Decided by question of fact, not question of law. Instead of "not liable in principle" it's "not liable because they couldn't prove it". Judge's favorite way of avoiding responsibility for a legal precedent for hundreds of years. I'm sorry, but where the fuck have you been for the last 15 years? The judge essentially can't rule against the RIAA based on "not liable in principle" because the RIAA has written all the relevant laws and had their government lapdogs pass them. At this point, the law as it stands practically makes it illegal to have digital music and internet connectivity on the same computer. The only place the judge can rule against them is in the area of "you can't prove it".
From my understanding, and the contention of the officer, the GPS logs average speed. Your understanding and the contention of the officer are correct, but misleading. It's based on a failure to understand how short an interval that average is. GPS units report speed at one second intervals, which is how often the NMEA standard interface updates. Therefore, the speed reading they give is the average speed for that one second interval. This is not meaningful in the context of a 17MPH discrepancy, though, as it's highly doubtful that one could have a large enough swing in velocity over one second to hit 62MPH while still averaging only 45. That would require a minimum delta-V of 34MPH over half a second, which comes out to around 3 G's! I say show me the skid marks and I'll believe it.
if he stopped for a light, then put his foot down you could concievably be doing 60 whilst recording an average of a lot less. So both readings can be right, its just one is an instantanous speed, the other an average. Where did you get the idea that GPS systems report average speed? They read your location, then calculate the speed based on the distance covered and the time elapsed since the last read. The elapsed time between NMEA data transmissions from the GPS unit is (by NMEA standard) one second. Subsequently, the vast majority of GPS devices update at 1Hz. Readings previous to the most recent two are not used in speed calculation. Because of this, there is simply no way a speed variation of 17MPH could be "lost in the average".
Excellent Youtube video [youtube.com] dealing with this stuff. .. It's really hard to take seriously a video that begins by misspelling the speaker's name (Naomi Wolf) as "Noami". Are these the kind of people I'd feel comfortable associating myself with? People who, instead of presenting a reasoned written argument, can only say "ya, you should, like, watch this video"?
I thought that was because SUVs qualified as light trucks under US law and were therefore exempt from fuel taxes?
No they're exempt from CAFE standards for gas mileage. How the fuck would they be exempt from fuel taxes, which are added in automatically at the pump? Think, man, THINK before you speak!
1 - Those who would commit violent crimes are also likely to smoke pot, and are in jail for that, prior to committing violent crimes.
\ The trouble with that analysis is that it's backwards, and casts too wide a net. It makes as much sense as arresting everyone who makes less than $100,000 a year (reported to the IRS), because that "low income" demographic is responsible for more than 99% of violent crime.
Agreed, but the original question was how to make something comparable to Apple I in impression on the world, not how far did technology advance in these years to allow one to entertain their private passions of watering tomatoes at $0.40/stem...:) So, the right price point to start was something comparable to the original $500 in (pre-profit) parts, *not* taking inflation into account...:) Indeed, there's not much room for entrepreneurial success in the homebrew electronics world anymore. The "digital electronics frontier" has been pretty thoroughly explored and homesteaded. Nowadays the equivalent is software, and even there the frontier is out in the "build a better google" area, rather than the "write a better [software app] and sell it mail order" we had in the 80's and 90's. The barrier to entry is about the same, though. Inflation adjusted, a couple thousand dollars gets you a usable server and internet connectivity, and the OS and coding tools are all free nowadays...
Obviously they earn a lot of money from displaying ads on tpb.com
See also: http://rixstep.com/1/20060708,00.shtml Are you stupid, or just being an ass? So the fuck what if TPB makes money? There's no link on ifpi.com to thepiratebay.org, so it clearly has no bearing on whether ifpi.com is "for profit". The profitability of their business interests are fucking irrelevant to the ifpi.com issue.
I've never heard Jobs' side of this story. And you never will. When someone does a crappy, inexcusable thing like that, there's nothing they can say about it. There's simply o room to "spin" it out of the realm of pure jackass behavior without claiming the known facts of the situation are false. Short of "I was a dick, and I'm really sorry", there's not much Jobs can say about it, and Jobs just isn't the kind of personality that ever will say something like that.
history is still flexable i see. they stole the chips to make the first computers from their employers, but somehow this is never mentioned. It's never mentioned because it didn't happen. They borrowed a bunch of money to buy the hardware components. This is well known, as the key part of their early success is that they managed to make enough off their first batch of systems to pay off their creditors. You are perhaps remembering the part of Woz's story where his employer (HP) actually gave him the hardware to build a circuit to output to TV (to build a clone of Pong).
Price a few out versus Dell et al. News flash: "Dell et al" are not the baseline for inexpensive hardware. They represent overpriced mass produced consumer junk.
What premium are you paying when their workstation is better spec'd and lower priced than Dells? Are you stupid, or just being an ass? Your choice for comparison is idiotic. No self respecting tech junkie who wants to install his own OS buys pre-built hardware from Dell.
So here is the part I don't understand... If they all have patents... why doesn't Verizon sue Sprint and Sprint sue ATT and ATT sue NTTDocomo and.... It begins as a sort of "mexican standoff", where the big guys each hold a big chunk of critical patent space and no one company is in any position to assert their patent position in court for fear the others will counter-sue. They then cross-license with one another, leaving the small group of large established companies free to pursue all things telephone. Any newcomers to the market face the impossible task of finding a way through this patent minefield that the big companies are free to ignore.
I think people who play online poker are crazy. The whole point of the game is making judgements about the cards people are holding from their behaviour. A large part of their behavior is how they bet and how long they take to do it. That's still visible. Believe it or not, most decent poker players have a pretty good "poker face". It's not like you gain much insight at live poker looking for twitching eyelids and nervous ball-scratching.
I do know a number of people who do work on classified technology and tend to camp their discussions right smack in that "big fat liar zone" because they technically can say what project they work on but don't care to walk the fine line of felony by saying too much more than that, even if legally they probably could. Quite true. I think "the zone" is evidence best used in conjunction with other evidence. I this case, the guy was a clueless fool of a coder, so likely he was "leveraging" his experience as an IT tech monkey swapping network cards on classified systems at Northrop-Grumman or some such. Defense contractors get paid giat barrels of money to build stuff for the government, so they tend to hire sharp people.
Wasn't your father then really not saying something that could be reworded as: "I work on some super cool secret B2 radar"? Doesn't that sound like the big fat liar zone described by you as "I worked on a secret anti-missle program"? I don't mean this as a flame, but more as an honest question. Where do you draw the line? The devil is in the details, usually. Details like the "what" of "the B-2 can use its radar and still remain difficult to detect, but I can't say how it's done". As another poster notes, a lot of guys won't care to share much detail for fear of legal problems, but it's usually fair to assume that someone who displays little technical skill (like the dolt in the GGP post) who speaks from the big fat liar zone, is probably a big fat liar. At best, he was probably an IT monkey at a defense contractor with just enough security clearance to swap network cards on classified systems.
He had claimed that he had been involved in writing code for some kind of automated anti-missile defense system, though he had always insisted that he wasn't allowed to give details.
If programmers like HIM are writing the code for these "smart" weapons, then I think we should just give the things to our enemies for free.
Defense contractors frequently end up with bad products, but it's usually due to mission creep and gross mismanagement. Based on my experience*, I'd almost guarantee that this guy was lying about his experience. Pretending to have worked on a "top secret" project that you conveniently can't talk about is pretty weak sauce. In reality, there are two kinds of classified projects: mundane ones, where the engineers working on 'em can talk about the "what" of the program in great general detail, but the specific "how" is classified; and REALLY secret ones, which you can't talk about at all, the most you can say is "I work for Lockheed" or whomever. This "I worked on a secret anti-missile program" shit is a load of crap. It falls into the big fat liar zone between mundane and really secret.
* I was an intelligence analyst in the Army. I dealt strictly with excruciatingly mundane secrets. Boring, boring, boring. My father was an engineer for Hughes (now Raytheon). He worked on things like the B-2 Spirit ground mapping radar system. For years he "worked at Hughes", and that was it. Later, he was able to say "I work on the B-2 radar system. You'd be amazed at some of the cool shit we do with it, but I can't say what it is."
she'd be better of just going out and spending half the cost of the Internet connection on a new DVD each month rather than downloading 1/2 a DVD then having to spend money on power for her computer and modem as well as the blank DVD to put it on. Bullcrap. This assumes she could somehow be spending half as much on her internet connection, when it's obvious she already has the cheapest crap available. The connection is going to be there either way, so no money saved there. And electricity? At 11 cents per Kw/hr, it's cheap. DVD-R media likewise. She's still coming out ahead. The store bought DVD might have added value (menus extras etc) but if you're downloading some shit stain like Underdog or Good Luck Chuck, who cares? In the end, it's still cheaper than even renting.
Then you were ripped off. The site works in pounds sterling - what's one quid these days? About USD$10? Pfff! The English Pound is no healthier than the US Dollar. It's generally floated between about $1.50 and $2.50 to the GBP for 30-odd years, generally sticking around $1.75.
I always thought that was funny. If his prediction models were so good couldn't he just factor in the fact that people were aware of the results? It was a plot device, not real science. He could make up any limitations he wanted.
Regulating commerce is well within the capacity of congress and the states, the constitution says so. While the point is largely irrelevant, the constitution says the fds can only regulate interstate commerce. The intent there was to make it so individual states couldn't (for example) tax/ban/regulate the importation of products from other other states in the union. Unfortunately, the interstate commerce clause has been so twisted from its original intent that the feds claim (with a straight face) that it allows them to do such blatantly extra-jurisdictional things as regulate the sale of marijuana that is grown, sold, and consumed entirely within one state. This is nothing new. They used it in the 60's to regulate "whites only" businesses, based on the fact that businesses had clientèle mostly from out of state (motels) or bought its supplies from out of state (restaurants). The ends (fighting racism) were clearly good, but the means were utterly despicable.
If 0.5% of Target's customers are blind (a decent estimate) When only.2% of the US population even meets the definition of "legally blind", 58% of which are elderly folks whose eyesight was fine for their first 60 years of life?
it might not be profitable for Target to go to the expense of assisting them. But if all businesses came to the same conclusion, we'd have a completely inaccessible society, and everyone with a disability would be forced to either live on social security or have a generous person assist them with everything in life. That's largely the case already, regardless of improvements in accessibility. "Equal access" doesn't magically make someone "equally useful". People with disabilities have disabilities. The blind can't drive trucks for a living. People in wheelchairs can't load concrete blocks onto pallets.
It's not only cruel, Nature is cruel. Society attempts to mitigate this somewhat. Failing to completely mitigate it to the satisfaction of a particular disability activist's whims is not an act of cruelty.
it's also worse for the overall economy if these people can't live independently. It's actually more expensive to make every damn thing in the world accessible to everyone of every sort of disability than it would be to hire someone to assist that person personally.
Requiring businesses to make reasonable accomodations to the disabled is not intruding Problem is, many aspects of the ADA are quite unreasonable.
it's really reducing the amount of our tax dollars that need to be spent helping those who can't live independently. Bullshit. I work for a large school district that's had to spend millions retrofitting scores of schools, sometimes requiring (for example) major structural alterations to make a main doorway 36" wide instead of 34.5" wide. The amount of money poured down the ADA rathole at our district is enough to buy each and every disabled student the best personal mobility equipment money could buy, plus pay an attendant to help them all day every day. Instead we have ADA compliance/disability rights activists roaming the schools compiling long lists of technical violations (toilet is 17.5" from centerline to the wall rather than the 18" ADA requires--- move toilet!) that, in practice, are largely irrelevant.
This is in addition to the fact that in our society we believe that everyone should be treated equally, even when it requires extra effort to do so. Forcing a multitude of special accommodations isn't "equal treatment", it's an attempt to legislate equal outcome. It's an absurdity. Attempting to create, via legislation, a world where all of us can pretend people with disabilities are not disabled is a recipe for failure. There are too many degrees of disability in too many flavors to reasonably accommodate them all. The disabled rights activists' claim of "a person with [disability] ought to be able to do [X] just like anyone else" is patently false. It's unfortunate, but people with disabilities have disabilities. Now, a decent society will collectively make an effort to assist such people when and where the need arises, but the idea that we should spend ourselves into ruination to transform the world into a magical Disneyland where everything is written in braille, all phones have TDDs and strobes, and all elevations are reached via gradual inclined planes is pure self-important folly.
Do you really want blind people to have to drive to the store because they can't order what they need via the internet? Is that not what they did a decade ago?
Interesting dichotomy. You rail against a lawsuit designed to compel accessibility to their services, saying that the stores should be free to choose to cater to these people, but when moderators freely choose to reduce accessibility to your diatribe by moderating you down, you reverse yourself and demand equal respect and accessibility rather than shopping elsewhere for a more receptive audience (while denying Slashdot ad revenue by reducing its readership).
You do your cause no credit. His "cause" is that no one should be forced to cater to the disabled at gunpoint, which is effectively what federal regulation is.
There's nothing in that philosophy that says it's not perfectly OK to publicly call out a bunch of jackass robot-head mods for the dumbfucks that they are. In fact, it's remarkably consistent with the idea above that it would only take a few 'chair bound folks crawling into Target stores on their bellies with the media in attendance to change things. Public spectacle embarrassing the company, rather than federal bureaucrats. See the difference?
It's unconventional ("we and pogue" would be more idiomatic), but I don't think it's ungrammatical; note that this is a subject, not an object (hence "we", not "us"). Am I missing something? It's grammatically correct, but it's very awkward. The grouping of the collective "we" on an equal footing with "Pogue" strains the mental picture of "we". This grouping, intimating a close association, is such that Pogue would naturally be assumed to be part of the "we" in question, so puzzlement ensues when he is not. It's just bad writing. Being an active part of the conversation in question, Pogue should have been included in the collective "we". Alternately, Valleywag could have used a collective pronoun for itself in a subordinate clause to show the separation. Any of the following would have been better:
"We all wish..."
"Both Pogue and we at Valleywag wish..."
"Pogue wishes (as do we at Valleywag) that..."
It also doesn't help that the/. blurb says "Jordan Golson writes" followed by nothing but a quote lifted from the article, which Jordan Golson certainly did not write, followed by some opinion from CmdrTaco. This sets up a situation where the identity of the "we" in question is thoroughly obfuscated. The original line was marginally acceptable, in a casual online writing sort of way, but it thoroughly lost its footing when it achieved four degrees of separation from the original conversation with Mr. Pogue.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really hard to take seriously a video that begins by misspelling the speaker's name (Naomi Wolf) as "Noami". Are these the kind of people I'd feel comfortable associating myself with? People who, instead of presenting a reasoned written argument, can only say "ya, you should, like, watch this video"?
No they're exempt from CAFE standards for gas mileage. How the fuck would they be exempt from fuel taxes, which are added in automatically at the pump? Think, man, THINK before you speak!
1 - Those who would commit violent crimes are also likely to smoke pot, and are in jail for that, prior to committing violent crimes. \ The trouble with that analysis is that it's backwards, and casts too wide a net. It makes as much sense as arresting everyone who makes less than $100,000 a year (reported to the IRS), because that "low income" demographic is responsible for more than 99% of violent crime.
See also: http://rixstep.com/1/20060708,00.shtml Are you stupid, or just being an ass? So the fuck what if TPB makes money? There's no link on ifpi.com to thepiratebay.org, so it clearly has no bearing on whether ifpi.com is "for profit". The profitability of their business interests are fucking irrelevant to the ifpi.com issue.
The devil is in the details, usually. Details like the "what" of "the B-2 can use its radar and still remain difficult to detect, but I can't say how it's done". As another poster notes, a lot of guys won't care to share much detail for fear of legal problems, but it's usually fair to assume that someone who displays little technical skill (like the dolt in the GGP post) who speaks from the big fat liar zone, is probably a big fat liar. At best, he was probably an IT monkey at a defense contractor with just enough security clearance to swap network cards on classified systems.
If programmers like HIM are writing the code for these "smart" weapons, then I think we should just give the things to our enemies for free.
Defense contractors frequently end up with bad products, but it's usually due to mission creep and gross mismanagement. Based on my experience*, I'd almost guarantee that this guy was lying about his experience. Pretending to have worked on a "top secret" project that you conveniently can't talk about is pretty weak sauce. In reality, there are two kinds of classified projects: mundane ones, where the engineers working on 'em can talk about the "what" of the program in great general detail, but the specific "how" is classified; and REALLY secret ones, which you can't talk about at all, the most you can say is "I work for Lockheed" or whomever. This "I worked on a secret anti-missile program" shit is a load of crap. It falls into the big fat liar zone between mundane and really secret.
* I was an intelligence analyst in the Army. I dealt strictly with excruciatingly mundane secrets. Boring, boring, boring. My father was an engineer for Hughes (now Raytheon). He worked on things like the B-2 Spirit ground mapping radar system. For years he "worked at Hughes", and that was it. Later, he was able to say "I work on the B-2 radar system. You'd be amazed at some of the cool shit we do with it, but I can't say what it is."
You do your cause no credit. His "cause" is that no one should be forced to cater to the disabled at gunpoint, which is effectively what federal regulation is.
There's nothing in that philosophy that says it's not perfectly OK to publicly call out a bunch of jackass robot-head mods for the dumbfucks that they are. In fact, it's remarkably consistent with the idea above that it would only take a few 'chair bound folks crawling into Target stores on their bellies with the media in attendance to change things. Public spectacle embarrassing the company, rather than federal bureaucrats. See the difference?
"We all wish..."
"Both Pogue and we at Valleywag wish..."
"Pogue wishes (as do we at Valleywag) that..."
It also doesn't help that the