All you nutjobs with your illegal and pay-for-crap stuff might like this, but my collection is based on the physical media I own. Yes, hundreds of CDs ripped to a TB FW tower. I want directories. I want to organize the way I want. I want the stuff WITHOUT tags to be searchable. I don't have the time to go through and edit every freakin file to get the tags right. Drag folder to Nero. Burn CD. Destroy CD though carelessness. Repeat.
And don't get me stared on my AudioBooks on CD. What a fucking mess. I still say if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.
And, yes, I owned an iPod. I returned it, in part, becuase iTunes was as bad a windows about doing its "own" think rather than what I wanted.
I agree, iTunes is probably good for 12 year old girls. I have a longer attention span and a far larger need for organization.
Yes, thousands of Billions, because people are too stupid to know that the word Trillion exists?
Well, now I know why nobody is worried about the US national debt. 7 Trillion is, like, practially nothing. Let me know when we get to 7000 Billion and I'll start getting worried. And don't tell me that millions of millions crap - it just gets confusing. Besides, a million isn't as much as it used to be. Inflation, you know.
Hint: after Trillion, the next is Quadrillion, and then (hold you breath) Quintillion. Gosh it's, like, a pattern!
I decided to reply to you rather than mod you down.
The parent actually does make a good point. That fact that you go to Duke and believe that you are so intellectually superior that you and Duke were meant for one another regardless of the promised trinkets has nothing to do with the truth in his argument.
Students considering Duke will be smart or, as you have pointin particular concerning round-ball sports. It is common knnowledge, though apparently not to Duke enrollees, that colleges at the top levels of academics are in fierce competition for the smartest, most successful students. It is also common knowledge that practically all colleges at this level have very similar tuition and fees. An interview session I had with an MIT examiner (many years ago) admitted as much.
So, here's how it stacks up: 1) Great academics - very nearly equal 2) Quality of Envorinment - Varies a good bit 3) Cool bonuses 4) Price of education - very nearly equal
(You'll notice cast is #4. That's 'cause there are a lot of kids for whom cost is no object. It's somehting for the parents to worry about. Maybe no t in your case, but is quite a few.)
If you've got acceptance letters from three or four Ivy league schools, you're probably choosing based on the "little things." Nice campus, close/far from home, close to "fun", whatever. All but the anti-social have a little voice in the back of their teen mind saying "choose the 'cool' school."
Now, by standard marketing logic: iPods are hip. Duke gives iPods to new students. Duke is hip.
No, not everyone will fall for this ploy. But SOME WILL. It doesn't make them bad, it makes them human. And Duke will get a few extra of that "top-notch" pool that all schools covet.
iPods are no more useful in the classroom than any handheld digital recorder, and a bit less useful because of the iPod->computer path obstacles. It has lots of uses, but no more than any digital recorder. It's a marketing ply, and nothing else. iPod takes "cool" and makes it "really cool".
I was under the impression that when Stephen King writes a novel, it is just as much copyrighted in Arial as in Times New Roman. Not only that, but a movie based on the book is also part of his IP, and he can sue if someone should make a movie based on his book without his permission.
As for FUD, I agree. It would be a pretty large stretch, and require a haberdashery full of tin foil to anticipate legal problems from this. No wonder it's getting so much play here on/.
So now we have to train every stupid operator to be able to handle 8 to 10 hours of this a day, in addition to learning the new interface.
Why not give them senso-finger-cots and a digitizer pad? You can stretch your fingers a lot farther on a desk mounted pad than you can on a full sized screen.
This is exactly what medium businesses are stuck with. If they were bigger, they'd write their apps from scratch, done by an in-house team, and supported by the same team. They'd have the choice of any OS, and language. They'd have training done by the design team. They'd fix bugs fast, because millions of dollars hang in the balance.
Without that kind of money, you buy off-the-shelf apps and do a little customizing to make it run smoothly for your company. I'd love to have a custom written technical drawing application for my strucutral engineering firm. Just what I needed, none of the chaff that gets added in. MY commands at MY fingertips in the OS I choose. What a pipe dream.
If you believe that OSS can provide what the world needs, yo uhave a lot to learn about business. The cost of OS licenses is trivial. The cost of support and integration is not. More importantly, the cost of training - and ongoing training of new hires - can be daunting. Face it - IT is a necessary evil in a competitive market. It's like accounting (in non-accounting firms), or purchasing, or administrative support - a cost which is necessary but does not provide income.
If the secretary candidates all knew OO and linux, and only a couple had ever heard of "Word" and something called "Windows" because their kid brother had this funny colored-pane flying window sticker on his monitor, we'd be scrambling to get linux on every machine. But that's not the case. All of a sudden, every single person who walks through the door has to be trained on the new system. None of their detailed knowledge on the computer is worth a crap because they only know MS products. You've just added $10k to the cost of hiring someone. Add that to the $10 to $20k in pre-productive time and training on our policies to begin with. Don't need that burden.
Sorry to be such a spoil sport, but reality is mostly perception when it comes to decisions like this. I happen to like linux, though I'll admit I'm not very well versed in it. I've got an install of slack that I play with when I have time, and I keep a knoppix around, just in case. But I dont have the time to put it into production, and I can't afford to pay someone to do it for me. Simple economics - what I have works, changing will cost money - money I don't have.
Actually, they are - in their own way. It's not the efficiency of the engine that matters, but the amount of excess material that gets carried around.
Now, there's no reasonable condition where you would have just the right vehicle for just the right situation. But owning an SUV for a single-occupant commuter vehicle with a super efficient gasoline engine is no different than owning an 8000SF house with R13 insulation for two people, but claiming that you're not the problem because you just put in a 17SEER heat pump or a 99% efficient gas boiler. No matter how efficient you are, you're still wasting energy to accomplish a purpose (transport / housing). If you spnd most of the time with one or two people in the car and occasionally need the capacity, go rent a van. If you've got five kids and soccer practice everyday, you need the big vehicle, and are using it - I'm fine with that.
SUV fuel economy is not taking care of itself. If you are increaseing effeciency by 10% per HP per year, and adding 15% to your output HP (or 15% in effective inefficiencies like AWD drivetrains and poor aerodynamics) you're not really getting anywhere.
Actually, the biggest contributor, imho, is the tax exemption used to buy these vehicles by small businesses. Your doctor or lawyer doesn't really need an SUV to run his/her business, but buys one because with an 80-90% "business use" write off in year number one, that $50,000 luxury SUV is really only costing about $26,000 after federal and state taxes. That's a bargain that dwarfs any gasoline costs.
Now, I have a problem with higher gasoline taxes. Gas taxes to cover roads is fine. I'm even okay with a portion going to cover public transportation startup costs, as it gets people off the roads and reduces the need for more paved road miles. I'm NOT in favor of gas taxes to discourage the purchase of low-MPG vehicles. Aside from driving up the cost of transportation sensitive goods, it is an attempt at using the tax code for social engineering. Don't want people to drive SUVs? Elimiate the tax credit for them. I suppose I'd be okay with adding a "balance" to it by adding vehicles with better than 50MPG to the list, but that's getting close to social engineering again.
We did, and it wasn't good enough (browsers, not OSes). There was a time when browsers couldn't execute anything - they just rendered html. But you wanter more. You wanted forms, and shopping, and banking. Eye candy and became more important than information; convenience more important than security.
If you remember DARPAnet, you know what the internet looked like in the late 80s/early 90s (which is when I got on). It was simple, obscure, and relatively safe. There were still explopits, but they were mostly beased on social engineering.
Let me ask you - if someone calls you on the phone and says they're from your bank, and they need your [SSN, credit card number, password] to [reactivate your account, authorize your automatic debit, enable your direct deposit, process your loan application] do you do it? Of course not! You've leared through countless ads and news stories that scammers will call you up to get your infomration, then steal you blind. But there are people who still do. Nobody is saying that the phone system is too hard to use or too filled with jargon to be "safe."
This isn't levelled at you personally, it's just that you've taken up the cause of the stupid people (see my sig and journal for explanation). I don't do "mission critical" stuff with technology or tools I don't understand.
The problem is that if you make it so simple that anyone can use it, it will probably be so simple that everyone will use it. Good for marketing, bad for safety. Press the button on that circular saw and the blade spins really really fast. As simple as that is, there are still multitudes of people who manage to cut their fingers off "accidentally." No matter how many safety devices there are, you'll always fiund someone who has mananged to circumvent them, either unintentionally or intentionally - usually in the name of "efficiency" (can you say "password file?") Expanding more, there are no doctors hiding behind the shed ready to make money by enticing you into cutting your fingers off. There are people on the internet who have a finacial interest in figuring out how to trick you into misusing your powerful but dangerous online financial tools.
I rented a moving truck recently. The agent (and owner of the place) required that I purchase their CDW, even though it says (and you must sign your acknolegdement) that you may decline. She told me that if I didn't get the CDW, she wouldn't rent me the van.
I lined out the clause, wrote in that I had been required to accept the CDW against my wishes, and signed. I suppose if things had gone sour, I could have taken it to the state govenement and had her reprimanded or her license suspended for violating the law (which required the ability to decline a CDW). As it was, I needed the van, the price was good - the bottom line was about the same as the other in-town rentals without a CDW - and it was available immediately.
Did it matter? Probably not. Nonetheless, most folks woildn't have bothered making the correction.
EULAs I cannot change (there's no way to negotiate). I also don't really give a crap. I bought the box, I'm using the software. I AM going to install it on all my personal partitions. If I have to crack it to make it work the way I want it to, so be it. No sense in losing 30 mintues of my life finding out that I'm supposed to stick my thumb up my butt and hum the theme song to the Magnificent Seven during bootup in order to make my license valid.
Actually, I found it quite interesting that (years ago) Virginia Tech decided to use Macs for the CS department and Windows boxes for Engineering students.
Now, here's a niche. How about a Eudora-like licensing scheme. They already have the "basic" service, which is free and terrybly stripped down. Add an ad-supported, full-featured, "free" version. Then take your pay version and soup it up like the units the hackers have created.
Most of them I suspect. It's the easiest way for federal employees to download copyrighted material from the internet without tying up their home lines unnecessarily;-)
(I'm a former federal employee. Much worse happens on those networks.)
Why would they bother. If you don't sign, you get no access. It's not a negotiable point. They're not "agreeing" they're "acknowledging". There's no active role on thier part.
I'm the guy who reads practially every agreement front to back. Except EULAs and "no change" agreements which I specifcally note to the observer that I did not read it, and signed on the lines they indicated.
Oh, and I've put changes is many "non-changeable" contracts.
Sadly, no. Sharing with your friends is copyright infringement, not fair use, and the copyright holder would win in court.
It's safe to do because there are very few people out there who would take you to court for the price of a handful of albums, even if they could get punitive damages. It would never cover the lawyers fees.
I agree with you, though, that making something available on the internet for 6B of you closest "friends" is a bit more high profile than dubbing a cassette on your dual-deck.
Actually, I just took a crack at opening my Sony MDR-V6 phones, and there's enough space in the one side to hold the working guts of the shuffle, plus a pair of small batteries. The usb connector would probably have to be swapped for a mini-female type, and the off-shuffle-cont switch replaced with a mini-type on the side. With some minor metal work, a circular hole could be cut in the aluminum shell for the original play button, but the new guts would need some positive retention to provide resistance for the "push". IT definitely could work in this case, and make quite an elegant/simple assembly.
Or, in the spirit of this "hack" you could just velcro the ipod to the outside of the V6s and shorten the cord so it plugs directly into the ipod.
I think I'll pass on both, as my shuffle is going to get sold pretty soon. My tunes just aren't organized enough to use iTunes effectively (and they're on a remote server to boot), and the resume function on the shuffle isn't user-friendly enough to rely on for frustration-free audiobook listening.
I never read Ender's War (or knew of its existance until now). Having read EG as a teen and really liked it, I picked it up again a couple of years ago. It was far more hollow and predictable then I had remembered. Your description about EW sounds like a much better story.
Also, I can't imagine putting both books into one movie and making it passable. There's just too much to deal with in a single book, let alone two.
No, nothing from a Bell is free. $1 makes it sound value added, like tone dialing. My proposal for $5.99 whitelisting is the stick to get your friends and family off that "evil" voip stuff.
(Disclaimer: I don't have voip. My cable connection isn't stable enough for reliable voice traffic, and my long distance bills are less than $3/mo. For me, it just doesn't pay.)
You can automatically block all VoIP call from your phone for just $1. For $5.99 you can add a whitelist. Or you can just tell all your friends to get a MaBell line and save that $5.99! Sounds like a win-win for the Bells!
No, no, he's got a point. There's always a chance, nomatter how remote, that the IRS just might ask me how an iPod qualifies as an "office expense". This make perfectly good sense. This one will keep my accountant laughing all afternoon.
Okay, I see the point you menat to make...it's an "all-in-one" solution that you're more likely to have "on your person" in the case of a sudden failure. Sort of like having a swiss army knife in your pocket. Sure, you can use it to clean the dirt out from under your fingernails or clip the sales tag off your new blouse, but you COULD use it to cut your arm off and free yourself from under a boulder if you had to. A bone saw would work better, but your less likely to have one around when catastrophe strikes.
You're value has only since the botom, but you have a "net gain," which I will take to mean that if you have put in $50,000 of your own money, you have $50,001 in your account after a five year investment period. Given your poor timing, that's probably pretty good. There is something to be said for breaking even, especially when inflation is low.
I'm guessing that you're young, though. If you were in your 60s and had a retirement account of $1,000,000 value to begin with, you'd probably still be down in the 40-50% loss category. DCA works, but as your investment portfolio grows significantly larger than your annual investments, you are far more a slave to the tide of the market. (which is why you switch from volitile to safe as you approach retirement)
that the current level is up 85% in 2.5 years (since the "bottom" of about 1114). Despite the precipitous fall, if you were in at the "bottom", you've recovered fairly well.
Of course, it's fun to realize that if you lose 80% of your investment, you have to manage a gain of 400% to get back to even. I'd say the corporations were paying for legislation that made it so hard for small investors to break even:-)
(That's a joke, by the way; there's a smiley at the end.)
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All you nutjobs with your illegal and pay-for-crap stuff might like this, but my collection is based on the physical media I own. Yes, hundreds of CDs ripped to a TB FW tower. I want directories. I want to organize the way I want. I want the stuff WITHOUT tags to be searchable. I don't have the time to go through and edit every freakin file to get the tags right. Drag folder to Nero. Burn CD. Destroy CD though carelessness. Repeat.
And don't get me stared on my AudioBooks on CD. What a fucking mess. I still say if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.
And, yes, I owned an iPod. I returned it, in part, becuase iTunes was as bad a windows about doing its "own" think rather than what I wanted.
I agree, iTunes is probably good for 12 year old girls. I have a longer attention span and a far larger need for organization.
(sorry for the rant...I've had a bad day)
Yes, thousands of Billions, because people are too stupid to know that the word Trillion exists?
Well, now I know why nobody is worried about the US national debt. 7 Trillion is, like, practially nothing. Let me know when we get to 7000 Billion and I'll start getting worried. And don't tell me that millions of millions crap - it just gets confusing. Besides, a million isn't as much as it used to be. Inflation, you know.
Hint: after Trillion, the next is Quadrillion, and then (hold you breath) Quintillion. Gosh it's, like, a pattern!
I decided to reply to you rather than mod you down.
The parent actually does make a good point. That fact that you go to Duke and believe that you are so intellectually superior that you and Duke were meant for one another regardless of the promised trinkets has nothing to do with the truth in his argument.
Students considering Duke will be smart or, as you have pointin particular concerning round-ball sports. It is common knnowledge, though apparently not to Duke enrollees, that colleges at the top levels of academics are in fierce competition for the smartest, most successful students. It is also common knowledge that practically all colleges at this level have very similar tuition and fees. An interview session I had with an MIT examiner (many years ago) admitted as much.
So, here's how it stacks up:
1) Great academics - very nearly equal
2) Quality of Envorinment - Varies a good bit
3) Cool bonuses
4) Price of education - very nearly equal
(You'll notice cast is #4. That's 'cause there are a lot of kids for whom cost is no object. It's somehting for the parents to worry about. Maybe no t in your case, but is quite a few.)
If you've got acceptance letters from three or four Ivy league schools, you're probably choosing based on the "little things." Nice campus, close/far from home, close to "fun", whatever. All but the anti-social have a little voice in the back of their teen mind saying "choose the 'cool' school."
Now, by standard marketing logic:
iPods are hip.
Duke gives iPods to new students.
Duke is hip.
No, not everyone will fall for this ploy. But SOME WILL. It doesn't make them bad, it makes them human. And Duke will get a few extra of that "top-notch" pool that all schools covet.
iPods are no more useful in the classroom than any handheld digital recorder, and a bit less useful because of the iPod->computer path obstacles. It has lots of uses, but no more than any digital recorder. It's a marketing ply, and nothing else. iPod takes "cool" and makes it "really cool".
*shrug*
Really?
/.
I was under the impression that when Stephen King writes a novel, it is just as much copyrighted in Arial as in Times New Roman. Not only that, but a movie based on the book is also part of his IP, and he can sue if someone should make a movie based on his book without his permission.
As for FUD, I agree. It would be a pretty large stretch, and require a haberdashery full of tin foil to anticipate legal problems from this. No wonder it's getting so much play here on
Oh, bullshit.
So now we have to train every stupid operator to be able to handle 8 to 10 hours of this a day, in addition to learning the new interface.
Why not give them senso-finger-cots and a digitizer pad? You can stretch your fingers a lot farther on a desk mounted pad than you can on a full sized screen.
This is exactly what medium businesses are stuck with. If they were bigger, they'd write their apps from scratch, done by an in-house team, and supported by the same team. They'd have the choice of any OS, and language. They'd have training done by the design team. They'd fix bugs fast, because millions of dollars hang in the balance.
Without that kind of money, you buy off-the-shelf apps and do a little customizing to make it run smoothly for your company. I'd love to have a custom written technical drawing application for my strucutral engineering firm. Just what I needed, none of the chaff that gets added in. MY commands at MY fingertips in the OS I choose. What a pipe dream.
If you believe that OSS can provide what the world needs, yo uhave a lot to learn about business. The cost of OS licenses is trivial. The cost of support and integration is not. More importantly, the cost of training - and ongoing training of new hires - can be daunting. Face it - IT is a necessary evil in a competitive market. It's like accounting (in non-accounting firms), or purchasing, or administrative support - a cost which is necessary but does not provide income.
If the secretary candidates all knew OO and linux, and only a couple had ever heard of "Word" and something called "Windows" because their kid brother had this funny colored-pane flying window sticker on his monitor, we'd be scrambling to get linux on every machine. But that's not the case. All of a sudden, every single person who walks through the door has to be trained on the new system. None of their detailed knowledge on the computer is worth a crap because they only know MS products. You've just added $10k to the cost of hiring someone. Add that to the $10 to $20k in pre-productive time and training on our policies to begin with. Don't need that burden.
Sorry to be such a spoil sport, but reality is mostly perception when it comes to decisions like this. I happen to like linux, though I'll admit I'm not very well versed in it. I've got an install of slack that I play with when I have time, and I keep a knoppix around, just in case. But I dont have the time to put it into production, and I can't afford to pay someone to do it for me. Simple economics - what I have works, changing will cost money - money I don't have.
Actually, they are - in their own way. It's not the efficiency of the engine that matters, but the amount of excess material that gets carried around.
Now, there's no reasonable condition where you would have just the right vehicle for just the right situation. But owning an SUV for a single-occupant commuter vehicle with a super efficient gasoline engine is no different than owning an 8000SF house with R13 insulation for two people, but claiming that you're not the problem because you just put in a 17SEER heat pump or a 99% efficient gas boiler. No matter how efficient you are, you're still wasting energy to accomplish a purpose (transport / housing). If you spnd most of the time with one or two people in the car and occasionally need the capacity, go rent a van. If you've got five kids and soccer practice everyday, you need the big vehicle, and are using it - I'm fine with that.
SUV fuel economy is not taking care of itself. If you are increaseing effeciency by 10% per HP per year, and adding 15% to your output HP (or 15% in effective inefficiencies like AWD drivetrains and poor aerodynamics) you're not really getting anywhere.
Actually, the biggest contributor, imho, is the tax exemption used to buy these vehicles by small businesses. Your doctor or lawyer doesn't really need an SUV to run his/her business, but buys one because with an 80-90% "business use" write off in year number one, that $50,000 luxury SUV is really only costing about $26,000 after federal and state taxes. That's a bargain that dwarfs any gasoline costs.
Now, I have a problem with higher gasoline taxes. Gas taxes to cover roads is fine. I'm even okay with a portion going to cover public transportation startup costs, as it gets people off the roads and reduces the need for more paved road miles. I'm NOT in favor of gas taxes to discourage the purchase of low-MPG vehicles. Aside from driving up the cost of transportation sensitive goods, it is an attempt at using the tax code for social engineering. Don't want people to drive SUVs? Elimiate the tax credit for them. I suppose I'd be okay with adding a "balance" to it by adding vehicles with better than 50MPG to the list, but that's getting close to social engineering again.
We did, and it wasn't good enough (browsers, not OSes). There was a time when browsers couldn't execute anything - they just rendered html. But you wanter more. You wanted forms, and shopping, and banking. Eye candy and became more important than information; convenience more important than security.
If you remember DARPAnet, you know what the internet looked like in the late 80s/early 90s (which is when I got on). It was simple, obscure, and relatively safe. There were still explopits, but they were mostly beased on social engineering.
Let me ask you - if someone calls you on the phone and says they're from your bank, and they need your [SSN, credit card number, password] to [reactivate your account, authorize your automatic debit, enable your direct deposit, process your loan application] do you do it? Of course not! You've leared through countless ads and news stories that scammers will call you up to get your infomration, then steal you blind. But there are people who still do. Nobody is saying that the phone system is too hard to use or too filled with jargon to be "safe."
This isn't levelled at you personally, it's just that you've taken up the cause of the stupid people (see my sig and journal for explanation). I don't do "mission critical" stuff with technology or tools I don't understand.
The problem is that if you make it so simple that anyone can use it, it will probably be so simple that everyone will use it. Good for marketing, bad for safety. Press the button on that circular saw and the blade spins really really fast. As simple as that is, there are still multitudes of people who manage to cut their fingers off "accidentally." No matter how many safety devices there are, you'll always fiund someone who has mananged to circumvent them, either unintentionally or intentionally - usually in the name of "efficiency" (can you say "password file?") Expanding more, there are no doctors hiding behind the shed ready to make money by enticing you into cutting your fingers off. There are people on the internet who have a finacial interest in figuring out how to trick you into misusing your powerful but dangerous online financial tools.
Okay, here's an example:
I rented a moving truck recently. The agent (and owner of the place) required that I purchase their CDW, even though it says (and you must sign your acknolegdement) that you may decline. She told me that if I didn't get the CDW, she wouldn't rent me the van.
I lined out the clause, wrote in that I had been required to accept the CDW against my wishes, and signed. I suppose if things had gone sour, I could have taken it to the state govenement and had her reprimanded or her license suspended for violating the law (which required the ability to decline a CDW). As it was, I needed the van, the price was good - the bottom line was about the same as the other in-town rentals without a CDW - and it was available immediately.
Did it matter? Probably not. Nonetheless, most folks woildn't have bothered making the correction.
EULAs I cannot change (there's no way to negotiate). I also don't really give a crap. I bought the box, I'm using the software. I AM going to install it on all my personal partitions. If I have to crack it to make it work the way I want it to, so be it. No sense in losing 30 mintues of my life finding out that I'm supposed to stick my thumb up my butt and hum the theme song to the Magnificent Seven during bootup in order to make my license valid.
Actually, I found it quite interesting that (years ago) Virginia Tech decided to use Macs for the CS department and Windows boxes for Engineering students.
Now, here's a niche. How about a Eudora-like licensing scheme. They already have the "basic" service, which is free and terrybly stripped down. Add an ad-supported, full-featured, "free" version. Then take your pay version and soup it up like the units the hackers have created.
Most of them I suspect. It's the easiest way for federal employees to download copyrighted material from the internet without tying up their home lines unnecessarily ;-)
(I'm a former federal employee. Much worse happens on those networks.)
Why would they bother. If you don't sign, you get no access. It's not a negotiable point. They're not "agreeing" they're "acknowledging". There's no active role on thier part.
I'm the guy who reads practially every agreement front to back. Except EULAs and "no change" agreements which I specifcally note to the observer that I did not read it, and signed on the lines they indicated.
Oh, and I've put changes is many "non-changeable" contracts.
Sadly, no. Sharing with your friends is copyright infringement, not fair use, and the copyright holder would win in court.
It's safe to do because there are very few people out there who would take you to court for the price of a handful of albums, even if they could get punitive damages. It would never cover the lawyers fees.
I agree with you, though, that making something available on the internet for 6B of you closest "friends" is a bit more high profile than dubbing a cassette on your dual-deck.
Actually, I just took a crack at opening my Sony MDR-V6 phones, and there's enough space in the one side to hold the working guts of the shuffle, plus a pair of small batteries. The usb connector would probably have to be swapped for a mini-female type, and the off-shuffle-cont switch replaced with a mini-type on the side. With some minor metal work, a circular hole could be cut in the aluminum shell for the original play button, but the new guts would need some positive retention to provide resistance for the "push". IT definitely could work in this case, and make quite an elegant/simple assembly.
Or, in the spirit of this "hack" you could just velcro the ipod to the outside of the V6s and shorten the cord so it plugs directly into the ipod.
I think I'll pass on both, as my shuffle is going to get sold pretty soon. My tunes just aren't organized enough to use iTunes effectively (and they're on a remote server to boot), and the resume function on the shuffle isn't user-friendly enough to rely on for frustration-free audiobook listening.
I never read Ender's War (or knew of its existance until now). Having read EG as a teen and really liked it, I picked it up again a couple of years ago. It was far more hollow and predictable then I had remembered. Your description about EW sounds like a much better story.
Also, I can't imagine putting both books into one movie and making it passable. There's just too much to deal with in a single book, let alone two.
No, nothing from a Bell is free. $1 makes it sound value added, like tone dialing. My proposal for $5.99 whitelisting is the stick to get your friends and family off that "evil" voip stuff.
(Disclaimer: I don't have voip. My cable connection isn't stable enough for reliable voice traffic, and my long distance bills are less than $3/mo. For me, it just doesn't pay.)
You can automatically block all VoIP call from your phone for just $1. For $5.99 you can add a whitelist. Or you can just tell all your friends to get a MaBell line and save that $5.99! Sounds like a win-win for the Bells!
No, no, he's got a point. There's always a chance, nomatter how remote, that the IRS just might ask me how an iPod qualifies as an "office expense". This make perfectly good sense. This one will keep my accountant laughing all afternoon.
FTP? Floppy? USB key? Second internal or external CDRW? External HD? Second internal HD?
Or you could use Puppy Linux mentioned here.
Okay, I see the point you menat to make...it's an "all-in-one" solution that you're more likely to have "on your person" in the case of a sudden failure. Sort of like having a swiss army knife in your pocket. Sure, you can use it to clean the dirt out from under your fingernails or clip the sales tag off your new blouse, but you COULD use it to cut your arm off and free yourself from under a boulder if you had to. A bone saw would work better, but your less likely to have one around when catastrophe strikes.
I had to smile when I read your post.
Your portfolio lost 80% at the "crash"
You dollar cost average (a good idea, btw)
You're value has only since the botom, but you have a "net gain," which I will take to mean that if you have put in $50,000 of your own money, you have $50,001 in your account after a five year investment period. Given your poor timing, that's probably pretty good. There is something to be said for breaking even, especially when inflation is low.
I'm guessing that you're young, though. If you were in your 60s and had a retirement account of $1,000,000 value to begin with, you'd probably still be down in the 40-50% loss category. DCA works, but as your investment portfolio grows significantly larger than your annual investments, you are far more a slave to the tide of the market. (which is why you switch from volitile to safe as you approach retirement)
IANAFA
Drop me your email address, I get hot stock tips everyday in my inbox. Maybe if I feed them yours they'll leave me alone.
that the current level is up 85% in 2.5 years (since the "bottom" of about 1114). Despite the precipitous fall, if you were in at the "bottom", you've recovered fairly well.
:-)
Of course, it's fun to realize that if you lose 80% of your investment, you have to manage a gain of 400% to get back to even. I'd say the corporations were paying for legislation that made it so hard for small investors to break even
(That's a joke, by the way; there's a smiley at the end.)
It's more about contituents. Goddard SFC is in Maryland, and there are a lot of folks who work for (or contract to) Goddard. It's just politics.
Oh, yeah, this will go over big in sharing communities. Only the leeches are legal. Pretty funny of you ask me.
(I suppose he could have gotten them off oc the usenet, but then how did he get caught?)