I don't like that particular portion of the DMCA, but the current situation is not all that bad, and it does not appear to be eroding (Android, Palm Pre, etc., are all more open and capable than phones available 5 years ago).
Counterfeit pills are probably being lumped in (because the guy working for the agency is a PR guy who wants to talk about ALL the good that the agency does, not just the good they do enforcing the DMCA).
So in 30 or 40 years, when every last American who was even conceivably involved in WW2 is dead and gone, can we finally put this one to rest?
I mean, I don't think it is a reasonable argument today (because there is a vastly different government in charge of the United States), but I don't expect everybody to agree that enough time has passed, because people are often fucking nuts.
I would expect not, the sun takes about 3 microseconds to release an equivalent amount of energy (39 nanoseconds * 100 / 1.4 = 2.786 microseconds), and then there is also the fact that the earth would have blocked much of the universe from seeing the blast (vaguely, ~half of it).
I often think XKCD falls flat (and I often think it is pretty funny). I've never once been amused by UserFriendly. Take today: I'm too busy being irritated that the comic calls a mine shaft with cart tracks 'unexplored' rather than the more appropriate 'unknown' to bother seeing a joke.
Does your OS support TRIM yet? If not, you shouldn't be on the fence, prices are plummeting (the newer, faster drives from Intel are cheaper...) and it isn't going to help you any until you upgrade your OS anyway.
Ok, pin down 'relatively quickly' for a drive with 156 million logical sectors and tens of thousands (or more?) of reserve sectors, instead of made up specifics. Even in the event that Intel decided to only include 1 spare sector and are overstating write limits by a factor of 2, you should get something like 700 billion writes (for the 80 gigabyte consumer model!), given the exactly degenerate data layout that you specify.
Assuming you only write 1 bit for each of those sector deletions, that's still almost 100 gigabytes before you reach 1/2 the stated write factor. And that is a silly, silly, silly, silly degenerate case, not something to actually spend time thinking about when considering throwing one of the drives in a laptop.
Between spare sectors and the fact that sectors are not physical things (they are mapped), no, you won't hit the 10000 rewrite limit relatively quickly.
To put it more clearly, recent wear leveling algorithms move full sectors, spreading writes over the entirety of the actual physical storage.
I understand exactly what ISPs are selling. The reason I don't like it is that they make little to no effort to make it clear to people that just want internet service, without spending the time to understand the technical details.
Hidden transfer caps are probably a bigger problem than poorly stated rate figures (but I'm pretty sure that only a very small fraction of DSL customers come anywhere near getting the actual number used in the 'up to' statement, making it pretty easy for me to call it advertising bullshit).
Requiring that advertised speeds be available 80% of the time (or whatever) would not be onerous for the ISPs.
It might not be perfect, but it would help address things like DSL being advertised as if the connection will maximize the technology (which between line quality and distance, almost never happens).
It's bizarre that you are using euphemisms like overprovisioning and oversubscribing, all the damn companies need to do to avoid that whole game is to advertise what they are actually willing and able to sell for $25 a month.
If it isn't unlimited transfer over a guaranteed 2 Mbps pipe, stop trying to convince me that it is in your advertising.
Have there been any new worm enabling Windows vulnerabilities disclosed since Conficker was first noticed? Looking around a little, there have been more non-worm remote exploits than I care to sort through; the worm/non-worm distinction I am drawing is that a worm enabling vulnerability doesn't require any action on the client.
The quiet period could simply be a result of nothing new to add.
The standard warranty isn't FREE, it is simply built into the base price of the item.
And even if it is government mandated (there are often minimum warranty periods for new goods), you can be sure as shit that the company is factoring the cost of warranty service into the price that they are willing to offer the item at.
Apple seems pretty good at retail operations, so I imagine they were making the offer in the context of the future, not with attachment to the past (a decent corporate policy will not include the silly mental attachment to sunk costs that we humans are so prone to, and I imagine the extended warranty was offered as a matter of policy, not on a case by case basis).
Government pressure did not contribute to the utter lack of reasonable practice in the loan origination industry; securitization helped enable the lack of practice by providing an outlet for garbage loans, but it took at least 3 failures for each garbage MBS to sell: a lack of honesty from the originator, a lack of honesty from the ratings agency that rubber stamped it and a lack of diligence from the buyer (and there are plenty of decent MBSs out there, so it seems reasonable to look to the quality of the securitization when assigning blame, rather than the act).
Anti-redlining laws might have made a few banks write less profitable loans, but those laws did not require banks to issue credit to anybody and everybody who walked in the door. In the up-market for real estate, banks loved sub-prime loans, they got higher interest, and it isn't that big a deal to foreclose on property that is increasing in value.
Fannie and Freddie probably contributed to the mess by making cheap money available to home buyers, which is quite likely to have contributed momentum to the residential real estate market (lower interest rates lower the total cost of a mortgage which results in buyers willing to take on a larger initial debt).
Lots of people who ended up upside down saw the value of their home decrease by more than 30%, a 20% down payment wouldn't have changed that, so the carnage wasn't limited to people who took out obviously unreasonable loans.
Xcel customers do not currently have any connection fee (they 'absorb' the connection costs by building them into the kw-h rate).
I have Consumers Energy in Michigan, they only moved to the split bill recently, I think it is party a product of deregulation that led to their divestiture of the transmission grid (a separate company is now responsible for the maintenance of the power lines). Both companies are still highly regulated, and even though photovoltaic doesn't make economic sense here, I doubt that they would be allowed to get away with the spiraling fees that you are conjuring.
Securitization did not cause the financial crisis, the sudden deflation of a huge asset price bubble caused the financial crisis. Securitization concentrated some of the consequences of that event.
(For instance, the bonds that Fannie and Freddie wrote 20 years ago are just fine, as they are secured by mortgages against houses that have, by now, very low loan to value ratios (like 30%)
It's barely about greed, power companies are among the most highly regulated businesses in the U.S. (My power company has to get approval from a public commission to change their rates).
The size and structure of the fee matters a great deal when deciding how much sense it makes, and until I actually face a situation where my (currently non-existent) grid-tie system is punitively expensive to keep attached to the grid, I have trouble getting real worked up about it.
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No one has forced me to purchase an iphone yet.
I don't like that particular portion of the DMCA, but the current situation is not all that bad, and it does not appear to be eroding (Android, Palm Pre, etc., are all more open and capable than phones available 5 years ago).
Counterfeit pills are probably being lumped in (because the guy working for the agency is a PR guy who wants to talk about ALL the good that the agency does, not just the good they do enforcing the DMCA).
Indeed.
So in 30 or 40 years, when every last American who was even conceivably involved in WW2 is dead and gone, can we finally put this one to rest?
I mean, I don't think it is a reasonable argument today (because there is a vastly different government in charge of the United States), but I don't expect everybody to agree that enough time has passed, because people are often fucking nuts.
I would expect not, the sun takes about 3 microseconds to release an equivalent amount of energy (39 nanoseconds * 100 / 1.4 = 2.786 microseconds), and then there is also the fact that the earth would have blocked much of the universe from seeing the blast (vaguely, ~half of it).
I often think XKCD falls flat (and I often think it is pretty funny). I've never once been amused by UserFriendly. Take today: I'm too busy being irritated that the comic calls a mine shaft with cart tracks 'unexplored' rather than the more appropriate 'unknown' to bother seeing a joke.
Does your OS support TRIM yet? If not, you shouldn't be on the fence, prices are plummeting (the newer, faster drives from Intel are cheaper...) and it isn't going to help you any until you upgrade your OS anyway.
Ok, pin down 'relatively quickly' for a drive with 156 million logical sectors and tens of thousands (or more?) of reserve sectors, instead of made up specifics. Even in the event that Intel decided to only include 1 spare sector and are overstating write limits by a factor of 2, you should get something like 700 billion writes (for the 80 gigabyte consumer model!), given the exactly degenerate data layout that you specify.
Assuming you only write 1 bit for each of those sector deletions, that's still almost 100 gigabytes before you reach 1/2 the stated write factor. And that is a silly, silly, silly, silly degenerate case, not something to actually spend time thinking about when considering throwing one of the drives in a laptop.
Between spare sectors and the fact that sectors are not physical things (they are mapped), no, you won't hit the 10000 rewrite limit relatively quickly.
To put it more clearly, recent wear leveling algorithms move full sectors, spreading writes over the entirety of the actual physical storage.
I understand exactly what ISPs are selling. The reason I don't like it is that they make little to no effort to make it clear to people that just want internet service, without spending the time to understand the technical details.
Hidden transfer caps are probably a bigger problem than poorly stated rate figures (but I'm pretty sure that only a very small fraction of DSL customers come anywhere near getting the actual number used in the 'up to' statement, making it pretty easy for me to call it advertising bullshit).
Requiring that advertised speeds be available 80% of the time (or whatever) would not be onerous for the ISPs.
It might not be perfect, but it would help address things like DSL being advertised as if the connection will maximize the technology (which between line quality and distance, almost never happens).
It's bizarre that you are using euphemisms like overprovisioning and oversubscribing, all the damn companies need to do to avoid that whole game is to advertise what they are actually willing and able to sell for $25 a month.
If it isn't unlimited transfer over a guaranteed 2 Mbps pipe, stop trying to convince me that it is in your advertising.
Yeah, if only our system was designed to work without involving any people.
Have there been any new worm enabling Windows vulnerabilities disclosed since Conficker was first noticed? Looking around a little, there have been more non-worm remote exploits than I care to sort through; the worm/non-worm distinction I am drawing is that a worm enabling vulnerability doesn't require any action on the client.
The quiet period could simply be a result of nothing new to add.
The standard warranty isn't FREE, it is simply built into the base price of the item.
And even if it is government mandated (there are often minimum warranty periods for new goods), you can be sure as shit that the company is factoring the cost of warranty service into the price that they are willing to offer the item at.
They went from selling cheese and meat at mediocre margins to selling flour and water and pretty good margins. Seems like a decent plan to me.
The selection is about the same, the staff is equally competent, and they don't even ask for your address when you buy some batteries.
Apple seems pretty good at retail operations, so I imagine they were making the offer in the context of the future, not with attachment to the past (a decent corporate policy will not include the silly mental attachment to sunk costs that we humans are so prone to, and I imagine the extended warranty was offered as a matter of policy, not on a case by case basis).
They offered you the opportunity to purchase the new extended warranty because their projections show it will be profitable.
Government pressure did not contribute to the utter lack of reasonable practice in the loan origination industry; securitization helped enable the lack of practice by providing an outlet for garbage loans, but it took at least 3 failures for each garbage MBS to sell: a lack of honesty from the originator, a lack of honesty from the ratings agency that rubber stamped it and a lack of diligence from the buyer (and there are plenty of decent MBSs out there, so it seems reasonable to look to the quality of the securitization when assigning blame, rather than the act).
Anti-redlining laws might have made a few banks write less profitable loans, but those laws did not require banks to issue credit to anybody and everybody who walked in the door. In the up-market for real estate, banks loved sub-prime loans, they got higher interest, and it isn't that big a deal to foreclose on property that is increasing in value.
Fannie and Freddie probably contributed to the mess by making cheap money available to home buyers, which is quite likely to have contributed momentum to the residential real estate market (lower interest rates lower the total cost of a mortgage which results in buyers willing to take on a larger initial debt).
Lots of people who ended up upside down saw the value of their home decrease by more than 30%, a 20% down payment wouldn't have changed that, so the carnage wasn't limited to people who took out obviously unreasonable loans.
Xcel customers do not currently have any connection fee (they 'absorb' the connection costs by building them into the kw-h rate).
I have Consumers Energy in Michigan, they only moved to the split bill recently, I think it is party a product of deregulation that led to their divestiture of the transmission grid (a separate company is now responsible for the maintenance of the power lines). Both companies are still highly regulated, and even though photovoltaic doesn't make economic sense here, I doubt that they would be allowed to get away with the spiraling fees that you are conjuring.
A battery bank and management equipment that can provide service equivalent to an electric line is going to run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
That'll pay for quite a lot of connectivity fees.
Securitization did not cause the financial crisis, the sudden deflation of a huge asset price bubble caused the financial crisis. Securitization concentrated some of the consequences of that event.
(For instance, the bonds that Fannie and Freddie wrote 20 years ago are just fine, as they are secured by mortgages against houses that have, by now, very low loan to value ratios (like 30%)
It's barely about greed, power companies are among the most highly regulated businesses in the U.S. (My power company has to get approval from a public commission to change their rates).
The size and structure of the fee matters a great deal when deciding how much sense it makes, and until I actually face a situation where my (currently non-existent) grid-tie system is punitively expensive to keep attached to the grid, I have trouble getting real worked up about it.
Don't forget the glorification of torture.