I don't hate them either, but I do think they're stupid (and, reading back - nobody said hate... just that they were idiots). It's not ignorance either - they have a good enough education to know better. It's a simple lack of foresight and planning.
Of course, when they get older they'll suddenly realize they don't have enough to retire on and start asking what the government is going to do for them.
The Sony Wega II 60" LCD is $5k list, and available for $4k delivered (although last I read there was an indeterminate waiting period due to supply issues). Not cheap, but also one of the best big screen digital display HDTV screens out there.
It's not a LCD flat panel - it's an LCD RPTV, but still only 16" deep.
Most are either capable of 480p/720p-i/1080i, or they only do 480p
Look at the specs again - most will do 480p and 1080i, but not 720p. 720p requires a much faster vertical refresh rate - since, essentially, 1080i only requires the equivalent of 540p.
But I find the HDTV tuner situation EXTREMELY confusing, and I'm a fucking genius
It sucks, and the cable and Hollywood lobbies aren't helping. I can understand their desire for content control, but they want far too much and are far too insane over it. As such we still don't have a definitive digital output (firewire or DVI), and it's making the tuner issue worse and worse. Add that to cable companies still resisting an open standard (actually, it's Motorola and Scientific Atlanta resisting it) and it gets murkier.
Yes it does. It's just that the pollution is moved. That energy doesn't come free you know - you have to charge the Segway, and that power has to come from a power plant, which does pollute.
Of course, I'd guess that cleaning up a few thousand stationary power plants is a helluva lot easier than cleaning up a few hundred million mobile vehicles, but saying that it doesn't pollute is ignorance.
I don't see noise as an issue either - modern hybrid cars make little noise (only when their engines are actually on). Electric cars don't make significantly more noise than a Segway. I suspect fuel cell cars are a little noiser than a hybrid, but considerably quieter than gas/diesel. It's not a solved issue yet, but it's getting there.
It doesn't just suck, it's totally insane. Imagine the productivity lost with everyone spenind 2+hours a day in their car
Yeah, so instead people will spend 4+ hours a day on their Segway. Because you didn't change anything - even if they can go top speed on the Segway then you're limited to ~12 mph. If your commute is 25 miles (which is not at all unusual in most major metro areas) then it's going to take you two hours at top speed, uninterrupted, on a Segway. A more realistic figure would be 2.5 hours. And, of course, the Segway doesn't even have enough range to do a 25 mile commute.
And this is an issue the Segway doesn't solve... and while it wasn't meant to address it, the mere fact that it doesn't is part of what doomed it to failure. It's simply not a viable method of transport for most people.
Heck, it's not viable for my family - I have a 4 mile commute that takes 15 minutes. My wife has a 10 mile commute that takes 45-60 minutes. With a Segway the time spent would remain about the same (under perfect circumstances), but now I'm screwed if it rains (~150 days/year), when it's hot and muggy (~6 months), when it's godawful cold (~1 month), etc. And cargo? What cargo? What about running errands (which I do during lunch 2-3 times/week)? Picking up groceries on the way home? Just about anything else?
Give it a chance you say? Nope... it's a non-viable solution. I'm perfectly willing to buy viable solutions, and I'll even pay a small premium for a hybrid or similar vehicle, but I'm not going to pay a premium for something that just doesn't solve the problem.
Or buy a digital HDTV using LCD, DLP, D-ILA, LCOS, or Plasma technology. They don't suffer from burn in.
The black levels aren't as good as they are on a CRT, but that's about the only downside. And the black levels are improving with every generation of the technology. For most people, not having to worry about burnin more than makes up for the small downside.
Very few HD monitors are capable of displaying 720p -- it requires a much higher refresh rate than 1080i. In fact, for CRT-based RPTVs I can only recall one that was capable of displaying 720p. There may be more now, but I haven't seen them (nor have I been following it that closely).
Most of the digital monitors should be able to display 720p just fine though.
Forget about 1080p. Processing isn't a big deal - your 2 GHz PC has enough horsepower to do that (actually more than enough). The problem is virtually nothing can display it because the horizontal refresh rate is too high. None of the RPTVs are certified for 1080p... only the $30k+ front projector CRTs are. If there was a digital solution (LCD, DLP, D-ILA, LCOS, etc) that could handle 1080i in full resolution, it wouldn't be an issue, but currently all of the sets that are claiming 1080i are actually throwing away information because they don't have the horizontal resolution necessary for true 1920x1080.
why does it seem that every single credit card company on the planet is fighting to get my business
Because your credit rating is (most likely) excellent. I did filtering on credit bureau data, and nearly all of it is done based on scores (and, no, FICO isn't the only one - there's a half dozen or so standard scores and companies can request the bureaus to build custom scores as well - for a price).
Wouldn't I have a lower credit rating?
No. Have you ever looked at a credit report? It doesn't say how much you've paid for the past N payments (for N>1... very often the last payment amount is reported), it merely says how often you've paid on time, how often you've been late in 30, 45, 60, etc. periods. Which is a pretty good indicator of whether or not you're going to become bad debt or keep paying.
One of the other key bits used in scoring is debt load... if you have a single credit card with a $5000 limit and regularly keep it at $3000 in charges (even if you pay it off monthly), then it's viewed as being worse than having 10 credit cards with a $50,000 total limit and $20,000 in charges - because your debt load is over 50% of your credit available. (Ok, this particular example is a bit extreme, but a debt load of over 50% is viewed as very bad). Yes, it's silly, but not having enough credit can actually hurt your score more than having too much credit. The last thing a creditor wants to do is extend credit to someone who's already over their head -- and a lot of people don't apply for additional credit cards until their old ones are nearly at the limit already.
The prime lendors (which is most of the cards, with interest rates under 20% and often under 10%) do like having more stable clients. They have much tighter criteria for pre-approval (the company I worked for looked for FICO scores in the 500s and low 600s -- a prime lendor won't touch anyone below 650 (score tops out at 800)). But they still like having interest, because the slim transaction fees simply don't cover the costs.
Pre-approval solicitations are pretty meaningless. Companies apply the shotgun effect - get a data pull from one of the three bureaus, do their scrubs, and submit them for solicitation. Getting a pre-approval letter doesn't even mean you can actually get the card.
Here's a question - how often does your credit card company raise your limit? Personally, I think I've only ever had one or two increases without requesting them. I have friends that run high balances though, and they get them regularly... whenever they appear to be approaching the limit, it would get increased. Why? Because the credit issuer would much rather you run a high balance (and pay the interest) with them than open a credit line with another company. There's always a stop point, but it's soft, not hard. If you start missing payments, it gets real hard, real fast.
Uh... no. People who pay their bill in full monthly (hi, I'm one) are known in the industry as "deadbeats". That small percentage they take generally just offsets their costs for providing the money and services. There's some profit involved, but not much. Most of the money goes toward covering advertising costs and bad debt (see below).
On the otherhand, they really love people who never pay in full, but still make regular payments. A bit more than the minimum payment is best, since while they bleed you for more with minimum payment, it also increases risk. But 10-20% interest is better than 2% any day of the week, especially since it's compounding interest. Gotta love paying interest on unpaid interest. At least if you're the lender that is.
I used to work for a company that contracted with a sub-prime credit card company - they really wanted the accounts that garnered interest (the average interest on the cards was 28% - and yes, there were entire states they didn't market to because that interest rate is illegal in those states). The entire business model was trying to identify more consumers that had poor enough credit to need a card like this (did I mention the average $50 annual fee? Or the card with a $300 credit limit that had $250 in fees put on it when you signed up?) but wouldn't go delinquint -- which was a problem. The average prime lender has to right off 15%... which is why about a year ago they slashed their IT budget and my company laid off 60% of their staff. Last I heard they were going into debt collector status - buying up bad debt from other credit card companies to turn around and sell it to debt collection agencies. They're still in business last I checked, but barely.
If you're buying the absolute, top of the line CPU, then yes, you're a fool. Unless you have to do some serious number crunching where time really is money, it doesn't matter that much. Back off a few revs on the CPU and you'll cut the cost by 60-70% for little speed difference.
But once you're down to that point, then cutting back further doesn't do you any good. It may be a drop of less than $10 to the next speed down. And if $10 makes that much difference in affording the computer, I suggest reprioritizing your spending habits.
If you're a gamer, then, yeah... drop some more money on video or memory. Just realize that for graphics, you may as well go for a GF4 Ti4200 or Radeon 9500 Pro or jump up to a Radeon 9700 Pro - which is a considerable gap. But anything in between just isn't worth the money. For memory, there isn't much that needs more than half a gig of memory (right now - it'll grow), unless you start playing with things like video editing.
For hard drives... SCSI? Why bother? I mean... really. IDE isn't the god awful monstrosity it used to be. Modern drives are fast, big, and cheap. If you want a bit of added speed, you can go for a RAID config, but you're going to spend a lot more money than you'll get back in peformance. SCSI just isn't worth it at all for the desktop PC - even for video editing it's questionable. For servers it's another matter, but we're not talking servers here.
About the closest to what you want is a TB AudioTron -- no 802.11b support directly, but you can use a wireless hub or whatever to make it work. The AT is $250 + whatever for the wireless stuff. It does have a S/PDIF output, which most of the other network music appliances lack. It also supports a wider array of formats than just MP3 - but no OGG or FLAC support directly (you can use Samba's on-the-fly conversion to do it, if you have the CPU power on the server).
It's larger than the SliMP3, and doesn't have as bright of a display, but that's about it for the differences as best I can recall.
While you have some things right, you've also completely forgotten about the innocent... and yes, there are people that qualify.
I've never personally downloaded a song or movie or anything else of the nature that I didn't have the rights to do so... and while I don't have an MP3 library yet, I will soon since my TiVo's will be able to play an MP3 library.
There does need to be some form of reasonable copyright controls... but the keyword here is reasonable. The RIAA and MPAA haven't gotten that through their heads yet. Instead they're trying for more and more draconian measures to protect against a group of people who, more likely than not, don't have the money to spend on their product in the first place. Heck, even the people I know that do download MP3s and the like illegally would be willing to pay for them if there was just some reasonable way to do so... but there isn't and the big recording houses are avoiding any attempt to go down that path.
And, yes, there are the dipshits who just happily steal everything they can, claiming all sorts of absurd reasons for why they're justified. That's the group that's impossible to prevent - I mean, hell, they're watching bootlegged video camera shots of LOTR complete with audience dialog, breathing sounds, et. al. -- do you really think you're going to be able to convince them of anything? I don't... their brain function isn't high enough.
What's the solution? Hell if I know. But Palladium style lockdown isn't it, nor are most of the solutions I've seen... about the best is to change the pricing structure to something reasonable, allow people to pay for what they want to listen to (and not the crap tracks they don't), and hope people are honest. The execs don't believe anyone will be honest though. Maybe that's more of a reflection on their own selves than anything else.
I still haven't had time to sit down and run through the different filing scenarios and see if TaxCut was as effective as TurboTax, but it looks solid
Well, we bought TaxCut after seeing the first/. post about Intuit's idiocy. Put in all the tax info and my wife couldn't believe what it output (the marraige penalty sucks - went from around $5k of refunds combined last year to owing money this year... and we earned less this year. Only difference is we're now married). My wife ran TurboTax on the web and it eventually output the exact same numbers.
The "eventually" bit was what sucked... it automagically imported my wife's data from last year (she used it last year), but not mine. So it only had half the information it needed and made some very bad, very wrong decisions based on that. It was fixable, but it required you to wipe out everything and start over. Wow... great "feature".
Between the installation bullshit and stupid assumptions like the above I'm very pleased to have moved to TaxCut.
All of those OS's allow you to mount the raw drive and write to it. You may need better privledges to do so (root, Administrator, etc), but it's possible.
Offtopic, but the latest extension isn't likely to expire anytime soon. When it was clear that 128 GB wasn't enough, Maxtor did the legwork on extending it again.
When you need more than 144 petabytes per drive then they'll change it again. But I suspect it'll be awhile.
you don't like that, they'll remove the meter and the power line, and you can live without electricity
Not likely.
What they will do is tell the meter to no longer deliver power to you. Removing the meter and power line is likely to be: A) too expensive, B) illegal (since in most locales in the US a building without power is not qualified as liveable - turning it off is one thing, removing the ability to deliver is another).
Now if you go turn that meter on, are you just "using the emissions already on your property" or are you illegally using service? The same holds true for most utilities such as water and gas, where in most residential neighborhoods the tap is controlled by a valve on your property. Doesn't mean you get to jack around with it though.
Heck, look at your freaking mailbox -- it's paid for by you, installed by you (or by a contractor), and on your land. Destroy it, or contents within, and it's a federal violation. You don't own it.
If I recall the Federal Communications Act of 1936
I suggest the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The 1936 Act was almost entirely rewritten by it. (And Judge Green probably rejoiced at its passing... he didn't expect to be the sole regulator of the telephone industry for 30+ years).
You most certainly cannot receive and decode any transmission you wish. Doing so to cellular telephones is illegal, as are military channels. Beamed sat transmission isn't either one of these, obviously, but there's precedent against "don't broadcast into my house!".
Heck, for that matter, would you like the inverse to be true? The Supreme Court ruled against police using passive detection methods such as heat radiation without a search warrant. By your logic, they should have been able to - since if you didn't want them to use such a method you should've prevented the heat from irradiating out from your walls.
I can see the arguments both ways, and I don't like the DMCA in the slightest (and suspect that the people involved in this case could have been prosecuted under other laws), but the whole "quit beaming at me" argument is absolutely absurd.
Except for the majority of the world who can't get any form of high speed access. But cell phones and landlines work just fine for low speed modems.
wired keyboards/mice
Except for the vast number of users who don't like replacing batteries in their keyboard/mouse, don't like the interference problems, and don't like the additional latency.
700~800mb CDs
Ok... I'll agree these are doomed to obscurity, but not for another 5 years or so. Maybe more. The DVD rewriteable market is still busy screwing itself due to a lack of standards. Until one clear standard comes about (or the various standards become irrelevant due to writer and reader interoperability) CD-R/RW is going to keep a huge chunk of the market.
analog displays
Except that CRT tubes still give far better blacks than any digital display, and do better than any current production method for color range, color accuracy, refresh, and half a dozen other things... yeah, I want my HDTV to be DLP/LCD/LCOS/D-ILA, but it has a lot less strenuous requirements than a monitor.
Of course, tech geeks who really have a clue know that it doesn't matter anymore.
Virtually all of the CD-RW's out there can burn any CD, regardless of copy protection, as long as you use the right software. None of them cause buffer underruns. And while they may not be better than a Plextor, they're not worse either.
Of course, if you include cost then they are better - about 1/2-1/4 the price. For the same stuff.
A lot of teams finish with spare time on their hands... not a lot of spare time, but I've seen at least 30 minutes before. They usually lose.
The majority do finish in the "nick of time"... or don't actually finish at all and are welding/constructing during the hour of tinker time on competition day.
A rather large number of the machines don't work at all, or fail during the tests... I wonder if they'll ever do hydroplanes again since they've yet to have a single one work out of two competitions (or maybe more... don't recall - most of them floated and moved, but none actually hydroplaned).
Read the forums though... the ones where the teams actually participate in them. There isn't any behind the scenes help in construction. Sorry to burst your cynical bubble.
However if it used radio waves (or something else) to automatically check car entering and leaving then what is to stop you not having a card? If they can work out what constitutes an individual car (which will be a fair bit of work), then they'll need to take a picture to follow up on the individal for a fine
These kinds of systems are already used all over the place for toll roads and even parking garages. I've gone through the toll booth on GA-400 at over 100 mph and it successfully caught my RF tag and charged the proper account $.50.
I've also gone through it without an RF tag in my car and received a $25 fine a couple weeks later - a camera took a picture of my plate, which was attached to the fine.
And this entire system is a decade old now - the problems of identifying vehicles, separating vehicles, and marking non-complying vehicles has been solved for some time.
Not that it would be feasible to put such a system in place in London, since one of the main problems is too many entrances and exits into the congestion zone. Tolls (automated or not) work only if you can control access. Otherwise the overhead kills you.
So it's either gridlock or a tagging system that can't cope if people don't buy a tag and requires not only RF hardware but an camera and image recognition. Hmmm.
Pretty much... which is why they apparantly chose to go this way. Eh.
I don't think Singapore's situation is directly analogous -- I suspect they didn't have as many entrances/exits in the controlled area, and I bet they don't tag some areas as "congested" because of this very same problem.
I suspect, however, that most locations will decide that a toll system analagous to Singapore's is a better (and more fair) solution.
Both of which were protested, rightfully, here on Slashdot.
But, of course, if a similar situation allowed the EU to take down Microsoft, well then screw ethics and what's right!
Uh huh.
Frankly, that's not the issue I have though. Microsoft does business in the EU, and they could cease doing so if a ruling was made against them -- they'd just have to decide that the cost of complying would exceed the cost of doing business.
While I agree that Microsoft has an effective monopoly (come on folks... it's been ruled one, even here in the US - quit trying to argue it's not), and that it has used illegal tactics to continue and extend that monopoly, I don't like the method of remedy being proposed here. One person as judge, jury, and executioner? Sorry... that's screwed up. Particularly if the prosecution can continuously change the charges being leveled... how would you like to be on the receiving end of that kind of case? Hope you didn't speed on the way to court this morning, or jay walk to cross the street, or do anything else illegal at any point in your life.
Frankly, this kind of thing is known as "railroading" and most modern court systems have evolved away from it because it's simply not fair.
From the sounds of it the EU just managed to backtrack 600 years or so in the judicial system. Way to go!
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I don't hate them either, but I do think they're stupid (and, reading back - nobody said hate... just that they were idiots). It's not ignorance either - they have a good enough education to know better. It's a simple lack of foresight and planning.
Of course, when they get older they'll suddenly realize they don't have enough to retire on and start asking what the government is going to do for them.
The Sony Wega II 60" LCD is $5k list, and available for $4k delivered (although last I read there was an indeterminate waiting period due to supply issues). Not cheap, but also one of the best big screen digital display HDTV screens out there.
It's not a LCD flat panel - it's an LCD RPTV, but still only 16" deep.
Most are either capable of 480p/720p-i/1080i, or they only do 480p
Look at the specs again - most will do 480p and 1080i, but not 720p. 720p requires a much faster vertical refresh rate - since, essentially, 1080i only requires the equivalent of 540p.
But I find the HDTV tuner situation EXTREMELY confusing, and I'm a fucking genius
It sucks, and the cable and Hollywood lobbies aren't helping. I can understand their desire for content control, but they want far too much and are far too insane over it. As such we still don't have a definitive digital output (firewire or DVI), and it's making the tuner issue worse and worse. Add that to cable companies still resisting an open standard (actually, it's Motorola and Scientific Atlanta resisting it) and it gets murkier.
The Segway obviously doesn't pollute
Yes it does. It's just that the pollution is moved. That energy doesn't come free you know - you have to charge the Segway, and that power has to come from a power plant, which does pollute.
Of course, I'd guess that cleaning up a few thousand stationary power plants is a helluva lot easier than cleaning up a few hundred million mobile vehicles, but saying that it doesn't pollute is ignorance.
I don't see noise as an issue either - modern hybrid cars make little noise (only when their engines are actually on). Electric cars don't make significantly more noise than a Segway. I suspect fuel cell cars are a little noiser than a hybrid, but considerably quieter than gas/diesel. It's not a solved issue yet, but it's getting there.
It doesn't just suck, it's totally insane. Imagine the productivity lost with everyone spenind 2+hours a day in their car
Yeah, so instead people will spend 4+ hours a day on their Segway. Because you didn't change anything - even if they can go top speed on the Segway then you're limited to ~12 mph. If your commute is 25 miles (which is not at all unusual in most major metro areas) then it's going to take you two hours at top speed, uninterrupted, on a Segway. A more realistic figure would be 2.5 hours. And, of course, the Segway doesn't even have enough range to do a 25 mile commute.
And this is an issue the Segway doesn't solve... and while it wasn't meant to address it, the mere fact that it doesn't is part of what doomed it to failure. It's simply not a viable method of transport for most people.
Heck, it's not viable for my family - I have a 4 mile commute that takes 15 minutes. My wife has a 10 mile commute that takes 45-60 minutes. With a Segway the time spent would remain about the same (under perfect circumstances), but now I'm screwed if it rains (~150 days/year), when it's hot and muggy (~6 months), when it's godawful cold (~1 month), etc. And cargo? What cargo? What about running errands (which I do during lunch 2-3 times/week)? Picking up groceries on the way home? Just about anything else?
Give it a chance you say? Nope... it's a non-viable solution. I'm perfectly willing to buy viable solutions, and I'll even pay a small premium for a hybrid or similar vehicle, but I'm not going to pay a premium for something that just doesn't solve the problem.
You really need to read The Millionaire Next Door.
In general, status symbols mean you care more about the flash than the fact... and flash is awfully short lived.
Or buy a digital HDTV using LCD, DLP, D-ILA, LCOS, or Plasma technology. They don't suffer from burn in.
The black levels aren't as good as they are on a CRT, but that's about the only downside. And the black levels are improving with every generation of the technology. For most people, not having to worry about burnin more than makes up for the small downside.
Very few HD monitors are capable of displaying 720p -- it requires a much higher refresh rate than 1080i. In fact, for CRT-based RPTVs I can only recall one that was capable of displaying 720p. There may be more now, but I haven't seen them (nor have I been following it that closely).
Most of the digital monitors should be able to display 720p just fine though.
Forget about 1080p. Processing isn't a big deal - your 2 GHz PC has enough horsepower to do that (actually more than enough). The problem is virtually nothing can display it because the horizontal refresh rate is too high. None of the RPTVs are certified for 1080p... only the $30k+ front projector CRTs are. If there was a digital solution (LCD, DLP, D-ILA, LCOS, etc) that could handle 1080i in full resolution, it wouldn't be an issue, but currently all of the sets that are claiming 1080i are actually throwing away information because they don't have the horizontal resolution necessary for true 1920x1080.
why does it seem that every single credit card company on the planet is fighting to get my business
Because your credit rating is (most likely) excellent. I did filtering on credit bureau data, and nearly all of it is done based on scores (and, no, FICO isn't the only one - there's a half dozen or so standard scores and companies can request the bureaus to build custom scores as well - for a price).
Wouldn't I have a lower credit rating?
No. Have you ever looked at a credit report? It doesn't say how much you've paid for the past N payments (for N>1... very often the last payment amount is reported), it merely says how often you've paid on time, how often you've been late in 30, 45, 60, etc. periods. Which is a pretty good indicator of whether or not you're going to become bad debt or keep paying.
One of the other key bits used in scoring is debt load... if you have a single credit card with a $5000 limit and regularly keep it at $3000 in charges (even if you pay it off monthly), then it's viewed as being worse than having 10 credit cards with a $50,000 total limit and $20,000 in charges - because your debt load is over 50% of your credit available. (Ok, this particular example is a bit extreme, but a debt load of over 50% is viewed as very bad). Yes, it's silly, but not having enough credit can actually hurt your score more than having too much credit. The last thing a creditor wants to do is extend credit to someone who's already over their head -- and a lot of people don't apply for additional credit cards until their old ones are nearly at the limit already.
The prime lendors (which is most of the cards, with interest rates under 20% and often under 10%) do like having more stable clients. They have much tighter criteria for pre-approval (the company I worked for looked for FICO scores in the 500s and low 600s -- a prime lendor won't touch anyone below 650 (score tops out at 800)). But they still like having interest, because the slim transaction fees simply don't cover the costs.
Pre-approval solicitations are pretty meaningless. Companies apply the shotgun effect - get a data pull from one of the three bureaus, do their scrubs, and submit them for solicitation. Getting a pre-approval letter doesn't even mean you can actually get the card.
Here's a question - how often does your credit card company raise your limit? Personally, I think I've only ever had one or two increases without requesting them. I have friends that run high balances though, and they get them regularly... whenever they appear to be approaching the limit, it would get increased. Why? Because the credit issuer would much rather you run a high balance (and pay the interest) with them than open a credit line with another company. There's always a stop point, but it's soft, not hard. If you start missing payments, it gets real hard, real fast.
Taco, really... you're duping your own stories now.
Not precisely a dupe, but we've seen stories about this moron before. No news here.
Uh... no. People who pay their bill in full monthly (hi, I'm one) are known in the industry as "deadbeats". That small percentage they take generally just offsets their costs for providing the money and services. There's some profit involved, but not much. Most of the money goes toward covering advertising costs and bad debt (see below).
On the otherhand, they really love people who never pay in full, but still make regular payments. A bit more than the minimum payment is best, since while they bleed you for more with minimum payment, it also increases risk. But 10-20% interest is better than 2% any day of the week, especially since it's compounding interest. Gotta love paying interest on unpaid interest. At least if you're the lender that is.
I used to work for a company that contracted with a sub-prime credit card company - they really wanted the accounts that garnered interest (the average interest on the cards was 28% - and yes, there were entire states they didn't market to because that interest rate is illegal in those states). The entire business model was trying to identify more consumers that had poor enough credit to need a card like this (did I mention the average $50 annual fee? Or the card with a $300 credit limit that had $250 in fees put on it when you signed up?) but wouldn't go delinquint -- which was a problem. The average prime lender has to right off 15%... which is why about a year ago they slashed their IT budget and my company laid off 60% of their staff. Last I heard they were going into debt collector status - buying up bad debt from other credit card companies to turn around and sell it to debt collection agencies. They're still in business last I checked, but barely.
Oh well... better job now anyway.
Depends.
If you're buying the absolute, top of the line CPU, then yes, you're a fool. Unless you have to do some serious number crunching where time really is money, it doesn't matter that much. Back off a few revs on the CPU and you'll cut the cost by 60-70% for little speed difference.
But once you're down to that point, then cutting back further doesn't do you any good. It may be a drop of less than $10 to the next speed down. And if $10 makes that much difference in affording the computer, I suggest reprioritizing your spending habits.
If you're a gamer, then, yeah... drop some more money on video or memory. Just realize that for graphics, you may as well go for a GF4 Ti4200 or Radeon 9500 Pro or jump up to a Radeon 9700 Pro - which is a considerable gap. But anything in between just isn't worth the money. For memory, there isn't much that needs more than half a gig of memory (right now - it'll grow), unless you start playing with things like video editing.
For hard drives... SCSI? Why bother? I mean... really. IDE isn't the god awful monstrosity it used to be. Modern drives are fast, big, and cheap. If you want a bit of added speed, you can go for a RAID config, but you're going to spend a lot more money than you'll get back in peformance. SCSI just isn't worth it at all for the desktop PC - even for video editing it's questionable. For servers it's another matter, but we're not talking servers here.
About the closest to what you want is a TB AudioTron -- no 802.11b support directly, but you can use a wireless hub or whatever to make it work. The AT is $250 + whatever for the wireless stuff. It does have a S/PDIF output, which most of the other network music appliances lack. It also supports a wider array of formats than just MP3 - but no OGG or FLAC support directly (you can use Samba's on-the-fly conversion to do it, if you have the CPU power on the server).
It's larger than the SliMP3, and doesn't have as bright of a display, but that's about it for the differences as best I can recall.
While you have some things right, you've also completely forgotten about the innocent... and yes, there are people that qualify.
I've never personally downloaded a song or movie or anything else of the nature that I didn't have the rights to do so... and while I don't have an MP3 library yet, I will soon since my TiVo's will be able to play an MP3 library.
There does need to be some form of reasonable copyright controls... but the keyword here is reasonable. The RIAA and MPAA haven't gotten that through their heads yet. Instead they're trying for more and more draconian measures to protect against a group of people who, more likely than not, don't have the money to spend on their product in the first place. Heck, even the people I know that do download MP3s and the like illegally would be willing to pay for them if there was just some reasonable way to do so... but there isn't and the big recording houses are avoiding any attempt to go down that path.
And, yes, there are the dipshits who just happily steal everything they can, claiming all sorts of absurd reasons for why they're justified. That's the group that's impossible to prevent - I mean, hell, they're watching bootlegged video camera shots of LOTR complete with audience dialog, breathing sounds, et. al. -- do you really think you're going to be able to convince them of anything? I don't... their brain function isn't high enough.
What's the solution? Hell if I know. But Palladium style lockdown isn't it, nor are most of the solutions I've seen... about the best is to change the pricing structure to something reasonable, allow people to pay for what they want to listen to (and not the crap tracks they don't), and hope people are honest. The execs don't believe anyone will be honest though. Maybe that's more of a reflection on their own selves than anything else.
I still haven't had time to sit down and run through the different filing scenarios and see if TaxCut was as effective as TurboTax, but it looks solid
/. post about Intuit's idiocy. Put in all the tax info and my wife couldn't believe what it output (the marraige penalty sucks - went from around $5k of refunds combined last year to owing money this year... and we earned less this year. Only difference is we're now married). My wife ran TurboTax on the web and it eventually output the exact same numbers.
Well, we bought TaxCut after seeing the first
The "eventually" bit was what sucked... it automagically imported my wife's data from last year (she used it last year), but not mine. So it only had half the information it needed and made some very bad, very wrong decisions based on that. It was fixable, but it required you to wipe out everything and start over. Wow... great "feature".
Between the installation bullshit and stupid assumptions like the above I'm very pleased to have moved to TaxCut.
Except that you're wrong...
All of those OS's allow you to mount the raw drive and write to it. You may need better privledges to do so (root, Administrator, etc), but it's possible.
Offtopic, but the latest extension isn't likely to expire anytime soon. When it was clear that 128 GB wasn't enough, Maxtor did the legwork on extending it again.
When you need more than 144 petabytes per drive then they'll change it again. But I suspect it'll be awhile.
you don't like that, they'll remove the meter and the power line, and you can live without electricity
Not likely.
What they will do is tell the meter to no longer deliver power to you. Removing the meter and power line is likely to be: A) too expensive, B) illegal (since in most locales in the US a building without power is not qualified as liveable - turning it off is one thing, removing the ability to deliver is another).
Now if you go turn that meter on, are you just "using the emissions already on your property" or are you illegally using service? The same holds true for most utilities such as water and gas, where in most residential neighborhoods the tap is controlled by a valve on your property. Doesn't mean you get to jack around with it though.
Heck, look at your freaking mailbox -- it's paid for by you, installed by you (or by a contractor), and on your land. Destroy it, or contents within, and it's a federal violation. You don't own it.
If I recall the Federal Communications Act of 1936
I suggest the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The 1936 Act was almost entirely rewritten by it. (And Judge Green probably rejoiced at its passing... he didn't expect to be the sole regulator of the telephone industry for 30+ years).
You most certainly cannot receive and decode any transmission you wish. Doing so to cellular telephones is illegal, as are military channels. Beamed sat transmission isn't either one of these, obviously, but there's precedent against "don't broadcast into my house!".
Heck, for that matter, would you like the inverse to be true? The Supreme Court ruled against police using passive detection methods such as heat radiation without a search warrant. By your logic, they should have been able to - since if you didn't want them to use such a method you should've prevented the heat from irradiating out from your walls.
I can see the arguments both ways, and I don't like the DMCA in the slightest (and suspect that the people involved in this case could have been prosecuted under other laws), but the whole "quit beaming at me" argument is absolutely absurd.
modems
Except for the majority of the world who can't get any form of high speed access. But cell phones and landlines work just fine for low speed modems.
wired keyboards/mice
Except for the vast number of users who don't like replacing batteries in their keyboard/mouse, don't like the interference problems, and don't like the additional latency.
700~800mb CDs
Ok... I'll agree these are doomed to obscurity, but not for another 5 years or so. Maybe more. The DVD rewriteable market is still busy screwing itself due to a lack of standards. Until one clear standard comes about (or the various standards become irrelevant due to writer and reader interoperability) CD-R/RW is going to keep a huge chunk of the market.
analog displays
Except that CRT tubes still give far better blacks than any digital display, and do better than any current production method for color range, color accuracy, refresh, and half a dozen other things... yeah, I want my HDTV to be DLP/LCD/LCOS/D-ILA, but it has a lot less strenuous requirements than a monitor.
Of course, tech geeks who really have a clue know that it doesn't matter anymore.
Virtually all of the CD-RW's out there can burn any CD, regardless of copy protection, as long as you use the right software. None of them cause buffer underruns. And while they may not be better than a Plextor, they're not worse either.
Of course, if you include cost then they are better - about 1/2-1/4 the price. For the same stuff.
The lovely thing about this is that most of the telemarketers bought your number from... guess who... Verizon!
So not only did they make money selling your number to telemarketing scum, they're now making money off you for what they did.
You don't watch the show much...
A lot of teams finish with spare time on their hands... not a lot of spare time, but I've seen at least 30 minutes before. They usually lose.
The majority do finish in the "nick of time"... or don't actually finish at all and are welding/constructing during the hour of tinker time on competition day.
A rather large number of the machines don't work at all, or fail during the tests... I wonder if they'll ever do hydroplanes again since they've yet to have a single one work out of two competitions (or maybe more... don't recall - most of them floated and moved, but none actually hydroplaned).
Read the forums though... the ones where the teams actually participate in them. There isn't any behind the scenes help in construction. Sorry to burst your cynical bubble.
However if it used radio waves (or something else) to automatically check car entering and leaving then what is to stop you not having a card? If they can work out what constitutes an individual car (which will be a fair bit of work), then they'll need to take a picture to follow up on the individal for a fine
These kinds of systems are already used all over the place for toll roads and even parking garages. I've gone through the toll booth on GA-400 at over 100 mph and it successfully caught my RF tag and charged the proper account $.50.
I've also gone through it without an RF tag in my car and received a $25 fine a couple weeks later - a camera took a picture of my plate, which was attached to the fine.
And this entire system is a decade old now - the problems of identifying vehicles, separating vehicles, and marking non-complying vehicles has been solved for some time.
Not that it would be feasible to put such a system in place in London, since one of the main problems is too many entrances and exits into the congestion zone. Tolls (automated or not) work only if you can control access. Otherwise the overhead kills you.
So it's either gridlock or a tagging system that can't cope if people don't buy a tag and requires not only RF hardware but an camera and image recognition. Hmmm.
Pretty much... which is why they apparantly chose to go this way. Eh.
I don't think Singapore's situation is directly analogous -- I suspect they didn't have as many entrances/exits in the controlled area, and I bet they don't tag some areas as "congested" because of this very same problem.
I suspect, however, that most locations will decide that a toll system analagous to Singapore's is a better (and more fair) solution.
If you're in congestion though, a car doesn't take up 10m of space... it's more like 4-5 m.
Even so, 55 km is a decent bit of space, but when you average it out over the city I'm not sure it's of much impact at all.
And if the public transportation system is already operating at over capacity then it's really not helping much of anything.
Both of which were protested, rightfully, here on Slashdot.
But, of course, if a similar situation allowed the EU to take down Microsoft, well then screw ethics and what's right!
Uh huh.
Frankly, that's not the issue I have though. Microsoft does business in the EU, and they could cease doing so if a ruling was made against them -- they'd just have to decide that the cost of complying would exceed the cost of doing business.
While I agree that Microsoft has an effective monopoly (come on folks... it's been ruled one, even here in the US - quit trying to argue it's not), and that it has used illegal tactics to continue and extend that monopoly, I don't like the method of remedy being proposed here. One person as judge, jury, and executioner? Sorry... that's screwed up. Particularly if the prosecution can continuously change the charges being leveled... how would you like to be on the receiving end of that kind of case? Hope you didn't speed on the way to court this morning, or jay walk to cross the street, or do anything else illegal at any point in your life.
Frankly, this kind of thing is known as "railroading" and most modern court systems have evolved away from it because it's simply not fair.
From the sounds of it the EU just managed to backtrack 600 years or so in the judicial system. Way to go!