They're probably custom components - you can't just unlock and lock them. In order to do so, you'd have to violate various laws or the sale contract. Technically illegal, and while they generally don't go after individuals - the government is a big fat target.
Yes, but it's still ~24k KM away. That's further away than many spy satellites, for example.
If things stay to current form, we'll be keeping our conflicts confined to countries far enough behind that they won't be able to launch an intercept capable of destroying it.
You could also build orbital hydroponics stations.. I wonder if that would be cost- or energy-effective in real life?
energy efficient? Quite possibly, as you're not drilling through kilometers of air, and you aren't necessarily limited to 50% light. Cost efficient? Under current developmental lines, only to supply food and air needs to space dwellers. IE a hydroponics bay on the ISS to provide foods to the astronauts there.
Darn it all, I thought I mentioned it, somehow it got lost during my editing.
- Starting the drug regime early is critical for effectiveness.
It's like the drugs slow/stop the acceleration of the disease, not the rate - If you're losing 1% of your memory a year*, you'll continue to lose that under the drugs - but it won't increase, hopefully, to 10%.
If they can catch it when that's still.5%, or better yet, 0%, great.
A good test - blood or imaging - or more likely a couple of half way decent tests with reasonable sensitivity and specificity would go a long way to helping doctors start treatments early on. It would also help the drug companies push the drugs even harder than they already are but no good deed goes unpunished.
In this case, having seen Alzheimer's in my family, it scares me to no end. I'm also something of a libertarian - people making a profit from doing good is great and perfectly allowed. In this case it would allow the pushing of drugs in a very targeted way - nursing homes are expensive enough that even if we have to prescribe these meds to ten people for ten years to keep one out of a home for a year, it'll be a net positive.
Alzheimer's patients tend to be some of the most expensive - not able to take care of themselves, yet their body can be healthy enough to last for years. My grandfather got to see this happen to his mother, he'd rather die than become like that. She lasted decades in a home, unable to recognize family any more.
*Very inaccurate, but I'm not sure how to describe it better.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather somebody get access to my stuff through means short of chopping a finger off, much less my thumb.
For that matter, I'd rather not be running around with information sensitive/valuable enough to chop body limbs off to get.
At least handcuff briefcase type guys are generally armed, or at least traveling with armed bodyguards(even if they will concentrate more on recovering the briefcase).
nothing I can realistically do to avoid a rather grim fate.
Actually, there are treatments available to at least delay Alzheimer's disease. They're in the same situation as AIDs medications a decade ago - not much good for reversing the disease, but capable of delaying or stopping it's progress for years.
Give it another decade and we might even be able to reverse it's progress - memories not retained will still be lost, but the functionality, and maybe some past memory, be restored.
I don't know about you, but at this time I'd much rather know, so I could get on the drugs now. It's especially critical for me - I have a family history of Alzheimer's.
Maybe they'll find a cure before it gets bad. Maybe I'll die of something else. But the drugs, especially given early, can delay the disease by decades.
Pretty much what I was thinking of. Or use them for those customer service surveys. You know, like 'How was your visit to the DMV today?'. Oddly enough 'Worse than my last visit to the 9th circle of Hell' would be missing, but whatever.
I'd love to see them do this, however they're probably screwed as they didn't write their requirements document well enough; such that the machines, while screwed up POSes, actually meet the requirements document. Perhaps even worse, the government probably signed the acceptance papers.
Recovering the money would require a huge lawsuit that the Florida government isn't guaranteed to win.
Except that one of the leaked Diebold memos basically had them going to charge more for adding printing capabilities than what they charged for the machines in the first place.
How is filling in a bubble, oval or line next to your choice 'far less intuitive to the user than a touch screen system'? People have been filling out standardized tests for years.
In addition, it's far easier to handle breakdowns - the markers, whether pen, pencil, or felt, can be replaced quickly and easily. They don't go bad often if they're of a decent quality. Paper ballots are pre-printed and can be replaced. You can have a lot of optical scanners, if one goes down, disregard it's count, feed the ballots it's collected into another(back at HQ).
I've heard of down rates being over 10% with the touch screen machines. Vote counts being outright lost, or worse, corrupted.
The only downside I can think of is that people are unable to deface a ballot as a protest vote.
As you later note, this is absolutely useless except for making you feel better. You'd do more good writing to the paper before the election.
It's not like you could do this with the touch screen machines either.
I figure the whole problem was caused by old machines and politicians wanting the latest and greatest - latching onto a neat phrase. Optical scanning should be familiar to any adult who's passed high school. We've been using it for standardized tests for years.
It's actually a component of federal and many state laws - equipment that's not considered sensitive in nature has to be sold to recover what money can be recovered.
I suppose you could use the systems for some non-critical voting purposes.
Kinda makes the market for that type of service a little small. Anyone who can afford to spend that much on a flight, already does.
Ever checked out the prices for many first class tickets? How about in situations where you're going from small airport to small airport, requiring connecting flights. A chartered plane, while it might be slower than a commercial jet, has the advantage of more or less direct line travel.
If you're sending more than one person, especially if travel hours are billable, it quickly makes sense to charter. Not only don't you have the 3 hour wait(generally) for security and boarding, you also have quick access to your luggage on the way out, and generally private facilities, so you don't have to dodge 300 other people at the terminal.
Still, back when this security mess started, I proposed creating a 'NRA Airlines, 10% discount for open carry.' While commercial passangers are required to fly nude for safety*, at NRA airlines the only thing you have to worry about is some retired police bomb dogs checking for explosives. You wouldn't be allowed to load from the terminals, so boarding would be by stairway. Handicapped will be assisted. Hearken back to the old days.
Have glaser type ammo available in common calibers if you want to be paranoid. And ask that passangers leave the.454 casull in their baggage.
How about a 3 day period because they automatically check, which takes only seconds, but having three days allows them to peform the hand checks needed when the automatic check throws a flag?
Yes, but what's the word on people's lips when it comes to picture editing? Photoshop, of course. It's even entered our vocabulary. 'That picture's been photoshopped'.
Windows gained dominance, in part, because of piracy - people who weren't in the market to buy it, stole it instead. While microsoft didn't gain any money from that copy, it still increased the user base, increasing the amount of programming done for windows, increasing the number of programs available for the OS, increasing the value of using windows over other operating systems.
I also can rip and use my own copies of movies while keeping my originals safe because funny enough even though I'm supposedly buying a license for the movie, and not the physical disc itself, when I buy a movie they still won't provide a reasonable price for a replacement disc.
I believe that this has actually gone to court, it's just that the media companies merely keep quiet about it.
It went to court 'It's a license, not a physical sale' - Court determined that it was a physical sale because the selling company wouldn't provide replacement disks It went to court 'It's a license, not a physical sale' - Court determined it was a physical sale because the selling company charged as much/more than the selling price of the software for replacement disks, so it was effectivly another sale.
If they want to keep the 'license' arguement media companies have to sell you replacement disks for not much more than what it costs them to keep a system in place to send you replacement disks if you prove you own the media in question.
They'd still have a harder case against me - I'm not distributing, nor even keeping excess copies of data - I replace one executable with a slightly modified one. I have a valid code, still have the media, etc...
Given how uniformly software licenses are thrown out,
6000 is the figure you're looking for for the semipro recording equipment. Quoted to me by an independant artist who set up shop in his apartment. It included the instruments too.
I'm curious: How much of the $6k was for the instruments? Was it for new or used stuff?
The case I had was that the guy already had a band and was playing at various bars around town. They already had instruments and at least some sound equipment. They needed a mixer, recorder, and a few other pieces of equipment, none of which were too expensive to meet his needs.
I used prices for new equipment - except I figured on him using his own computer, microphones, and instruments(which he stated he already had). I pointed out that he could buy used, but then it's his responsability to make sure the stuff is still servicable.
So, for a new studio from scratch, including instruments, $6k sounds quite reasonable.
Depending on requirements and fiscal sense of the band - I could see the studio cost varying by an order of magnitude. Whether or not you have the studio professionally remodeled or simply staple up a lot of egg cartons, for example. The sky's the limit as far as costs go(as the $1k/foot speaker cables show).
The important part of that is that it's more or less a static cost. Until you feel the need to upgrade, it'll work*. While you need to order 2k CDs to get the price for the first order down to ~$1 per, you only need 1k CDs for subsequent orders from the company(they already have the glass master). If you buy another 2k, it'd be something like $.87 per, 5k, $.74. Sample site.
*well, unless something breaks, but that should be years down the road. Might be a good idea for such a band to invest $1k or so each CD release on upgrades - it's tax deductible as a bonus.
Just out of curiosity... do you use an ebook reader, which one and do you like it?
Sorry, just my computer. They don't offer them for sale here, and I'm unwilling to spend $200+ for one with less than a hundred megabytes of memory that I can't handle before buying.
You should be able to use pretty much any pda to read webscription ebooks - they're available in html and richtext, among other formats.
But we are nerds. Matter of fact, when it comes to programming language matters even more than it does in a court. Here, we're talking about stuff that could land you in court, so precise language is of benefit.
In a court of law, stealing requires depriving somebody of something more than a theoretical sale. It's only theoretical because there's no real proof that any given copyright infringer would have bought a legitimate copy if they hadn't been able to get the illegal copy.
Take one of the more stolen pieces of software: Adobe photoshop, $649 for the basic version. Would you be able to seriously say that a high school student would have purchased a legitimate copy using a whole month's pay(if not two!) from his part time job? When he's already paying a car loan, insurance, and gas from said pay?
Of course, you're probably one of those people who have no trouble calling a magazine a clip when it comes to guns. Or point at the monitor when you say computer.
I've never heard anyone complain about.jpg images at 90 quality, demanding lossless versions of the same image, except for people who use the image as source material in other productions, yet for some reason it's cool to pretend to hear things that aren't there.
128kbps MP3 isn't just lossless, it's also low enough that many people with decent-good systems can hear the differences.
Sure, it's fine for most portable/computer purposes, but it's more like a 50%.jpg image rather than a 90% one. It's just fine until you go to print it out, but then it's all fuzzy. A 192 kbps MP3 would be like a 75% quality one - good for most hifi stereo systems, and 256kbps would be getting into 'golden ears' territory, especially if they go back to the masters to do the encoding.
And I am by no means a golden eared person, but I could easily hear the difference between a CD and the 128mbps mp3 when I hooked my computer into my receiver. Sure, somebody might come along and say it was my encoder, but at that bitrate there was simply a lot missing.
Still HD space is cheap, and the higher quality can always be downcoded for usage in a player. It can also be billed as a selling point - better quality than the pirates.
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They're probably custom components - you can't just unlock and lock them. In order to do so, you'd have to violate various laws or the sale contract. Technically illegal, and while they generally don't go after individuals - the government is a big fat target.
Yes, but it's still ~24k KM away. That's further away than many spy satellites, for example.
If things stay to current form, we'll be keeping our conflicts confined to countries far enough behind that they won't be able to launch an intercept capable of destroying it.
You could also build orbital hydroponics stations.. I wonder if that would be cost- or energy-effective in real life?
energy efficient? Quite possibly, as you're not drilling through kilometers of air, and you aren't necessarily limited to 50% light. Cost efficient? Under current developmental lines, only to supply food and air needs to space dwellers. IE a hydroponics bay on the ISS to provide foods to the astronauts there.
Darn it all, I thought I mentioned it, somehow it got lost during my editing.
.5%, or better yet, 0%, great.
- Starting the drug regime early is critical for effectiveness.
It's like the drugs slow/stop the acceleration of the disease, not the rate - If you're losing 1% of your memory a year*, you'll continue to lose that under the drugs - but it won't increase, hopefully, to 10%.
If they can catch it when that's still
A good test - blood or imaging - or more likely a couple of half way decent tests with reasonable sensitivity and specificity would go a long way to helping doctors start treatments early on. It would also help the drug companies push the drugs even harder than they already are but no good deed goes unpunished.
In this case, having seen Alzheimer's in my family, it scares me to no end. I'm also something of a libertarian - people making a profit from doing good is great and perfectly allowed. In this case it would allow the pushing of drugs in a very targeted way - nursing homes are expensive enough that even if we have to prescribe these meds to ten people for ten years to keep one out of a home for a year, it'll be a net positive.
Alzheimer's patients tend to be some of the most expensive - not able to take care of themselves, yet their body can be healthy enough to last for years. My grandfather got to see this happen to his mother, he'd rather die than become like that. She lasted decades in a home, unable to recognize family any more.
*Very inaccurate, but I'm not sure how to describe it better.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather somebody get access to my stuff through means short of chopping a finger off, much less my thumb.
For that matter, I'd rather not be running around with information sensitive/valuable enough to chop body limbs off to get.
At least handcuff briefcase type guys are generally armed, or at least traveling with armed bodyguards(even if they will concentrate more on recovering the briefcase).
nothing I can realistically do to avoid a rather grim fate.
Actually, there are treatments available to at least delay Alzheimer's disease. They're in the same situation as AIDs medications a decade ago - not much good for reversing the disease, but capable of delaying or stopping it's progress for years.
Give it another decade and we might even be able to reverse it's progress - memories not retained will still be lost, but the functionality, and maybe some past memory, be restored.
I don't know about you, but at this time I'd much rather know, so I could get on the drugs now. It's especially critical for me - I have a family history of Alzheimer's.
Maybe they'll find a cure before it gets bad. Maybe I'll die of something else. But the drugs, especially given early, can delay the disease by decades.
Except that the OS and hardware of these systems are supposably locked down. Do we even know if they have standard USB ports?
Sure, hackers can probably get something on it, but the government doesn't work on that basis.
Pretty much what I was thinking of. Or use them for those customer service surveys. You know, like 'How was your visit to the DMV today?'. Oddly enough 'Worse than my last visit to the 9th circle of Hell' would be missing, but whatever.
I'd love to see them do this, however they're probably screwed as they didn't write their requirements document well enough; such that the machines, while screwed up POSes, actually meet the requirements document. Perhaps even worse, the government probably signed the acceptance papers.
Recovering the money would require a huge lawsuit that the Florida government isn't guaranteed to win.
Except that one of the leaked Diebold memos basically had them going to charge more for adding printing capabilities than what they charged for the machines in the first place.
How is filling in a bubble, oval or line next to your choice 'far less intuitive to the user than a touch screen system'? People have been filling out standardized tests for years.
In addition, it's far easier to handle breakdowns - the markers, whether pen, pencil, or felt, can be replaced quickly and easily. They don't go bad often if they're of a decent quality. Paper ballots are pre-printed and can be replaced. You can have a lot of optical scanners, if one goes down, disregard it's count, feed the ballots it's collected into another(back at HQ).
I've heard of down rates being over 10% with the touch screen machines. Vote counts being outright lost, or worse, corrupted.
The only downside I can think of is that people are unable to deface a ballot as a protest vote.
As you later note, this is absolutely useless except for making you feel better. You'd do more good writing to the paper before the election.
It's not like you could do this with the touch screen machines either.
I figure the whole problem was caused by old machines and politicians wanting the latest and greatest - latching onto a neat phrase. Optical scanning should be familiar to any adult who's passed high school. We've been using it for standardized tests for years.
It's actually a component of federal and many state laws - equipment that's not considered sensitive in nature has to be sold to recover what money can be recovered.
I suppose you could use the systems for some non-critical voting purposes.
Kinda makes the market for that type of service a little small. Anyone who can afford to spend that much on a flight, already does.
.454 casull in their baggage.
Ever checked out the prices for many first class tickets? How about in situations where you're going from small airport to small airport, requiring connecting flights. A chartered plane, while it might be slower than a commercial jet, has the advantage of more or less direct line travel.
If you're sending more than one person, especially if travel hours are billable, it quickly makes sense to charter. Not only don't you have the 3 hour wait(generally) for security and boarding, you also have quick access to your luggage on the way out, and generally private facilities, so you don't have to dodge 300 other people at the terminal.
Still, back when this security mess started, I proposed creating a 'NRA Airlines, 10% discount for open carry.' While commercial passangers are required to fly nude for safety*, at NRA airlines the only thing you have to worry about is some retired police bomb dogs checking for explosives. You wouldn't be allowed to load from the terminals, so boarding would be by stairway. Handicapped will be assisted. Hearken back to the old days.
Have glaser type ammo available in common calibers if you want to be paranoid. And ask that passangers leave the
*Yes, I'm being silly.
How about a 3 day period because they automatically check, which takes only seconds, but having three days allows them to peform the hand checks needed when the automatic check throws a flag?
Unless they accept military orders as an exception, I can see the military not liking this one bit. Most personel movements are via commercial air.
There have been many cases where I've seen somebody go from every day work to outprocessing and on a plane that night or early the next morning.
That's not including 'death/family emergency' where it's sometimes even faster.
Still, you'd think that if they could get 3 days notice for 90% of traffic, they'd be able to fast track the remaining 10% or so.
Yes, but what's the word on people's lips when it comes to picture editing? Photoshop, of course. It's even entered our vocabulary. 'That picture's been photoshopped'.
Windows gained dominance, in part, because of piracy - people who weren't in the market to buy it, stole it instead. While microsoft didn't gain any money from that copy, it still increased the user base, increasing the amount of programming done for windows, increasing the number of programs available for the OS, increasing the value of using windows over other operating systems.
I also can rip and use my own copies of movies while keeping my originals safe because funny enough even though I'm supposedly buying a license for the movie, and not the physical disc itself, when I buy a movie they still won't provide a reasonable price for a replacement disc.
I believe that this has actually gone to court, it's just that the media companies merely keep quiet about it.
It went to court 'It's a license, not a physical sale'
- Court determined that it was a physical sale because the selling company wouldn't provide replacement disks
It went to court 'It's a license, not a physical sale'
- Court determined it was a physical sale because the selling company charged as much/more than the selling price of the software for replacement disks, so it was effectivly another sale.
If they want to keep the 'license' arguement media companies have to sell you replacement disks for not much more than what it costs them to keep a system in place to send you replacement disks if you prove you own the media in question.
They'd still have a harder case against me - I'm not distributing, nor even keeping excess copies of data - I replace one executable with a slightly modified one. I have a valid code, still have the media, etc...
Given how uniformly software licenses are thrown out,
Ohhh.... Half price!
Still a hefty fee when you consider that a home version of windows costs ~$100 retail.
I purchased my copy of office through the HUP program for ~$20.
$299 is still high priced for non-professional home use.
6000 is the figure you're looking for for the semipro recording equipment. Quoted to me by an independant artist who set up shop in his apartment. It included the instruments too.
I'm curious: How much of the $6k was for the instruments? Was it for new or used stuff?
The case I had was that the guy already had a band and was playing at various bars around town. They already had instruments and at least some sound equipment. They needed a mixer, recorder, and a few other pieces of equipment, none of which were too expensive to meet his needs.
I used prices for new equipment - except I figured on him using his own computer, microphones, and instruments(which he stated he already had). I pointed out that he could buy used, but then it's his responsability to make sure the stuff is still servicable.
So, for a new studio from scratch, including instruments, $6k sounds quite reasonable.
Depending on requirements and fiscal sense of the band - I could see the studio cost varying by an order of magnitude. Whether or not you have the studio professionally remodeled or simply staple up a lot of egg cartons, for example. The sky's the limit as far as costs go(as the $1k/foot speaker cables show).
The important part of that is that it's more or less a static cost. Until you feel the need to upgrade, it'll work*. While you need to order 2k CDs to get the price for the first order down to ~$1 per, you only need 1k CDs for subsequent orders from the company(they already have the glass master). If you buy another 2k, it'd be something like $.87 per, 5k, $.74. Sample site.
*well, unless something breaks, but that should be years down the road. Might be a good idea for such a band to invest $1k or so each CD release on upgrades - it's tax deductible as a bonus.
Just out of curiosity... do you use an ebook reader, which one and do you like it?
Sorry, just my computer. They don't offer them for sale here, and I'm unwilling to spend $200+ for one with less than a hundred megabytes of memory that I can't handle before buying.
You should be able to use pretty much any pda to read webscription ebooks - they're available in html and richtext, among other formats.
But we are nerds. Matter of fact, when it comes to programming language matters even more than it does in a court. Here, we're talking about stuff that could land you in court, so precise language is of benefit.
In a court of law, stealing requires depriving somebody of something more than a theoretical sale. It's only theoretical because there's no real proof that any given copyright infringer would have bought a legitimate copy if they hadn't been able to get the illegal copy.
Take one of the more stolen pieces of software: Adobe photoshop, $649 for the basic version. Would you be able to seriously say that a high school student would have purchased a legitimate copy using a whole month's pay(if not two!) from his part time job? When he's already paying a car loan, insurance, and gas from said pay?
Of course, you're probably one of those people who have no trouble calling a magazine a clip when it comes to guns. Or point at the monitor when you say computer.
well, if you want to be lazy: webscription.net
I've never heard anyone complain about .jpg images at 90 quality, demanding lossless versions of the same image, except for people who use the image as source material in other productions, yet for some reason it's cool to pretend to hear things that aren't there.
.jpg image rather than a 90% one. It's just fine until you go to print it out, but then it's all fuzzy. A 192 kbps MP3 would be like a 75% quality one - good for most hifi stereo systems, and 256kbps would be getting into 'golden ears' territory, especially if they go back to the masters to do the encoding.
128kbps MP3 isn't just lossless, it's also low enough that many people with decent-good systems can hear the differences.
Sure, it's fine for most portable/computer purposes, but it's more like a 50%
And I am by no means a golden eared person, but I could easily hear the difference between a CD and the 128mbps mp3 when I hooked my computer into my receiver. Sure, somebody might come along and say it was my encoder, but at that bitrate there was simply a lot missing.
Still HD space is cheap, and the higher quality can always be downcoded for usage in a player. It can also be billed as a selling point - better quality than the pirates.