In fact, the first thing I'm going to do after I purchase the new VHS movie I want today, is to download *legally* a DivXed copy (save myself the trouble of digitization).
Just remember that it's not legal for you to download and use any content that isn't part of the original VHS tape you bought, like deleted scenes, director commentary, or anything else added only to the digital format; those are all covered by separate copyright.
"Sir, the teleport is complete; you're now really in Paris. If you'll step this way, we can destroy this body. Yes, I'm sure. No, you're not really you, just a leftover body. Really, now, you're overreacting!"
Re:I'm not getting in one of those things
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Laser Beam Teleported
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· Score: 3, Funny
What if they could scan the original you, make sure they have two or three backups first, and confirm several long checksums of the backups versus the copied you, before they killed the original you? Would it be acceptable then?
Um. If I way up after someone makes a copy of me elsewhere, that's proof enough that that person is not me.
"We're not killing you, just turning off your body here; you're really now in Paris. Trust me. Be still!"
No, this person would be like you, but wouldn't be you.
Think about it: using the technology, you could make multiple instances of yourself; perhaps even delay their creation through time, if you had enough storage space you could set aside to hold the pattern. Any and all copies would think themselves to be you, assuming that memories properly transfer. However, you would cease to exist if you were destroyed in the creation of any copy or copies.
Taking into account what the result of other class-action lawsuits will be, I'm afraid that if this one is successful, the result will be that I'll get a coupon for a free Magic Marker (to modify my affected "music discs," of course).
I put the Harry Potter Widescreen version in my DVD ROM drive, and it asked me what region I wanted to set my DVD ROM to, and that I had only 5 more times I could change it. Maybe I've just been playing all-region discs since my reformat a few weeks back, but I remember the 5 number from when I set it up over a year ago, as well.
off topic: Also, it has this buggy "InterActual" software fluff it tries to install on my system... I let it install, but it never sees a DVD in my DVD drive if there's a CD in my CD drive, and there's no easy way for me to hardcode what drive it should be looking at.
back on topic: My guess is they know that people have figured out how to suck the VOBs and convert them if they really want to be mean evil people, and have decided not to waste the money right now. I'm sure this doesn't mean they have given up on protection altogether; they'll just make the next DVD-replacement format a bit wackier, I'm sure. Frankly, I'm all for them releasing their best formatted stuff with protection, as long as it doesn't interfere with the playback quality. While there may be some grey area in the concept of viewing a screener version of a movie to decide if you want to pay to see it, there is NO grey area when it comes to directly trading ripped DVDs (or CDs, for that matter).
Now, is it just me, or does the phrase "underwater lightning" send images into your brain of tons of rich people floating dead on the surface of their new hottub?
No, it reminds me of "ball lightning," which naturally occurs at certain private moments but can leave a disgusting film on the side...
Mallory can inject her code into the client application and crack any "secure" protocol unless the hardware is trusted, and that can only happen if Congress passes the CBDTPA. Do you really want to give up all fair-use rights just to prevent online gamers from cheating?
Damian, give some links. I fail to see how hardware can only be trusted if it's got government-approved DRM - But I see you've been using that acronym a lot lately, so you must consider yourself an expert on the issues. And Mallory? Wasn't she the dumb older sister of Alex P. Keaton? Never thought she'd become a coder... =)
If (and this is a big if) some other provider wants to get in on the action, the first provider (for all intents and purposes a monopoly) can easly squeeze the new provider by dropping thier price and or loosening up the control over the content to passify their current clients.
If the threat of a competitor gives a monopolist incentive to provide service that better meets the needs of consumers of that service, then it is essentially behaving competitively to the market, anyway. Sure, they do retain some monopolist power in an economic sense, because of the barriers to competition, but new technologies (as mentioned in the story, wireless, etc) erode those barriers constantly. However, the real problem monopolies are those created by the FCC when it sells spectrum licenses, because until the new whiz-bang spread-spectrum chips really get going, the wireless data market will stay more limited than the telco and cable markets have been.
I hate to say it, but there needs to be strong regulation of at least the last mile or there will never be any competition.
As long as you cling to the idea that there has to be a physical last mile, probably so. The way things work now, even if you have many DSL vendors with access to the DSLAM in your area (or whatever equivalent exists in the cable world), you can still only subscribe to one at a time. You can't use both Verizon and Speakeasy, for example. However, if you eliminate the dependence on poking a hole in your wall for each connection, fiber or copper, and go with wireless, you have another order of options, entirely. Suddenly you allow for the creation of routers that can shunt your data over whichever wireless provider has the best rate and QoS at any given time. If one wireless provider has crappy service, there will be others (if we can ever get rid of the idea that one company has to license one block of the spectrum, instead of everyone using spread-spectrum devices) who can pick up the slack, without you having to wait for customer service to call you back or for technicians to come fix a busted circuit.
By the way, this is where the internet really becomes able to "route around damage," unlike the way things are today, where, if you're not a big business, you rely on one ISP to get you to the internet. If you feel monopolists are giving you the squeeze right now, then you should feel compelled to convert everyone to wireless, like I'm doing =)
Disclaimer: I don't own any wireless stock, and in fact, I own JDSU stock, which I'm down 90% on so far, and will continue to lose money on, if people don't use more fiber. But all those wireless providers will need OC-48s and above, hopefully =) Or you could just take that as a sign that I have no idea what is going on, and ignore me =)
What's the difference in the cost of operations between a mono-culture and a shop running two or more vendors' OSs? $32,593.12
I find it hard to believe you could get an experienced, committed, and loyal *nix system admin for that amount of money, especially when many NT admins in all-NT shops make $50k or so. On the other hand, if that's added to what the current system admin makes... call me =)
If the dongle is serialized, anyone who does manage to hack it (either to not require the dongle per se, or to still pull off a cheat) can be banned from the server by serial #.
Um, not exactly. The cracks/cheats would probably not be tied to any specific serial number to work, and all they could do is say "if we catch you cheating, we'll close your account," which they say for many MMORPGs anyway. Otherwise, if they block only by serial, you could just intercept the serial reporting and send a bogus serial to the central servers.
No, having more secure protocols and having the server not tell each client what others nearby are doing (unless they are in sight) is a much better way to go, as mentioned previously in a comment about "aim cheats."
Sorry, but they probably will need to stand at the rear of the "I need a job" line, like the rest of us.
Is this where the line ends? I just got laid off on Friday =)
However, i do admire their dedication to their jobs. It's either customer loyalty or "Hell no. Not again. HELL NO." Mentality of losing a job.
Yah, well. The market sucks for admins in general right now, and at least while they volunteer to stay on the job, their skills are kept fresh. Plus, think of all the free soda they would miss! =)
No, seriously, system admins can build their own boxes at home (or buy cheap discarded Suns) during their downtime, and keep practicing and learning new stuff. It's a bit harder for network engineers - most of us can't buy multiple Ciscos big enough to run BGP and ISIS on, much less any Junipers, etc. Staying with the toys until they are made to go home is a decent plan.
Besides, we don't know the full labor situation there; there was mention of the government and labor unions in one of the articles, and so they may be retaining some legal status by staying there.
Yes, but first you have to get to "the Internet" itself. Taking down KPNQWest's backbone will take down any customer who is not multi-homed; that is, those who do not have transit through other providers besides KPNQWest.
Oh, and for those customer who are multihomed, they're going to see surges in latency & packet loss as their other providers try to keep up with the demand from all their, uh, "peers." =)
If someone sold you a software product and told you that you couldn't modify it in any way or let anyone else use it while you were using it, or make more than one copy, or...
You didn't pay attention, did you?
Over-the-air broadcasts are entirely free, and no contract is needed to get them. I feel a moral obligation not to violate fair use by redistributing and claiming it's my own stuff, but that's it.
The cable company I went through never told me I couldn't timeshift or edit material for my own use, only that I could not resell it or show it as a public venue. Private parties are okay... again, nobody says I can't edit things for my own use.
As far as software goes, no, I don't modify software beyond what I'm allowed to do (.ini files,.rc files, whatever) and I don't give copies to others. The terms of all the software I buy let me make multiple copies, as long as I only use one copy at a time (laptop & server, only use the laptop while away, etc.)
While I know this is done by map companies, can you prove it is done in Trivial Pursuit? I would really like to see a written statement of the question and the incorrect and correct answers. Not disagreeing with you, I'd just like to see it. There have been a few times when I swore I was right but the card said different
It's in one of the books in the series called "Big Secrets." I don't have the books on hand (they are at my parents'), but the reference does show at least one question with the wrong answer, etc. You can probably find the books at a library.
They agree to show a show, you agree to watch the commercials. It's a concept as old as the Magna Carta.
Surely you are being sarcastic?
I didn't enter any contract when I bought my TV or when I had cable, that stated that I agreed to watch anything. The cable contract essentially limited me to use within my own place and no resale of the material, but that was it. With open-air broadcasting, there is definitely no contract - the broadcasters are sending their material out into the public airwaves, and I certainly don't see a problem with collecting it for personal use any way I feel like it.
The idea that advertisers on TV are buying eyeballs and have the right to be intrusive about what goes onto a machine I buy to collect the stream from the public airwaves is nonsense. Look at the print industries - advertisers buy space, but don't demand that you sit and read their ads, even though you paid for the paper or magazine.
I can't wait until these self-delusional pirates are given the smackdown by a clueful judge.
If someone made a machine that recognized and clipped the ad-only pages from newspapers or magazines and mulched them, do you think the advertisers would/should sue? Would they have a moral leg to stand on? Keep in mind that this is in the print industries, where you at least you generally pay for your own copy, and not the broadcast media, where it's just thrown out there.
Yea and it would really screw up the tribial persuit game.
You do know that some answers in "Trivial Pursuit" are wrong, right? This is done deliberately, as an anti-copying measure, in case someone tries to knock-off the game ("see, they're using the same wrong answers we use").
Much more likely the answer would be F., whoever paid the game company more to make up the answer =)
Heh. Well. I was actually geeky in all definitions. I moved across the country, became a network engineer (just got laid off, but I'm the last one of my industry friends that did, so that's an accomplishment, right?) making about twice what I would have made as an elementary school teacher (which I may go do now, actually). So I have to say that my social skills have improved at least to the point where I can get by. But I don't recall being friends with anyone in junior high or high school (we moved into a much more expensive neighborhood, in junior high, and I was made fun of from day 1 for my "poor" clothes, by people I found out later were living on welfare).
It was just a bad scene, all around, and it seems that if I go back it will be to try to prove something to people I shouldn't care a bit about. I might go in a couple of years to "network" if I'm out of a job again, but... going to a party full of people I either can't or don't want to remember sounds like a waste of time. Maybe if I was bored and lived nearby, I could just treat it as crashing a party full of strangers. Or go and observe what types of lives all the people who stayed behind ended up with, and reassure myself that while I'm no CEO, star actor, or Nobel Prize winner, I did relatively well. But I should be comparing myself to my goals, not to what others have done.
Only thing is, I have the same feelings about college, too, but I will probably go to my 10th reunion, there. I'm not sure why, maybe to see if anyone actually uses their degrees in their fields? =)
The diference between geeks and jocks is a unique American invention.
You're right. We used to say "dumb jocks" as a pejorative for someone whose only success was on the field or in the gym, but "dumb" became seemingly redundant as sports became more about beating other people than about winning. That's not to say that smart athletes don't exist, here, of course, but it seems that only in smaller schools, these days, can you find that the math whiz is also the star basketball player, etc., simply because many people will pick just a single thing to be good at now.
One more reason why I've never been to a "class reunion" - how they treated us geeks.
I for one, harbor a deep hatred towards the way schools treat atheletes vs. the way they treat scholars.
It's funny you should say this - when I was on my high school'sAcademic Decathlon team, our principal and our main coach decided to applaud us with letter jackets at a mandatory pep rally, before our big state competition. We did appreciate the sincerity and thoughtfulness of those adults, but when we walked into the gym, people booed and hissed, some team of jocks (who were losers competitively as well as academically) were openly making fun of us as they left the floor, and the cheerleaders just couldn't stop giggling enough to really cheer us. For the rest of the year I got teased a bit about where my "letter" was for my letter jacket, and what sport I played, etc. At least they were good for showing off to the other geeks that "our school cares." (Yeah, right!) But if I hadn't made other memories outside of school with that jacket later, i'd have put it in a homeless shelter donation bin long ago.
Oh, yeah, the next year (after I graduated), the team won the national competition - but I didn't hear of them getting much more respect, then, either... but how about that golf team!
Why don't the cable comanies just be honest about it and sell me a 70kbps pipe for $50/month, a 150 kbps pipe for $100 a month and a 1.5Mbps pipe for $1000/month?
Because they are marketing based on max throughput, not on constant rate. If they sold you constant rate 70kbps, and you ended up using only 35kkbps, you'd ask for 1/2 your money back. But within those days, you might have hours of virtual dead time and then spikes as you download the latest isos, or whatever.
Its quite likely you would be much better off with 2 channel-bonded 56k dialups if you are a heavy bandwidth user, while it is the light users who want small amounts of high-speed net access that benefit most from 'broadband'
It's that kind of thinking (bonding data channels) that got ISDN started. =)
The cost of producing bandwith is fixed, it is not three times as expensive to give someone 1.5 MBps than.5 MBps. It's not electricity where there is an acutal added cost in producing more.
Wrong. Bandwidth is a variable cost over time. Let's say I'm an ISP with DSL customers. (Okay, so I'm nuts.) If I am maxxing out the oc-XXs on my regional aggregates and my backbone because of warez puppies, I have to lease more lines from the telco. That's not free. There are both setup fees and recurring fixed costs for each circuit. Not only do I have to buy more lines, I have to get more cards for the Junipers and Ciscos, run BGP to the extra interfaces (causing even greater overhead), and I may have to get additional routers as well. If I start saturating my private peers, then I have to renegotiate peering arrangements with them, which can also be a pain in the ass all by itself.
This can and does mean the difference between reasonable profit and big loss, for most companies.
By the way, don't assume that a bigger pipe is always going to be priced by the telco less than or equal to the equivalent bandwidth across smaller pipes. In many areas, there are special rate plans in effect, with max amounts the telcos are able to charge for one or two types of circuits, like frame relay or 0-mile T-1s, etc. The telco makes up what it thinks it is missing in revenue by raising the rates on higher bandwidth circuits.
Dude. You hit the nail on the head. A couple of weeks ago I was at Fry's looking for an s-video to RCA adapter, and the geek with the name badge said he was sure they didn't carry those. The closest things they had were some s-video to composite adapters... =)
What you say rings true; however, I just saw a one-off magazine down at Fry's that touted that it was "Timeless Star Trek." There were three captains on the cover.
Can you guess which three?
Kirk, Picard, and... Archer?
Ugh. Not only does the target market appear to be misogynist, there's probably also racism involved. Janeway and Sisko each have more "right" to be on the cover than Archer. No offense to the actor who plays Archer, but the fewest people seem to like his show or his character.
But God help us if anyone but white guys are on that cover, right? The market segmentation seems clearer if you can assume that publisher tested covers in focus groups before picking one, and that the artist didn't just say "I don't know how to draw those two" or "I don't know who they are."
The "Babylonian" reference may at first seem apt: the towers were built 'to the heavens' (well, pretty high) and a lack of communication and understanding among peoples led to their downfall.
However, the underlying, unspoken subtext of a comparison between us and Babylon is that we displeased God. Remember, in the Bible at least (there's other versions in other histories/religions), God was displeased, and the language confusion among the peoples was caused in order to bring us down.
What this logo basically tells the world (or at least those who have an understanding of the mythos) isn't that we're a great nation and metter communication would have helped us - it's that we went against God, and this is how we paid.
This sounds a lot like those right-wing extremists who tried to blame the attack on 'communists' and homosexuals in our country making God upset.
Now, I feel, like many people do, that our country has done a great many things wrong: setting policy based on oil needs and not human rights, keeping some smaller countries' governments (including some democracies) destabilized in order to serve our own interests, etc. However, just as I don't think that we can claim "God is on our side," neither do I think anyone can claim that God isn't.
This logo is offensive. That it shows the half-thought-out mentality of some of the people in charge at our governmental agencies should be a cause for alarm, not applause. We have been called Babylon by many people with grievances against us, and it seems our leaders are reveling in the name.
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In fact, the first thing I'm going to do after I purchase the new VHS movie I want today, is to download *legally* a DivXed copy (save myself the trouble of digitization).
Just remember that it's not legal for you to download and use any content that isn't part of the original VHS tape you bought, like deleted scenes, director commentary, or anything else added only to the digital format; those are all covered by separate copyright.
According to who's definition of equality?
You just don't get it, do you?
"Sir, the teleport is complete; you're now really in Paris. If you'll step this way, we can destroy this body. Yes, I'm sure. No, you're not really you, just a leftover body. Really, now, you're overreacting!"
What if they could scan the original you, make sure they have two or three backups first, and confirm several long checksums of the backups versus the copied you, before they killed the original you? Would it be acceptable then?
Um. If I way up after someone makes a copy of me elsewhere, that's proof enough that that person is not me.
"We're not killing you, just turning off your body here; you're really now in Paris. Trust me. Be still!"
No, this person would be like you, but wouldn't be you.
Think about it: using the technology, you could make multiple instances of yourself; perhaps even delay their creation through time, if you had enough storage space you could set aside to hold the pattern. Any and all copies would think themselves to be you, assuming that memories properly transfer. However, you would cease to exist if you were destroyed in the creation of any copy or copies.
Taking into account what the result of other class-action lawsuits will be, I'm afraid that if this one is successful, the result will be that I'll get a coupon for a free Magic Marker (to modify my affected "music discs," of course).
I put the Harry Potter Widescreen version in my DVD ROM drive, and it asked me what region I wanted to set my DVD ROM to, and that I had only 5 more times I could change it. Maybe I've just been playing all-region discs since my reformat a few weeks back, but I remember the 5 number from when I set it up over a year ago, as well.
off topic: Also, it has this buggy "InterActual" software fluff it tries to install on my system... I let it install, but it never sees a DVD in my DVD drive if there's a CD in my CD drive, and there's no easy way for me to hardcode what drive it should be looking at.
back on topic: My guess is they know that people have figured out how to suck the VOBs and convert them if they really want to be mean evil people, and have decided not to waste the money right now. I'm sure this doesn't mean they have given up on protection altogether; they'll just make the next DVD-replacement format a bit wackier, I'm sure. Frankly, I'm all for them releasing their best formatted stuff with protection, as long as it doesn't interfere with the playback quality. While there may be some grey area in the concept of viewing a screener version of a movie to decide if you want to pay to see it, there is NO grey area when it comes to directly trading ripped DVDs (or CDs, for that matter).
Now, is it just me, or does the phrase "underwater lightning" send images into your brain of tons of rich people floating dead on the surface of their new hottub?
No, it reminds me of "ball lightning," which naturally occurs at certain private moments but can leave a disgusting film on the side...
Mallory can inject her code into the client application and crack any "secure" protocol unless the hardware is trusted, and that can only happen if Congress passes the CBDTPA. Do you really want to give up all fair-use rights just to prevent online gamers from cheating?
Damian, give some links. I fail to see how hardware can only be trusted if it's got government-approved DRM - But I see you've been using that acronym a lot lately, so you must consider yourself an expert on the issues. And Mallory? Wasn't she the dumb older sister of Alex P. Keaton? Never thought she'd become a coder... =)
If (and this is a big if) some other provider wants to get in on the action, the first provider (for all intents and purposes a monopoly) can easly squeeze the new provider by dropping thier price and or loosening up the control over the content to passify their current clients.
If the threat of a competitor gives a monopolist incentive to provide service that better meets the needs of consumers of that service, then it is essentially behaving competitively to the market, anyway. Sure, they do retain some monopolist power in an economic sense, because of the barriers to competition, but new technologies (as mentioned in the story, wireless, etc) erode those barriers constantly. However, the real problem monopolies are those created by the FCC when it sells spectrum licenses, because until the new whiz-bang spread-spectrum chips really get going, the wireless data market will stay more limited than the telco and cable markets have been.
I hate to say it, but there needs to be strong regulation of at least the last mile or there will never be any competition.
As long as you cling to the idea that there has to be a physical last mile, probably so. The way things work now, even if you have many DSL vendors with access to the DSLAM in your area (or whatever equivalent exists in the cable world), you can still only subscribe to one at a time. You can't use both Verizon and Speakeasy, for example. However, if you eliminate the dependence on poking a hole in your wall for each connection, fiber or copper, and go with wireless, you have another order of options, entirely. Suddenly you allow for the creation of routers that can shunt your data over whichever wireless provider has the best rate and QoS at any given time. If one wireless provider has crappy service, there will be others (if we can ever get rid of the idea that one company has to license one block of the spectrum, instead of everyone using spread-spectrum devices) who can pick up the slack, without you having to wait for customer service to call you back or for technicians to come fix a busted circuit.
By the way, this is where the internet really becomes able to "route around damage," unlike the way things are today, where, if you're not a big business, you rely on one ISP to get you to the internet. If you feel monopolists are giving you the squeeze right now, then you should feel compelled to convert everyone to wireless, like I'm doing =)
Disclaimer: I don't own any wireless stock, and in fact, I own JDSU stock, which I'm down 90% on so far, and will continue to lose money on, if people don't use more fiber. But all those wireless providers will need OC-48s and above, hopefully =) Or you could just take that as a sign that I have no idea what is going on, and ignore me =)
What's the difference in the cost of operations between a mono-culture and a shop running two or more vendors' OSs?
$32,593.12
I find it hard to believe you could get an experienced, committed, and loyal *nix system admin for that amount of money, especially when many NT admins in all-NT shops make $50k or so. On the other hand, if that's added to what the current system admin makes... call me =)
If the dongle is serialized, anyone who does manage to hack it (either to not require the dongle per se, or to still pull off a cheat) can be banned from the server by serial #.
Um, not exactly. The cracks/cheats would probably not be tied to any specific serial number to work, and all they could do is say "if we catch you cheating, we'll close your account," which they say for many MMORPGs anyway. Otherwise, if they block only by serial, you could just intercept the serial reporting and send a bogus serial to the central servers.
No, having more secure protocols and having the server not tell each client what others nearby are doing (unless they are in sight) is a much better way to go, as mentioned previously in a comment about "aim cheats."
Sorry, but they probably will need to stand at the rear of the "I need a job" line, like the rest of us.
Is this where the line ends? I just got laid off on Friday =)
However, i do admire their dedication to their jobs. It's either customer loyalty or "Hell no. Not again. HELL NO." Mentality of losing a job.
Yah, well. The market sucks for admins in general right now, and at least while they volunteer to stay on the job, their skills are kept fresh. Plus, think of all the free soda they would miss! =)
No, seriously, system admins can build their own boxes at home (or buy cheap discarded Suns) during their downtime, and keep practicing and learning new stuff. It's a bit harder for network engineers - most of us can't buy multiple Ciscos big enough to run BGP and ISIS on, much less any Junipers, etc. Staying with the toys until they are made to go home is a decent plan.
Besides, we don't know the full labor situation there; there was mention of the government and labor unions in one of the articles, and so they may be retaining some legal status by staying there.
I thought the Internet routed around damage?
Yes, but first you have to get to "the Internet" itself. Taking down KPNQWest's backbone will take down any customer who is not multi-homed; that is, those who do not have transit through other providers besides KPNQWest.
Oh, and for those customer who are multihomed, they're going to see surges in latency & packet loss as their other providers try to keep up with the demand from all their, uh, "peers." =)
If someone sold you a software product and told you that you couldn't modify it in any way or let anyone else use it while you were using it, or make more than one copy, or...
.rc files, whatever) and I don't give copies to others. The terms of all the software I buy let me make multiple copies, as long as I only use one copy at a time (laptop & server, only use the laptop while away, etc.)
You didn't pay attention, did you?
Over-the-air broadcasts are entirely free, and no contract is needed to get them. I feel a moral obligation not to violate fair use by redistributing and claiming it's my own stuff, but that's it.
The cable company I went through never told me I couldn't timeshift or edit material for my own use, only that I could not resell it or show it as a public venue. Private parties are okay... again, nobody says I can't edit things for my own use.
As far as software goes, no, I don't modify software beyond what I'm allowed to do (.ini files,
While I know this is done by map companies, can you prove it is done in Trivial Pursuit? I would really like to see a written statement of the question and the incorrect and correct answers. Not disagreeing with you, I'd just like to see it. There have been a few times when I swore I was right but the card said different
It's in one of the books in the series called "Big Secrets."
I don't have the books on hand (they are at my parents'), but the reference does show at least one question with the wrong answer, etc. You can probably find the books at a library.
They agree to show a show, you agree to watch the commercials. It's a concept as old as the Magna Carta.
Surely you are being sarcastic?
I didn't enter any contract when I bought my TV or when I had cable, that stated that I agreed to watch anything. The cable contract essentially limited me to use within my own place and no resale of the material, but that was it. With open-air broadcasting, there is definitely no contract - the broadcasters are sending their material out into the public airwaves, and I certainly don't see a problem with collecting it for personal use any way I feel like it.
The idea that advertisers on TV are buying eyeballs and have the right to be intrusive about what goes onto a machine I buy to collect the stream from the public airwaves is nonsense. Look at the print industries - advertisers buy space, but don't demand that you sit and read their ads, even though you paid for the paper or magazine.
I can't wait until these self-delusional pirates are given the smackdown by a clueful judge.
If someone made a machine that recognized and clipped the ad-only pages from newspapers or magazines and mulched them, do you think the advertisers would/should sue? Would they have a moral leg to stand on? Keep in mind that this is in the print industries, where you at least you generally pay for your own copy, and not the broadcast media, where it's just thrown out there.
Yea and it would really screw up the tribial persuit game.
You do know that some answers in "Trivial Pursuit" are wrong, right?
This is done deliberately, as an anti-copying measure, in case someone tries to knock-off the game ("see, they're using the same wrong answers we use").
Much more likely the answer would be F., whoever paid the game company more to make up the answer =)
Heh. Well. I was actually geeky in all definitions. I moved across the country, became a network engineer (just got laid off, but I'm the last one of my industry friends that did, so that's an accomplishment, right?) making about twice what I would have made as an elementary school teacher (which I may go do now, actually). So I have to say that my social skills have improved at least to the point where I can get by. But I don't recall being friends with anyone in junior high or high school (we moved into a much more expensive neighborhood, in junior high, and I was made fun of from day 1 for my "poor" clothes, by people I found out later were living on welfare).
It was just a bad scene, all around, and it seems that if I go back it will be to try to prove something to people I shouldn't care a bit about. I might go in a couple of years to "network" if I'm out of a job again, but... going to a party full of people I either can't or don't want to remember sounds like a waste of time. Maybe if I was bored and lived nearby, I could just treat it as crashing a party full of strangers. Or go and observe what types of lives all the people who stayed behind ended up with, and reassure myself that while I'm no CEO, star actor, or Nobel Prize winner, I did relatively well. But I should be comparing myself to my goals, not to what others have done.
Only thing is, I have the same feelings about college, too, but I will probably go to my 10th reunion, there. I'm not sure why, maybe to see if anyone actually uses their degrees in their fields? =)
The diference between geeks and jocks is a unique American invention.
You're right. We used to say "dumb jocks" as a pejorative for someone whose only success was on the field or in the gym, but "dumb" became seemingly redundant as sports became more about beating other people than about winning. That's not to say that smart athletes don't exist, here, of course, but it seems that only in smaller schools, these days, can you find that the math whiz is also the star basketball player, etc., simply because many people will pick just a single thing to be good at now.
One more reason why I've never been to a "class reunion" - how they treated us geeks.
I for one, harbor a deep hatred towards the way schools treat atheletes vs. the way they treat scholars.
It's funny you should say this - when I was on my high school's Academic Decathlon team, our principal and our main coach decided to applaud us with letter jackets at a mandatory pep rally, before our big state competition. We did appreciate the sincerity and thoughtfulness of those adults, but when we walked into the gym, people booed and hissed, some team of jocks (who were losers competitively as well as academically) were openly making fun of us as they left the floor, and the cheerleaders just couldn't stop giggling enough to really cheer us. For the rest of the year I got teased a bit about where my "letter" was for my letter jacket, and what sport I played, etc. At least they were good for showing off to the other geeks that "our school cares." (Yeah, right!) But if I hadn't made other memories outside of school with that jacket later, i'd have put it in a homeless shelter donation bin long ago.
Oh, yeah, the next year (after I graduated), the team won the national competition - but I didn't hear of them getting much more respect, then, either... but how about that golf team!
Why don't the cable comanies just be honest about it and sell me a 70kbps pipe for $50/month, a 150 kbps pipe for $100 a month and a 1.5Mbps pipe for $1000/month?
Because they are marketing based on max throughput, not on constant rate. If they sold you constant rate 70kbps, and you ended up using only 35kkbps, you'd ask for 1/2 your money back. But within those days, you might have hours of virtual dead time and then spikes as you download the latest isos, or whatever.
Its quite likely you would be much better off with 2 channel-bonded 56k dialups if you are a heavy bandwidth user, while it is the light users who want small amounts of high-speed net access that benefit most from 'broadband'
It's that kind of thinking (bonding data channels) that got ISDN started. =)
The cost of producing bandwith is fixed, it is not three times as expensive to give someone 1.5 MBps than .5 MBps. It's not electricity where there is an acutal added cost in producing more.
Wrong. Bandwidth is a variable cost over time. Let's say I'm an ISP with DSL customers. (Okay, so I'm nuts.) If I am maxxing out the oc-XXs on my regional aggregates and my backbone because of warez puppies, I have to lease more lines from the telco. That's not free. There are both setup fees and recurring fixed costs for each circuit. Not only do I have to buy more lines, I have to get more cards for the Junipers and Ciscos, run BGP to the extra interfaces (causing even greater overhead), and I may have to get additional routers as well. If I start saturating my private peers, then I have to renegotiate peering arrangements with them, which can also be a pain in the ass all by itself.
This can and does mean the difference between reasonable profit and big loss, for most companies.
By the way, don't assume that a bigger pipe is always going to be priced by the telco less than or equal to the equivalent bandwidth across smaller pipes. In many areas, there are special rate plans in effect, with max amounts the telcos are able to charge for one or two types of circuits, like frame relay or 0-mile T-1s, etc. The telco makes up what it thinks it is missing in revenue by raising the rates on higher bandwidth circuits.
Dude. You hit the nail on the head.
A couple of weeks ago I was at Fry's looking for an s-video to RCA adapter, and the geek with the name badge said he was sure they didn't carry those. The closest things they had were some s-video to composite adapters... =)
What you say rings true; however, I just saw a one-off magazine down at Fry's that touted that it was "Timeless Star Trek." There were three captains on the cover.
Can you guess which three?
Kirk, Picard, and... Archer?
Ugh. Not only does the target market appear to be misogynist, there's probably also racism involved. Janeway and Sisko each have more "right" to be on the cover than Archer. No offense to the actor who plays Archer, but the fewest people seem to like his show or his character.
But God help us if anyone but white guys are on that cover, right? The market segmentation seems clearer if you can assume that publisher tested covers in focus groups before picking one, and that the artist didn't just say "I don't know how to draw those two" or "I don't know who they are."
The "Babylonian" reference may at first seem apt: the towers were built 'to the heavens' (well, pretty high) and a lack of communication and understanding among peoples led to their downfall.
However, the underlying, unspoken subtext of a comparison between us and Babylon is that we displeased God. Remember, in the Bible at least (there's other versions in other histories/religions), God was displeased, and the language confusion among the peoples was caused in order to bring us down.
What this logo basically tells the world (or at least those who have an understanding of the mythos) isn't that we're a great nation and metter communication would have helped us - it's that we went against God, and this is how we paid.
This sounds a lot like those right-wing extremists who tried to blame the attack on 'communists' and homosexuals in our country making God upset.
Now, I feel, like many people do, that our country has done a great many things wrong: setting policy based on oil needs and not human rights, keeping some smaller countries' governments (including some democracies) destabilized in order to serve our own interests, etc. However, just as I don't think that we can claim "God is on our side," neither do I think anyone can claim that God isn't.
This logo is offensive. That it shows the half-thought-out mentality of some of the people in charge at our governmental agencies should be a cause for alarm, not applause. We have been called Babylon by many people with grievances against us, and it seems our leaders are reveling in the name.