I thought that was an innate ability of all lawyers. Attacking the govenernment with little chance of seeing hard cash - now that would take some real training. If you could do that and manage to train them to ignore the money in your wallet - now that would be quite a trick!
Acatully, I stopped giving blood regularly about 10 years ago. I used to give every two months until I had some blood work done for a physical that revealed I was suffering from low ferritin levels (stored iron, as I understood it). The doctor recommended several tests, but after hearing that I gave blood regularly sugessted that I stop for 6-8 months and get re-tested. My ferritin levels came back to normal. I've given very sproadically since then.
BTW - does anyone know if there is a publically availble (and layman-readable) list of medications which would cause your blood to be rejected? I usually try to schedule when I've not been taking anything for at least 2 weeks, but as one grows older the periods of time when I'm (a) available and (b) haven't taken a single medication for 2 weeks or more prior are starting to occur with lower frequency.
It's not that I mind going, but if I'm going to spend an hour and a half of my time, I'd rather not have some techician decide later that my bag goes in the trash 'cause I had heartburn last week.
I wondered how well that actually worked. I've got the sd version, but since I don't own a br/hd drive I haven't bothered with the upgrade. Of course it doesn't help matters that the 1TB drives are about 6-9 months behind release schedule (origially due mid 2006, then 4Q 2006, then Jan 2007, then 1Q 2007...still waiting - though dell supposedly has oems). Where are you going to store all that content? And don't tell me to rip to DiVX again...I don't need yet another lossy-lossy conversion. I gave up on DVD-DiVX when I realized that even on my small RPTV the artifacts were obvious at 2.5:1 compression (~1.8GB/movie). BTW - aren't both HD formats already compressed in MP4?
Actually, Im rather impresed that those who have d/l the low res version can get the high res version for the difference in cost. 30c for the recode, new backend and bandwidth may not really be "at cost" but I don't see Disney offering to let me buy the DVD of the VHS tapes I own for the difference in price between the two.
And crap is in the eye of the beholder. For a fly, crap looks like a hearty meal. For the content industry, selling you the same thing three times seems like a bargain compared to making you pay every time you listen!
Most Christians I know do not actually live by the standards their bible sets. They have very little compassion for thier fellow man, and will gladly take advantage of a situation to amplify their personal profit, even when they would be appalled to be treated the same way. They may attend church every Sunday, but Christians they are not. Sadly, I'm going to part ways with you in one respect - they will not go away. Christianity gives these people a sense of superiority, and plays into their need to be exclusive and special. Christianity is a salve for their egos, and they will pass on that to their children. It is just this superiority which causes so much grief in cross-religion interaction.
I think it will get worse until it hits a breaking point (inquisition and backlach, for example).
I suppose we can now answer the question, "What can brown do for you?" with a solid negative answer.
Seriously, though - if they want to make the hardware a success, go find some balls and tell the recording industry they can take their DRM and shove it where the sun don't shine. Once they're done with that, make the thing scream over Wifi. g is good, n is better. Wifi sync. Bluetooth A2DP. Make it play most audio formats - it's not like there's a shortage of ram for the codecs - use the power used for DRM overhead to put in better decoding.
Quit trying to help the content industry screw the consumers, and it might have a chance - take that 11 digit warchest and help make DRM a thing of the past, and make the Zune the central figure in the battle.
Or just satisfy yourself that apple will always be cooler than you, and your products will always suck.
Neither is a single iphone for a married couple. I didn't say I agreed with the logic, but Jobs himself indicated the logic for the iPhone, and nobody seems to make much of it.
Actually, that's not uncommon in non-major markets. You can find industrial space in S/W Virginia for under $10/sf/yr. You can buy land and build your own facility for $50/SF. And they'll probably give you some tax breaks - or lease you the land for $1 - if you plan on brining in 50 or more jobs.
My professional office is about $8/sf/month, though going rates are closer to $12-15 in buildings with a bit more curb appeal.
I would have expected a more targeted increase on taxes, though. Usually the hospitality industry takes it on the chin - restaurants and hotels - so that the increase isn't felt by the locals too badly. Heck, I think locally we're up to 10% on prepared meals and 12% on hotels, and we're not really a destination place, nor is the money going for anything in particular like a spaceport.
Exactly - you need hardware encoding and decoding for HD. Not impossible, but an extra expense. Disc access shouldn't bee too bad...60Mb/s should cover 3 HD streams, and DVD player on a separate channel would be fine. A fresh XP box with a P4-2.8 will have problems decoding 1080i/mpeg2 content, though, without hardware support if anything else requires the processor.
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
You must be new here.
Seriously, though, the fact that reprocessing is not economically viable today at todays prices (which seem pretty darned low per unit output), if the price were to go to 10 or 20 times the current rate, nuclear energy would still be viable against a $60+/bbl world and reprocessing might be economical.
TFA is worried about natural fuel supplies running out, but in fact there would be a balance as the price for processed ore increased. Like anything, though, it does take some planning - something that humans seem exceptionally poor at these days.
I figured as much. Chances of winning (enough) are just too slim, even if you could find legal footing.
I must admit the legal rambling is interesting. Sometimes the answer of whether you're on solid legal ground depends on whether the issue is just under idle discussion or you've got actual cash on the line. I'm tertially involved in a legal battle, and the general consensus is that I'm clearly the owner of an item of property (the ownership is in dispute by two other parties, but the item is in my posession). My lawyer, when it came down to actual disposition of the item, recommended a passive position for me as there was a slim - but finite - chance that the common ownership transfer could, theoretically, be viewed as nonbinding. I always enjoy a good arguement.
...you can't run XP and media player with anything but cutting edge horsepower. If you'd buy a $1500 computer and a $400 set top box, you'd probably jump at the idea of an $1900 combination box, right? Sort of a iPhone approach ($300 ipod + $300 phone = $600 iphone). Problem is that it really wasn't up to snuff - at least not TiVo-like plug and play.
Now they're facing a bigger battle - Vista. MCE is included, but the Vista version is more expensive, and you need two cores, minimum because the OS takes so much power to keep from imploding that you can't run media player and the OS in one core. Add HD to that, which took a tweaked box and a 3+ GHz processor in XP (plus incense, a rabbits foot, 2-3 shamrocks, and occasional human sacrifice), and you practically have to have a high dollar box. Oh, and no cable card support.
I'd throw in the towel, too. I've heard good things about MCE in the enthusiast forums, but those folks are willing to put up with a lot.
Tell you what - there's a growing body of cases which are really going to provide some ammunition to the defendants in these cases. The reference to Capitol v. Foster was a nice touch. Anyone have an idea when those records will become public?
Maybe Ray will read down this deep, as he would be one of the best to answer this:
If the tide really does turn significantly against the RIAA through multiple court rulings, is there any chance that those who have previously settled could form some sort of class to recover their settlements based on, well, I don't even know - extortion, with the settlements signed under duress (fear of financial ruin, win or lose)?
Would you people just give it up on the read/write FUD?
Modern NAND is good for 1E5-1E6 cycles, and then some. Go figure out how long it would take - assuming write levelling - to take one of these discs to their limit, given a 3% pagefile and 50% typical capacity utilization (without dynamic reallocation). I suspect you'll find somewhere in the answer given in years of continuous uptime.
Here...I'll do it, with rounding for ease:
32 GB space for swap file - say 30GB to save one chunk for safety. If we presume one read per write, we get about (64+45/2) 55MB/sec, half of which is write, so 28MB/s.
Drumroll please...32e9*1e6 / 28e6 s^-1 = 36.2 years if you do nothing but write-read to the disk swap and do nothing else (sounds like Vista, huh?).
I've got this funny feeling you won't run out of cycles on this drive.
(btw - with dynamic reallocation of space - writing existing locations with low cycles and low turnover to areas with higher cycles, one could use the entire drive space. This is possible since the random access is nearly the same speed as sequential access - the pagefile does not need to be a contiguous physical block of memory)
Rather than spending four (or more) years in college up front, perhaps a better choice would be to get into the lifestyle for 6-8 months first.
I would recommend 8-10 cups of strong coffee per day, so that he can stay up writing code for 12-16 hours, 7 days a week (start slow - 10x6, then work up to 16x7). Not fun code, but really mind numbing stuff. Get a good test project, then let him go at it. Figure a good project might be 4-6 weeks long (say, 500-600 hours of programming). When he gets about 75% of the way through - ideally when he starts seeing the light at the end of the tunnel - change the specs. This will be hardest for you, as you'll need to phase the changes so that there are 2-3 new things that need to be incorporated each week, plus 2-3 things that will need to be rewritten. Make sure that you throw in the rolling-rewrite or two - somehting he's already rewritten that "needs" to be changed...again. If you're certain he's not saving old code, do a re-set once in a while to make him re-code something he's deleted as not needed anymore.
If he's not a slobbering idiot in 8 months, he'll at least be ready to save yoy a year's worth of tuition by taking 22-24 credits per semester. And you'll know he can hack the EA deathmarch. Well, at least until he has a family.
That's not too bad, presuming that the kids can pool their screentime resources. I would hope the the screen time would include a DVR for television watching, as 20 minutes makes for either issing the beginning of a show, or missing the end.
We've only got one child, so she gets quite a bit more "screen" time, and though its heavily regulated she tends not to notice - of course, she's 4 so there are fewer outside pressures even with preschool peers. With TiVo, she only knows of programs we record (I love the Boomerang channel). "Her" laptop isn't connected to the net, though to be honest that's mostly because I can't get Ubuntu to play nice with the wireless card.
At that age there are so many more things to do, being on the tv/computer/game system really should fall to the bottom of the list. My last house had a 120" FP system for a TV, but it was in a licing romm that was mostly glass, so you really couldn't watch TV until middle-twilight. I reasoned that if it were light enough outside to mess with the screen, then you probably shouldn't be inside watching. Rainy days and afternoon college football were the exception.
All I can think of is that old C W McCall song, Classified.
And just for the heck of it...I'm going to post the whole damned thing:
I's thumbin' through the want ads in the Shelby County Tribune when this classified advertisement caught my eye. It said, "Take imme-di-ate delivery on this '57 Chevrolet half-ton pickup truck. Will sell or swap for a hide-a-bed and thirty-five bucks. Call One-four-oh, ring two, and ask for Bob."
Well, I called Bob up on the telephone, he says, "Hello, this is Bob speakin'." I says "This here the Bob got the pickup truck for sale?" He says, "Yeah." I says, "Where are ya?" He says, "Fourteen east on County 12, turn right on the one-lane gravel road, you can park in the yard, beware of the dog, wipe your feet off, knock three times, and bring your billfold."
Well, I tooled on east on County 12, turned right on the one-lane gravel road, and I parked in the yard and a German shepherd come out and grabbed onto my leg. Then I knocked three times and wiped my feet, the dog let go and the screen door opened and Bob come out and says "Whaddya want?" I says, "Come to see your truck." He says, "Follow me. Come on, Frank." (Dog's name is Frank.)
Well, we all went past the chicken house, through the hog pen, down to the tractor shed, and then wound up in back of the barn in a field of cowpies. And settin' right there in a pool of grease was a half-ton Chevy pickup truck with a 1960 license plate, a bumper sticker says "Vote for Dick" and Brillo box full of rusty parts, and Bob says "Whaddya think?".
Well, I kicked the tires and I got in the seat and set on a petrified apple core and found a bunch of field mice livin' in the glove compartment. He says, "Her shaft is bent and her rear end leaks, you can fix her quick with an oily rag. Use a nail as a starter; I lost the key. Don't pay no mind to that whirrin' sound. She use a little oil, but outside a' that, she's cherry."
I says, "What'll take?" He says, "What've you got?" I says, "Twenty-eight dollars and fifteen cents." He says, "You got a deal. Sign here, I'll go get the title and a can full of gas." I put the nail in the slot and fired 'er up; she coughed and belched up a bunch a' smoke and I backed her right through the hog pen into the yard.
Well, Frank jumped in and bit my leg and I beat him off with a crowbar. He jumped on out and the door fell off and the left front tire went flat. I jacked it up and patched the tube and Frank tore a piece of my shirt off. Then Bob come out and called him off and says "You better'd get on out of here."
I went left on the one-lane gravel road, went fourteen west on County 12. Took two full quarts of forty-weight oil just to get her to the Conoco station. And I pulled up to the Regular pump and then Harold Sykes and his kid come out. He says, "I've seen better stuff at junkyards and where'd you ever get that truck?"
I says, "That's a long story, Harold. I's thumbin' through the want ads in the Shelby County Tribune when this classified advertisement caught my eye. It said, "Take imme-di-ate delivery on this '57 Chevrolet half-ton pickup truck. Will sell or swap for a hide-a-bed and thirty-five bucks..."
Where's the excitement in that? Unless, of course, you let it choose the number you call based on natural speach and heuristic analysis of your phone patterns and mood. That would certainly make for an exciting life.
"I get all my homework done during recess because then I can go home and play Webkinz"
Oh, yeah, sign my kid up. Nothing I want more than to have a kid that spends her recess time doing homework so that she can play some inane game on the computer where online furry things get to play outdoors while she's stuck inside. No need for her to have any downtime, time to recharge and decomress in the middle of her schoolwork.
Oh, well, I guess that's practice for when the ozone is completely gone and nobody is allowed outside anymore.
I thought that IBM would propose puting the leads on two outside edges of the chip and slapping a heatsink on the bottom. That would (almost) double the heat dissipation, too.
Ahh, but what you are allowed to collect, and what you can claim as damages at this stage is totally irrelevant. There is easily $20-30k in international legal fees to be spend over this $800 (plus maybe treble damages at $2400). You would likely have to go to court to fight that (unreasonable) sum, and even if you win you've spent the money. They're offering to give him the easy way out and just pay all the lawyers fees upfront and be done with it;-)
It just so happens that a similar situation occured for my professional website. I got a panniky email from the woman who did my site (~$800 total fee) saying that she had been contacted about some (unintentionally) unlicensed content on my site. I presume she didn't get a $25k letter, though. This was from a CD stock photo product for which she throght she had the rights, but didn't. Anyway, she shot some new photos for the site and sent them to me to replace the infringing content and that was it. I'm not sure what the ultimate outcome was, but I don't think any money changed hands.
Well slashdot hasn't duped this yet, so I can understand how you missed it. Actually, it looks like a small-sample poll (100,000 votes), but they did manange to rank up there with the worst.
Dell, of course. The beauty is that any disc works on any dell bios. The trap is that you can never leave (cue evil laugh).
I don't have the time or energy to defeat it, and if I were really worked up I would probably just buy a new dell machine and upfit it - it would probably end up about the same price as a piecemeal. I have a business account and get good tech support, so for me there's usually a deal that makes it worth my while. I've got so many spare (proprietary) parts lying around the office I never really care about needing one.
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and training them to go for the wallet.
I thought that was an innate ability of all lawyers. Attacking the govenernment with little chance of seeing hard cash - now that would take some real training. If you could do that and manage to train them to ignore the money in your wallet - now that would be quite a trick!
Acatully, I stopped giving blood regularly about 10 years ago. I used to give every two months until I had some blood work done for a physical that revealed I was suffering from low ferritin levels (stored iron, as I understood it). The doctor recommended several tests, but after hearing that I gave blood regularly sugessted that I stop for 6-8 months and get re-tested. My ferritin levels came back to normal. I've given very sproadically since then.
BTW - does anyone know if there is a publically availble (and layman-readable) list of medications which would cause your blood to be rejected? I usually try to schedule when I've not been taking anything for at least 2 weeks, but as one grows older the periods of time when I'm (a) available and (b) haven't taken a single medication for 2 weeks or more prior are starting to occur with lower frequency.
It's not that I mind going, but if I'm going to spend an hour and a half of my time, I'd rather not have some techician decide later that my bag goes in the trash 'cause I had heartburn last week.
I wondered how well that actually worked. I've got the sd version, but since I don't own a br/hd drive I haven't bothered with the upgrade. Of course it doesn't help matters that the 1TB drives are about 6-9 months behind release schedule (origially due mid 2006, then 4Q 2006, then Jan 2007, then 1Q 2007...still waiting - though dell supposedly has oems). Where are you going to store all that content? And don't tell me to rip to DiVX again...I don't need yet another lossy-lossy conversion. I gave up on DVD-DiVX when I realized that even on my small RPTV the artifacts were obvious at 2.5:1 compression (~1.8GB/movie). BTW - aren't both HD formats already compressed in MP4?
Actually, Im rather impresed that those who have d/l the low res version can get the high res version for the difference in cost. 30c for the recode, new backend and bandwidth may not really be "at cost" but I don't see Disney offering to let me buy the DVD of the VHS tapes I own for the difference in price between the two.
And crap is in the eye of the beholder. For a fly, crap looks like a hearty meal. For the content industry, selling you the same thing three times seems like a bargain compared to making you pay every time you listen!
I'm going to chime in with a bit of support here.
Most Christians I know do not actually live by the standards their bible sets. They have very little compassion for thier fellow man, and will gladly take advantage of a situation to amplify their personal profit, even when they would be appalled to be treated the same way. They may attend church every Sunday, but Christians they are not. Sadly, I'm going to part ways with you in one respect - they will not go away. Christianity gives these people a sense of superiority, and plays into their need to be exclusive and special. Christianity is a salve for their egos, and they will pass on that to their children. It is just this superiority which causes so much grief in cross-religion interaction.
I think it will get worse until it hits a breaking point (inquisition and backlach, for example).
I suppose we can now answer the question, "What can brown do for you?" with a solid negative answer.
Seriously, though - if they want to make the hardware a success, go find some balls and tell the recording industry they can take their DRM and shove it where the sun don't shine. Once they're done with that, make the thing scream over Wifi. g is good, n is better. Wifi sync. Bluetooth A2DP. Make it play most audio formats - it's not like there's a shortage of ram for the codecs - use the power used for DRM overhead to put in better decoding.
Quit trying to help the content industry screw the consumers, and it might have a chance - take that 11 digit warchest and help make DRM a thing of the past, and make the Zune the central figure in the battle.
Or just satisfy yourself that apple will always be cooler than you, and your products will always suck.
Neither is a single iphone for a married couple. I didn't say I agreed with the logic, but Jobs himself indicated the logic for the iPhone, and nobody seems to make much of it.
Actually, that's not uncommon in non-major markets. You can find industrial space in S/W Virginia for under $10/sf/yr. You can buy land and build your own facility for $50/SF. And they'll probably give you some tax breaks - or lease you the land for $1 - if you plan on brining in 50 or more jobs.
My professional office is about $8/sf/month, though going rates are closer to $12-15 in buildings with a bit more curb appeal.
I would have expected a more targeted increase on taxes, though. Usually the hospitality industry takes it on the chin - restaurants and hotels - so that the increase isn't felt by the locals too badly. Heck, I think locally we're up to 10% on prepared meals and 12% on hotels, and we're not really a destination place, nor is the money going for anything in particular like a spaceport.
Exactly - you need hardware encoding and decoding for HD. Not impossible, but an extra expense. Disc access shouldn't bee too bad...60Mb/s should cover 3 HD streams, and DVD player on a separate channel would be fine. A fresh XP box with a P4-2.8 will have problems decoding 1080i/mpeg2 content, though, without hardware support if anything else requires the processor.
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
You must be new here.
Seriously, though, the fact that reprocessing is not economically viable today at todays prices (which seem pretty darned low per unit output), if the price were to go to 10 or 20 times the current rate, nuclear energy would still be viable against a $60+/bbl world and reprocessing might be economical.
TFA is worried about natural fuel supplies running out, but in fact there would be a balance as the price for processed ore increased. Like anything, though, it does take some planning - something that humans seem exceptionally poor at these days.
I figured as much. Chances of winning (enough) are just too slim, even if you could find legal footing.
I must admit the legal rambling is interesting. Sometimes the answer of whether you're on solid legal ground depends on whether the issue is just under idle discussion or you've got actual cash on the line. I'm tertially involved in a legal battle, and the general consensus is that I'm clearly the owner of an item of property (the ownership is in dispute by two other parties, but the item is in my posession). My lawyer, when it came down to actual disposition of the item, recommended a passive position for me as there was a slim - but finite - chance that the common ownership transfer could, theoretically, be viewed as nonbinding. I always enjoy a good arguement.
...you can't run XP and media player with anything but cutting edge horsepower. If you'd buy a $1500 computer and a $400 set top box, you'd probably jump at the idea of an $1900 combination box, right? Sort of a iPhone approach ($300 ipod + $300 phone = $600 iphone). Problem is that it really wasn't up to snuff - at least not TiVo-like plug and play.
Now they're facing a bigger battle - Vista. MCE is included, but the Vista version is more expensive, and you need two cores, minimum because the OS takes so much power to keep from imploding that you can't run media player and the OS in one core. Add HD to that, which took a tweaked box and a 3+ GHz processor in XP (plus incense, a rabbits foot, 2-3 shamrocks, and occasional human sacrifice), and you practically have to have a high dollar box. Oh, and no cable card support.
I'd throw in the towel, too. I've heard good things about MCE in the enthusiast forums, but those folks are willing to put up with a lot.
Tell you what - there's a growing body of cases which are really going to provide some ammunition to the defendants in these cases. The reference to Capitol v. Foster was a nice touch. Anyone have an idea when those records will become public?
Maybe Ray will read down this deep, as he would be one of the best to answer this:
If the tide really does turn significantly against the RIAA through multiple court rulings, is there any chance that those who have previously settled could form some sort of class to recover their settlements based on, well, I don't even know - extortion, with the settlements signed under duress (fear of financial ruin, win or lose)?
Would you people just give it up on the read/write FUD?
Modern NAND is good for 1E5-1E6 cycles, and then some. Go figure out how long it would take - assuming write levelling - to take one of these discs to their limit, given a 3% pagefile and 50% typical capacity utilization (without dynamic reallocation). I suspect you'll find somewhere in the answer given in years of continuous uptime.
Here...I'll do it, with rounding for ease:
32 GB space for swap file - say 30GB to save one chunk for safety. If we presume one read per write, we get about (64+45/2) 55MB/sec, half of which is write, so 28MB/s.
Drumroll please...32e9*1e6 / 28e6 s^-1 = 36.2 years if you do nothing but write-read to the disk swap and do nothing else (sounds like Vista, huh?).
I've got this funny feeling you won't run out of cycles on this drive.
(btw - with dynamic reallocation of space - writing existing locations with low cycles and low turnover to areas with higher cycles, one could use the entire drive space. This is possible since the random access is nearly the same speed as sequential access - the pagefile does not need to be a contiguous physical block of memory)
Rather than spending four (or more) years in college up front, perhaps a better choice would be to get into the lifestyle for 6-8 months first.
I would recommend 8-10 cups of strong coffee per day, so that he can stay up writing code for 12-16 hours, 7 days a week (start slow - 10x6, then work up to 16x7). Not fun code, but really mind numbing stuff. Get a good test project, then let him go at it. Figure a good project might be 4-6 weeks long (say, 500-600 hours of programming). When he gets about 75% of the way through - ideally when he starts seeing the light at the end of the tunnel - change the specs. This will be hardest for you, as you'll need to phase the changes so that there are 2-3 new things that need to be incorporated each week, plus 2-3 things that will need to be rewritten. Make sure that you throw in the rolling-rewrite or two - somehting he's already rewritten that "needs" to be changed...again. If you're certain he's not saving old code, do a re-set once in a while to make him re-code something he's deleted as not needed anymore.
If he's not a slobbering idiot in 8 months, he'll at least be ready to save yoy a year's worth of tuition by taking 22-24 credits per semester. And you'll know he can hack the EA deathmarch. Well, at least until he has a family.
That's not too bad, presuming that the kids can pool their screentime resources. I would hope the the screen time would include a DVR for television watching, as 20 minutes makes for either issing the beginning of a show, or missing the end.
We've only got one child, so she gets quite a bit more "screen" time, and though its heavily regulated she tends not to notice - of course, she's 4 so there are fewer outside pressures even with preschool peers. With TiVo, she only knows of programs we record (I love the Boomerang channel). "Her" laptop isn't connected to the net, though to be honest that's mostly because I can't get Ubuntu to play nice with the wireless card.
At that age there are so many more things to do, being on the tv/computer/game system really should fall to the bottom of the list. My last house had a 120" FP system for a TV, but it was in a licing romm that was mostly glass, so you really couldn't watch TV until middle-twilight. I reasoned that if it were light enough outside to mess with the screen, then you probably shouldn't be inside watching. Rainy days and afternoon college football were the exception.
All I can think of is that old C W McCall song, Classified.
And just for the heck of it...I'm going to post the whole damned thing:
I's thumbin' through the want ads in the Shelby County Tribune when this classified advertisement caught my eye. It said, "Take imme-di-ate delivery on this '57 Chevrolet half-ton pickup truck. Will sell or swap for a hide-a-bed and thirty-five bucks. Call One-four-oh, ring two, and ask for Bob."
Well, I called Bob up on the telephone, he says, "Hello, this is Bob speakin'." I says "This here the Bob got the pickup truck for sale?" He says, "Yeah." I says, "Where are ya?" He says, "Fourteen east on County 12, turn right on the one-lane gravel road, you can park in the yard, beware of the dog, wipe your feet off, knock three times, and bring your billfold."
Well, I tooled on east on County 12, turned right on the one-lane gravel road, and I parked in the yard and a German shepherd come out and grabbed onto my leg. Then I knocked three times and wiped my feet, the dog let go and the screen door opened and Bob come out and says "Whaddya want?" I says, "Come to see your truck." He says, "Follow me. Come on, Frank." (Dog's name is Frank.)
Well, we all went past the chicken house, through the hog pen, down to the tractor shed, and then wound up in back of the barn in a field of cowpies. And settin' right there in a pool of grease was a half-ton Chevy pickup truck with a 1960 license plate, a bumper sticker says "Vote for Dick" and Brillo box full of rusty parts, and Bob says "Whaddya think?".
Well, I kicked the tires and I got in the seat and set on a petrified apple core and found a bunch of field mice livin' in the glove compartment. He says, "Her shaft is bent and her rear end leaks, you can fix her quick with an oily rag. Use a nail as a starter; I lost the key. Don't pay no mind to that whirrin' sound. She use a little oil, but outside a' that, she's cherry."
I says, "What'll take?" He says, "What've you got?" I says, "Twenty-eight dollars and fifteen cents." He says, "You got a deal. Sign here, I'll go get the title and a can full of gas." I put the nail in the slot and fired 'er up; she coughed and belched up a bunch a' smoke and I backed her right through the hog pen into the yard.
Well, Frank jumped in and bit my leg and I beat him off with a crowbar. He jumped on out and the door fell off and the left front tire went flat. I jacked it up and patched the tube and Frank tore a piece of my shirt off. Then Bob come out and called him off and says "You better'd get on out of here."
I went left on the one-lane gravel road, went fourteen west on County 12. Took two full quarts of forty-weight oil just to get her to the Conoco station. And I pulled up to the Regular pump and then Harold Sykes and his kid come out. He says, "I've seen better stuff at junkyards and where'd you ever get that truck?"
I says, "That's a long story, Harold. I's thumbin' through the want ads in the Shelby County Tribune when this classified advertisement caught my eye. It said, "Take imme-di-ate delivery on this '57 Chevrolet half-ton pickup truck. Will sell or swap for a hide-a-bed and thirty-five bucks..."
Where's the excitement in that? Unless, of course, you let it choose the number you call based on natural speach and heuristic analysis of your phone patterns and mood. That would certainly make for an exciting life.
"Bring me my red shirt!"
"I get all my homework done during recess because then I can go home and play Webkinz"
Oh, yeah, sign my kid up. Nothing I want more than to have a kid that spends her recess time doing homework so that she can play some inane game on the computer where online furry things get to play outdoors while she's stuck inside. No need for her to have any downtime, time to recharge and decomress in the middle of her schoolwork.
Oh, well, I guess that's practice for when the ozone is completely gone and nobody is allowed outside anymore.
I thought that IBM would propose puting the leads on two outside edges of the chip and slapping a heatsink on the bottom. That would (almost) double the heat dissipation, too.
Ahh, but what you are allowed to collect, and what you can claim as damages at this stage is totally irrelevant. There is easily $20-30k in international legal fees to be spend over this $800 (plus maybe treble damages at $2400). You would likely have to go to court to fight that (unreasonable) sum, and even if you win you've spent the money. They're offering to give him the easy way out and just pay all the lawyers fees upfront and be done with it ;-)
It just so happens that a similar situation occured for my professional website. I got a panniky email from the woman who did my site (~$800 total fee) saying that she had been contacted about some (unintentionally) unlicensed content on my site. I presume she didn't get a $25k letter, though. This was from a CD stock photo product for which she throght she had the rights, but didn't. Anyway, she shot some new photos for the site and sent them to me to replace the infringing content and that was it. I'm not sure what the ultimate outcome was, but I don't think any money changed hands.
Well slashdot hasn't duped this yet, so I can understand how you missed it. Actually, it looks like a small-sample poll (100,000 votes), but they did manange to rank up there with the worst.
What part of "Permanent Injunction" don't you understand?
Dell, of course. The beauty is that any disc works on any dell bios. The trap is that you can never leave (cue evil laugh).
I don't have the time or energy to defeat it, and if I were really worked up I would probably just buy a new dell machine and upfit it - it would probably end up about the same price as a piecemeal. I have a business account and get good tech support, so for me there's usually a deal that makes it worth my while. I've got so many spare (proprietary) parts lying around the office I never really care about needing one.