Actually, citizens haven't had globally downgraded signals since May 1st, 2000. The US military found it could regionally downgrade signals to protect sensitive locations while allowing people in general to have full access to GPS.
Again, not 100% will be returned to the air. There will be some portion of waste product that will end up buried and that portion will have some percentage of carbon which came from the atmosphere. After all, that's where all the carbon in coal and oil came from in the first place; biomass that has been buried and decomposed. Now I'm not saying the waste biomass will become coal or oil at any rate to be useful, but it does take some small portion of carbon out of the atmosphere (again, assuming the entire process is done with carbon neutral energy).
Technically ethanol production (or any other form of biofuel) could even be carbon negative. You will never convert 100% of the biomass into fuel so some of the carbon that the biomass has taken out of the air won't be returned to the air as the fuel is burned.
...Sea creatures need flattened, webbed appendages in order to swim, and those wouldn't be very good at fine manipulation...
Which is proven by the fact that octopi are such poor swimmers and have practically no ability to manipulate objects.;)
Seriously though, the most likely reason that animals tend to have similar forms is because they have common ancestors. The closer the ancestor the more similar the forms. Physically we are really similar to primates, not as similar but still pretty similar to prosimians, less similar to cats, though we retain the head, four limbs, live bearing, hair, etc., and only somewhat similar to alligators.
There's plenty of successful animals on Earth that we have very little similarity to. Arthropods have more than 4 limbs and the similarity between us and a starfish or sea sponge are really small.
Now this may look like it is purely an issue of evolutionary advancement, with animals becoming more different from us as they become simpler but there are some fairly advanced creatures that aren't closely related to us at all. Octopi and cuttlefish are both in the mollusk family but are remarkably advanced creatures, especially when you realize they are invertebrates and are probably a lot smarter than many of the 'highest order' group, the mammals.
So in the end I would probably be surprised to find that the human shape really is a 'universal shape' for advanced creatures. Yes, some things such as chitin would be very problematic for an advanced intelligence, but I don't see any reason to believe that a race couldn't evolve with six limbs instead of four, have their brains buried in their torsos, have three eyes on stalks and a mass of squirming tentacles to help dissipate heat buildup from their brains.
So basically the only step between this being 'as proposed' and 'another royal ass-fucking like Everquest' is for Sony to buy Flying Labs?
Leaving aside any and all issues about SOE for the moment, that 'only' step your talking about is sort of a big one. It's kind of like saying the only step between FedEx having the ability to have the new Harry Potter book rewritten or not is for them to buy Scholastic.
I'm not going to try to talk you down from your dislike of SOE. All I was really saying was that your original premise that SOE screwed up a Everquest when it was a third party product is wrong. To date I can't think of a single third party MMO that SOE has distributed where they have influenced the creative process.
When exactly has SOE meddled with the design of a third party that they were publishing?
You mean like Verant?
You need to come up with another example. Verant wasn't a third party being published by SOE. Verant was SOE. It's name was changed from Verant to SOE after Verant was acquired by Sony.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the Holocaust was caused by religion. In fact the suffering of the Holocaust was based much more upon the "science" (I put it in quotes because of course nowadays we reject it but back then it was viewed by many of the Germans as scientific fact) of the day, eugenics and the belief in racial purity. Jews were targeted for ethnic reasons, not religious ones.
Which of course is completely bogus. There's no reason to restrict such ammo. Sure, I -might- use it to shoot at a person wearing a bulletproof vest, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons why I might need to use armor piercing ammunition.
Like if I go hunting ultra high molecular weight polyethylene deer.
Actually a good part of the efficiency in a hybrid's gasoline engine comes from its electric motor. This occurs even when the electric motor isn't running, as would be the case if you drove a long distance on a very flat highway.
The reason for this is that conventional cars engines have a pretty good amount of inefficiency at their cruising speed. This is because they are larger than they need to be to sustain the car at that speed. They are larger because they are often called on to provide more torque than is used at cruising speed in situations such as accelerating the car when it is below cruising speed or going up a hill.
In the case of the hybrid car this extra torque comes from the electric motor. That means that the gasoline engine doesn't have to provide a lot more torque than it's average output and it can be designed to be far more efficient at cruising speeds.
Now it absolutely is possible to make a car with two gasoline engines, one tuned to cruising and a second one that kicks in when extra torque is needed, but such a design would be unable to recapture lost energy when the car brakes or goes downhill. It would also consume a bit of gas even when the torque engine isn't used since it has to idle.
That was my first thought as well, but after thinking about it I realized that these batteries are far heavier than the battery that sits in a conventional car and they are probably a lot less accessible. I doubt people are going to be tearing these out of cars for $200. Probably the only way for a criminal to get the battery out would be to first steal the car, which I doubt they would do solely for the battery, especially since it likely has a serial number or something which means they couldn't sell it back to Toyota.
I'm pretty sure at least some of the 'bounty' will get passed on to the car owner (though I suspect the dealers will certainly pocket some of it for themselves). I think they only pay the dealers so that they won't have to process as much paperwork and issue as many checks since the dealers will aggregate the batteries together.
Also just a little above the section I quoted they talk about the lifespan of the Prius batteries and say that since they started making the Prius in 2000 they haven't replaced a single battery for wear and tear. So the oldest batteries out there are 7 years old and still going and I would suspect that the newer batteries they produce will have even longer lifespans.
How long does the Prius battery last and what is the replacement cost?
The Prius battery (and the battery-power management system) has been designed to maximize battery life. In part this is done by keeping the battery at an optimum charge level - never fully draining it and never fully recharging it. As a result, the Prius battery leads a pretty easy life. We have lab data showing the equivalent of 180,000 miles with no deterioration and expect it to last the life of the vehicle. We also expect battery technology to continue to improve: the second-generation model battery is 15% smaller, 25% lighter, and has 35% more specific power than the first. This is true of price as well. Between the 2003 and 2004 models, service battery costs came down 36% and we expect them to continue to drop so that by the time replacements may be needed it won't be a much of an issue. Since the car went on sale in 2000, Toyota has not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.
So it isn't as though you will be replacing the battery every few years. 7 years without a single replacement makes me suspect that if you bought a new Prius now the battery would last on average at least 10 to 15 years (since the batteries being installed now are even better than those installed 7 years ago).
Also because of Toyota's battery recycling program paying $200 per battery (though I expect that would drop as the cost of the batteries get lower) you won't, or at least shouldn't, have any form of disposal charge.
Is there a recycling plan in place for nickel-metal hydride batteries?
Toyota has a comprehensive battery recycling program in place and has been recycling nickel-metal hydride batteries since the RAV4 Electric Vehicle was introduced in 1998. Every part of the battery, from the precious metals to the plastic, plates, steel case and the wiring, is recycled. To ensure that batteries come back to Toyota, each battery has a phone number on it to call for recycling information and dealers are paid a $200 "bounty" for each battery.
So I suppose that yes, they will have a battery recycling program in place since it is doubtful they would discontinue their current one.
Unfortunately this is false reasoning. The argument falls apart in the second premise "[r]ights are defined as to determine how scarce resources are to be controlled".
Free speech is a right that has nothing to do with scarce resources. Neither is freedom of religion.
The premise of copyright and all the ancillary laws such as DMCA is, I believe, that the individual who creates a work has a right to compensation for that work. Under that reasoning when you illegally copy something you are, in fact, depriving someone of one of their rights.
Please note that I am not saying I am for or against copyright laws, DMCA, RIAA, AACS, or WTFBBQ. I am simply saying 'here is the flaw in your argument' and 'here is the point of view of those in opposition to you'.
Unfortunately even if the electricity were free there is a major hurdle that electric cars need to solve before they can really replace chemical fuel powered vehicles (gasoline, alcohol, bio-diesel, et al.). Namely the problem of recharge time.
As it is if you currently want to drive an electric car further than it is able to go on a single charge you are forced to stop somewhere along the trip and spend hours recharging it. That's just not practical since it is quite possible for a person to drive two to three times the range of a single charge in one day.
That doesn't mean you need to be able to fully recharge an electric vehicle in the time it takes to fill an empty tank. I would suspect you could get by if it took ten or fifteen minutes to charge the car since the only people who would need to do so would be people on long trips (otherwise they would just charge up at home) and after three or fours hours driving they probably wouldn't mind fifteen minutes while they stretch their legs and eat some lunch.
Forget about all the other arguments against electric cars; energy cost to produce, battery lifetime, etc.. Until it's practical to drive for at least five or six hundred miles in a day (if not more) electric cars will never really come to dominate the market.
That doesn't mean the current electric cars are useless. I know the figures about most people living within fifteen miles of their work, or whatever and truth to tell I've thought on more than one occasion about getting an electric car to commute to work (if I could afford it), but I also would never get rid of my gasoline powered car because I know that I occasionally have to make trips further than I could on a single charge.
This is obviously a clear cut example of prior art.
In all seriousness, I really just can't understand at all what he thinks he's doing. Either he is completely ignoring the advice of his lawyers or else he has got some incredibly bad ones. Just like most of the posters here I am not a lawyer* but I'm pretty sure that to be guilty of libel or slander the accused has to knowingly make a false statement and the statement has to be done with the intent of causing harm to the subject's reputation.
Making a true statement (It appears that he stole another artists work, I think he stole another artists work, He has created something a great deal like something someone else has created, etc.) or erroneously making a false statement (for example, saying Goldman's work was created second if it were to turn out that Goldman's work was actually created first) don't pass the standard to legally be considered libel. Of course since libel is a civil case rather than a criminal case he would only need a preponderance of evidence to win rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but even then I have a really hard time believing his lawyers think there's any chance of winning, and of course as people avidly point out whenever Mr. Thompson files a suit or even threatens such a thing, filing a suit that you have no reasonable expectations of winning opens you up to a counter-suit and just the act of threatening a suit that you have no reasonable chance of winning opens you up to charges of barratry.
*I wrote the abbreviation first but decided I really didn't like the sentence "Just like most of the posters here IANAL..."
First off I have to admit that I am hardly a Linux guru. Yes, I run Ubuntu on several machines at home and have them doing little tricks like automatically downloading shows off my ReplayTV and encoding them so I can play them on my PSP the next day, but I really just fumble around with Linux for the most part, so if there's something I'm missing here maybe a real Linux guru could enlighten me.
Shouldn't it be possible for Dell to have disk images of, say, half a dozen of the most popular distros with all the support needed for the hardware options they are offering? When someone orders a computer they select the distro they want and the image is burned to the hard disk (or probably more accurately whoever is assembling the order just grabs the correct hard disk with the image already burned and installs it). When the computer is booted up for the first time a startup program is automatically run that scans the hardware, makes sure the correct drivers are installed, deletes the unnecessary drivers, then removes itself.
There wouldn't be a hardware/distro matrix any more than there is currently a hard drive/memory/CD-ROM matrix currently. The OS being installed would just be another pull down menu on the order form.
Well, I'm not really going to go into the ethics of copying and copyright. All I really intended was to point out that the statement 'Common sense tells us there's no difference' is clearly false. There's obviously a difference, and it goes deeper than not having to worry about your friend returning your CDs. If you loan your CD to your friend the content of that CD is still limited to being played in a single location. If both you and your friend like the CD then a second copy will need to be bought if the two of you wish to listen to it in different locations. If you burn your friend a copy then the content you purchased can be played in two different locations at the same time.
Again, I'm not going to get into 'Oh no! The recording company lost a sale!' or 'What if my friend wouldn't have bought a copy in the first place?'. Just pointing out that the two conditions are clearly not identical.
In a similar vein, pointing out that making a copy of a CD is trivially easy has absolutely no bearing on anything. It is also trivially easy to swerve up onto a curb and start running pedestrians over (assuming you own a car). The degree of difficulty has no bearing in whether something should or should not be allowed.
Likewise, pointing out that you own the house, the blank and the CD burner has no merit. If I own a hammer I am not allowed to freely hit people simply because they are on my property. Ownership of the tools and locale is irrelevant.
This means all your argument really has at the moment is the fact you own the CD. That isn't an inconsequential fact and I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to make a copy of it. All I'm saying is that the rest of your argument is simple rhetoric.
I can't wait either because I think the writers really nailed how one of those things would work. I mean the way all the loose change and dirt tumbled around to pile up on the driver's side window was a stroke of genius. It's really too bad they had to cut the scene where he had to make a quick stop after going to the grocery.:)
So some people tried to coin a new term and accidentally selected an existing term. Let's cut them some slack. I mean, it's not like they're rocket....
Ah! Got it. You're saying it would have helped if the Robotic Parking employees were let back into the garage.
I hadn't really thought about that, but of course if that's why so many cars are stranded that is hardly RP's fault. From the tone of the articles I got the impression the reason cars couldn't be retrieved was because the software shutdown, so I assume (and quite possibly incorrectly) that Hoboken Parking Utility had its own employees who were capable of running the system, at least for a limited amount of time.
If that isn't the case then the software shutting down really has nothing to do with the cars being stranded since even if the software was working the cars would be stuck.
It isn't covered in the linked article but by following other links it seems that Robotic Parking's behavior isn't as bad as it looks at first glance.
According to http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ people received a letter on the Wednesday before August 1st informing them that "It is with sincere regret that we now have to announce that we will conclude our servicing and operation of the 916 Garden St. Garage in Hoboken as of midnight, Aug. 1. The city was given 30 days notice," and "Therefore, as a courtesy, we urge all patrons to remove their vehicles from the 916 Garden Street Garage before midnight Aug. 1 or make other arrangements with the City of Hoboken Parking ahead of time to retrieve their vehicles after that time."
Discounting Wednesday, the day that people received the letter, that still left five entire days for people to remove their cars. While it still would have been a much better choice for Robotic Parking to include a 'graceful shutdown' so that people would still be able to retrieve their cars it doesn't seem to be the case that they hid a logic bomb in their code in order to strand lots of cars within the structure so they could be held hostage. Given what I've read I would even say there is a pretty good chance that Hoboken Parking Utility was told that the software would shutdown on August 1st, though that is simply an assumption I am making based on the documented actions of parties involved and not something I have seen in print. On the other hand I haven't actually seen anything reputable that indicates that HPU wasn't aware the software would stop working. That's simply an assumption people have been making.
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Actually, citizens haven't had globally downgraded signals since May 1st, 2000. The US military found it could regionally downgrade signals to protect sensitive locations while allowing people in general to have full access to GPS.
Again, not 100% will be returned to the air. There will be some portion of waste product that will end up buried and that portion will have some percentage of carbon which came from the atmosphere. After all, that's where all the carbon in coal and oil came from in the first place; biomass that has been buried and decomposed. Now I'm not saying the waste biomass will become coal or oil at any rate to be useful, but it does take some small portion of carbon out of the atmosphere (again, assuming the entire process is done with carbon neutral energy).
Technically ethanol production (or any other form of biofuel) could even be carbon negative. You will never convert 100% of the biomass into fuel so some of the carbon that the biomass has taken out of the air won't be returned to the air as the fuel is burned.
Which is proven by the fact that octopi are such poor swimmers and have practically no ability to manipulate objects. ;)
Seriously though, the most likely reason that animals tend to have similar forms is because they have common ancestors. The closer the ancestor the more similar the forms. Physically we are really similar to primates, not as similar but still pretty similar to prosimians, less similar to cats, though we retain the head, four limbs, live bearing, hair, etc., and only somewhat similar to alligators.
There's plenty of successful animals on Earth that we have very little similarity to. Arthropods have more than 4 limbs and the similarity between us and a starfish or sea sponge are really small.
Now this may look like it is purely an issue of evolutionary advancement, with animals becoming more different from us as they become simpler but there are some fairly advanced creatures that aren't closely related to us at all. Octopi and cuttlefish are both in the mollusk family but are remarkably advanced creatures, especially when you realize they are invertebrates and are probably a lot smarter than many of the 'highest order' group, the mammals.
So in the end I would probably be surprised to find that the human shape really is a 'universal shape' for advanced creatures. Yes, some things such as chitin would be very problematic for an advanced intelligence, but I don't see any reason to believe that a race couldn't evolve with six limbs instead of four, have their brains buried in their torsos, have three eyes on stalks and a mass of squirming tentacles to help dissipate heat buildup from their brains.
Leaving aside any and all issues about SOE for the moment, that 'only' step your talking about is sort of a big one. It's kind of like saying the only step between FedEx having the ability to have the new Harry Potter book rewritten or not is for them to buy Scholastic.
I'm not going to try to talk you down from your dislike of SOE. All I was really saying was that your original premise that SOE screwed up a Everquest when it was a third party product is wrong. To date I can't think of a single third party MMO that SOE has distributed where they have influenced the creative process.
You need to come up with another example. Verant wasn't a third party being published by SOE. Verant was SOE. It's name was changed from Verant to SOE after Verant was acquired by Sony.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the Holocaust was caused by religion. In fact the suffering of the Holocaust was based much more upon the "science" (I put it in quotes because of course nowadays we reject it but back then it was viewed by many of the Germans as scientific fact) of the day, eugenics and the belief in racial purity. Jews were targeted for ethnic reasons, not religious ones.
Which of course is completely bogus. There's no reason to restrict such ammo. Sure, I -might- use it to shoot at a person wearing a bulletproof vest, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons why I might need to use armor piercing ammunition.
Like if I go hunting ultra high molecular weight polyethylene deer.
Actually a good part of the efficiency in a hybrid's gasoline engine comes from its electric motor. This occurs even when the electric motor isn't running, as would be the case if you drove a long distance on a very flat highway.
The reason for this is that conventional cars engines have a pretty good amount of inefficiency at their cruising speed. This is because they are larger than they need to be to sustain the car at that speed. They are larger because they are often called on to provide more torque than is used at cruising speed in situations such as accelerating the car when it is below cruising speed or going up a hill.
In the case of the hybrid car this extra torque comes from the electric motor. That means that the gasoline engine doesn't have to provide a lot more torque than it's average output and it can be designed to be far more efficient at cruising speeds.
Now it absolutely is possible to make a car with two gasoline engines, one tuned to cruising and a second one that kicks in when extra torque is needed, but such a design would be unable to recapture lost energy when the car brakes or goes downhill. It would also consume a bit of gas even when the torque engine isn't used since it has to idle.
That was my first thought as well, but after thinking about it I realized that these batteries are far heavier than the battery that sits in a conventional car and they are probably a lot less accessible. I doubt people are going to be tearing these out of cars for $200. Probably the only way for a criminal to get the battery out would be to first steal the car, which I doubt they would do solely for the battery, especially since it likely has a serial number or something which means they couldn't sell it back to Toyota.
I'm pretty sure at least some of the 'bounty' will get passed on to the car owner (though I suspect the dealers will certainly pocket some of it for themselves). I think they only pay the dealers so that they won't have to process as much paperwork and issue as many checks since the dealers will aggregate the batteries together.
Also just a little above the section I quoted they talk about the lifespan of the Prius batteries and say that since they started making the Prius in 2000 they haven't replaced a single battery for wear and tear. So the oldest batteries out there are 7 years old and still going and I would suspect that the newer batteries they produce will have even longer lifespans.
From Toyota's own site (http://www.toyota.com/about/environment/technolog y/2004/hybrid.html)
How long does the Prius battery last and what is the replacement cost?The Prius battery (and the battery-power management system) has been designed to maximize battery life. In part this is done by keeping the battery at an optimum charge level - never fully draining it and never fully recharging it. As a result, the Prius battery leads a pretty easy life. We have lab data showing the equivalent of 180,000 miles with no deterioration and expect it to last the life of the vehicle. We also expect battery technology to continue to improve: the second-generation model battery is 15% smaller, 25% lighter, and has 35% more specific power than the first. This is true of price as well. Between the 2003 and 2004 models, service battery costs came down 36% and we expect them to continue to drop so that by the time replacements may be needed it won't be a much of an issue. Since the car went on sale in 2000, Toyota has not replaced a single battery for wear and tear.
So it isn't as though you will be replacing the battery every few years. 7 years without a single replacement makes me suspect that if you bought a new Prius now the battery would last on average at least 10 to 15 years (since the batteries being installed now are even better than those installed 7 years ago).
Also because of Toyota's battery recycling program paying $200 per battery (though I expect that would drop as the cost of the batteries get lower) you won't, or at least shouldn't, have any form of disposal charge.
From Toyota's own website (http://www.toyota.com/about/environment/technolog y/2004/hybrid.html)
Is there a recycling plan in place for nickel-metal hydride batteries?Toyota has a comprehensive battery recycling program in place and has been recycling nickel-metal hydride batteries since the RAV4 Electric Vehicle was introduced in 1998. Every part of the battery, from the precious metals to the plastic, plates, steel case and the wiring, is recycled. To ensure that batteries come back to Toyota, each battery has a phone number on it to call for recycling information and dealers are paid a $200 "bounty" for each battery.
So I suppose that yes, they will have a battery recycling program in place since it is doubtful they would discontinue their current one.
Unfortunately this is false reasoning. The argument falls apart in the second premise "[r]ights are defined as to determine how scarce resources are to be controlled".
Free speech is a right that has nothing to do with scarce resources. Neither is freedom of religion.
The premise of copyright and all the ancillary laws such as DMCA is, I believe, that the individual who creates a work has a right to compensation for that work. Under that reasoning when you illegally copy something you are, in fact, depriving someone of one of their rights.
Please note that I am not saying I am for or against copyright laws, DMCA, RIAA, AACS, or WTFBBQ. I am simply saying 'here is the flaw in your argument' and 'here is the point of view of those in opposition to you'.
Unfortunately even if the electricity were free there is a major hurdle that electric cars need to solve before they can really replace chemical fuel powered vehicles (gasoline, alcohol, bio-diesel, et al.). Namely the problem of recharge time.
As it is if you currently want to drive an electric car further than it is able to go on a single charge you are forced to stop somewhere along the trip and spend hours recharging it. That's just not practical since it is quite possible for a person to drive two to three times the range of a single charge in one day.
That doesn't mean you need to be able to fully recharge an electric vehicle in the time it takes to fill an empty tank. I would suspect you could get by if it took ten or fifteen minutes to charge the car since the only people who would need to do so would be people on long trips (otherwise they would just charge up at home) and after three or fours hours driving they probably wouldn't mind fifteen minutes while they stretch their legs and eat some lunch.
Forget about all the other arguments against electric cars; energy cost to produce, battery lifetime, etc.. Until it's practical to drive for at least five or six hundred miles in a day (if not more) electric cars will never really come to dominate the market.
That doesn't mean the current electric cars are useless. I know the figures about most people living within fifteen miles of their work, or whatever and truth to tell I've thought on more than one occasion about getting an electric car to commute to work (if I could afford it), but I also would never get rid of my gasoline powered car because I know that I occasionally have to make trips further than I could on a single charge.
Maybe he's suing for Definition of Character?
This is obviously a clear cut example of prior art.
In all seriousness, I really just can't understand at all what he thinks he's doing. Either he is completely ignoring the advice of his lawyers or else he has got some incredibly bad ones. Just like most of the posters here I am not a lawyer* but I'm pretty sure that to be guilty of libel or slander the accused has to knowingly make a false statement and the statement has to be done with the intent of causing harm to the subject's reputation.
Making a true statement (It appears that he stole another artists work, I think he stole another artists work, He has created something a great deal like something someone else has created, etc.) or erroneously making a false statement (for example, saying Goldman's work was created second if it were to turn out that Goldman's work was actually created first) don't pass the standard to legally be considered libel. Of course since libel is a civil case rather than a criminal case he would only need a preponderance of evidence to win rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but even then I have a really hard time believing his lawyers think there's any chance of winning, and of course as people avidly point out whenever Mr. Thompson files a suit or even threatens such a thing, filing a suit that you have no reasonable expectations of winning opens you up to a counter-suit and just the act of threatening a suit that you have no reasonable chance of winning opens you up to charges of barratry.
*I wrote the abbreviation first but decided I really didn't like the sentence "Just like most of the posters here IANAL..."
First off I have to admit that I am hardly a Linux guru. Yes, I run Ubuntu on several machines at home and have them doing little tricks like automatically downloading shows off my ReplayTV and encoding them so I can play them on my PSP the next day, but I really just fumble around with Linux for the most part, so if there's something I'm missing here maybe a real Linux guru could enlighten me.
Shouldn't it be possible for Dell to have disk images of, say, half a dozen of the most popular distros with all the support needed for the hardware options they are offering? When someone orders a computer they select the distro they want and the image is burned to the hard disk (or probably more accurately whoever is assembling the order just grabs the correct hard disk with the image already burned and installs it). When the computer is booted up for the first time a startup program is automatically run that scans the hardware, makes sure the correct drivers are installed, deletes the unnecessary drivers, then removes itself.
There wouldn't be a hardware/distro matrix any more than there is currently a hard drive/memory/CD-ROM matrix currently. The OS being installed would just be another pull down menu on the order form.
Well, I'm not really going to go into the ethics of copying and copyright. All I really intended was to point out that the statement 'Common sense tells us there's no difference' is clearly false. There's obviously a difference, and it goes deeper than not having to worry about your friend returning your CDs. If you loan your CD to your friend the content of that CD is still limited to being played in a single location. If both you and your friend like the CD then a second copy will need to be bought if the two of you wish to listen to it in different locations. If you burn your friend a copy then the content you purchased can be played in two different locations at the same time.
Again, I'm not going to get into 'Oh no! The recording company lost a sale!' or 'What if my friend wouldn't have bought a copy in the first place?'. Just pointing out that the two conditions are clearly not identical.
In a similar vein, pointing out that making a copy of a CD is trivially easy has absolutely no bearing on anything. It is also trivially easy to swerve up onto a curb and start running pedestrians over (assuming you own a car). The degree of difficulty has no bearing in whether something should or should not be allowed.
Likewise, pointing out that you own the house, the blank and the CD burner has no merit. If I own a hammer I am not allowed to freely hit people simply because they are on my property. Ownership of the tools and locale is irrelevant.
This means all your argument really has at the moment is the fact you own the CD. That isn't an inconsequential fact and I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to make a copy of it. All I'm saying is that the rest of your argument is simple rhetoric.
If that were really the case then why make a copy? Just loan your friend the CD.
Blame Canada
I can't wait either because I think the writers really nailed how one of those things would work. I mean the way all the loose change and dirt tumbled around to pile up on the driver's side window was a stroke of genius. It's really too bad they had to cut the scene where he had to make a quick stop after going to the grocery. :)
oh.
I hadn't really thought about that, but of course if that's why so many cars are stranded that is hardly RP's fault. From the tone of the articles I got the impression the reason cars couldn't be retrieved was because the software shutdown, so I assume (and quite possibly incorrectly) that Hoboken Parking Utility had its own employees who were capable of running the system, at least for a limited amount of time.
If that isn't the case then the software shutting down really has nothing to do with the cars being stranded since even if the software was working the cars would be stuck.
I'm not quite following you. As I understand it they were allowed back into the garage during those five days.
According to http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ people received a letter on the Wednesday before August 1st informing them that "It is with sincere regret that we now have to announce that we will conclude our servicing and operation of the 916 Garden St. Garage in Hoboken as of midnight, Aug. 1. The city was given 30 days notice," and "Therefore, as a courtesy, we urge all patrons to remove their vehicles from the 916 Garden Street Garage before midnight Aug. 1 or make other arrangements with the City of Hoboken Parking ahead of time to retrieve their vehicles after that time."
Discounting Wednesday, the day that people received the letter, that still left five entire days for people to remove their cars. While it still would have been a much better choice for Robotic Parking to include a 'graceful shutdown' so that people would still be able to retrieve their cars it doesn't seem to be the case that they hid a logic bomb in their code in order to strand lots of cars within the structure so they could be held hostage. Given what I've read I would even say there is a pretty good chance that Hoboken Parking Utility was told that the software would shutdown on August 1st, though that is simply an assumption I am making based on the documented actions of parties involved and not something I have seen in print. On the other hand I haven't actually seen anything reputable that indicates that HPU wasn't aware the software would stop working. That's simply an assumption people have been making.