the tax is paid by the corporations that own the commercial vehicles. A non-commercial 18 wheeler, for example, isn't taxed.
To ballance the stupidity, the weight limit the truck is allowed to haul is determined by the number of axles, and the weight per axle is constant. There are weigh stations along major highways that open randomly to check the weight of trucks on the road to enforce the rules. The up-side is that the tax is a flat rate to some extent, so you don't spend a lot trying to figure out who owes how much. The net effect is the same as what you describe, but the taxes aren't the whole story.
The really stupid stuff is when you get to the state level where some states disallow certain truck configurations because there is an anti-truck lobby. Yes, crazy people oppose trucks entirely because they don't realize that the lifestyle they're acustomed to is made possible by trucks and truck taxes. For a while Connecticut dissallowed tandem trucks, and then only tandem trucks over a certain length, thus making the use of tandem truck in New England impractical. Now they focus on keeping the axle count down. If you ask me, they're a bunch of crackpots.
similar to the US EZPass, except that you don't need to slow down too much when you pass under the toll booth
The slowing down for EZPass is not a technical issue, it's a social one. There is an arbitrary limit placed on the speed you can travel through the booth based on the state's desire to push the "speed kills" propaganda and keep their fine revenue up. With the exact same transponders, the speed limit varies from state to state. You can go through the Massachusets booth at 15 mph, and 100 yards later go through the New York booth where the limit is 5mph. I've gone through at close to 50mph, and it still worked.
The proof that your argument is garbage is that the level of subsidy is such that it allows US farmers to export their goods overseas at subsidised prices
If that's what you're opposed to, than oppose the low price exports, not the subsidies.
So where does it end?
It ends where we can no longer withstand the political pressure of the rest of the world. It is the responsibility of the US government to look after our own needs first. You don't survive by being the nice guy. If there were a chance in hell that everybody else wouldn't do the same exact thing if they were in the same position as the US, perhaps this would be a different conversation.
Free trade is great.... but you have to draw the line somewhere. If the US didn't subsidize agricultural products then most farms in the US would shut down and we'd be importing cheaper stuff from other subsidized countries. This is fine in other industries, and we've clearly shown we're willing to let other types of labor leave the country, but if we loose our farms we'll be dependant on other countries to feed our population. That's not a very good move strategically. It's hard to be the most powerful country in the world if we can't flex our muscles without starving. It's not like we're hiding anything either. Look at what our policy makers actually say, not what CNN reports.
Engineers should not do programming of any kind--they simply lack the qualifications and training. And industrial programmers always need more education and need to get less religious, in order to catch up with the state of the art.
There you go mixing up Programmers with Computer Scientists. Here's a hint: they're two different things. Computer scientists use programming languages as a tool. They are not necissicarily programmers first. Far too many people have this misconception and either wrongly have poor opinions of perfectly good computer scientists, or have way too high of expectations of programmers who can't do design work or math.
Incidentally, electrical engineers doing digital design are in the same situation. They write code, and they use it as a tool to express their designs. The only practical difference is the the level of abstraction.
However, one of the things which inspires people to buy games is mods.
The percentage of the game buying population that knows what a mod is is practically insignificant in the pool of buyers. On top of that, mod users can be more of a hassle than their $50 is worth. Catering to the 12 guys who built their own PCs with "cool" features that they don't realize are the cause of instability (like the windows in the side with the wireless base station on top) who act like children (or are children) and fill the forum with threats of lawsuits instead of just returning the game to get their money back may not be a winning strategy.
They need to get people to actually start buying their current releases, since most businesses still run Windows 98 or Win2k, and their surveys of IT managers indicated that they wouldn't be purchasing XP simply because Longhorn was coming out so soon.
I don't buy it. That doesn't give you any protection. It's each cell in the flash chip that has a limit, not the entire chip. If you fill all the keys once a day you can use the card for 1000 years (Something else will probably happen to it by then, but you get the picture). It doesn't matter if you fill them all at once or you fill them in 160 little bursts.
And don't give me any crap about FAT wear. Just because you *can* do something stupid like use FAT16 on a flash device doesn't mean you *should*. You could make your backup image over the network and write all at once. If you need 100 keys to backup you shouldn't be doing it anyway. Spend $40 and get a 10GB tape drive. It's cheaper than hard drives *and* flash, you'll be able to keep more archives because tapes are smaller and cheaper than disks. Your process will be more reliable too.
As an aside, what's with all the stupidity about backups being spouted around here? Don't you have to work with an experienced sysadmin before you can get hired into a decision making position anymore? Here's a hint: If you're a self-taught sysadmin, and you see a way to do things that you think is way better and way cheaper than how everybody else is doing it, and it seems like it should have been obvoius, you're doing something stupid. There's a reason why experienced sysadmins do everything the way they do. The chances that you've had some revolutionary idea are slim due simply to the vast number of inteligent people who have already thought about your problems before you. Learn from their experience.... and don't come crying around here when you get fired for accidentally nudging a hard drive off the shelf, or they decide to do construction on the office next to you and the vibrations cause you to loose 20% of your data. Professional means you get paid, not that you've got a clue. Even if you have a clue, shit happens. Handle enough disks and you're going to drop one someday. I don't care how "professional" you are.
Let's say you fill the entire card every backup... At one backup a day you could use the card for 1000 years without exceeding the write limits of the card. Hardly a disadvantage when you consider that unlike a hard drive, the flash will still work after you drop it.
Now take the same server, and instead of transfering a 1GB file, send a 4k message for a DSM page update, or a filesystem locking operation (4k is generous). Which network is effectively faster then? Transferring large files is far from the only use of networks. Latency *is* important, and ethernet latencies have not gotten the exponential speed boosts that the bandwidth has.
Clustering and LAN file servers are two common uses for networks that won't benifit much by increasing bandwidth beyond 2gbps compared to how much they would benefit from lower latencies.
Actually, it would compile just fine (Assuming we're talking about C or C++ here). Non-integer assignments to integer variables are silently truncated unless you enable non-standard compiler options. The variable "SIXTY" as initialized in the parent comment would indeed hold the value '60' after the assignment.
Paypal only has access to accounts you grant them access to. If you give them access to your primary bank account (or if you give anybody access for that matter), you brought your troubles on yourself. It's so easy to move money around these days that there's no excuse for exposing yourself to the possibilty of PayPal freezing your funds. Take a hint from the actual fraudulent users. Open a seperate bank account for your PayPal transactions.
you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...
I don't know where you live, but everywhere I've voted in the US, it's gone something like: Show up, tell one of the people overseeing the voting what my name and address are (no ID check). Watch to make sure they cross off the right name on the list (no signing anything). Vote (by whatever method the district uses. I've lived in districts with lever machines, paper ballots, and electronic ballot readers). Tell the person on the other side of the room what my name and address are on the way out (no ID check and no signing anything).
I've been registered and voted in 5 different districts in two states and I've never had my ID checked. In fact when I tried to present it last year they looked at me like I was nuts and told me they don't need to see it...
(i.e. cable modem uncapping, IP theft, abuse, etc)
Cable modem uncapping is a problem caused by lazy implementation. If new services were created by engineers rather than the marketing department it would have never been an issue. The problem can still be fixed retroactively by either uncapping everybody, or capping at the provider end like should have been done to begin with.
"IP theft" is what we're talking about here. Specifically copyright infringement (You can't "Steal" trademarks or patents using an internet connection any more than you can without one. In fact, you can't "steal" a trademark at all really. The term "IP theft" is a broken creation of legal PR departments. You should remove it from your vocabulary.). Telephone companies should not incur financial expense for the wrongdoing of individual customers using a service they provide that has far more non-infringing uses than infringing ones. Telcos should want to be unable to find these people because it will save them money.
Abuse is a whole other problem, and one that is still solveable, but not in a way that would punish the offenders.
Whenever I can't seem to concentrate on work (usually because it's something I don't really want to do) I just have a beer. There's something about the alcohol of a single beer that makes me able to concentrate on one (and only one) task. More beer than that and you can't think clearly enough, so be sure to stop at one. Try it. It works.
The "independent promoter" business model is funded by the distribution cartel. If distribution doesn't net obscene profits anymore, there won't be any "independent promoters" to pay ClearChannel to play anything. Popular FM radio will become 80% advertising (instead of 50-60%) and stations will have to find music on their own (or every station will become an "oldies" station, which don't pull in the promoter dollars already). Advertising is where ClearChannel makes most of it's money anyway and the payola is just icing, so you probably won't hear them protest too much. In fact, they'd probably get to call the shots and lower their royalties in such a scenario which is probably why you don't hear any commentary from them on this whole P2P thing.
The whole business is a self perpetuating cycle, and if any one part breaks, it will all break.
noone is going to buy more licensed music because of their efforts.
The target of these lawsuits isn't really the defendants, it's the US Congress. The RIAA is trying to get noticed in a way that will encourage congress to pass a law that will ensure they can continue to make money in the distribution business. The lawsuits are just a tool to make their blip on lawmakers radar screens bigger.
Piracy or no, the service that the RIAA members perform is obsolete, and without some prop to hold them up they will slowly loose revenue as artists choose alternative (and increasingly more profitable and effective) distribution methods, and listeners choose a more convienient channel. As you correctly point out, ending piracy will just postpone the inevetable. Let's not get so distracted by these petty suits that we let worse legislation than the DMCA get passed.
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I doubt that's the answer you wanted to hear though.
Why do you doubt that? The cost of the aircraft is insignificant compared to the operating costs. The price increase you mention would be insignificant. Besides, no matter what the rules are, some looser is going to turn their device on. I want to be safe. It's worth the price... Bring it on.
"You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"
Both. It's a million dollar aircraft, and the ticket is expensive. Figure out how to make it safe. When they find themselves asking questions like this, how can they wonder why they're having a hard time making money?
Wow, that's interesting.. All the ones I've been through don't have that. I'd slow down for one of those too!
According to NCO's web site, they appear to be a third-party collection agency. They can't call you to collect a debt unless you've given them permission to do so.
Which you may very well have done by signing a credit application. You are supposed to read those first, you know.
The Medium of Exchange by which music is exchanged is not infringing upon Apple Corps trademark of being the only one that can produce music under that name.
Usually , yes, but this seems to be a contract case, not a trademark law case.
Now either it's my imagination or I haven't seen very many triaxles in the US. What's up with that? Is there no similar tax setup stateside?
Commercial vehicles are taxed and tolled per axle in the US. The taxes are incredibly high, but the average joe here doesn't realize this because the tax is paid by the corporations that own the commercial vehicles. A non-commercial 18 wheeler, for example, isn't taxed.
To ballance the stupidity, the weight limit the truck is allowed to haul is determined by the number of axles, and the weight per axle is constant. There are weigh stations along major highways that open randomly to check the weight of trucks on the road to enforce the rules. The up-side is that the tax is a flat rate to some extent, so you don't spend a lot trying to figure out who owes how much. The net effect is the same as what you describe, but the taxes aren't the whole story.
The really stupid stuff is when you get to the state level where some states disallow certain truck configurations because there is an anti-truck lobby. Yes, crazy people oppose trucks entirely because they don't realize that the lifestyle they're acustomed to is made possible by trucks and truck taxes. For a while Connecticut dissallowed tandem trucks, and then only tandem trucks over a certain length, thus making the use of tandem truck in New England impractical. Now they focus on keeping the axle count down. If you ask me, they're a bunch of crackpots.
similar to the US EZPass, except that you don't need to slow down too much when you pass under the toll booth
The slowing down for EZPass is not a technical issue, it's a social one. There is an arbitrary limit placed on the speed you can travel through the booth based on the state's desire to push the "speed kills" propaganda and keep their fine revenue up. With the exact same transponders, the speed limit varies from state to state. You can go through the Massachusets booth at 15 mph, and 100 yards later go through the New York booth where the limit is 5mph. I've gone through at close to 50mph, and it still worked.
The proof that your argument is garbage is that the level of subsidy is such that it allows US farmers to export their goods overseas at subsidised prices
If that's what you're opposed to, than oppose the low price exports, not the subsidies.
So where does it end?
It ends where we can no longer withstand the political pressure of the rest of the world. It is the responsibility of the US government to look after our own needs first. You don't survive by being the nice guy. If there were a chance in hell that everybody else wouldn't do the same exact thing if they were in the same position as the US, perhaps this would be a different conversation.
Free trade is great.... but you have to draw the line somewhere. If the US didn't subsidize agricultural products then most farms in the US would shut down and we'd be importing cheaper stuff from other subsidized countries. This is fine in other industries, and we've clearly shown we're willing to let other types of labor leave the country, but if we loose our farms we'll be dependant on other countries to feed our population. That's not a very good move strategically. It's hard to be the most powerful country in the world if we can't flex our muscles without starving. It's not like we're hiding anything either. Look at what our policy makers actually say, not what CNN reports.
Engineers should not do programming of any kind--they simply lack the qualifications and training. And industrial programmers always need more education and need to get less religious, in order to catch up with the state of the art.
There you go mixing up Programmers with Computer Scientists. Here's a hint: they're two different things. Computer scientists use programming languages as a tool. They are not necissicarily programmers first. Far too many people have this misconception and either wrongly have poor opinions of perfectly good computer scientists, or have way too high of expectations of programmers who can't do design work or math.
Incidentally, electrical engineers doing digital design are in the same situation. They write code, and they use it as a tool to express their designs. The only practical difference is the the level of abstraction.
However, one of the things which inspires people to buy games is mods.
The percentage of the game buying population that knows what a mod is is practically insignificant in the pool of buyers. On top of that, mod users can be more of a hassle than their $50 is worth. Catering to the 12 guys who built their own PCs with "cool" features that they don't realize are the cause of instability (like the windows in the side with the wireless base station on top) who act like children (or are children) and fill the forum with threats of lawsuits instead of just returning the game to get their money back may not be a winning strategy.
Theory #3:
They need to get people to actually start buying their current releases, since most businesses still run Windows 98 or Win2k, and their surveys of IT managers indicated that they wouldn't be purchasing XP simply because Longhorn was coming out so soon.
So you overwrite each key 160 times a day?
I don't buy it. That doesn't give you any protection. It's each cell in the flash chip that has a limit, not the entire chip. If you fill all the keys once a day you can use the card for 1000 years (Something else will probably happen to it by then, but you get the picture). It doesn't matter if you fill them all at once or you fill them in 160 little bursts.
And don't give me any crap about FAT wear. Just because you *can* do something stupid like use FAT16 on a flash device doesn't mean you *should*. You could make your backup image over the network and write all at once. If you need 100 keys to backup you shouldn't be doing it anyway. Spend $40 and get a 10GB tape drive. It's cheaper than hard drives *and* flash, you'll be able to keep more archives because tapes are smaller and cheaper than disks. Your process will be more reliable too.
As an aside, what's with all the stupidity about backups being spouted around here? Don't you have to work with an experienced sysadmin before you can get hired into a decision making position anymore? Here's a hint: If you're a self-taught sysadmin, and you see a way to do things that you think is way better and way cheaper than how everybody else is doing it, and it seems like it should have been obvoius, you're doing something stupid. There's a reason why experienced sysadmins do everything the way they do. The chances that you've had some revolutionary idea are slim due simply to the vast number of inteligent people who have already thought about your problems before you. Learn from their experience.... and don't come crying around here when you get fired for accidentally nudging a hard drive off the shelf, or they decide to do construction on the office next to you and the vibrations cause you to loose 20% of your data. Professional means you get paid, not that you've got a clue. Even if you have a clue, shit happens. Handle enough disks and you're going to drop one someday. I don't care how "professional" you are.
Let's say you fill the entire card every backup... At one backup a day you could use the card for 1000 years without exceeding the write limits of the card. Hardly a disadvantage when you consider that unlike a hard drive, the flash will still work after you drop it.
Now take the same server, and instead of transfering a 1GB file, send a 4k message for a DSM page update, or a filesystem locking operation (4k is generous). Which network is effectively faster then? Transferring large files is far from the only use of networks. Latency *is* important, and ethernet latencies have not gotten the exponential speed boosts that the bandwidth has.
Clustering and LAN file servers are two common uses for networks that won't benifit much by increasing bandwidth beyond 2gbps compared to how much they would benefit from lower latencies.
bash-2.04$ chsh
Actually, it would compile just fine (Assuming we're talking about C or C++ here). Non-integer assignments to integer variables are silently truncated unless you enable non-standard compiler options. The variable "SIXTY" as initialized in the parent comment would indeed hold the value '60' after the assignment.
If you get screwed it's your fault. Period.
Paypal only has access to accounts you grant them access to. If you give them access to your primary bank account (or if you give anybody access for that matter), you brought your troubles on yourself. It's so easy to move money around these days that there's no excuse for exposing yourself to the possibilty of PayPal freezing your funds. Take a hint from the actual fraudulent users. Open a seperate bank account for your PayPal transactions.
At least I know if I get quicken for windows or microsoft money they will always work.
HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAA! *gasp* HAAAAAAAAAAAA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Sorry. Couldn't keep it in after that.
you go vote very much the way you do now (by presenting your id and signing a sheet of paper)...
I don't know where you live, but everywhere I've voted in the US, it's gone something like: Show up, tell one of the people overseeing the voting what my name and address are (no ID check). Watch to make sure they cross off the right name on the list (no signing anything). Vote (by whatever method the district uses. I've lived in districts with lever machines, paper ballots, and electronic ballot readers). Tell the person on the other side of the room what my name and address are on the way out (no ID check and no signing anything).
I've been registered and voted in 5 different districts in two states and I've never had my ID checked. In fact when I tried to present it last year they looked at me like I was nuts and told me they don't need to see it...
The "Glossmark" thing looks like a 1-bit overlay to me. You don't need any fancy equipment to reproduce that. Just a pair of eyes and the gimp.
(i.e. cable modem uncapping, IP theft, abuse, etc)
Cable modem uncapping is a problem caused by lazy implementation. If new services were created by engineers rather than the marketing department it would have never been an issue. The problem can still be fixed retroactively by either uncapping everybody, or capping at the provider end like should have been done to begin with.
"IP theft" is what we're talking about here. Specifically copyright infringement (You can't "Steal" trademarks or patents using an internet connection any more than you can without one. In fact, you can't "steal" a trademark at all really. The term "IP theft" is a broken creation of legal PR departments. You should remove it from your vocabulary.). Telephone companies should not incur financial expense for the wrongdoing of individual customers using a service they provide that has far more non-infringing uses than infringing ones. Telcos should want to be unable to find these people because it will save them money.
Abuse is a whole other problem, and one that is still solveable, but not in a way that would punish the offenders.
Whenever I can't seem to concentrate on work (usually because it's something I don't really want to do) I just have a beer. There's something about the alcohol of a single beer that makes me able to concentrate on one (and only one) task. More beer than that and you can't think clearly enough, so be sure to stop at one. Try it. It works.
The "independent promoter" business model is funded by the distribution cartel. If distribution doesn't net obscene profits anymore, there won't be any "independent promoters" to pay ClearChannel to play anything. Popular FM radio will become 80% advertising (instead of 50-60%) and stations will have to find music on their own (or every station will become an "oldies" station, which don't pull in the promoter dollars already). Advertising is where ClearChannel makes most of it's money anyway and the payola is just icing, so you probably won't hear them protest too much. In fact, they'd probably get to call the shots and lower their royalties in such a scenario which is probably why you don't hear any commentary from them on this whole P2P thing.
The whole business is a self perpetuating cycle, and if any one part breaks, it will all break.
noone is going to buy more licensed music because of their efforts.
The target of these lawsuits isn't really the defendants, it's the US Congress. The RIAA is trying to get noticed in a way that will encourage congress to pass a law that will ensure they can continue to make money in the distribution business. The lawsuits are just a tool to make their blip on lawmakers radar screens bigger.
Piracy or no, the service that the RIAA members perform is obsolete, and without some prop to hold them up they will slowly loose revenue as artists choose alternative (and increasingly more profitable and effective) distribution methods, and listeners choose a more convienient channel. As you correctly point out, ending piracy will just postpone the inevetable. Let's not get so distracted by these petty suits that we let worse legislation than the DMCA get passed.