They need to put the phone tapping system to work for us. If we get one of those recorded calls, we should be able to fill out a simple form with the time and date, then have the phone company identify the caller for us. Recorded pitches are generally illegal, afaict, and I thought they carried hefty judgments for those who bothered to take them to court. All I want is the same access then NSA has.
You clearly don't get the 4x year call from the Fraternal Order Troopers Society calling "on behalf" of the local police organization asking for cash for policemen retirement benefits, or some such. You know, I have established business relationships with all the charities I donate to. Being on the DNC list doesn't prevent them from calling me (that whole prior relationship thing). If necessary, get a 2 bit identifier attached to the DNC list; set bit zero as charities and bit one as political action. With 145M people on the DNC list, that ads up to a whopping 20MB of additional space. If it means getting it added, I'll send them a nickel to cover the cost of the extra storage.
I don't work out that much, but I have a reasonable amount of lower-body muscle, I've got a 35" waist and I'm 6 feet tall. I also weigh 200 lbs. To get me into the very high end of normal, I'd have to weigh 180lbs - about what I weighed 15 years ago when I graduated college. To be dead-normal (21.7 BMI), I'd have to be 160lbs. I haven't been that thin since I was a scraggly teen of 16, and I had a 30" waist. Heck, when I ran triathlons about 10 years ago, I competed at 190-195 lbs.
BMI seems to be one of those things that maybe can represent a population, but not an individual.
Seriously, though, I've been aerospace, mechanical (widgets), and structural (architectural)...keeping buildings up is very simple, really. Keeping them watertight (the architect's job, btw) is a real pain in the ass.
Correct, they did put corner cubes on the moon (aka retroreflectors, or three mirrored surfaces all at 90 degree angles to one another).
However, the beam size from a collimated laser is a couple miles across at the moon. Typically, receiving a signal back takes a large telescope which counts single-digit photon returns from a Nd:YAG q-switched laser. It's been almost 2 decades since I worked with the stuff (you might search for Satellite Laser Ranging, Goddard Optical Research Facility and MOBLAS or TLRS) and the units that ranged on the moon cubes were at Mt. Haleakala in Hawaii.
It was neat stuff, but I remember one of the PIs saying the spot on the moon was the size of Georgetown (a section of Washington DC), though I can't remember exactly now. The outgoing laser was about 4" in diameter.
Hrm...I would prefer not to have to look at my phone while I navigate through my phone mail, something I do frequently while not driving. This is especially true when I'm writing notes in my call log with one hand while flipping through messages with the other.
Seriously, cutting through a reinf. concrete wall is not trivial, if it was indeed just that. By code, the minimum thickness of a concrete wall is 6" and most used for loadbearing in anything but the cheapest residential construction are 8". You aren't cutting that with a reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall). Second, reinforced concrete walls are required (in order to be considered "reinforced" by code) to have steel bars equal to 0.0014 x wall area in both directions at a spacing no greater than 18". That typically works out to a 1/2" steel bar at 12" on center or a 5/8" steel bar at 16" o 18" on center both horizontally and vertically.
Now, this is a non-technical publication, so "reinforced" may mean anything - like a 1/2" bar at the top and bottom, and around jambs. Also, this is Chicago, known far and wide for severe corruption in the building inspection process.
Still, anything close to a RC wall is going to require a diamond blade and a gas powered saw for any kind of efficiency at all, and the cut rate is going to be measured in single-digit (or fractional) inches per minute. Most also require a water source for cooling. You'd have to be utterly incompetent not to catch these guys before they got in.
I almost granted your wish (to mod you flamebait...slashdot mod requests are often reversed), but want to just tell you you're a prick and a troll. Just because you can't get out of 1982 and work in a windowed operating system doesn't mean that you need to proclaim you backwardness to everyone. I like the command line too. I learned programming on the 6502 and, yes, I coded in machine directly. I've even compiled a slackware kernel a couple of years ago - it didn't work, but hey, the default kernel wouldn't boot on that old Dell either. It's a shame you couldn't add anything useful to the discussion, though you managed to drag me in to this useless post, too.
By the way - I have yet to come across a reason why I wouldn't want to mount a CD-ROM drive at boot. I'm sure there's a good reason out there. Okay, no, I'm not sure there's a _good_ reason, but somebody has probably found at least poor reason - other than sheer lazyness - to not mount CD drive on a machine. (and don't complain about small memory footprints...why would you have a CD-ROM drive connected _and_ not mount it?).
I almost modded you up, and hope others do. But I wanted to point out to all the GK and [favorite freeware] posters that for $80, you get a suite that just works. Decoding is completely transparent - you can just do an explorer copy of the files to your HD if you want. Or you can easily remaster, recoding if necessary, in a 4 step wizard to mpeg4. Want to transfer to your portable? Use the program made for portables with presets for many popular devices.
Oh, sure, you can go to Doom9 or afterdawn and gather up your tools, prep them yourself, choose all your settings, optimize your output, and then go back to get the updates every couple of weeks. My time is worth more than that. $80 is 40 minutes of billing time for me, and everything is together, always useful, and readily updated (though not perfectly transparent, admittedly).
I do wish Slysoft would make a better Xvid or H.264 converter for full size video (DVDmobile is not very good for that) it might just be perfect. Then again, storage is still dropping in price, and there's no sense in recoding from mpeg2->xvid to save 50% anymore when the savings in drive space per disc is often less than 50c.
Thanks. I've got ffmpeg on my theater machine, but am using it as just a decode-codec pack. I might have to hijack my daughter's laptop to try it out, since she's the only one with a linux machine in the house. (She's safer without windows on the 'net, and the edubuntu included games are good)
I'm already using windvd; I wish slysoft's divx compressor (mobile) was better/more universal.
Thank god I don't have a piece of crap like that. My bargain SIRF-based gps receiver updates every second, and I have never seen it jump positions by 500 feet in a single tick once it was locked(which would be about 350MPH or so). You need better equipment.
The unit I've got, a bluetooth one that connect with my phone, is mounted in the glasses case of my F150, right next to the steel cab hood, and in zero unobstructed view of the sky. I get, typically, 7-8 satellites at about 50-80% strength. If I put it on the dash, I get an extra 1-3 birds, with signals improved by 10-20% across the board. Either your equipment sucks balls, or something's wrong with it.
FTFA:
Our goal is to resolve these matters by offering the defendants the opportunity to participate in our patent licensing program for card and system technology," said E. Earle Thompson, chief intellectual property counsel at SanDisk I certainly hope there's been some serious negotiation leading up to this. Otherwise, that's quite a dickish statement to make.
What are you using to convert? I've been up to 2-2.5GB using Xvid, and I still have not been happy on rips of 5GB+ MPEG2 DVD streams. I essentially gave up since anything more just isn't worth it going higher, and I can see the artifacts on my 51" HD screen. I've watched xvid on the 125" for u???net rips, but it's not really a good experience - and those guys seem to get better results than I do.
An earlier poster suggested that maybe the 80 DVD was based on the seeminly ubiquitous 1.4GB (700x2) xvid/divx rips that float around the net. I budget for 4.5GB per movie on my server, which lets me do a 1:1 DVD rip to ISO for playback. I'm already "out of space" based on the discs in the jukebox, but I just can't bring myself to go to drop the $$ on a new raid setup, though I know I should.
Hey, the best plumbers are smart folks with college degrees who really understand how the systems work. I'm not saying being a plumber is bad, but to the "kids" it's no different than a workaday IT job putting stuff together, getting the new software online, and keeping the services running.
Apple, Google, and the like are not the ditchdiggers of the IT world, nor is Adobe or any of the major software development houses. They make parts that countless other install in the field. Those field people are - surprise - just human widgets. Some of those widgets are really good at what they do, but they're still widgets.
The thing to remember is that 98% of IT is not in a rockstar job, and these kids know it - they're going to be rockstars. You and I wanted to be rockstars when we were in school, too.
Call me a troll or this post flamebait, but it will be true.
Look at IT objectively - it's infrastructure. You do the jobs that make the background stuff work. Mechanics, machinists, equipment opertors, assemblers, all do this stuff. They diagnose problems and fix them. They assemble components built and designed primarily by others into a useful working product, often based on the experience of others.
Of course gen Y doesn't want any part of that. It takes effort and requires getting your hands dirty. Most kids out of school (in any generation, I might add) are looking for which CEO position will give them the best golden parachute. Nevermind that that's not how the real world works - their perceptions are based on seeing smart people (like them) on TV shows get to the top without effort. Some will eventually realize they have to make money, and they'll be IT ditchdiggers. Others will find their niche in retail sales, or construction, or some white collar paper-pushing position.
Nobody aspires to grow up and be a plumber, but the world still needs them. And, in case you haven't looked lately, plumbers can make decent money.
I ended up just buying a new card after several hours of trying to get a wireless network card to work in my daughter's laptop. All this "sudo apt-get-install foobar" is great if you know what it is you need and where it is, but I have yet to figure out how to use any of it, and I've been doing command line in DOS/Apple environments since '79. Mostly because once you go into linux, eveyone assumes you already know where everything is and where it all should go. I have news for you - I don't have hundreds of hours to tinker like I did back in middle school. I already know how windows and DOS works, and where I can reasonably expect to find things in windows (though I'd like to shoot the developer that decided "my" should be part of any path, and the ability for installation programs to write anything above the install directory level or to the registry). I have yet to find a simple guide to linux that tells your where things are hiding and where they need to go to work. Most are "here's how to put in a disk and use the interface" or assumes you know the OS intimately. That resource may be out there, but I've never found it.
I looked at the wiki pages, and it looked like there were a lot more train accidents (total number) than airline, with trains going 30+ per year. One of the commercial plane incidents included a pair of helicopters covering a highway chase - not exactly planes.
Actually, I looked at 2007/2006/2005 for North America in that list, and I came up with a total of 6 incidents, 5 of which ended with no fatalities or injuries of the plane occupants (one person on the ground died), and one which killed 20 people - and that was on a 1947 Grumman Mallard.
Trains had the same number of incidents in the US - 6, with fatalities in nearly every incident, though all of them to bystanders.
It is true that when planes really do crash, they tend to kill more people, but they tend to crash exceedingly infrequently in North America. Most of the "incidents" are near misses or landing goofs which occur at commercial fields.
Actually, AT&T/Cingy is surprisingly open. The CS is supposed to suck something awful, but they'll let just about anything on their network. Verizon, the original suitor for the iPhone, wanted total control of the iPhone, and Jobs told them to go screw themselves. AT&T was the largest network which would play ball with Steve.
Everybody wants exclusivity in the business world. In a market where you're just moving bits around and anyone is technically capable of doing it you need differentiation. Bringing in new subscribers is a valuable prospect - and I'm sure AT&T is compensating Steve well for that.
*dis: I have AT&T. I got it because I hated the lock-in with US Cellular and Verizon, and wanted to have a pda/phone. I ended up getting a subsidized 8525 instead of the Hermes (same model phone) 'cause the lock didn't matter to me. I have since unlocked the phone. I have never had to use their CS, except once to downgrade a data plan, and it was not too difficult. No worse than anyone else - and far better than any of my dealings with Adelphia/Comcast cable CS.
Because it is (a) too damned expensive to put in rail lines and (b) the current system is slow enough most people can drive to their destinations faster, for less (gas) money.
If we still had legions of penny-a-day, disposable immigrants and virtually no opposition to laying track through high-value suburbs then we might have the ability to put in light rail. But we don't...on either count...so it will never happen. Rail is phenomenally expensive to put in, and nobody wants it in their back yard. It will never be commercially viable in the US except in dense areas (which, not too surprisingly, is what much of Europe looks like).
Also, high-speed rail has the same annoying problem as high-speed internet - the last mile is very tough to cover. Airports have that problem, too, but rail is going to have to do _better_ to compensate for the inherent slower travel speeds.
Besides - more rail traffic means more chances of collision, and I would guess (though I can't back it up) that there have been more US rail crashes in the last 5 years than US commercial airline crashes (including both passenger and freight).
I realize that all of us have some difficulties putting thoughts to e-paper. We miss spell words and screw up usages. Sometimes we even leave a fragment in the post during writing, and forget to re-read the post before hitting "Submit."
Those emails are - without question - worse than what we see in the posts here on slashdot, and far worse than what I get in my inbox. I never realized how lucky I was not to have your job.
Have you seen how much information gets loaded with CS3? Freaking insane. You'd have to fire every developer they have (not a bad idea, really) and hire new ones that learned to program in the 70s just to fit down a 10mbps pipe.
This is about serving apps over the internet, not install the 5 DVDs locally and connect to activate every time (but wouldn't that be nice...for them).
Re:I've seen the trickle down effects of piracy
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think anyone is really interested in protecting your competitors. Quite honestly...turn them in if you think their collection is pirated. I presume that you don't really care if I have a personal collection of karaoke tracks I've downloaded from the usenet^wsomewhere, because my basement "bar" doesn't really compete with you. In fact, if I get my friends involved in karaoke, they're more likely to do it in public...say, at your club.
Taking stuff off usenet and re-selling it in bulk (which is what the "other" clubs may be doing) is a commercial use of the material, and it pretty lousy. I have a real hard time saying that folks trolling the 'net for some personal karaoke fetish is really a huge deal (karaoke publishers may disagree).
FWIW, I don't have any karaoke. I hate karaoke, to be honest; mostly because I can't stand out-of-tune singers, even when I am drunk. I don't participate because I don't use my voice to sing on a regular basis and, like any instrument, it is not in the best shape.
Oh, and for what it's worth, although you may find $300k an exorbitant amount to spend, for some of these retired electrical engineers (or whatever) they just want it all, and will drop "stupid" money on their pet projects. They'll probably go out of business when the market turns a bit thin again. If you're still around, you might even be able to buy their collection at firesale prices.
Welcome to the world of the modern CEO (which the president of a university effectively is). Other's time is worth nothing compared to your time - both figuratively and nearly literally for some CEOs. Sadly, it probably wasn't even a good speech - they rarely are.
Slashdot Mirror
They need to put the phone tapping system to work for us. If we get one of those recorded calls, we should be able to fill out a simple form with the time and date, then have the phone company identify the caller for us. Recorded pitches are generally illegal, afaict, and I thought they carried hefty judgments for those who bothered to take them to court. All I want is the same access then NSA has.
You clearly don't get the 4x year call from the Fraternal Order Troopers Society calling "on behalf" of the local police organization asking for cash for policemen retirement benefits, or some such. You know, I have established business relationships with all the charities I donate to. Being on the DNC list doesn't prevent them from calling me (that whole prior relationship thing). If necessary, get a 2 bit identifier attached to the DNC list; set bit zero as charities and bit one as political action. With 145M people on the DNC list, that ads up to a whopping 20MB of additional space. If it means getting it added, I'll send them a nickel to cover the cost of the extra storage.
I don't work out that much, but I have a reasonable amount of lower-body muscle, I've got a 35" waist and I'm 6 feet tall. I also weigh 200 lbs. To get me into the very high end of normal, I'd have to weigh 180lbs - about what I weighed 15 years ago when I graduated college. To be dead-normal (21.7 BMI), I'd have to be 160lbs. I haven't been that thin since I was a scraggly teen of 16, and I had a 30" waist. Heck, when I ran triathlons about 10 years ago, I competed at 190-195 lbs.
BMI seems to be one of those things that maybe can represent a population, but not an individual.
...Civil Engineers design targets.
Seriously, though, I've been aerospace, mechanical (widgets), and structural (architectural)...keeping buildings up is very simple, really. Keeping them watertight (the architect's job, btw) is a real pain in the ass.
Funny, I didnt RTFA, but presumed that they did just that and showed a 3-6dB link margin. Oh well, so much for real science.
Correct, they did put corner cubes on the moon (aka retroreflectors, or three mirrored surfaces all at 90 degree angles to one another).
However, the beam size from a collimated laser is a couple miles across at the moon. Typically, receiving a signal back takes a large telescope which counts single-digit photon returns from a Nd:YAG q-switched laser. It's been almost 2 decades since I worked with the stuff (you might search for Satellite Laser Ranging, Goddard Optical Research Facility and MOBLAS or TLRS) and the units that ranged on the moon cubes were at Mt. Haleakala in Hawaii.
It was neat stuff, but I remember one of the PIs saying the spot on the moon was the size of Georgetown (a section of Washington DC), though I can't remember exactly now. The outgoing laser was about 4" in diameter.
Hrm...I would prefer not to have to look at my phone while I navigate through my phone mail, something I do frequently while not driving. This is especially true when I'm writing notes in my call log with one hand while flipping through messages with the other.
I'd like to see you dial without looking at the phone on a touchscreen.
Seriously, cutting through a reinf. concrete wall is not trivial, if it was indeed just that. By code, the minimum thickness of a concrete wall is 6" and most used for loadbearing in anything but the cheapest residential construction are 8". You aren't cutting that with a reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall). Second, reinforced concrete walls are required (in order to be considered "reinforced" by code) to have steel bars equal to 0.0014 x wall area in both directions at a spacing no greater than 18". That typically works out to a 1/2" steel bar at 12" on center or a 5/8" steel bar at 16" o 18" on center both horizontally and vertically.
Now, this is a non-technical publication, so "reinforced" may mean anything - like a 1/2" bar at the top and bottom, and around jambs. Also, this is Chicago, known far and wide for severe corruption in the building inspection process.
Still, anything close to a RC wall is going to require a diamond blade and a gas powered saw for any kind of efficiency at all, and the cut rate is going to be measured in single-digit (or fractional) inches per minute. Most also require a water source for cooling. You'd have to be utterly incompetent not to catch these guys before they got in.
I almost granted your wish (to mod you flamebait...slashdot mod requests are often reversed), but want to just tell you you're a prick and a troll. Just because you can't get out of 1982 and work in a windowed operating system doesn't mean that you need to proclaim you backwardness to everyone. I like the command line too. I learned programming on the 6502 and, yes, I coded in machine directly. I've even compiled a slackware kernel a couple of years ago - it didn't work, but hey, the default kernel wouldn't boot on that old Dell either. It's a shame you couldn't add anything useful to the discussion, though you managed to drag me in to this useless post, too.
By the way - I have yet to come across a reason why I wouldn't want to mount a CD-ROM drive at boot. I'm sure there's a good reason out there. Okay, no, I'm not sure there's a _good_ reason, but somebody has probably found at least poor reason - other than sheer lazyness - to not mount CD drive on a machine. (and don't complain about small memory footprints...why would you have a CD-ROM drive connected _and_ not mount it?).
I almost modded you up, and hope others do. But I wanted to point out to all the GK and [favorite freeware] posters that for $80, you get a suite that just works. Decoding is completely transparent - you can just do an explorer copy of the files to your HD if you want. Or you can easily remaster, recoding if necessary, in a 4 step wizard to mpeg4. Want to transfer to your portable? Use the program made for portables with presets for many popular devices.
Oh, sure, you can go to Doom9 or afterdawn and gather up your tools, prep them yourself, choose all your settings, optimize your output, and then go back to get the updates every couple of weeks. My time is worth more than that. $80 is 40 minutes of billing time for me, and everything is together, always useful, and readily updated (though not perfectly transparent, admittedly).
I do wish Slysoft would make a better Xvid or H.264 converter for full size video (DVDmobile is not very good for that) it might just be perfect. Then again, storage is still dropping in price, and there's no sense in recoding from mpeg2->xvid to save 50% anymore when the savings in drive space per disc is often less than 50c.
Thanks. I've got ffmpeg on my theater machine, but am using it as just a decode-codec pack. I might have to hijack my daughter's laptop to try it out, since she's the only one with a linux machine in the house. (She's safer without windows on the 'net, and the edubuntu included games are good)
I'm already using windvd; I wish slysoft's divx compressor (mobile) was better/more universal.
Thank god I don't have a piece of crap like that. My bargain SIRF-based gps receiver updates every second, and I have never seen it jump positions by 500 feet in a single tick once it was locked(which would be about 350MPH or so). You need better equipment.
The unit I've got, a bluetooth one that connect with my phone, is mounted in the glasses case of my F150, right next to the steel cab hood, and in zero unobstructed view of the sky. I get, typically, 7-8 satellites at about 50-80% strength. If I put it on the dash, I get an extra 1-3 birds, with signals improved by 10-20% across the board. Either your equipment sucks balls, or something's wrong with it.
What are you using to convert? I've been up to 2-2.5GB using Xvid, and I still have not been happy on rips of 5GB+ MPEG2 DVD streams. I essentially gave up since anything more just isn't worth it going higher, and I can see the artifacts on my 51" HD screen. I've watched xvid on the 125" for u???net rips, but it's not really a good experience - and those guys seem to get better results than I do.
An earlier poster suggested that maybe the 80 DVD was based on the seeminly ubiquitous 1.4GB (700x2) xvid/divx rips that float around the net. I budget for 4.5GB per movie on my server, which lets me do a 1:1 DVD rip to ISO for playback. I'm already "out of space" based on the discs in the jukebox, but I just can't bring myself to go to drop the $$ on a new raid setup, though I know I should.
Hey, the best plumbers are smart folks with college degrees who really understand how the systems work. I'm not saying being a plumber is bad, but to the "kids" it's no different than a workaday IT job putting stuff together, getting the new software online, and keeping the services running.
Apple, Google, and the like are not the ditchdiggers of the IT world, nor is Adobe or any of the major software development houses. They make parts that countless other install in the field. Those field people are - surprise - just human widgets. Some of those widgets are really good at what they do, but they're still widgets.
The thing to remember is that 98% of IT is not in a rockstar job, and these kids know it - they're going to be rockstars. You and I wanted to be rockstars when we were in school, too.
Call me a troll or this post flamebait, but it will be true.
Look at IT objectively - it's infrastructure. You do the jobs that make the background stuff work. Mechanics, machinists, equipment opertors, assemblers, all do this stuff. They diagnose problems and fix them. They assemble components built and designed primarily by others into a useful working product, often based on the experience of others.
Of course gen Y doesn't want any part of that. It takes effort and requires getting your hands dirty. Most kids out of school (in any generation, I might add) are looking for which CEO position will give them the best golden parachute. Nevermind that that's not how the real world works - their perceptions are based on seeing smart people (like them) on TV shows get to the top without effort. Some will eventually realize they have to make money, and they'll be IT ditchdiggers. Others will find their niche in retail sales, or construction, or some white collar paper-pushing position.
Nobody aspires to grow up and be a plumber, but the world still needs them. And, in case you haven't looked lately, plumbers can make decent money.
I ended up just buying a new card after several hours of trying to get a wireless network card to work in my daughter's laptop. All this "sudo apt-get-install foobar" is great if you know what it is you need and where it is, but I have yet to figure out how to use any of it, and I've been doing command line in DOS/Apple environments since '79. Mostly because once you go into linux, eveyone assumes you already know where everything is and where it all should go. I have news for you - I don't have hundreds of hours to tinker like I did back in middle school. I already know how windows and DOS works, and where I can reasonably expect to find things in windows (though I'd like to shoot the developer that decided "my" should be part of any path, and the ability for installation programs to write anything above the install directory level or to the registry). I have yet to find a simple guide to linux that tells your where things are hiding and where they need to go to work. Most are "here's how to put in a disk and use the interface" or assumes you know the OS intimately. That resource may be out there, but I've never found it.
I looked at the wiki pages, and it looked like there were a lot more train accidents (total number) than airline, with trains going 30+ per year. One of the commercial plane incidents included a pair of helicopters covering a highway chase - not exactly planes.
Actually, I looked at 2007/2006/2005 for North America in that list, and I came up with a total of 6 incidents, 5 of which ended with no fatalities or injuries of the plane occupants (one person on the ground died), and one which killed 20 people - and that was on a 1947 Grumman Mallard.
Trains had the same number of incidents in the US - 6, with fatalities in nearly every incident, though all of them to bystanders.
It is true that when planes really do crash, they tend to kill more people, but they tend to crash exceedingly infrequently in North America. Most of the "incidents" are near misses or landing goofs which occur at commercial fields.
Actually, AT&T/Cingy is surprisingly open. The CS is supposed to suck something awful, but they'll let just about anything on their network. Verizon, the original suitor for the iPhone, wanted total control of the iPhone, and Jobs told them to go screw themselves. AT&T was the largest network which would play ball with Steve.
Everybody wants exclusivity in the business world. In a market where you're just moving bits around and anyone is technically capable of doing it you need differentiation. Bringing in new subscribers is a valuable prospect - and I'm sure AT&T is compensating Steve well for that.
*dis: I have AT&T. I got it because I hated the lock-in with US Cellular and Verizon, and wanted to have a pda/phone. I ended up getting a subsidized 8525 instead of the Hermes (same model phone) 'cause the lock didn't matter to me. I have since unlocked the phone. I have never had to use their CS, except once to downgrade a data plan, and it was not too difficult. No worse than anyone else - and far better than any of my dealings with Adelphia/Comcast cable CS.
Because it is (a) too damned expensive to put in rail lines and (b) the current system is slow enough most people can drive to their destinations faster, for less (gas) money.
If we still had legions of penny-a-day, disposable immigrants and virtually no opposition to laying track through high-value suburbs then we might have the ability to put in light rail. But we don't...on either count...so it will never happen. Rail is phenomenally expensive to put in, and nobody wants it in their back yard. It will never be commercially viable in the US except in dense areas (which, not too surprisingly, is what much of Europe looks like).
Also, high-speed rail has the same annoying problem as high-speed internet - the last mile is very tough to cover. Airports have that problem, too, but rail is going to have to do _better_ to compensate for the inherent slower travel speeds.
Besides - more rail traffic means more chances of collision, and I would guess (though I can't back it up) that there have been more US rail crashes in the last 5 years than US commercial airline crashes (including both passenger and freight).
Wow. Just wow.
I realize that all of us have some difficulties putting thoughts to e-paper. We miss spell words and screw up usages. Sometimes we even leave a fragment in the post during writing, and forget to re-read the post before hitting "Submit."
Those emails are - without question - worse than what we see in the posts here on slashdot, and far worse than what I get in my inbox. I never realized how lucky I was not to have your job.
Have you seen how much information gets loaded with CS3? Freaking insane. You'd have to fire every developer they have (not a bad idea, really) and hire new ones that learned to program in the 70s just to fit down a 10mbps pipe.
This is about serving apps over the internet, not install the 5 DVDs locally and connect to activate every time (but wouldn't that be nice...for them).
I don't think anyone is really interested in protecting your competitors. Quite honestly...turn them in if you think their collection is pirated. I presume that you don't really care if I have a personal collection of karaoke tracks I've downloaded from the usenet^wsomewhere, because my basement "bar" doesn't really compete with you. In fact, if I get my friends involved in karaoke, they're more likely to do it in public...say, at your club.
Taking stuff off usenet and re-selling it in bulk (which is what the "other" clubs may be doing) is a commercial use of the material, and it pretty lousy. I have a real hard time saying that folks trolling the 'net for some personal karaoke fetish is really a huge deal (karaoke publishers may disagree).
FWIW, I don't have any karaoke. I hate karaoke, to be honest; mostly because I can't stand out-of-tune singers, even when I am drunk. I don't participate because I don't use my voice to sing on a regular basis and, like any instrument, it is not in the best shape.
Oh, and for what it's worth, although you may find $300k an exorbitant amount to spend, for some of these retired electrical engineers (or whatever) they just want it all, and will drop "stupid" money on their pet projects. They'll probably go out of business when the market turns a bit thin again. If you're still around, you might even be able to buy their collection at firesale prices.
Welcome to the world of the modern CEO (which the president of a university effectively is). Other's time is worth nothing compared to your time - both figuratively and nearly literally for some CEOs. Sadly, it probably wasn't even a good speech - they rarely are.