From the DMCA, to suport my statment you feel is false: "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title"
In Universal City Studios Inc. v. Reimerdes, Judge Kaplan wrote, "The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress unless Congress' decision contravenes the Constitution."
So, as I said, the DMCA does restrict fair use to those who can create the cracks themselves, but it doesn't explicitly ban fair use. Someone giving you the tools is forbidden, but using them is not as long as the result is a fair use of the work. That's a shitty thing to do, and anyone who voted for it should be publically evicerated. But my point stands.
It's about the applications. I've played around with Knoppix, and set up a RedHat box a couple of years ago. And you know what...I can't do productive shit on them. Apple is the same way.
You see, it has nothing to do with the 10-30% price difference in an Apple, or the fact that Apple (C)Won't compete in the entry level systems (my small office runs on a $200 dell server that's three years old an hasn't so much as sneezed in all that time). I can't use Apple (or Linux) because I can't afford to (a) relearn how to manage the OS, (b) relearn all new applications for my technical work, (c) force all my clients to figure out how to interact with my non-industry-standard applications. Most of that stuff is MS only. Oh, sure, I suppose I could spend a few months figuring out if every single one of my dedicated engineering apps works with Wine, or (um, shoot, can't remember the Apple one.../. just covered it). Or I could pay someone (who is reliable) five figures to come in and do the testing for me. Sad part is, I can't afford either. I can't imagine a system so legacy-burdened and OS-entangled as (for example) AutoCAD running reliably, every day, without a possible hiccup, with all the little goofy add-on shit it needs to be functional, on something other than native MS. Hell, it's not completely stable in it's native environment. Is it worth losing a client worth 20% of my gross income just so I can have a pretty machine on my desktop that is slightly less likely to be totally wiped out by a virus? In 25 years of using IBM PC systems, I have yet to have an unrecoverable failure due to virus. Sorry, betting my salary, plus guaranteed loss of two years of company profits to re-buy and retrain me and my employees in new apps, against something that hasn't happened in that long doesn't make financial sense.
I'm stuck with MS at work because most of the vendors only write for MS. I use MS at home because I use MS at work. I can't afford to re-buy my apps for home. I use the same apps both places (mostly in conformance with the EULAs, by god damned fair use if not). When that changes, we'll re-evaluate.
Well, it's arguable that the DMCA doesn't make any additional restrictions, as it does not impede fair use, and I believe (danger: going from memory) specifically allows fair use. What it does, effectively, is make circumvention of DRM practically impossible for the typical layman.
Although I'm not going to send the RIAA a picture of my "borrowed" tape collection of Eagles albums, I'll bookmark some of this for later reading. I'd rather see case law where this has been tested and found in favor of the fair-use defendant, but I suspect the RIAA has tried their best to make sure cases that would support the law don't exist.
Personally, I still don't think it's a fair use (that's "fair" as in, "it's not fair to allow a 120 year term on copyright," not in the legal sense) of a work to give a copy to someone else without the author's permission, except as informal advertising. But maybe that's just me.
Of course not. The engine isn't hooked up to the transmission or the gas line, so you can just take it out and store extra stuff under the hood. It's a special feature of the "first edition".
Successful terrorism. You mean like the fluke that was the WTC, that should have been prevented if Billy had been watching the chicken coop in the late 90s? If the various law enforcement agencies actually worked together (and I don't mean in the "we need an extra 20,000 government employees in a new cabinet level department" working together) instead of arguing sandbox politics, we wouldn't have had to worry about it.
I mean, damn, folks - we spend a small fortune on keeping an ear to the ground, and we've got a bunch of pretty damned smart, savvy folks working for us. The brits aren't exactly slackers either - they did catch these guys before they stepped foot on a plane.
Israel gets bombed every couple of weeks, but they seem to be doing pretty well overall. Maybe we should all be a little more Jewish and actually care for our fellow man and keep an eye out rather than taking bread and wine on Sunday and ignoring the guy getting mugged in the park on Tuesday.
I say quit tying ourselves up in knots over this shit and get on with life. The whole terrorism argument is like putting kids in car seats until they're 12 years old. Yes, God damnit, car travel is dangerous - but guess what: that should be fucking obvious. Lets put a little more faith in the good people of this country and hang together once in a while. It sould be everyone's civic duty to "keep and eye out" for trouble. We can all do more in 10 minutes a day towards making our world a safer place than we can ever pay our government to do for us.
Sorry, it's been a long week, and I'm just fucking tired of all the assholes who think the world's problems should have nothing to do with them. All I can say is that it's a good thing I don't have the nuclear codes this weekend.
(Trustme, I'd really like to be wrong about my reading of the fair use doctrine, but I've yet to see legislation or court cases which definitively assert that you are correct, and delinieate the limit of fair use person-to-person transfers of copyrighted works without permission.)
I didn't comment yesterday on this, and thought about it last night.
Every time there's an environmental regulation (clean air, clean water) or some social program which impacts business, there's an instant outcry from the right side of the aisle that there needs to be an economic impact study to determine if these new regulations are really financially viable. So, where is the cry now? We're looking at billions upon billions of lost productivity, likely slowing of the economy, more people losing jobs and healthcare (and other) benefits beacuse of the increased "downtime" due to these draconian flight regulations.
There were what, 10 aircraft in all, tops? I want to see the cost of the aircraft and the insurance value of the couple thousand people balanced against the lost productivity. Yes, call me cynical.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that they caught these folks without the ban in place, and only catching the extra one or two planes that might slip by just makes my economic argument that much more salient.
No, copying a friends tape is infringing. Making an extra copy to take with you in the car is fair use. Recording a show off of HBO so you can watch it later is fair use; giving it to a friend - even one who subscribes to HBO, is not, as far as I can tell. There's a fine line where fair use is concerned.
Making a copy of a work for your neighbor to watch is no more fair use than making a photocopy of a novel for him to read.
There's clearly a big market for video on demand, and the ability to burn movies at a kiosk would greatly reduce the up-front warehousing, shipping, floor space, and back catalog storage. This is a masterful win for potential sales and increasing sales outlets.
Fromt the desciption and my palty knowledge of the DVD format, it seems like they're simply going to make everybody capable of burning in the key area with approved software. The end user part is to allow electronic distribution through a pay-per-download scheme. That scheme can also be used to digitally watermark the downloads and monitor infringing uploads, which is a bonus for them. More people with bigger pipes will be necessary for that to really take hold.
As for the end user burning a CCA encrypted disc, thay pretty much have to keep that part in order to retain much in the way of legal protections. Consumers keep crying "fair use" as a way to format shift, and to them format shifting is pronounced "lost sale". If drop the encryption, it's just like a CD, and there are already services which will format shift your CDs to MP3. All legal through fair use and unencrypted content. By encrypting the content, they keep their DMCA protections - it's not legal anyone else to help you format shift, in any way shape or form. For the vast majority of the population, that means format shifting is done via additional purchase.
Everyone here seems to think that the MPAA is trying to stop pirates, and we bubble with exhaspiration over the fact that the encryption has been broken and is useless. The MPAA doesn't really care about big time pirates all that much - it's a small market, mostly in asia, and mostly in places where the disposable income isn't high enough for the average person to afford a price that would turn a profit for the member organizations. No, the pirates the MPAA is concerned about are the casual ones - the guy next door who will burn his also-tech-unsavvy neighbor a quick copy on his consumer DVD recorder. That's more likely to be a lost sale than some chick dropping $1US on a pirated Malasian jewelcase on a street corner or a pimply faced 14 year old downloading a torrent. They won't admit it in public, but they know its true. Keeping Jim and Billy Bob from swapping discs will generate more revenue than stopping a dozen teenagers from getting an image off the eDonkey.
There are punishments for lawyers who bring frivolous cases. If the RIAA's lawyers were sanctioned for cases like this, that would really make them think twice before going after the obviously innocent.
I argue that it wouldn't make a difference. Individual lawyers may be sanctioned, but the RIAA is a corporation and above such rulings. Should, in some amazing stroke of "judicial activism," the RIAA be barred from filing such suits, the member organizations will merely re-form a copyright protection and defense corporation under new articles, in a favorable state, and restart the harrassment with nary a hiccup. New corporation, new lawyers as principals, old lawyers now disbarred providing consulting services instead of actually litigating.
This is, of course, one of the problems with allowing corporations the rights of citizens. A citizen once marked carries that mark, a corporation once marked dissolves and is reformed without prejudice.
That would be like the federal govenment restricting health insurance for its employees to specifically prohibit reimbursement for certain reproductive rights procedures, even though the employee pays for at least 1/4 of the basic coverage premium costs, and all of the premium costs above a certain threshhold.
Oh, right. They already do that. (or, at least, they used to - I can't imagine the law has changed back in the last decade)
I think your post is FUNNY, not FLAMEBAIT. Though, it is funny in a sad/odd kind of way.
I'm a so-so fan of Colbert, and rarely watch a whole show because I find him annoying in interviews. Still, at his intent - a mock-conservative commentator - he's pretty damned funny.
I'm really not sure which is worse - SC trying to skew a bridge naming website in his favor, or a government using a web poll to name a bridge.
A sibling posted: If someone took 10-20 hours your productive time per week I'm sure you would just suck it up. Maybe you commute? How would you like to have an extra 4 hours added to your commute because you now have to undergo a 2 hour security clearing process before entering or leaving your school or office building?
I'll expand on that: If you're not a company man, and are a contractor or even an independent businessperson, are you willing to give up 25-50% of your salary when you go on business travel? That's really what your asking us to do.
Your argument falls as flat as the "computers will lighten our workload" argument of 30 years ago. By now we should be kicking back after 8-10 hours a week at work due to the produtivity advances thanks to computers. The problem is that clients (and at some point in life you are one) expect that productivity to be passed on to you in lower costs. If you're willing to pay me my billable rate for those hours in addition to the ones I spend working, well, I'm okay with that. If not, shut up and sit down.
there's no sense in trying to trick everyone that the climate there is warm. Besides, it would put pressure on South Dakota to rename to South Colbert, just to make things balance.
I've got bad news for you - that piece of "your" lawn most likely belongs to you about as much as the center of the road. That's why you should never plant anything you intend to keep in the public right of way. And they're generally not required to patch anything when they're done. That's just the way public utilities work. Would you have been happier if they'd strung that line, along with the phone, cable, and power, 30' overhead down every road in the development?
They just boosted the value of your property by a couple grand (by making the advanced service available to your home). Go buy a rake and a damned bag of grass seed, ya whiner.
And, yes, I do have mod points. I decided to give you crap instead of modding you down.
Anything that makes it this easy (which is everything the internet is) is just asking for it to happen. If you were to leave the doors of a store unlocked and propped open at night, and all the cops were in another town, and the power went out so all the surveillance equipment was dead, that's not really asking for people to come in and steal everything. But in just about any heavily populated are that store wouldn't have a crumb small enough for a mouse left. There's nothing that should make those things foster crime, but it does. The entire internet is no more than a honey pot for sharing copyrighted information.
Of course, one could say the same thing about guns, or cars, or easily-obtained-credit. But those people have specific lobbying groups that make sure they don't get into trouble. The people don't have any cohesive representation, and the US congress is proof.
'Cause as your income goes up, so does your tax rate. Sure you can deduct the interest, but the $45k that isn't is taxed at about 5% net (after deductions,exemptions and such) and the $85,000 is taxed closer to 15-18%. Add to that the local real estate taxes - which are usually not just a percentage of home value, but a increased percentage of home value in bigger cities (.6% in rural areas, vs 1.5-2% in populated areas), and the differential keeps dropping.
OF coursem you do have the home-value nest egg. As long as the market doesn't flatten or tank. Remember kids, there's an 8%-9% fee on the front and back end of every house purchase, taxes each year, and maintenance, and if you should hit a flat spot or just the long term average (about 6% annual appreciation), it's just a christmas fund account that you can live in.
...with the exception of the DRM circumvention. I googled but couldn't find a lawsuit that challenged the CD ripping service offered by Slim Devices which has been around for quite some time. They will rip your CD collection and provide you with the data for use on your home network, presumably to stream audio to their players.
Of course, this brings DRM encrypted works into the mix, but it seems that nobody (i.e. the RIAA) cares about the service offered by Slim Devices for audio so the format-shift part hasn't been challenged. This could be a lucrative service, especially given the prices for format specific versions of the content. All of a sudden, it's not "pirates" doing the work, but good-ol' palm-greasing, profit making corporate America. I would, indeed, be more likely to support CC if they carry this through to SCOTUS and/or congressional action to gut the DMCA and restore balance to the system.
I'm not going to hold my breath or anything, but it's good for a smile this Friday afternoon.
Does it have to be new? Are you near an ebay vendor selling one that will let you pick one up?
The HP 5si(MX) is a mule of a printer. It will churn out pages for ever, it can have a duplexor, envelope feeder, 4000page base, jetdirect (10bt), prints up to 11x17 (well, 11.7x17.7 technically), and is fast (24ppm). The memory it uses costs about $5/stick (old 72 pin SIMMs, I think). You can get a non-OEM cartridge for about $60, and refill toner for about $15 (precisionroller.com) for 15,000 pages. eBay prices usually run in the $150-300+ range depending on options, but...
It's heavy as sin - about 125lbs shipping weight. It's big - no compact desktop model here.
I bought one three years ago, and use it as my primary printer, hooked direectly on the network. It was $275 including shipping, and came with the network and duplexor. I did have to spend about $120 on a fuser after a couple of months, but I'm still using it. We probably go through 15,000-20,000 pages a year in my office. Images and text are far, far more crisp than the Dell 5100 color lasre I have, and every bit as good as the HP 2600n I've got (which can be had, on sale/after rebate for just under $250 if you're diligent).
OTOH, you could just go lurk on fatwallet.com in the hot deals forum - there's a b/w printer deal there about every other week, and those folks get pissed if the end price after rebate cost more than about $10.
Trading of almost any sort, including stocks, but far more appropriately options, futures, and derivatives, is Gambling, but is legal all over the US and is a sanctioned sport.
Yes, there are legitamate reasons for all three instruments and they can be, and are, used by a small number of institutions for the intended purpose, which is to limit risk and provide certain guarantees of performance. Mostly, howeverm they are used for gambling. It's no different than betting the ponies. You research the background, estimate the conditions, allow for some randomness, and then GUESS what will happen to the price and place your bet accordingly. Oh, sure, it's better than buying a lottery ticket, but really no different than any other paramutual game. The house still takes their margin/cut (known as brokerage fees), and makes money whether you win or lose.
If I were king, I'd outlaw all options, derivatives, and futures (Imo, they're the reason oil is $70+/bbl - the cost of extraction hasn't substantially changed, and E/M's bottom line proves it). If you want to place bets, do it in Vegas like everybody else.
Sorry I don't have mod points, but this is exactly the value to Amazon.
I do the same thing, and usually weigh the increased amazon cost against the pay-for-shipping, but cheaper unit-price vendor. It works, imo, because nobody else does it. If everybody had the option - say a Buy.com Prime membership - it would lose its value. I'm not going to pay three or four vendors $70/yr - it's only be aggragating a large percentage of my purchases in one place that makes it worthwhile. (I'm not sure there's a resonable logic in there, to be quite honest). Also, $3.99 for an overnight shipment of a reference book I really need or a gift I've forgotten to buy/send is a bargain compared to the usual shipping rates.
Slashdot Mirror
From the DMCA, to suport my statment you feel is false:
"Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title"
In Universal City Studios Inc. v. Reimerdes, Judge Kaplan wrote, "The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress unless Congress' decision contravenes the Constitution."
So, as I said, the DMCA does restrict fair use to those who can create the cracks themselves, but it doesn't explicitly ban fair use. Someone giving you the tools is forbidden, but using them is not as long as the result is a fair use of the work. That's a shitty thing to do, and anyone who voted for it should be publically evicerated. But my point stands.
It's about the applications. I've played around with Knoppix, and set up a RedHat box a couple of years ago. And you know what...I can't do productive shit on them. Apple is the same way.
/. just covered it). Or I could pay someone (who is reliable) five figures to come in and do the testing for me. Sad part is, I can't afford either. I can't imagine a system so legacy-burdened and OS-entangled as (for example) AutoCAD running reliably, every day, without a possible hiccup, with all the little goofy add-on shit it needs to be functional, on something other than native MS. Hell, it's not completely stable in it's native environment. Is it worth losing a client worth 20% of my gross income just so I can have a pretty machine on my desktop that is slightly less likely to be totally wiped out by a virus? In 25 years of using IBM PC systems, I have yet to have an unrecoverable failure due to virus. Sorry, betting my salary, plus guaranteed loss of two years of company profits to re-buy and retrain me and my employees in new apps, against something that hasn't happened in that long doesn't make financial sense.
You see, it has nothing to do with the 10-30% price difference in an Apple, or the fact that Apple (C)Won't compete in the entry level systems (my small office runs on a $200 dell server that's three years old an hasn't so much as sneezed in all that time). I can't use Apple (or Linux) because I can't afford to (a) relearn how to manage the OS, (b) relearn all new applications for my technical work, (c) force all my clients to figure out how to interact with my non-industry-standard applications. Most of that stuff is MS only. Oh, sure, I suppose I could spend a few months figuring out if every single one of my dedicated engineering apps works with Wine, or (um, shoot, can't remember the Apple one...
I'm stuck with MS at work because most of the vendors only write for MS. I use MS at home because I use MS at work. I can't afford to re-buy my apps for home. I use the same apps both places (mostly in conformance with the EULAs, by god damned fair use if not). When that changes, we'll re-evaluate.
Tell Steve he has more work to do.
Well, it's arguable that the DMCA doesn't make any additional restrictions, as it does not impede fair use, and I believe (danger: going from memory) specifically allows fair use. What it does, effectively, is make circumvention of DRM practically impossible for the typical layman.
Although I'm not going to send the RIAA a picture of my "borrowed" tape collection of Eagles albums, I'll bookmark some of this for later reading. I'd rather see case law where this has been tested and found in favor of the fair-use defendant, but I suspect the RIAA has tried their best to make sure cases that would support the law don't exist.
Personally, I still don't think it's a fair use (that's "fair" as in, "it's not fair to allow a 120 year term on copyright," not in the legal sense) of a work to give a copy to someone else without the author's permission, except as informal advertising. But maybe that's just me.
Of course not. The engine isn't hooked up to the transmission or the gas line, so you can just take it out and store extra stuff under the hood. It's a special feature of the "first edition".
Really?
Successful terrorism. You mean like the fluke that was the WTC, that should have been prevented if Billy had been watching the chicken coop in the late 90s? If the various law enforcement agencies actually worked together (and I don't mean in the "we need an extra 20,000 government employees in a new cabinet level department" working together) instead of arguing sandbox politics, we wouldn't have had to worry about it.
I mean, damn, folks - we spend a small fortune on keeping an ear to the ground, and we've got a bunch of pretty damned smart, savvy folks working for us. The brits aren't exactly slackers either - they did catch these guys before they stepped foot on a plane.
Israel gets bombed every couple of weeks, but they seem to be doing pretty well overall. Maybe we should all be a little more Jewish and actually care for our fellow man and keep an eye out rather than taking bread and wine on Sunday and ignoring the guy getting mugged in the park on Tuesday.
I say quit tying ourselves up in knots over this shit and get on with life. The whole terrorism argument is like putting kids in car seats until they're 12 years old. Yes, God damnit, car travel is dangerous - but guess what: that should be fucking obvious. Lets put a little more faith in the good people of this country and hang together once in a while. It sould be everyone's civic duty to "keep and eye out" for trouble. We can all do more in 10 minutes a day towards making our world a safer place than we can ever pay our government to do for us.
Sorry, it's been a long week, and I'm just fucking tired of all the assholes who think the world's problems should have nothing to do with them. All I can say is that it's a good thing I don't have the nuclear codes this weekend.
References?
(Trustme, I'd really like to be wrong about my reading of the fair use doctrine, but I've yet to see legislation or court cases which definitively assert that you are correct, and delinieate the limit of fair use person-to-person transfers of copyrighted works without permission.)
I didn't comment yesterday on this, and thought about it last night.
Every time there's an environmental regulation (clean air, clean water) or some social program which impacts business, there's an instant outcry from the right side of the aisle that there needs to be an economic impact study to determine if these new regulations are really financially viable. So, where is the cry now? We're looking at billions upon billions of lost productivity, likely slowing of the economy, more people losing jobs and healthcare (and other) benefits beacuse of the increased "downtime" due to these draconian flight regulations.
There were what, 10 aircraft in all, tops? I want to see the cost of the aircraft and the insurance value of the couple thousand people balanced against the lost productivity. Yes, call me cynical.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that they caught these folks without the ban in place, and only catching the extra one or two planes that might slip by just makes my economic argument that much more salient.
No, copying a friends tape is infringing. Making an extra copy to take with you in the car is fair use. Recording a show off of HBO so you can watch it later is fair use; giving it to a friend - even one who subscribes to HBO, is not, as far as I can tell. There's a fine line where fair use is concerned.
Making a copy of a work for your neighbor to watch is no more fair use than making a photocopy of a novel for him to read.
There's clearly a big market for video on demand, and the ability to burn movies at a kiosk would greatly reduce the up-front warehousing, shipping, floor space, and back catalog storage. This is a masterful win for potential sales and increasing sales outlets.
Fromt the desciption and my palty knowledge of the DVD format, it seems like they're simply going to make everybody capable of burning in the key area with approved software. The end user part is to allow electronic distribution through a pay-per-download scheme. That scheme can also be used to digitally watermark the downloads and monitor infringing uploads, which is a bonus for them. More people with bigger pipes will be necessary for that to really take hold.
As for the end user burning a CCA encrypted disc, thay pretty much have to keep that part in order to retain much in the way of legal protections. Consumers keep crying "fair use" as a way to format shift, and to them format shifting is pronounced "lost sale". If drop the encryption, it's just like a CD, and there are already services which will format shift your CDs to MP3. All legal through fair use and unencrypted content. By encrypting the content, they keep their DMCA protections - it's not legal anyone else to help you format shift, in any way shape or form. For the vast majority of the population, that means format shifting is done via additional purchase.
Everyone here seems to think that the MPAA is trying to stop pirates, and we bubble with exhaspiration over the fact that the encryption has been broken and is useless. The MPAA doesn't really care about big time pirates all that much - it's a small market, mostly in asia, and mostly in places where the disposable income isn't high enough for the average person to afford a price that would turn a profit for the member organizations. No, the pirates the MPAA is concerned about are the casual ones - the guy next door who will burn his also-tech-unsavvy neighbor a quick copy on his consumer DVD recorder. That's more likely to be a lost sale than some chick dropping $1US on a pirated Malasian jewelcase on a street corner or a pimply faced 14 year old downloading a torrent. They won't admit it in public, but they know its true. Keeping Jim and Billy Bob from swapping discs will generate more revenue than stopping a dozen teenagers from getting an image off the eDonkey.
There are punishments for lawyers who bring frivolous cases. If the RIAA's lawyers were sanctioned for cases like this, that would really make them think twice before going after the obviously innocent.
I argue that it wouldn't make a difference. Individual lawyers may be sanctioned, but the RIAA is a corporation and above such rulings. Should, in some amazing stroke of "judicial activism," the RIAA be barred from filing such suits, the member organizations will merely re-form a copyright protection and defense corporation under new articles, in a favorable state, and restart the harrassment with nary a hiccup. New corporation, new lawyers as principals, old lawyers now disbarred providing consulting services instead of actually litigating.
This is, of course, one of the problems with allowing corporations the rights of citizens. A citizen once marked carries that mark, a corporation once marked dissolves and is reformed without prejudice.
That would be like the federal govenment restricting health insurance for its employees to specifically prohibit reimbursement for certain reproductive rights procedures, even though the employee pays for at least 1/4 of the basic coverage premium costs, and all of the premium costs above a certain threshhold.
Oh, right. They already do that. (or, at least, they used to - I can't imagine the law has changed back in the last decade)
I think your post is FUNNY, not FLAMEBAIT. Though, it is funny in a sad/odd kind of way.
I'm a so-so fan of Colbert, and rarely watch a whole show because I find him annoying in interviews. Still, at his intent - a mock-conservative commentator - he's pretty damned funny.
I'm really not sure which is worse - SC trying to skew a bridge naming website in his favor, or a government using a web poll to name a bridge.
A sibling posted:
If someone took 10-20 hours your productive time per week I'm sure you would just suck it up. Maybe you commute? How would you like to have an extra 4 hours added to your commute because you now have to undergo a 2 hour security clearing process before entering or leaving your school or office building?
I'll expand on that: If you're not a company man, and are a contractor or even an independent businessperson, are you willing to give up 25-50% of your salary when you go on business travel? That's really what your asking us to do.
Your argument falls as flat as the "computers will lighten our workload" argument of 30 years ago. By now we should be kicking back after 8-10 hours a week at work due to the produtivity advances thanks to computers. The problem is that clients (and at some point in life you are one) expect that productivity to be passed on to you in lower costs. If you're willing to pay me my billable rate for those hours in addition to the ones I spend working, well, I'm okay with that. If not, shut up and sit down.
there's no sense in trying to trick everyone that the climate there is warm. Besides, it would put pressure on South Dakota to rename to South Colbert, just to make things balance.
I'll jump on the bandwagon when we can get rid of the power cable. When is power over wireless coming to computer peripherals?
I've got bad news for you - that piece of "your" lawn most likely belongs to you about as much as the center of the road. That's why you should never plant anything you intend to keep in the public right of way. And they're generally not required to patch anything when they're done. That's just the way public utilities work. Would you have been happier if they'd strung that line, along with the phone, cable, and power, 30' overhead down every road in the development?
They just boosted the value of your property by a couple grand (by making the advanced service available to your home). Go buy a rake and a damned bag of grass seed, ya whiner.
And, yes, I do have mod points. I decided to give you crap instead of modding you down.
...right after the blink tag.
Anything that makes it this easy (which is everything the internet is) is just asking for it to happen. If you were to leave the doors of a store unlocked and propped open at night, and all the cops were in another town, and the power went out so all the surveillance equipment was dead, that's not really asking for people to come in and steal everything. But in just about any heavily populated are that store wouldn't have a crumb small enough for a mouse left. There's nothing that should make those things foster crime, but it does. The entire internet is no more than a honey pot for sharing copyrighted information.
Of course, one could say the same thing about guns, or cars, or easily-obtained-credit. But those people have specific lobbying groups that make sure they don't get into trouble. The people don't have any cohesive representation, and the US congress is proof.
'Cause as your income goes up, so does your tax rate. Sure you can deduct the interest, but the $45k that isn't is taxed at about 5% net (after deductions,exemptions and such) and the $85,000 is taxed closer to 15-18%. Add to that the local real estate taxes - which are usually not just a percentage of home value, but a increased percentage of home value in bigger cities (.6% in rural areas, vs 1.5-2% in populated areas), and the differential keeps dropping.
OF coursem you do have the home-value nest egg. As long as the market doesn't flatten or tank. Remember kids, there's an 8%-9% fee on the front and back end of every house purchase, taxes each year, and maintenance, and if you should hit a flat spot or just the long term average (about 6% annual appreciation), it's just a christmas fund account that you can live in.
...with the exception of the DRM circumvention. I googled but couldn't find a lawsuit that challenged the CD ripping service offered by Slim Devices which has been around for quite some time. They will rip your CD collection and provide you with the data for use on your home network, presumably to stream audio to their players.
Of course, this brings DRM encrypted works into the mix, but it seems that nobody (i.e. the RIAA) cares about the service offered by Slim Devices for audio so the format-shift part hasn't been challenged. This could be a lucrative service, especially given the prices for format specific versions of the content. All of a sudden, it's not "pirates" doing the work, but good-ol' palm-greasing, profit making corporate America. I would, indeed, be more likely to support CC if they carry this through to SCOTUS and/or congressional action to gut the DMCA and restore balance to the system.
I'm not going to hold my breath or anything, but it's good for a smile this Friday afternoon.
Does it have to be new? Are you near an ebay vendor selling one that will let you pick one up?
The HP 5si(MX) is a mule of a printer. It will churn out pages for ever, it can have a duplexor, envelope feeder, 4000page base, jetdirect (10bt), prints up to 11x17 (well, 11.7x17.7 technically), and is fast (24ppm). The memory it uses costs about $5/stick (old 72 pin SIMMs, I think). You can get a non-OEM cartridge for about $60, and refill toner for about $15 (precisionroller.com) for 15,000 pages. eBay prices usually run in the $150-300+ range depending on options, but...
It's heavy as sin - about 125lbs shipping weight. It's big - no compact desktop model here.
I bought one three years ago, and use it as my primary printer, hooked direectly on the network. It was $275 including shipping, and came with the network and duplexor. I did have to spend about $120 on a fuser after a couple of months, but I'm still using it. We probably go through 15,000-20,000 pages a year in my office. Images and text are far, far more crisp than the Dell 5100 color lasre I have, and every bit as good as the HP 2600n I've got (which can be had, on sale/after rebate for just under $250 if you're diligent).
OTOH, you could just go lurk on fatwallet.com in the hot deals forum - there's a b/w printer deal there about every other week, and those folks get pissed if the end price after rebate cost more than about $10.
Trading of almost any sort, including stocks, but far more appropriately options, futures, and derivatives, is Gambling, but is legal all over the US and is a sanctioned sport.
Yes, there are legitamate reasons for all three instruments and they can be, and are, used by a small number of institutions for the intended purpose, which is to limit risk and provide certain guarantees of performance. Mostly, howeverm they are used for gambling. It's no different than betting the ponies. You research the background, estimate the conditions, allow for some randomness, and then GUESS what will happen to the price and place your bet accordingly. Oh, sure, it's better than buying a lottery ticket, but really no different than any other paramutual game. The house still takes their margin/cut (known as brokerage fees), and makes money whether you win or lose.
If I were king, I'd outlaw all options, derivatives, and futures (Imo, they're the reason oil is $70+/bbl - the cost of extraction hasn't substantially changed, and E/M's bottom line proves it). If you want to place bets, do it in Vegas like everybody else.
And isn't it curious that the good science is coming from the lesser funded of the two "halves".
Looks like the website owner is from Denmark, which according to wikipedia has 170 days of rain per year.
Sorry I don't have mod points, but this is exactly the value to Amazon.
I do the same thing, and usually weigh the increased amazon cost against the pay-for-shipping, but cheaper unit-price vendor. It works, imo, because nobody else does it. If everybody had the option - say a Buy.com Prime membership - it would lose its value. I'm not going to pay three or four vendors $70/yr - it's only be aggragating a large percentage of my purchases in one place that makes it worthwhile. (I'm not sure there's a resonable logic in there, to be quite honest). Also, $3.99 for an overnight shipment of a reference book I really need or a gift I've forgotten to buy/send is a bargain compared to the usual shipping rates.