NO! It's for the basic one that actually works for what it says on the box. People don't buy something that can't patch, can't save, can't connect to the net without buying upgrades! Come ON, what's with all the PREMIUM nonsense? I own a 360 and I nor any other owner I know of EVER talked like that. Don't any of you realize how lame you sound?
Sorry to parody your response but it's a little hypocritical to complain about SKU vs. Premium when no one considers the Premium anything other than the basic, working X360.
It's like getting upset that people call Starbucks swill a SKU when "everyone" knows it's a 'tall', 'grande', etc. As Foamy explains, "when was the last time you went in to Taco Hell, ordered a Taco Grande and got a medium sized taco?" In the same way, when was the last time you talked bought a "premium" car just to get them to put the fuel tank in? If Ford tried to sell you a "basic" version that didn't include a fuel tank, requiring you to upgrade or constantly prime the engine by hand in order to get it to do anything, you'd be suing them. To sell a modern console that can't save games, can't patch them when they're buggy, can't go online, can't play your music, or any of the other features it says on the box as a "basic" version is just as ludicrous.
Premium/Basic doesn't exist in people's minds, just as SKU doesn't. There's version that does what it promises/cheap ploy at making it seem more affordable while gouging you even more to get it functional.
Interesting how you equate nothing beyond quoting two of the most famous passages of text of the last millenium with emotional hyperbole.
Now, I'd argue that any speech, to be worth speaking, should trigger a strong response but I wouldn't accuse either of those passages of being hyperbole.
As for what I wrote, interestingly enough, I didn't write anything - I let those passages speak for themselves. Perhaps it's like a rorschach test: the very absence of anything reveals more about the viewer in the emotions that actually come from within.
It perhaps raises more questions about your own bias that you'd manage to find emotional hyperbole even in silence if you felt the other person, behind that silence, held a view different to your own.
There are certainly many concepts that fall within the broad brush of "conversational terrorism". One of which, however, is the act of learning just enough of the buzz phrases to attempt to throw them around to belittle anyone one disagrees with.
Now, had I made stiring speaches about how generations of Americans have fought and died to hold dear the concepts enshrined... yada yada... then you might have had a point. To throw out a phrase like emotional hyperbole, when confronted by nothing more than two classic passages and silence, simply cheapens the term and reveals more of the person who'd try to do so.
Assuming they're smart enough to create signals that we can detect, they can most likely detect ours too.
Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely, if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and are quite a bit smarter.
Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars - and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.
So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.
I'll leave it to other people's words to explain why trying to make distinctions, just violating what your country upholds as someone's rights when it comes to one group - be they 'just foreign nationals' or whatever - is about as purely un-American as you can get:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
ABS compensates when the driver brakes too hard, but does not discourage the driver from taking such action in the future. A drunk-driving detector won't compensate for your poor driving while drunk, but it will instead warn you of your impairment to discourage you from continuing to drive. Those are two very different concepts. Previously:
One beer... I'm pretty sure I'm sober enough to drive.
Two plus... I'm not sure, better not chance it.
Now
One beer... It lets me start, I'm sober.
Five beers... It won't let me start. Yay, I can rely on this.
Three beers... Eh, I'll give it a shot. Hey, what do you know? I guess I'm more sober than I thought. Let's drive!
Whilst it's true that it's not exactly the same concept as ABS which compensates without discouraging, it does have a huge drawback in terms of giving people the sense that they can pass responsibility off on to a machine to determine if they're too drunk rather than erring on the side of caution.
Of course, the flip side is that many people don't err on the side of caution. It was an eye opener for me, moving from a country where drink driving was a major no-no to one where just about every person I meet seems to have a story about how they got pulled over after having "only had a few" and how unfair they felt it was. For people who err on the side of excess, this system will rein them in - great. For people who err on the side of caution however - and I desperately want to believe there are more people like this - it plays in to all kinds of behavioral psychology weaknesses to encourage them to stop playing it so safe. If that is indeed the larger group, it probably does make things worse overall.
That being said, I would drop cash in a heartbeart to play a MMORPG with Oblivion-like gameplay.
The best thing about Oblivion is what happens to it when it's modded. Almost every single PC review will talk about how the available mods turn it in to the game it should have been - from interface enhancements to losing powerless vampires and demons at low level and losing indestructable uber wolves at high level. The biggest complaints most reviews seem to have with its expansions is that they play with the mods turned off again and realize how much they miss them.
Unfortunately, MMOs tend not to be moddable - losing the best aspect of Oblivion's gameplay.
Then there's their second best feature - completely exploitable gameplay. No "balanced" MMO is going to let you create a spellcaster with custom spells that drop cold defenses by 100%, increase cold damage by 100% and do so much damage on touch that they're one shot kills. Whilst that utterly appeals to the hacker gamer mentality, it's something that'll have most players whining about how "unfair" it is.
While it's theoretically possible they'll carve out a niche, inventing an MMO that gives all of those advantages back, doesn't claim to be balanced and stops worrying about whether people can powerlevel or have to suck up grind or not... something tells me that no current publisher has the nerve to risk it. Shame. Seeing those aspects of Oblivion make it to the MMO space would be one hell of a breath of fresh air.
To hire a good educator for your course, you have to address the cost of making it more appealing than the alternatives (non-academic career paths). Sure, perceived longer vacations, the greater good, etc. may be appealing but they only count for so much.
A qualified expert in computer science can earn $50,000/year without breaking a sweat and, if any good, can look at around $100,000 a year fairly easily.
A qualified expert with a liberal arts degree will be happy to stop asking customers if they'd like fries with that.
Even with lab equipment etc. taken out of it, a department of 20 lecturers charging $30,000 a year is always going to cost a million a year less than a department of 20 lecturers charging $80,000 a year. 3,000 students taking 20 credits each means you need to find roughly $15/credit extra.
The question at that point is: Are they milking students or are they simply paying a competetive wage and passing that cost on?
Imagine if consumers could pull the same crap with changing contracts, updating terms and expecting the businesses to check online for any updates that businesses pull on consumers.
Henceforth, the customer [Me] doesn't have to make any payments and will face no consequences for doing so. Further, the lender [You] agrees to assume existing and future debts whilst continuing an open line of credit. This was posted somewhere on the net so it's the lender's [your] obligation to check for it.
As described in Tenni Theurer's blog Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!, 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache. Making your page fast for these first time visitors is key to a better user experience.
What, seriously? Are you really optimizing for your visitors who load one and only one page before their cache is cleared? Even though you "measured... and found the number of page views with a primed cache is 75-85%"? Daily Visitors != Page Views
Making up random numbers and fudging to a perfect caching system for convenience:
10 people hit your site on a given day.
3 have never been there before, have an empty cache, say, "Damn, this shit's slow," and leave. 2 have never been there before, have an empty cache but endure, surfing 5 pages each. The other five are regular users and have files cached. They surf the same 5 pages.
Total: 3x1 + 2x(1+4) + 5x5 = 38 total pages.
(5 out of 10) 50% of daily visitors had an empty cache. (5 out of 38) 13% of page requests hit with an empty cache. (33 out of 38) 87% of page requests hit with a primed cache.
So, both quotes are correct: 50% of daily unique visitors came in with an empty cache, 87% of total page requests were made with a primed cache.
Obviously those numbers are pulled out of my anatomical/dev/null and make some major assumptions - but they do help illustrate how Unique Visitors is not the same as Page Views.
Both numbers are important. By looking at the gulf between them, you can start to build up an impression of what new users vs. what returning users do with your site.
Similarly, both types of users are essential:
Sure, you want to ensure new users love the site and become repeat users. So you want to optimize for them. But you don't want to do this at the cost of returning users or they'll come, love the experience, decide to return, discover it sucks, then leave again.
In the same way, you want to ensure your existing users have a site they love and don't defect. So you want to optimize for them. But you don't want to do this at the cost of the site sucking so much for new users none of them convert in to repeat users in the first place.
It's a classic case of all things in moderation: If you're going to one or other extreme, you're probably hamstringing yourself. If you're picking somewhere in the middle, informing yourself with the statistics, getting the best understanding of where that sweet spot lies, you're probably going to be far more successful.
The people who fail are the ones who say, "Statistics show that 85% of page views are hitting with a primed cache! We should always plan for that." and go off after what's actually only 50% of total users - they'll lose all new traffic and their site will slowly die. So will the people who say, "50% of daily visitors have an empty cache! We should always plan for that." and go after what're only 15% of the total site's experience. The wiser people say, "Hmm, 50% of unique users hit with an empty cache, 85% of page views have a primed cache. That implies we're getting a lot of new users coming in that we should accomodate but that most of our total traffic is to established users. We should find a healthy balance point for both."
So little air pressure that if you jumped out of a plane on Mars and popped a parachute, you'd be the next crater Spirit went to study. I'm pretty sure that, even on Earth, if you make your parachute go pop, you still end up as a crater. Granted, thicker air means lower terminal velocity but the popping of your chute remains pretty bad.
please stop making stuff up about how this is all 9/11 overreaction
I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States... You're right. No connection at all. </sarcasm>
Wow, if only there was some way we could have predicted this?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Of course, had the British government of the time acted a little more like the current U.S. administration, he would have been arrested as a terrorist, jailed with habeus corpus suspended, and there may well not be a U.S. administration today to ignore his wisdom.
Instead the company will use total time spent on a site. How popular your site is is now measured by how long people spend on it? Isn't that kind of like rating auto manufacturers based on how many culmulative gallons of gasoline their cars burn, rewarding inefficiency?
Adobe must be in heaven, planning all of the extra sales of Flash...
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PJ of Groklaw wrote this story about how and why the GPLv3 will apply to Microsoft. There's the classic acronym IANAL. Even when two lawyers are involved, the moment they're from different sides, they too have different interpretations. They may be certain their personal interpretation is correct and is exactly how things will pan out but the same still holds true...
The judge you get on the day, the jury, how well the lawyers convince the jury to see things their way, what the judge allows and disallows, what the various appeals processes rule, the politicians you buy to change the law at the last moment, all of those change it from absolute certainty to something much hazier.
In that haze, Microsoft's PR, lawyers, management, etc. can all state, "The GPLv3 won't stand up in court." Groklaw can state, "This is how it will go..." and we on Slashdot can argue, "Ha, we've got them now!" or "Microsoft will wriggle out of it somehow, like they always do." to our heart's content. The one certainty is that those are opinions, not absolutes for how it'll work out.
PJ's welcome to an opinion. More accurately however, the title should be "PJ from Groklaw has an opinion about how GPLv3 and Microsoft will work out." What it isn't, and can't be until it's gone through every last legal wrangling, is an absolute what "will" happen.
Ultimately, you just don't put nerds in management roles, you make them SAs, or coders, etc, and put people-persons in management. You know, managers. One very unfortunate thing is that companies tend not to financially recognize the increasing benefits of increasing technical experience in the same way they do increasing managerial experience. As a result, a lot of nerds who don't really want to become managers - and probably never should - see it as the only way to earn more and take promotions in to roles they suck at.
I've seen a lot of great technical people take managerial positions that made them miserable. Many of them ended up getting fired/demoted/spun-to-the-rest-of-the-company-as-t heir-choice-to-step-down. Many of them ended up resenting the sense of being stuck, unable to advance, and losing some of that spark that made them really great technical people.
I've only come across one company that I felt really had a good solution to that: You could progress down whatever path suited you best - doing more management, less management, whatever worked for you so long as the company had a need for it. You got absolutely no raise associated with new positions. Everyone got reviewed for whether they were doing well or badly in whatever their current position happened to be. The better the review, the greater the raise, completely regardless of management/tech paths. They had very senior techs who earned way more than the norm and more than many even mid level managers. The flip side was that they had a company filled with people doing whatever they did best, knowing they were rewarded for it and not resenting their positions and feeling trapped. No idea whether this proved profitable overall but I can certainly respect their willingness to try something different to address what is an horrifically common issue in the field.
Hmmm. Let's see. He said "basic XBox 360". You quoted the price for the top of the line 360 with the most expensive add-on available. But you're clearly just trolling.
The guy you're calling a troll made a point of referencing HDMI versions.
That was always the main sticking point on the $100 price difference between the two skus of the PS3. Wireless this and that, a bigger harddrive, these were all things you could upgrade if you wanted to. The one thing you couldn't upgrade was HDMI which, even now, no one knows how big an issue HDCP is going to turn in to in three or four years.
In short, if HDMI wasn't an issue, the $599 PS3 pricepoint would never have been an issue and the PS3 should always have been having its $100 cheaper version compared against Microsoft's cheaper versions (plus the cost of a memory card to unlock the functionality). That HDMI was considered such a critical factor, with many refusing to buy the cheaper option, makes considering HDMI variant of the X360 absolutely valid.
What you (and Sony) forget is that some people buy a game console just to play games. And if you just play games the PS3 is horribly overpriced. Even at $499, it will still be way more expensive than the competition (by 66% to 100%).
That argument can be taken as far and ridiculously as you want:
Were I to be facetious, the $299 X360 is still way more expensive (more than double the cost) of the PS2 which has a far better library of games. The counter argument there is to list the improved gaming features, higher resolution, etc. of the 360 over the PS2 - but then that same argument also holds that if better quality graphics are your criteria for games, the XBox 360 can't match the PS3's slightly higher end hardware and sure as hell can't match a PC with four 8800 chips, a gig of ram on each of the two cards, on a quad core processor.
In other words, purely looking at gaming...
Gameboy - very cheap, much lower quality.
PS2/XBox - cheap, lower quality
X360 basic - medium price, decent quality, very hamstrung feature set
X360 basic plus memory card - medium price, decent quality
X360 plus HDD - higher end of medium price, improved decent quality games
X360 elite - higher end of medium price again, no improvement for pure gamers
PS3 - highest end of medium price, best of the medium price gaming options.
Typical gamer PC - about 2-3 times the cost of the mid range but capable of higher resolutions, better AA, more processing power available to AI, etc.
High end gamer PC - about ten times the cost of the mid range but capable of powering 2560x1600 30 inch displays with anti aliasing, DX10 effects and a mouse so you can actually play FPSs without needing the game to cheat your aiming.;)
It's a continuum. Everyone picks the right price point for them (except for fanboys who declare the price point of their favored unit to be the only valid one, dismissing cheaper options as poorer quality while ignoring the cost savings and dismissing the more expensive options as overpriced while dismissing the quality improvements as trivial).
The PS3 is more expensive than an X360. Compare the minimum usable X360 (with 20GB hdd) against the PS3 and the small increase in gaming improvements doesn't justify the price increase if that's your sole criteria.
Then again, for many people, the more than double price increase from PS2 to X360 isn't justified either.
For other people, spending over $200 on a console, they damn well expect next gen DVD playback and a $200 add on player for the X360 that already doesn't work with every HD-DVD out there and doesn't have HDMI which may turn out to be critical down the line and for them the criteria isn't matched.
That's the fun thing about a diverse market, everyone gets to pick their own criteria and then find what fits that criteria the best.
Of course, I've always done it...I liked her and valued her. But never even given a second thought to her power. And you're absolutely right. It's the one useful thing I learned at university...
No lecturer actually collected their assignments at the 5pm cut off. Very few would even see it as a priority before noon the next day. They simply relied upon the department receptionist to tell them who handed it in on time and who gets the instant 20% knocked off for being late.
Befriend the receptionist and you got an extra night on every assignment. For the really big stuff, if she liked you enough, you'd tell her your woes and find she'd offer to tell the lecturer, "I'm SO sorry, Nick handed this to me before the deadline last week but I guess I put it down on the wrong pile." You then got to listen to the lecturer talk about what he had been looking for, after he assumed no one else could submit work, and leave everyone else wondering how you so effortlessly got straight As.
Sure, technically, each lecturer held more power. But every one of them always had students sucking up to them, trying to gradegrub, and was pretty much immune. And you had ten or twenty different lecturers you had to try it with.
Alternatively, one receptionist extended every deadline for you and knew the lecturers well enough to tell you great tidbits like, "Lecturer X admits in the staff breakroom that he likes a glass or two of whisky while he grades. He starts off grading pretty strict but jokes about how his criteria's much more 'relaxed' by the end of the night. I'll slip your assignment in where it'll get the most generous grader. Lecturer Y hates grading and gets more angry as the night goes on, so I'll put your assignment at the top of her stack."
Amazing how much power the people who allegedly don't have any power really wield.
Mind you, social engineering is also the reason why some hackers will spend days trying to crack security vulnerabilities in software while another guy will achieve just as much in a single phonecall.
Different people like different things. That goes for the employees and the employers. It's why Google does things one way, Fog Creek does things another and why some of us will quit jobs in disgust and never understand why our friends, who we thought were smart, will happily remain there for years.
I'm lucky, I've got a situation where my management have given me a free rein to do what I think is best, a team that appears to appreciate the environment I create and that's been able to pay off in terms of a sustained, significant increase in profitability (any idiot can increase profitability in the short term at long term expense), a huge increase in reputation for my team members within the company, with clients and even on standards bodies, etc. and, off the back of that demonstrable increase in profitability, the ability for me to argue for, and get, a large number of significant pay raises for every single long term team member in an industry where large raises tend to only be achievable by job hopping.
Sure, my style's not for everyone. One contractor we used sent me racist hate mail after we let him go for yelling at the receptionist, bitching that a server admin took too long to set up an account and then leaving after three hours because parking cost $8 for the day. In his case, my beliefs that we're the sum of our reputation, including how we treat others as well as how we perform technically, were so objectionable he needed to resort to vitriol. That's cool, I hope he'll be happy somewhere where you're allowed to attack people for improper care and handling of the self important. The great thing about the world is he gets to find a manager that suits him, reaping the rewards of that, while my team members get to find a manager that suits them, reaping their own rewards.
I'm not in any way denegrating nerds. I'm one first, learning the other aspects on top of that. Technical knowledge remains essential for a technical role and I was careful to state that I don't have respect for the technically illiterate, morally vacuous schmoozers out there. Where I've personally found works well for me, and works well for most employers, is the realization that a combination of strong technical skills with an understanding there's a human level too (where interaction with integrity rather than fake schmoozing is the emphasis) seems to generally make for a good manager.
I'm not perfect. I make all kinds of mistakes. But that's at least the philosophy I've formed, what I've observed many more senior managers seem to look to hire and, aiming for, has at least brought me a fair degree of success measured both in terms of how my team performs over the long term and how well I feel I've been able to do, looking out for the guys who do work for me.
Of course, those're just my observations and the direction I try to head in. That doesn't appeal to you? That's cool, it's a huge industry. Interviews should be as much about you interviewing your potential new management as about them interviewing you. You get to find somewhere that works for you, I get to build somewhere that appears to work pretty well for me, and we all come out of it pretty well.
The number one thing I do: Say good morning to the receptionist.
A good relationship with her (it could be a him, it's simply a her where I work) is essential:
Just about everyone bitches to her. Whether an issue's with email, with network reliability, a printer not working, phones playing up, the cold tap running hot, she's aware of all of it.
She's also the one point everyone has to pass at least once and, being close to both restrooms and breakroom, she tends to see most people much more too. Better than anyone, she can serve as a barometer of people's moods. If someone is obviously in a foul mood that morning, if someone's running around stressed about something, she knows faster than just about anyone.
She's also the person everyone has to let know if a client's coming in as she'll be the person to meet them. She also tends to handle much of the mess that is meeting room booking so she gets even more insight in to who's coming.
Build a good relationship with her and she looks out for me. If everything's cool, I get a "Hi" back and get on with greeting my team, checking email, checking in with project leads and PMs, reading slashdot, etc. If there's something up, she'll give me a summary that, with her understanding my needs from our previous talks, pretty much prioritizes as I need to know. I can then get on any problems far faster than checking each of the traditional reporting methods or I can go about my normal routine prepped so I don't say send an email that might trigger the guy who's in a bad mood that day.
And that's just the first fifteen seconds of my day.
She's also the first person to interview any candidates for me: If someone's an asshole to the people they think "don't matter," they're going to disrupt my team in a million other ways.
As already mentioned, she handles the mess of meeting rooms - an often precious resource. Do you want that person favoring you or someone else?
Being the first person everyone bitches to, she can come back with, "Wow, Nick [or Nick's team] is really being a jerk. Let's see what we can do." or she can respond, "Wow, that doesn't sound like Nick [or Nick's team]. He'd never knowingly let that happen. Let's let him know and I'm sure he'll get it addressed right away." Her response, being many people's first reaction when something goes wrong, can totally color the rest of their reaction and how easily I can deal with the issue.
She also knows where everything is, how everything functions, or who would do. "Hey, I can't find the contractor NDA forms." can get you a sympathetic acknowledgment from a rushed person and hold up your rush filling of a position by a day or two while you track them down or it can get "Hmm, I'll track them down and IM you in about five once I've got them." from someone who likes you.
The same holds true for all interpersonnel relationships, it's just especially important with a front desk person given everything that crosses their world - plus the question was what do you do "first" and they are pretty much always the first person you'll see.
Most nerds give great answers about slashdot, about email, about remote logging and paging systems. They're great nerd answers that show why you'd be great for a nerd position. What they demonstrate a lack of is an appreciation of what good interpersonnel relationships give you and adding that on top of the nerd qualifications is what demonstrates you'll be a good manager. Management is no longer a role about who can do the coolest nerd thing, it's about how do you handle all of the relationships around a diverse bunch of people. If your answer is about the systems, not the people, you're most comfortable interacting with - you're probably giving a major red flag for your abilities to work with people who should work with systems for you.
There were quite a few joke comments about "schmoozing." While I know they were intended as fun, that it's seen as something silly that managers that n
The TV playing music on the TV being counted as a live performance is a joke, as are the speculative calls asking, "Do you ever play gospel music."
That said, I only have limited sympathy for:
The coffeeshop owner who makes more money, selling more drinks because live music brings in more customers when that benefit is gained from using other people's work.
The singer/songwriter who held down gigs by profiting off someone else's work. Despite the self agrandizing title of singer/songwriter, his own compositions are such that, evidently, no one wants to pay to hear them.
I'll be sympathetic to people who weren't in any way trying to profit from using other people's work. If you're selling more coffee or getting paid to perform and have upped your margins (albeit from unprofitable to profitable) by taking someone else's work and not paying, I have a hard time being sympathetic to you when you're finally caught. They're not even getting fined for the [potentially] years they've got away with it already, they're simply being asked, "If you want to keep profiting from someone else's work, you're going to have to start paying them too."
It's not like they're banned from playing live music. They're totally free to have singer/songwriters play their own compositions. Except they don't want to because they can't profit so much from it. Why's it OK for them to profit but not the people, who covered the costs of creating and popularizing that music in the first place, that they're now profiting from?
It's much the same as my line of work: I use PhotoShop daily. It costs a small fortune for private individuals. The flip side is that we can probably make that cost and much more back because we use it. If we aren't willing to pay, there're free alternatives like GimpShop out there. I've got respect for those who pay for the better tools and try to turn a profit. I've got respect for those who cut margins by using the free tools and try to turn a profit. I've got very little respect for those who try to improve their margins, while getting all the same benefits, by pirating PhotoShop. If Adobe releases a new version that they're convinced they need but can't steal anymore... cry me a river for their losing their business model of trying to profit by taking other people's work for free without their consent.
About the only unfairness in this is the perception of unfairness: That you can likely get away with gaming the system for years so when you do finally get held accountable, it seems that much more arbitrary and thus unfair. Then again, is that genuinely unfair or is it just the perception of unfairness and frankly your issue to get over?
The same happens with speeding tickets. I can drive at 65 and never get a ticket. I can drive at 85 and get places faster, 999 out of a thousand, benefiting from that. The one time in a thousand I get caught, it feels so unfair that I now have a couple of hundred bucks in fines to pay off. Yet I don't bitch about it - I get on and pay. If I don't want the risk anymore, I'll stop trying to game the system. If I do try to game the system, I'll suck it up when I do get caught and recognize the unfairness is in my perception, not a system I knowingly flaunted for a long, long time.
So, for something as ridiculous as charging for music played on a TV, yeah, it's a joke. For bitching when you try to make more of a profit (or less of a loss in the case of the people who can't figure out how to run a profitable coffeeshop in the first place) by profiting off someone else's work... suck it up when you're finally asked to pay or move to the free option that, admittedly, won't let you profit in quite the same way anymore.
Enlisted sailors are saluted? I thought salutes were reserved for officers. I honestly don't know the system that well but I think you're confusing Enlisted with Commissioned. In most branches of the U.S. military, an E-5 and above is some flavor of Sergeant and thus a Non Commissioned Officer. The Navy uses the term Petty Officer to denote its NCO equivalents and starts them at E-4, one grade earlier than the other branches:
E-4: Petty Officer Third Class E-5: Petty Officer Second Class E-6: Petty Officer First Class E-7: Chief Petty Officer E-8: Senior Chief Petty Officer E-9: Master Chief Petty Officer
Thus, if the rule is that "officers" get saluted, it may well be that E-4 and above with in the Navy merit it as Non Commissioned Officers. Even if they don't, there's always the simple self preservation of not screwing with a chief, even retired, as they usually have the means to make your life hell, even if you are commissioned.
I actually have experience of Navy GPS units, courtesy of a retired senior chief father in law who built the things for the Navy as a civilian contractor.
Compared to a little pocket sized GPS unit, these things were huge. Their dimensions were actually constrained by one very simple requirement: They had to fit the standard ammo tin as the Navy had a butt load of storage that was designed to fit exactly that. It also had to have standardized power connectors, standardized venting connectors, etc. The extra ruggedization was less of an issue for the Navy compared to say the Army but they still had to handle being tossed on to ships buy guys who didn't really care too much about what it was they were moving, they just had to move it fast. It seemed ridiculous at first, to have such a huge box and pay so much extra for it - until you realize that the Navy would much rather than than have to search for a nice ergonomic unit that was small enough to roll off and get lost when they really needed it plus had turned out to have overheated and had a charger that kept blowing out on ship's electricity.
Illustrating much the same point, his company laid him and the other retired Navy guys off a few months later and replaced them with a bunch of freshly minted Master's degrees as they were "clearly" better. A month later the genius who made that call got fired. Yes, a Master's degree in all of the latest techs is very nice. It's completely useless when you have someone who gets lost on ships, who gets their car stopped every time they drive on base vs. the retired E-8 who gets a salute and waved straight through, and someone who pisses off the guys they have no idea how to speak to and thus gets absolutely no help whenever something needs doing. Sure, they designed great products back in the head office but the moment they delivered what the Navy "should" want rather than what it "did" want, they suddenly found it wasn't such a smart idea.
It's ironic: Anyone who's worked in IT for any length of time has seen that drawing of the swing requested by the marketing team, ordered by sales, designed by engineering, etc. And yet, every time DoD contracts get discussed, the supposedly experienced Slashdot crowd always has someone who says, "Consumer grade is cheaper, smaller and therefore better."
As the kid in Australia who tried to fix his laundered iPod, put a screwdriver through the lithium ion battery pack and took a flamethrower to the face discovered... Size/weight vs. capacity isn't the only factor for a battery in rough environments.
White phosphorous grenades are harsh because you have to dig the burning fragments out of your unanesthetized buddy before they burn any deeper through his flesh. Do you really want to be in an environment where the first round through your battery pack not only leaves you with a bullet inside you but also sets you on fire/douses you with acid. And that's just considering getting shot - how many troops will continue to carry something that gets a reputation for setting them on fire if they bang it wrongly getting in and out of a hummer. No one likes a burning feeling from their hummer.
It's much like the much discussed "Why do DoD products cost the government 10-100x what the equivalent consumer grade one does? Why not just by consumer models and save cash plus get it in to the field faster?" Tolerances and what happens when those tolerances fail may well be that answer.
Granted, this is AT&T not Sprint but the concept still applies...
Assuming you buy a $600 iPhone that doesn't work on any network other than AT&T's, when they terminate your contract, do they buy back the hardware that they've now rendered unusable?
I wonder if you can claim it as faulty under an extended 2 year Apple care warranty as it now fails to work as advertised? I could see Apple getting pissed at AT&T for forcing them to take returns on otherwise totally functional hardware just because AT&T decided phone support cost too much.
Slashdot Mirror
NO! It's for the premium XBOX.
NO! It's for the basic one that actually works for what it says on the box. People don't buy something that can't patch, can't save, can't connect to the net without buying upgrades! Come ON, what's with all the PREMIUM nonsense? I own a 360 and I nor any other owner I know of EVER talked like that. Don't any of you realize how lame you sound?
Sorry to parody your response but it's a little hypocritical to complain about SKU vs. Premium when no one considers the Premium anything other than the basic, working X360.
It's like getting upset that people call Starbucks swill a SKU when "everyone" knows it's a 'tall', 'grande', etc. As Foamy explains, "when was the last time you went in to Taco Hell, ordered a Taco Grande and got a medium sized taco?" In the same way, when was the last time you talked bought a "premium" car just to get them to put the fuel tank in? If Ford tried to sell you a "basic" version that didn't include a fuel tank, requiring you to upgrade or constantly prime the engine by hand in order to get it to do anything, you'd be suing them. To sell a modern console that can't save games, can't patch them when they're buggy, can't go online, can't play your music, or any of the other features it says on the box as a "basic" version is just as ludicrous.
Premium/Basic doesn't exist in people's minds, just as SKU doesn't. There's version that does what it promises/cheap ploy at making it seem more affordable while gouging you even more to get it functional.
Interesting how you equate nothing beyond quoting two of the most famous passages of text of the last millenium with emotional hyperbole.
Now, I'd argue that any speech, to be worth speaking, should trigger a strong response but I wouldn't accuse either of those passages of being hyperbole.
As for what I wrote, interestingly enough, I didn't write anything - I let those passages speak for themselves. Perhaps it's like a rorschach test: the very absence of anything reveals more about the viewer in the emotions that actually come from within.
It perhaps raises more questions about your own bias that you'd manage to find emotional hyperbole even in silence if you felt the other person, behind that silence, held a view different to your own.
There are certainly many concepts that fall within the broad brush of "conversational terrorism". One of which, however, is the act of learning just enough of the buzz phrases to attempt to throw them around to belittle anyone one disagrees with.
Now, had I made stiring speaches about how generations of Americans have fought and died to hold dear the concepts enshrined... yada yada... then you might have had a point. To throw out a phrase like emotional hyperbole, when confronted by nothing more than two classic passages and silence, simply cheapens the term and reveals more of the person who'd try to do so.
Assuming they're smart enough to create signals that we can detect, they can most likely detect ours too.
Complex life on this planet has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and yet it's only in the last hundred or so that we've been able to look out with anything more than enhancements of our natural senses. This implies that the odds of a second species being at exactly the same point tiny. Most likely, if they're sending things we can read, they got there a long way before us and are quite a bit smarter.
Assuming they're quite a bit smarter, one look at the crap our radiowaves are sharing with the universe - infomercials, reality TV and our politics/wars - and I'd imagine pretty much any higher civilization would be embarrassed enough about us to screen their signature and make damn sure those idiotic hairless apes don't go and screw their part of the galaxy up too.
So, the answer to the paradox: There's most likely higher intelligence out there. And, because it's higher, it's most likely embarrassed to hell and back by us and screening itself from us. Problem solved.
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
One beer... I'm pretty sure I'm sober enough to drive.
Two plus... I'm not sure, better not chance it.
Now
One beer... It lets me start, I'm sober.
Five beers... It won't let me start. Yay, I can rely on this.
Three beers... Eh, I'll give it a shot. Hey, what do you know? I guess I'm more sober than I thought. Let's drive!
Whilst it's true that it's not exactly the same concept as ABS which compensates without discouraging, it does have a huge drawback in terms of giving people the sense that they can pass responsibility off on to a machine to determine if they're too drunk rather than erring on the side of caution.
Of course, the flip side is that many people don't err on the side of caution. It was an eye opener for me, moving from a country where drink driving was a major no-no to one where just about every person I meet seems to have a story about how they got pulled over after having "only had a few" and how unfair they felt it was. For people who err on the side of excess, this system will rein them in - great. For people who err on the side of caution however - and I desperately want to believe there are more people like this - it plays in to all kinds of behavioral psychology weaknesses to encourage them to stop playing it so safe. If that is indeed the larger group, it probably does make things worse overall.
That being said, I would drop cash in a heartbeart to play a MMORPG with Oblivion-like gameplay.
The best thing about Oblivion is what happens to it when it's modded. Almost every single PC review will talk about how the available mods turn it in to the game it should have been - from interface enhancements to losing powerless vampires and demons at low level and losing indestructable uber wolves at high level. The biggest complaints most reviews seem to have with its expansions is that they play with the mods turned off again and realize how much they miss them.
Unfortunately, MMOs tend not to be moddable - losing the best aspect of Oblivion's gameplay.
Then there's their second best feature - completely exploitable gameplay. No "balanced" MMO is going to let you create a spellcaster with custom spells that drop cold defenses by 100%, increase cold damage by 100% and do so much damage on touch that they're one shot kills. Whilst that utterly appeals to the hacker gamer mentality, it's something that'll have most players whining about how "unfair" it is.
While it's theoretically possible they'll carve out a niche, inventing an MMO that gives all of those advantages back, doesn't claim to be balanced and stops worrying about whether people can powerlevel or have to suck up grind or not... something tells me that no current publisher has the nerve to risk it. Shame. Seeing those aspects of Oblivion make it to the MMO space would be one hell of a breath of fresh air.
To hire a good educator for your course, you have to address the cost of making it more appealing than the alternatives (non-academic career paths). Sure, perceived longer vacations, the greater good, etc. may be appealing but they only count for so much.
A qualified expert in computer science can earn $50,000/year without breaking a sweat and, if any good, can look at around $100,000 a year fairly easily.
A qualified expert with a liberal arts degree will be happy to stop asking customers if they'd like fries with that.
Even with lab equipment etc. taken out of it, a department of 20 lecturers charging $30,000 a year is always going to cost a million a year less than a department of 20 lecturers charging $80,000 a year. 3,000 students taking 20 credits each means you need to find roughly $15/credit extra.
The question at that point is: Are they milking students or are they simply paying a competetive wage and passing that cost on?
What, seriously? Are you really optimizing for your visitors who load one and only one page before their cache is cleared? Even though you "measured... and found the number of page views with a primed cache is 75-85%"? Daily Visitors != Page Views
Making up random numbers and fudging to a perfect caching system for convenience:
10 people hit your site on a given day.
3 have never been there before, have an empty cache, say, "Damn, this shit's slow," and leave.
2 have never been there before, have an empty cache but endure, surfing 5 pages each.
The other five are regular users and have files cached. They surf the same 5 pages.
Total: 3x1 + 2x(1+4) + 5x5 = 38 total pages.
(5 out of 10) 50% of daily visitors had an empty cache.
(5 out of 38) 13% of page requests hit with an empty cache.
(33 out of 38) 87% of page requests hit with a primed cache.
So, both quotes are correct: 50% of daily unique visitors came in with an empty cache, 87% of total page requests were made with a primed cache.
Obviously those numbers are pulled out of my anatomical
Both numbers are important. By looking at the gulf between them, you can start to build up an impression of what new users vs. what returning users do with your site.
Similarly, both types of users are essential:
Sure, you want to ensure new users love the site and become repeat users. So you want to optimize for them. But you don't want to do this at the cost of returning users or they'll come, love the experience, decide to return, discover it sucks, then leave again.
In the same way, you want to ensure your existing users have a site they love and don't defect. So you want to optimize for them. But you don't want to do this at the cost of the site sucking so much for new users none of them convert in to repeat users in the first place.
It's a classic case of all things in moderation: If you're going to one or other extreme, you're probably hamstringing yourself. If you're picking somewhere in the middle, informing yourself with the statistics, getting the best understanding of where that sweet spot lies, you're probably going to be far more successful.
The people who fail are the ones who say, "Statistics show that 85% of page views are hitting with a primed cache! We should always plan for that." and go off after what's actually only 50% of total users - they'll lose all new traffic and their site will slowly die. So will the people who say, "50% of daily visitors have an empty cache! We should always plan for that." and go after what're only 15% of the total site's experience. The wiser people say, "Hmm, 50% of unique users hit with an empty cache, 85% of page views have a primed cache. That implies we're getting a lot of new users coming in that we should accomodate but that most of our total traffic is to established users. We should find a healthy balance point for both."
</sarcasm>
Wow, if only there was some way we could have predicted this?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Of course, had the British government of the time acted a little more like the current U.S. administration, he would have been arrested as a terrorist, jailed with habeus corpus suspended, and there may well not be a U.S. administration today to ignore his wisdom.
Adobe must be in heaven, planning all of the extra sales of Flash...
Please wait for the rest of this response:
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The judge you get on the day, the jury, how well the lawyers convince the jury to see things their way, what the judge allows and disallows, what the various appeals processes rule, the politicians you buy to change the law at the last moment, all of those change it from absolute certainty to something much hazier.
In that haze, Microsoft's PR, lawyers, management, etc. can all state, "The GPLv3 won't stand up in court." Groklaw can state, "This is how it will go..." and we on Slashdot can argue, "Ha, we've got them now!" or "Microsoft will wriggle out of it somehow, like they always do." to our heart's content. The one certainty is that those are opinions, not absolutes for how it'll work out.
PJ's welcome to an opinion. More accurately however, the title should be "PJ from Groklaw has an opinion about how GPLv3 and Microsoft will work out." What it isn't, and can't be until it's gone through every last legal wrangling, is an absolute what "will" happen.
I've seen a lot of great technical people take managerial positions that made them miserable. Many of them ended up getting fired/demoted/spun-to-the-rest-of-the-company-as-
I've only come across one company that I felt really had a good solution to that: You could progress down whatever path suited you best - doing more management, less management, whatever worked for you so long as the company had a need for it. You got absolutely no raise associated with new positions. Everyone got reviewed for whether they were doing well or badly in whatever their current position happened to be. The better the review, the greater the raise, completely regardless of management/tech paths. They had very senior techs who earned way more than the norm and more than many even mid level managers. The flip side was that they had a company filled with people doing whatever they did best, knowing they were rewarded for it and not resenting their positions and feeling trapped. No idea whether this proved profitable overall but I can certainly respect their willingness to try something different to address what is an horrifically common issue in the field.
Hmmm. Let's see. He said "basic XBox 360". You quoted the price for the top of the line 360 with the most expensive add-on available. But you're clearly just trolling.
The guy you're calling a troll made a point of referencing HDMI versions.
That was always the main sticking point on the $100 price difference between the two skus of the PS3. Wireless this and that, a bigger harddrive, these were all things you could upgrade if you wanted to. The one thing you couldn't upgrade was HDMI which, even now, no one knows how big an issue HDCP is going to turn in to in three or four years.
In short, if HDMI wasn't an issue, the $599 PS3 pricepoint would never have been an issue and the PS3 should always have been having its $100 cheaper version compared against Microsoft's cheaper versions (plus the cost of a memory card to unlock the functionality). That HDMI was considered such a critical factor, with many refusing to buy the cheaper option, makes considering HDMI variant of the X360 absolutely valid.
What you (and Sony) forget is that some people buy a game console just to play games. And if you just play games the PS3 is horribly overpriced. Even at $499, it will still be way more expensive than the competition (by 66% to 100%).
That argument can be taken as far and ridiculously as you want:
Were I to be facetious, the $299 X360 is still way more expensive (more than double the cost) of the PS2 which has a far better library of games. The counter argument there is to list the improved gaming features, higher resolution, etc. of the 360 over the PS2 - but then that same argument also holds that if better quality graphics are your criteria for games, the XBox 360 can't match the PS3's slightly higher end hardware and sure as hell can't match a PC with four 8800 chips, a gig of ram on each of the two cards, on a quad core processor.
In other words, purely looking at gaming...
It's a continuum. Everyone picks the right price point for them (except for fanboys who declare the price point of their favored unit to be the only valid one, dismissing cheaper options as poorer quality while ignoring the cost savings and dismissing the more expensive options as overpriced while dismissing the quality improvements as trivial).
The PS3 is more expensive than an X360. Compare the minimum usable X360 (with 20GB hdd) against the PS3 and the small increase in gaming improvements doesn't justify the price increase if that's your sole criteria.
Then again, for many people, the more than double price increase from PS2 to X360 isn't justified either.
For other people, spending over $200 on a console, they damn well expect next gen DVD playback and a $200 add on player for the X360 that already doesn't work with every HD-DVD out there and doesn't have HDMI which may turn out to be critical down the line and for them the criteria isn't matched.
That's the fun thing about a diverse market, everyone gets to pick their own criteria and then find what fits that criteria the best.
Before I'm accused of being a Sony fan
No lecturer actually collected their assignments at the 5pm cut off. Very few would even see it as a priority before noon the next day. They simply relied upon the department receptionist to tell them who handed it in on time and who gets the instant 20% knocked off for being late.
Befriend the receptionist and you got an extra night on every assignment. For the really big stuff, if she liked you enough, you'd tell her your woes and find she'd offer to tell the lecturer, "I'm SO sorry, Nick handed this to me before the deadline last week but I guess I put it down on the wrong pile." You then got to listen to the lecturer talk about what he had been looking for, after he assumed no one else could submit work, and leave everyone else wondering how you so effortlessly got straight As.
Sure, technically, each lecturer held more power. But every one of them always had students sucking up to them, trying to gradegrub, and was pretty much immune. And you had ten or twenty different lecturers you had to try it with.
Alternatively, one receptionist extended every deadline for you and knew the lecturers well enough to tell you great tidbits like, "Lecturer X admits in the staff breakroom that he likes a glass or two of whisky while he grades. He starts off grading pretty strict but jokes about how his criteria's much more 'relaxed' by the end of the night. I'll slip your assignment in where it'll get the most generous grader. Lecturer Y hates grading and gets more angry as the night goes on, so I'll put your assignment at the top of her stack."
Amazing how much power the people who allegedly don't have any power really wield.
Mind you, social engineering is also the reason why some hackers will spend days trying to crack security vulnerabilities in software while another guy will achieve just as much in a single phonecall.
None taken.
Different people like different things. That goes for the employees and the employers. It's why Google does things one way, Fog Creek does things another and why some of us will quit jobs in disgust and never understand why our friends, who we thought were smart, will happily remain there for years.
I'm lucky, I've got a situation where my management have given me a free rein to do what I think is best, a team that appears to appreciate the environment I create and that's been able to pay off in terms of a sustained, significant increase in profitability (any idiot can increase profitability in the short term at long term expense), a huge increase in reputation for my team members within the company, with clients and even on standards bodies, etc. and, off the back of that demonstrable increase in profitability, the ability for me to argue for, and get, a large number of significant pay raises for every single long term team member in an industry where large raises tend to only be achievable by job hopping.
Sure, my style's not for everyone. One contractor we used sent me racist hate mail after we let him go for yelling at the receptionist, bitching that a server admin took too long to set up an account and then leaving after three hours because parking cost $8 for the day. In his case, my beliefs that we're the sum of our reputation, including how we treat others as well as how we perform technically, were so objectionable he needed to resort to vitriol. That's cool, I hope he'll be happy somewhere where you're allowed to attack people for improper care and handling of the self important. The great thing about the world is he gets to find a manager that suits him, reaping the rewards of that, while my team members get to find a manager that suits them, reaping their own rewards.
I'm not in any way denegrating nerds. I'm one first, learning the other aspects on top of that. Technical knowledge remains essential for a technical role and I was careful to state that I don't have respect for the technically illiterate, morally vacuous schmoozers out there. Where I've personally found works well for me, and works well for most employers, is the realization that a combination of strong technical skills with an understanding there's a human level too (where interaction with integrity rather than fake schmoozing is the emphasis) seems to generally make for a good manager.
I'm not perfect. I make all kinds of mistakes. But that's at least the philosophy I've formed, what I've observed many more senior managers seem to look to hire and, aiming for, has at least brought me a fair degree of success measured both in terms of how my team performs over the long term and how well I feel I've been able to do, looking out for the guys who do work for me.
Of course, those're just my observations and the direction I try to head in. That doesn't appeal to you? That's cool, it's a huge industry. Interviews should be as much about you interviewing your potential new management as about them interviewing you. You get to find somewhere that works for you, I get to build somewhere that appears to work pretty well for me, and we all come out of it pretty well.
The number one thing I do: Say good morning to the receptionist.
A good relationship with her (it could be a him, it's simply a her where I work) is essential:
Just about everyone bitches to her. Whether an issue's with email, with network reliability, a printer not working, phones playing up, the cold tap running hot, she's aware of all of it.
She's also the one point everyone has to pass at least once and, being close to both restrooms and breakroom, she tends to see most people much more too. Better than anyone, she can serve as a barometer of people's moods. If someone is obviously in a foul mood that morning, if someone's running around stressed about something, she knows faster than just about anyone.
She's also the person everyone has to let know if a client's coming in as she'll be the person to meet them. She also tends to handle much of the mess that is meeting room booking so she gets even more insight in to who's coming.
Build a good relationship with her and she looks out for me. If everything's cool, I get a "Hi" back and get on with greeting my team, checking email, checking in with project leads and PMs, reading slashdot, etc. If there's something up, she'll give me a summary that, with her understanding my needs from our previous talks, pretty much prioritizes as I need to know. I can then get on any problems far faster than checking each of the traditional reporting methods or I can go about my normal routine prepped so I don't say send an email that might trigger the guy who's in a bad mood that day.
And that's just the first fifteen seconds of my day.
She's also the first person to interview any candidates for me: If someone's an asshole to the people they think "don't matter," they're going to disrupt my team in a million other ways.
As already mentioned, she handles the mess of meeting rooms - an often precious resource. Do you want that person favoring you or someone else?
Being the first person everyone bitches to, she can come back with, "Wow, Nick [or Nick's team] is really being a jerk. Let's see what we can do." or she can respond, "Wow, that doesn't sound like Nick [or Nick's team]. He'd never knowingly let that happen. Let's let him know and I'm sure he'll get it addressed right away." Her response, being many people's first reaction when something goes wrong, can totally color the rest of their reaction and how easily I can deal with the issue.
She also knows where everything is, how everything functions, or who would do. "Hey, I can't find the contractor NDA forms." can get you a sympathetic acknowledgment from a rushed person and hold up your rush filling of a position by a day or two while you track them down or it can get "Hmm, I'll track them down and IM you in about five once I've got them." from someone who likes you.
The same holds true for all interpersonnel relationships, it's just especially important with a front desk person given everything that crosses their world - plus the question was what do you do "first" and they are pretty much always the first person you'll see.
Most nerds give great answers about slashdot, about email, about remote logging and paging systems. They're great nerd answers that show why you'd be great for a nerd position. What they demonstrate a lack of is an appreciation of what good interpersonnel relationships give you and adding that on top of the nerd qualifications is what demonstrates you'll be a good manager. Management is no longer a role about who can do the coolest nerd thing, it's about how do you handle all of the relationships around a diverse bunch of people. If your answer is about the systems, not the people, you're most comfortable interacting with - you're probably giving a major red flag for your abilities to work with people who should work with systems for you.
There were quite a few joke comments about "schmoozing." While I know they were intended as fun, that it's seen as something silly that managers that n
The TV playing music on the TV being counted as a live performance is a joke, as are the speculative calls asking, "Do you ever play gospel music."
That said, I only have limited sympathy for:
The coffeeshop owner who makes more money, selling more drinks because live music brings in more customers when that benefit is gained from using other people's work.
The singer/songwriter who held down gigs by profiting off someone else's work. Despite the self agrandizing title of singer/songwriter, his own compositions are such that, evidently, no one wants to pay to hear them.
I'll be sympathetic to people who weren't in any way trying to profit from using other people's work. If you're selling more coffee or getting paid to perform and have upped your margins (albeit from unprofitable to profitable) by taking someone else's work and not paying, I have a hard time being sympathetic to you when you're finally caught. They're not even getting fined for the [potentially] years they've got away with it already, they're simply being asked, "If you want to keep profiting from someone else's work, you're going to have to start paying them too."
It's not like they're banned from playing live music. They're totally free to have singer/songwriters play their own compositions. Except they don't want to because they can't profit so much from it. Why's it OK for them to profit but not the people, who covered the costs of creating and popularizing that music in the first place, that they're now profiting from?
It's much the same as my line of work: I use PhotoShop daily. It costs a small fortune for private individuals. The flip side is that we can probably make that cost and much more back because we use it. If we aren't willing to pay, there're free alternatives like GimpShop out there. I've got respect for those who pay for the better tools and try to turn a profit. I've got respect for those who cut margins by using the free tools and try to turn a profit. I've got very little respect for those who try to improve their margins, while getting all the same benefits, by pirating PhotoShop. If Adobe releases a new version that they're convinced they need but can't steal anymore... cry me a river for their losing their business model of trying to profit by taking other people's work for free without their consent.
About the only unfairness in this is the perception of unfairness: That you can likely get away with gaming the system for years so when you do finally get held accountable, it seems that much more arbitrary and thus unfair. Then again, is that genuinely unfair or is it just the perception of unfairness and frankly your issue to get over?
The same happens with speeding tickets. I can drive at 65 and never get a ticket. I can drive at 85 and get places faster, 999 out of a thousand, benefiting from that. The one time in a thousand I get caught, it feels so unfair that I now have a couple of hundred bucks in fines to pay off. Yet I don't bitch about it - I get on and pay. If I don't want the risk anymore, I'll stop trying to game the system. If I do try to game the system, I'll suck it up when I do get caught and recognize the unfairness is in my perception, not a system I knowingly flaunted for a long, long time.
So, for something as ridiculous as charging for music played on a TV, yeah, it's a joke. For bitching when you try to make more of a profit (or less of a loss in the case of the people who can't figure out how to run a profitable coffeeshop in the first place) by profiting off someone else's work... suck it up when you're finally asked to pay or move to the free option that, admittedly, won't let you profit in quite the same way anymore.
E-4: Petty Officer Third Class
E-5: Petty Officer Second Class
E-6: Petty Officer First Class
E-7: Chief Petty Officer
E-8: Senior Chief Petty Officer
E-9: Master Chief Petty Officer
Thus, if the rule is that "officers" get saluted, it may well be that E-4 and above with in the Navy merit it as Non Commissioned Officers. Even if they don't, there's always the simple self preservation of not screwing with a chief, even retired, as they usually have the means to make your life hell, even if you are commissioned.
I actually have experience of Navy GPS units, courtesy of a retired senior chief father in law who built the things for the Navy as a civilian contractor.
Compared to a little pocket sized GPS unit, these things were huge. Their dimensions were actually constrained by one very simple requirement: They had to fit the standard ammo tin as the Navy had a butt load of storage that was designed to fit exactly that. It also had to have standardized power connectors, standardized venting connectors, etc. The extra ruggedization was less of an issue for the Navy compared to say the Army but they still had to handle being tossed on to ships buy guys who didn't really care too much about what it was they were moving, they just had to move it fast. It seemed ridiculous at first, to have such a huge box and pay so much extra for it - until you realize that the Navy would much rather than than have to search for a nice ergonomic unit that was small enough to roll off and get lost when they really needed it plus had turned out to have overheated and had a charger that kept blowing out on ship's electricity.
Illustrating much the same point, his company laid him and the other retired Navy guys off a few months later and replaced them with a bunch of freshly minted Master's degrees as they were "clearly" better. A month later the genius who made that call got fired. Yes, a Master's degree in all of the latest techs is very nice. It's completely useless when you have someone who gets lost on ships, who gets their car stopped every time they drive on base vs. the retired E-8 who gets a salute and waved straight through, and someone who pisses off the guys they have no idea how to speak to and thus gets absolutely no help whenever something needs doing. Sure, they designed great products back in the head office but the moment they delivered what the Navy "should" want rather than what it "did" want, they suddenly found it wasn't such a smart idea.
It's ironic: Anyone who's worked in IT for any length of time has seen that drawing of the swing requested by the marketing team, ordered by sales, designed by engineering, etc. And yet, every time DoD contracts get discussed, the supposedly experienced Slashdot crowd always has someone who says, "Consumer grade is cheaper, smaller and therefore better."
As the kid in Australia who tried to fix his laundered iPod, put a screwdriver through the lithium ion battery pack and took a flamethrower to the face discovered... Size/weight vs. capacity isn't the only factor for a battery in rough environments.
White phosphorous grenades are harsh because you have to dig the burning fragments out of your unanesthetized buddy before they burn any deeper through his flesh. Do you really want to be in an environment where the first round through your battery pack not only leaves you with a bullet inside you but also sets you on fire/douses you with acid. And that's just considering getting shot - how many troops will continue to carry something that gets a reputation for setting them on fire if they bang it wrongly getting in and out of a hummer. No one likes a burning feeling from their hummer.
It's much like the much discussed "Why do DoD products cost the government 10-100x what the equivalent consumer grade one does? Why not just by consumer models and save cash plus get it in to the field faster?" Tolerances and what happens when those tolerances fail may well be that answer.
Granted, this is AT&T not Sprint but the concept still applies...
Assuming you buy a $600 iPhone that doesn't work on any network other than AT&T's, when they terminate your contract, do they buy back the hardware that they've now rendered unusable?
I wonder if you can claim it as faulty under an extended 2 year Apple care warranty as it now fails to work as advertised? I could see Apple getting pissed at AT&T for forcing them to take returns on otherwise totally functional hardware just because AT&T decided phone support cost too much.