With some upstream providers charging the equivalent of $24/pa per IP address, there are ISPs that are considering doing this.
All their users live safely behind a NATed firewall. Send mail ougoing through a virus-scanning and rate-limited mail relay. Receive HTTP through a proxy-cache. Play games through application level proxies. The user will only notice the difference when they try to host games - that just won't work unless the game knows about SOCKS. Diablo II realms play works fine behind a NAT firewall. Quake III Arena works fine behind a NAT firewall, as long as you're willing to play on someone else's server.
Most IM programs work just great without direct peer-to-peer cracking... I mean... communication. MSN Messenger, Jabber, ICQ - they work just fine. Not being able to transfer files directly just means you won't be able to infect your computer with viruses by accepting "real nude photos" from some loser you've never met.
The number of support calls this plan eliminates ("my computer is broken - is that because of KaZaa?" or "dear abuse@isp, so-and-so is a spammer") is far in excess of the number of support calls it generates ("you bastards! I have the God given right to at least 5 unique IP addresses! What do you think I'm paying you $AUS80/month for? Don't try to tell me that 75% of your cash flow is taken up by infrastructure expenses! How dare you tell me that I can't send 2000 emails per minute!").
I can't wait till we can ship out something as simple as a dial-up router that is preconfigured to connect to our ISP, and provides ZeroConf/DHCP services internally. Maybe finally we'll have an end to those endless calls along the lines of, "why won't it let me connect when I don't type in my password?"... sheesh!
You want a unique IP address? I'll sell it to you, along with some bandwidth for you to use. When you can provide me with hostmaster@, abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, and register your own domain, I'll open up port 25 outgoing and go secondary for your DNS. Then when you start sending spam or viruses, I can point the finger at someone whose "God given right" to access the Internet just blew up in their faces, and laugh.
At that stage, you can bet you'll be back on consumer level Internet access again.
Oh no... please don't ever EVER recommend that someone install ZoneAlarm unless they're at least as clued as you are.
I had a client ring up the other day - his computer could connect to the net properly, but no traffic could get in or out. The PPP link would stay up because LCP echoes came back fine.
While frustratedly pulling the last remaining hairs out, I asked the user to read out to me the contents of the "Add/Remove Software" control panel. Amidst the usual cruft was "ZoneAlarm". I asked the user to uninstall ZoneAlarm, and everything went back to working normally.
I asked that user to please never install ZoneAlarm again.
The Regional Court of Munich stiffed SCO GmbH Germany for 10 thousand big ones, necaise SCO refused to STFU as they were told to yonks ago.
Tarent lawyer Till Hunter seemed quite proud of the outcome, especially since SCO's pissing and moaning about Linux users being a bunch of Intellectual Property scavengers was putting people off. The court went easy on them though, since the SCO brass claimed that they really had been trying to do the right thing (really!).
At the time that this story was being scratched out, noone from SCO was willing to stick their heads out and make a noise. They're probably all crying into the holes where their paychecks are supposed to be.
Just be aware that the name "Oceania" is already used to describe the island group including Australia and New Zealand.
Certainly, the classic Unseen Enemy will no doubt be raised. But will the Government of the USA be so pig-headed as to suggest that as, "one nation under God", they're obviously more powerful than the Go'auld attack fleet?
I don't want to know how long it will take the Govt of the USA to stoop to staging flying-bomb attacks in order to convince the proletariat that the enemy really is at the gates, thus civil liberties should be restricted further...
I would have thought that the emergency beacons of ships lost in the ether between planets when their skip-drives failed would have counted as more interesting listening than the planet-bound commercial radio.
Darth Vader was upset that Princess Leia wasn't buying into his sales pitch about EmpireOS. Princess Leia was most disappointed about the EULA for EmpireOS - especially the part where your home planet gets destroyed simply because Darth Vader suspected one or two people were running RebelOS.
So the licencing control gets tighter and tighter, and harder to comply to. Princess Leia comes up with this gem (I think I got it right): "The tighter you clench your fists, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"
I couldn't have put it better myself. In "The Real World" we have Bill Gates, who thinks that by making licencing more complicated, more people are likely to comply with it - but instead he'll find that more people look for alternatives that are easier to understand, and aren't accompanied by jack-booted storm troopers (sorry - audit teams).
One of the companies I support has a legal team who do nothing more than review Microsoft contracts, first to make sure that their department is willing to accept the contract, second to ensure that the terms of the contract are clear enough to give sysadmins guidelines on what can and cannot be legally done, and third to ensure that previous contracts are being complied with.
They are terrified of cutting a deal similar to the one Lando Calrissian thought he'd struck with the Empire. You know, the one that started out as "hand over Luke, and we'll leave you alone" to "hand over Luke, Han Solo, and a fair chunk of your annual profit, and we'll think about not destroying your business."
Switch to Open Source Software, and suddenly you're putting lots of lawyers out of business. Even better, you have more money left over from the extort... sorry, licence fees that you don't have to pay. You can sleep better at night, on a nicer bed too!
Having a certification means nothing. I've seen mechanics who are supposedly trained to diagnose the problems with my car, who in the process of attempting to figure out why my engine stutters at 3800RPM, proceed to damage the auto-choke, mess up the idle settings, and leave fan belts unmounted when starting the engine.
Just because you've received some form of Government mandated training, doesn't mean you're going to stick to the procedures you were trained in. Just because you can pass an exam, doesn't mean you really know what you're doing.
The only thing a certification means is that the certified person has expended the capital required to enter the market (they've overcome that barrier to entry).
If a certified/licenced/guaranteed mechanic causes problem that affect your life or livelihood, you'll just be suing their insurance company. Being certified doesn't mean that they won't make mistakes.
The only way to check that a mechanic is good at fixing your problem is to get them to try to fix your problem. I judge by reputation, not by certification.
So how is compulsory certification going to solve the problem of the shonky dealer? If you're going to be dishonest, does having an A+ certification mean anything to the client?
Having the required certification might give them a false sense of security, sure, but certification doesn't mean you're necessarily any more honest or competent than the next guy.
As far as I can see, the target audience of the geek.nz campaign is New Zealand geeks. Support from "Americans" won't matter diddly-squat, since the NZ domain commissioner only cares about NZ Citizens (ANZUS treaty or no).
So from the front page of the campaign web site, the entire "why should I care?" question has been answered.
The campaign doesn't have to answer your question of "why should I care?" - mainly because they don't care if you care. You have no impact in their problem space. You don't matter.
How Does This Compare To My Palm V?
on
Real PDA Wristwatch
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How does this watch compare to my Palm V?
The main reason I got the Palm V was to be an alarm clock. I kept missing appointments, even though I had them written in my DayRunner(tm) diary - I just never got into the habit of checking my diary every 15 minutes.
This watch would make life a little easier for me - as slim as the Palm V is, it's still something extra to bulk up my shirt/trouser/backpack pockets with.
The biggest drawback for me would be that the watch isn't designed to be a PDA by itself. It's almost like Fossil only wanted the watch to be a fancy alarm clock with address book function. So you'd have to have the watch as well as a PDA in order to get full functionality from it (using beamed business cards for example).
But for the original purpose that I bought the Palm V - reminding me of appointments (and putting out the trash, and leaving the computer game to go to bed) - this watch is just right. I don't think I'd be willing to pony up the $AU600 though - that kind of money would get a really nice watch from Casio.
Since I already have a PalmOS device, this watch wouldn't really be much use to me. If I didn't have a PalmOS device, I'd consider buying it, if it was half the price.
I wonder if the lack of poor quality MPEGs will inspire Mac OS X users to go out and create their own content? After all - if you have the tools such as iMovie, the iLink video camera, a little creativity and some time (since you're not wasting time watching movies you've already seen), it's not too hard to imagine you'd at least experiment with making a movie, is it?
No doubt when you've made your movie, you'll share it with your housemate. What about the rest of the world?
Imagine when Gnutella is full of home-made movies - we'll have an entire community based around producing, viewing and critiquing home-made movies. Maybe one day we'll have a "Videoforge" component of the OSDN network?
Perhaps I'm being a little too optimistic, but I expect that between the affordablility of production equipment, the ease of use of Apple's movie making software, and the lack of conventient alternatives, we'll see many more independent movie artists flexing their wings.
The Movielink people are interested in making the most amount of money possible, as quickly as possible. Since Windows (various flavours) has such a huge market share, most developers interested in making a quick buck will only develop their software or service for Windows.
Platforms like Mac OS or Linux lose out in the quick-bucks scheme because their market share is so small that it's not profitable to provide the service to those people.
I don't think the argument is really about DRM - it's about the cost-effectiveness of developing anything for low-market-share operating systems.
Either of those actions void the basic assumptions of the CAPP (pdf) - in particular, A.NO_EVIL_ADM and A.COOP.
A.NO_EVIL_ADM is the assumption that noone is trying to break the system.
A.COOP is the assumption that everyone using the system is working in harmony to support the aims of the system.
Re:For those of you on the West Coast...
on
Step 2, Groceries
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· Score: 1
To get the cost of delivery down, they'd have to have many customers on the same route.
As an example, in Australia the typical running costs for a Ford Transit van would be about $0.80/km - this assumes you're amortising the vehicle finance and insurance over the km life of the vehicle. Then you have to figure the cost of the driver (eg: $12/hr).
Assume your customer live 5km away from the shipping area. That's a 10km round trip which probably takes about 45min including dropping off the goods, meaning you should be charging $17 for that delivery.
The local Woolworths (Woden, Canberra, Australia) does Internet groceries, but deliveries are only on fixed days (I think Tuesday is the fixed day). This means Woollies can pack the truck full of deliveries for a number of clients and actually break even while delivering product.
In addition to the cost of running a vehicle, an internet-only grocery store would still have to face the cost of a depot, which also means building refrigerators and loading docks.
Me - I can't see how internet groceries actually save you anything. I'd prefer to walk down to the local shops and support a local family. Dagnabbit - that might mean getting some exercise!
Unfortunately, some of the things that have to be done to adapt a novel to movie form include dropping out some scenes that people might consider to be core to the plot.
For example, various revelations in the book, "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" include the fact that Gilderoy Lockhart was only ever good at charms magic, and that he was the only applicant for the position of teacher of Defence Against The Dark Arts.
Certainly, there are issues that J.K. Rowling doesn't tackle in the Harry Potter series - but there are many that she does. Harry is often in the situation of having to make a decision about some clear courses of action - but we never get inside his head to see what he's thinking. There are issues of heritage and race - the whole muggle/mudblood/squib deal, and Hagrid's half-giant heritage that is hidden yet so blatant.
Then again - when do we ever get inside Frodo's head in Lord Of The Rings? What racial issues arise in LoTR apart from hobbits being treated almost like children because of their height? The richness of character in J.R.R. Tolkien's work is mostly due to the environment the characters are placed in. None of the lead characters actually die - Gandalf miraculously survives the confrontation with the Balrog, and Frodo always does the right thing eventually.
Perhaps some people need to look for the story J.K. Rowlings is trying to tell, rather than the one they want to hear.
Yes, Harry Potter is a fraud - but so is any truly heroic figure I've heard about. Winston Churchill was a womanising imbiber. Sir Edmund Hillary was the second person to scale Mt. Everest. Albert Einstein only made it through Uni by borrowing his friends' notes. Draco Malfoy has all the advantages that Harry has - money, wizarding parents - but isn't as great because he doesn't build friendships. Crabbe and Goyle are only lackeys, serving Draco because the Malfoys are famous Death Eaters (or perhaps only because Draco pays them - that's never really addressed).
Re:Isn't this another "urban legend"?
on
Ants Invade iBook
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· Score: 1
The magnetic noise of a Motorola chip (68k or PPC) is much more aesthetically pleasing to ants than the harsh screeching of an Intel.
Kinda like the way humans prefer waterfalls to jackhammers. Same power levels, different styles of modulation.
Then, assuming they know which computer the suspect was at, match the IP's with the queries.
You've got it backwards.
The FBI isn't interested in finding out what queries have been made by dangerous suspects. What the FBI will be doing is looking for dangerous queries (people pulling out copies of "Catcher in the Rye" for example), and thus locating their next suspect.
So be careful about your book borrowing habits. Rather than borrowing books, buy them. Buy books from stores using only cash. Only buy one book per transaction. Buy your books from different stores. Never visit the same store twice in a row.
The easiest way to find out - if you have a firewall - is to count the traffic from your games machine while you're playing the game. Some ISPs have a "usage meter" which lets you see how many megabytes you've sent/received - this could also be useful to you.
Compare 15Mb/hour for a games like Diablo II to downloading a movie. Games are very low bandwidth compared to warez leechers. I switched to ADSL for low latency - we've had pay-per-megabyte plans in Australia since the first ISP.
Australian ISPs pay upstream for their bandwidth - and the ISPs are quite happy to pass the costs on to their customers. That's the way things go in a Capitalist economy. If you sell unlimited bandwidth, expect the user to use all the available bandwidth, all the time. I don't know why your ISPs made the assumption that people wouldn't comsume all the free resource. I don't think their business managers had their heads screwed on properly.
It's not just about making backup copies of flaky CDs (have you seen the crap that they're manufacturing these days?).
It's also about being able to listen to the music in the format that's most convenient for you.
When I buy a CD from The Music Store here in Canberra, the last thing I'm going to be listening to it in is an audio CD player. The CD goes into the CD tray of my Strawberry iMac, sits there for a few minutes, then gets put in its jewel case and sits on the shelf gathering dust.
Then I listen to my music on the speakers in my bedroom (connected to the iMac), or headphones downstairs (connected to my PC). Eventually I hope to be listening to the music on my iPod - but I have a iBook to buy first;)
Microsoft's DRM ideal means that I won't be able to do any of the above without continually asking permission from Microsoft to move my recorded music to the new player.
As soon as iTunes and iPod support Ogg Vorbis, my entire CD collection will come out of mothballs, and I'll be using Ogg Vorbis instead of patent-encumbered MPEG 2 Layer 3 encoding.
An ISP using an anti-spam list is exercising the will of its subscribers (freedom of association). If the subscriber wishes to receive email from open relays, they can find an ISP who doesn't filter, or else ask their ISP to not filter.
The Great Firewall of China is imposing the Government's will upon the citizens. This is taking away their citizens' rights to free association (though I'm not aware if China is a signatory to the United Nations Human Rights charter).
Jonadab didn't use the words "infinite supply", but he said just about the same thing: he/she claimed that there is no fixed amount of wealth.
Of course, the fact that Jonadab uses "wealth" to variously describe currency and capital does confuse the argument a little.
There are certainly fixed quantities of wealth. There are only a certain number of car factories, there are only a certain number of chip manufacturing plants - "production capital" is a finite number of things that are used to make goods or supply services. The same goes for "fixed capital" - which isn't really so fixed.
There is also a fixed quantity of money - the Federal Reserve makes sure of that, and is very careful about ensuring that counterfeit money is hard to make and quickly destroyed.
To get rich and strip the proletariat of their money and capital is relatively easy - keep selling them stuff they can't keep. Things like seeds that won't produce fertile plants, food that can only be eaten and not composted, or software that they only rent. Eventually they'll have to sell their houses to pay for their wheat, burgers, Microsoft Office XP and Monotype Corsiva.
Then you can rent them their houses too. Though these days it's more fashionable to refer to that as "outsourcing".
Slashdot Mirror
With some upstream providers charging the equivalent of $24/pa per IP address, there are ISPs that are considering doing this.
All their users live safely behind a NATed firewall. Send mail ougoing through a virus-scanning and rate-limited mail relay. Receive HTTP through a proxy-cache. Play games through application level proxies. The user will only notice the difference when they try to host games - that just won't work unless the game knows about SOCKS. Diablo II realms play works fine behind a NAT firewall. Quake III Arena works fine behind a NAT firewall, as long as you're willing to play on someone else's server.
Most IM programs work just great without direct peer-to-peer cracking... I mean... communication. MSN Messenger, Jabber, ICQ - they work just fine. Not being able to transfer files directly just means you won't be able to infect your computer with viruses by accepting "real nude photos" from some loser you've never met.
The number of support calls this plan eliminates ("my computer is broken - is that because of KaZaa?" or "dear abuse@isp, so-and-so is a spammer") is far in excess of the number of support calls it generates ("you bastards! I have the God given right to at least 5 unique IP addresses! What do you think I'm paying you $AUS80/month for? Don't try to tell me that 75% of your cash flow is taken up by infrastructure expenses! How dare you tell me that I can't send 2000 emails per minute!").
I can't wait till we can ship out something as simple as a dial-up router that is preconfigured to connect to our ISP, and provides ZeroConf/DHCP services internally. Maybe finally we'll have an end to those endless calls along the lines of, "why won't it let me connect when I don't type in my password?"... sheesh!
You want a unique IP address? I'll sell it to you, along with some bandwidth for you to use. When you can provide me with hostmaster@, abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, and register your own domain, I'll open up port 25 outgoing and go secondary for your DNS. Then when you start sending spam or viruses, I can point the finger at someone whose "God given right" to access the Internet just blew up in their faces, and laugh.
At that stage, you can bet you'll be back on consumer level Internet access again.
Oh no... please don't ever EVER recommend that someone install ZoneAlarm unless they're at least as clued as you are.
I had a client ring up the other day - his computer could connect to the net properly, but no traffic could get in or out. The PPP link would stay up because LCP echoes came back fine.
While frustratedly pulling the last remaining hairs out, I asked the user to read out to me the contents of the "Add/Remove Software" control panel. Amidst the usual cruft was "ZoneAlarm". I asked the user to uninstall ZoneAlarm, and everything went back to working normally.
I asked that user to please never install ZoneAlarm again.
The Regional Court of Munich stiffed SCO GmbH Germany for 10 thousand big ones, necaise SCO refused to STFU as they were told to yonks ago.
Tarent lawyer Till Hunter seemed quite proud of the outcome, especially since SCO's pissing and moaning about Linux users being a bunch of Intellectual Property scavengers was putting people off. The court went easy on them though, since the SCO brass claimed that they really had been trying to do the right thing (really!).
At the time that this story was being scratched out, noone from SCO was willing to stick their heads out and make a noise. They're probably all crying into the holes where their paychecks are supposed to be.
Ripper, mate!
Just be aware that the name "Oceania" is already used to describe the island group including Australia and New Zealand.
Certainly, the classic Unseen Enemy will no doubt be raised. But will the Government of the USA be so pig-headed as to suggest that as, "one nation under God", they're obviously more powerful than the Go'auld attack fleet?
I don't want to know how long it will take the Govt of the USA to stoop to staging flying-bomb attacks in order to convince the proletariat that the enemy really is at the gates, thus civil liberties should be restricted further...
I would have thought that the emergency beacons of ships lost in the ether between planets when their skip-drives failed would have counted as more interesting listening than the planet-bound commercial radio.
But that's just me.
RTFA.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the uninstaller leave half of the Xupiter spyware installed.
Running the uninstaller from the company who wrote the spyware is like responding to the "remove" link in spam emails.
Darth Vader was upset that Princess Leia wasn't buying into his sales pitch about EmpireOS. Princess Leia was most disappointed about the EULA for EmpireOS - especially the part where your home planet gets destroyed simply because Darth Vader suspected one or two people were running RebelOS.
So the licencing control gets tighter and tighter, and harder to comply to. Princess Leia comes up with this gem (I think I got it right): "The tighter you clench your fists, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"
I couldn't have put it better myself. In "The Real World" we have Bill Gates, who thinks that by making licencing more complicated, more people are likely to comply with it - but instead he'll find that more people look for alternatives that are easier to understand, and aren't accompanied by jack-booted storm troopers (sorry - audit teams).
One of the companies I support has a legal team who do nothing more than review Microsoft contracts, first to make sure that their department is willing to accept the contract, second to ensure that the terms of the contract are clear enough to give sysadmins guidelines on what can and cannot be legally done, and third to ensure that previous contracts are being complied with.
They are terrified of cutting a deal similar to the one Lando Calrissian thought he'd struck with the Empire. You know, the one that started out as "hand over Luke, and we'll leave you alone" to "hand over Luke, Han Solo, and a fair chunk of your annual profit, and we'll think about not destroying your business."
Switch to Open Source Software, and suddenly you're putting lots of lawyers out of business. Even better, you have more money left over from the extort... sorry, licence fees that you don't have to pay. You can sleep better at night, on a nicer bed too!
Having a certification means nothing. I've seen mechanics who are supposedly trained to diagnose the problems with my car, who in the process of attempting to figure out why my engine stutters at 3800RPM, proceed to damage the auto-choke, mess up the idle settings, and leave fan belts unmounted when starting the engine.
Just because you've received some form of Government mandated training, doesn't mean you're going to stick to the procedures you were trained in. Just because you can pass an exam, doesn't mean you really know what you're doing.
The only thing a certification means is that the certified person has expended the capital required to enter the market (they've overcome that barrier to entry).
If a certified/licenced/guaranteed mechanic causes problem that affect your life or livelihood, you'll just be suing their insurance company. Being certified doesn't mean that they won't make mistakes.
The only way to check that a mechanic is good at fixing your problem is to get them to try to fix your problem. I judge by reputation, not by certification.
So how is compulsory certification going to solve the problem of the shonky dealer? If you're going to be dishonest, does having an A+ certification mean anything to the client?
Having the required certification might give them a false sense of security, sure, but certification doesn't mean you're necessarily any more honest or competent than the next guy.
As far as I can see, the target audience of the geek.nz campaign is New Zealand geeks. Support from "Americans" won't matter diddly-squat, since the NZ domain commissioner only cares about NZ Citizens (ANZUS treaty or no).
So from the front page of the campaign web site, the entire "why should I care?" question has been answered.
The campaign doesn't have to answer your question of "why should I care?" - mainly because they don't care if you care. You have no impact in their problem space. You don't matter.
How does this watch compare to my Palm V?
The main reason I got the Palm V was to be an alarm clock. I kept missing appointments, even though I had them written in my DayRunner(tm) diary - I just never got into the habit of checking my diary every 15 minutes.
This watch would make life a little easier for me - as slim as the Palm V is, it's still something extra to bulk up my shirt/trouser/backpack pockets with.
The biggest drawback for me would be that the watch isn't designed to be a PDA by itself. It's almost like Fossil only wanted the watch to be a fancy alarm clock with address book function. So you'd have to have the watch as well as a PDA in order to get full functionality from it (using beamed business cards for example).
But for the original purpose that I bought the Palm V - reminding me of appointments (and putting out the trash, and leaving the computer game to go to bed) - this watch is just right. I don't think I'd be willing to pony up the $AU600 though - that kind of money would get a really nice watch from Casio.
Since I already have a PalmOS device, this watch wouldn't really be much use to me. If I didn't have a PalmOS device, I'd consider buying it, if it was half the price.
I wonder if the lack of poor quality MPEGs will inspire Mac OS X users to go out and create their own content? After all - if you have the tools such as iMovie, the iLink video camera, a little creativity and some time (since you're not wasting time watching movies you've already seen), it's not too hard to imagine you'd at least experiment with making a movie, is it?
No doubt when you've made your movie, you'll share it with your housemate. What about the rest of the world?
Imagine when Gnutella is full of home-made movies - we'll have an entire community based around producing, viewing and critiquing home-made movies. Maybe one day we'll have a "Videoforge" component of the OSDN network?
Perhaps I'm being a little too optimistic, but I expect that between the affordablility of production equipment, the ease of use of Apple's movie making software, and the lack of conventient alternatives, we'll see many more independent movie artists flexing their wings.
The Movielink people are interested in making the most amount of money possible, as quickly as possible. Since Windows (various flavours) has such a huge market share, most developers interested in making a quick buck will only develop their software or service for Windows.
Platforms like Mac OS or Linux lose out in the quick-bucks scheme because their market share is so small that it's not profitable to provide the service to those people.
I don't think the argument is really about DRM - it's about the cost-effectiveness of developing anything for low-market-share operating systems.
Either of those actions void the basic assumptions of the CAPP (pdf) - in particular, A.NO_EVIL_ADM and A.COOP.
A.NO_EVIL_ADM is the assumption that noone is trying to break the system.
A.COOP is the assumption that everyone using the system is working in harmony to support the aims of the system.
To get the cost of delivery down, they'd have to have many customers on the same route.
As an example, in Australia the typical running costs for a Ford Transit van would be about $0.80/km - this assumes you're amortising the vehicle finance and insurance over the km life of the vehicle. Then you have to figure the cost of the driver (eg: $12/hr).
Assume your customer live 5km away from the shipping area. That's a 10km round trip which probably takes about 45min including dropping off the goods, meaning you should be charging $17 for that delivery.
The local Woolworths (Woden, Canberra, Australia) does Internet groceries, but deliveries are only on fixed days (I think Tuesday is the fixed day). This means Woollies can pack the truck full of deliveries for a number of clients and actually break even while delivering product.
In addition to the cost of running a vehicle, an internet-only grocery store would still have to face the cost of a depot, which also means building refrigerators and loading docks.
Me - I can't see how internet groceries actually save you anything. I'd prefer to walk down to the local shops and support a local family. Dagnabbit - that might mean getting some exercise!
Unfortunately, some of the things that have to be done to adapt a novel to movie form include dropping out some scenes that people might consider to be core to the plot.
For example, various revelations in the book, "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" include the fact that Gilderoy Lockhart was only ever good at charms magic, and that he was the only applicant for the position of teacher of Defence Against The Dark Arts.
Certainly, there are issues that J.K. Rowling doesn't tackle in the Harry Potter series - but there are many that she does. Harry is often in the situation of having to make a decision about some clear courses of action - but we never get inside his head to see what he's thinking. There are issues of heritage and race - the whole muggle/mudblood/squib deal, and Hagrid's half-giant heritage that is hidden yet so blatant.
Then again - when do we ever get inside Frodo's head in Lord Of The Rings? What racial issues arise in LoTR apart from hobbits being treated almost like children because of their height? The richness of character in J.R.R. Tolkien's work is mostly due to the environment the characters are placed in. None of the lead characters actually die - Gandalf miraculously survives the confrontation with the Balrog, and Frodo always does the right thing eventually.
Perhaps some people need to look for the story J.K. Rowlings is trying to tell, rather than the one they want to hear.
Yes, Harry Potter is a fraud - but so is any truly heroic figure I've heard about. Winston Churchill was a womanising imbiber. Sir Edmund Hillary was the second person to scale Mt. Everest. Albert Einstein only made it through Uni by borrowing his friends' notes. Draco Malfoy has all the advantages that Harry has - money, wizarding parents - but isn't as great because he doesn't build friendships. Crabbe and Goyle are only lackeys, serving Draco because the Malfoys are famous Death Eaters (or perhaps only because Draco pays them - that's never really addressed).
The magnetic noise of a Motorola chip (68k or PPC) is much more aesthetically pleasing to ants than the harsh screeching of an Intel.
Kinda like the way humans prefer waterfalls to jackhammers. Same power levels, different styles of modulation.
They're undocumented creatures.
You've got it backwards.
The FBI isn't interested in finding out what queries have been made by dangerous suspects. What the FBI will be doing is looking for dangerous queries (people pulling out copies of "Catcher in the Rye" for example), and thus locating their next suspect.
So be careful about your book borrowing habits. Rather than borrowing books, buy them. Buy books from stores using only cash. Only buy one book per transaction. Buy your books from different stores. Never visit the same store twice in a row.
And remember - trust no-one.
Diablo II, for example, uses about 15Mb/hour.
The easiest way to find out - if you have a firewall - is to count the traffic from your games machine while you're playing the game. Some ISPs have a "usage meter" which lets you see how many megabytes you've sent/received - this could also be useful to you.
Compare 15Mb/hour for a games like Diablo II to downloading a movie. Games are very low bandwidth compared to warez leechers. I switched to ADSL for low latency - we've had pay-per-megabyte plans in Australia since the first ISP.
Australian ISPs pay upstream for their bandwidth - and the ISPs are quite happy to pass the costs on to their customers. That's the way things go in a Capitalist economy. If you sell unlimited bandwidth, expect the user to use all the available bandwidth, all the time. I don't know why your ISPs made the assumption that people wouldn't comsume all the free resource. I don't think their business managers had their heads screwed on properly.
The target customer base for Palladium is anyone who uses Microsoft software - such as Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office or Microsoft Media Player.
The eventual aim of Palladium to to make software and content rent-only, thus removing the first-sale doctrine.
They used the name Palladium to reflect the fact that compulsory DRM will be costly to everyone.
It's not just about making backup copies of flaky CDs (have you seen the crap that they're manufacturing these days?).
;)
It's also about being able to listen to the music in the format that's most convenient for you.
When I buy a CD from The Music Store here in Canberra, the last thing I'm going to be listening to it in is an audio CD player. The CD goes into the CD tray of my Strawberry iMac, sits there for a few minutes, then gets put in its jewel case and sits on the shelf gathering dust.
Then I listen to my music on the speakers in my bedroom (connected to the iMac), or headphones downstairs (connected to my PC). Eventually I hope to be listening to the music on my iPod - but I have a iBook to buy first
Microsoft's DRM ideal means that I won't be able to do any of the above without continually asking permission from Microsoft to move my recorded music to the new player.
As soon as iTunes and iPod support Ogg Vorbis, my entire CD collection will come out of mothballs, and I'll be using Ogg Vorbis instead of patent-encumbered MPEG 2 Layer 3 encoding.
An ISP using an anti-spam list is exercising the will of its subscribers (freedom of association). If the subscriber wishes to receive email from open relays, they can find an ISP who doesn't filter, or else ask their ISP to not filter.
The Great Firewall of China is imposing the Government's will upon the citizens. This is taking away their citizens' rights to free association (though I'm not aware if China is a signatory to the United Nations Human Rights charter).
Jonadab didn't use the words "infinite supply", but he said just about the same thing: he/she claimed that there is no fixed amount of wealth.
Of course, the fact that Jonadab uses "wealth" to variously describe currency and capital does confuse the argument a little.
There are certainly fixed quantities of wealth. There are only a certain number of car factories, there are only a certain number of chip manufacturing plants - "production capital" is a finite number of things that are used to make goods or supply services. The same goes for "fixed capital" - which isn't really so fixed.
There is also a fixed quantity of money - the Federal Reserve makes sure of that, and is very careful about ensuring that counterfeit money is hard to make and quickly destroyed.
To get rich and strip the proletariat of their money and capital is relatively easy - keep selling them stuff they can't keep. Things like seeds that won't produce fertile plants, food that can only be eaten and not composted, or software that they only rent. Eventually they'll have to sell their houses to pay for their wheat, burgers, Microsoft Office XP and Monotype Corsiva.
Then you can rent them their houses too. Though these days it's more fashionable to refer to that as "outsourcing".