Yeah, 'cause the various arms of government have such a great track record when it comes to network security. Remember when the department of the interior was so monumentally hosed that all internet activity was banned? They weren't even allowed to have their public websites online.
Actually, I do understand the basic concepts of plaster, plumbing, heating, cooking, electronics, telephones, construction, first aid, sales, accounting, and many many other fields. I'm also pretty well versed on physics, physiology, gardening, sewing, boating, flying (tho I admit that I would be uncomfortable if forced to fly a helicopter solo), nutrition, weight training (I haven't been actively practicing either of the last two in recent years), geometry, animal training, fishing, hunting, asteroids (on the 2600, not the arcade version), and Jebus knows what else. However, I tend to focus on the things most relevant to my immediate and future needs.
I know how the stuff that is relevant to my life works at a basic level and there's no reason for anything relevant to my life to be a mystery. Anyone who says, "I can't possibly understand that" is either lazy or unintelligent. I may not be able to hold my own in a conversation with physicists at CERN but it's not because I don't have the potential. It's because I didn't dedicate my life to the same thing they did. Give me five years or so and I could get up to speed enough to not sound like a mentally challenged chimp. But I'd never say, "I can't possibly understand that."
Mod me "troll" if you want but there is nothing magical about computers. If someone feels it's not worth their time and effort to learn how computers work, that's their prerogative. But, when they make the choice to remain ignorant, they need to man up and accept that this is going to cost them. They will be at the complete mercy of people who made the effort to understand how these devices work.
Heck, I can tear down an engine and rebuild it if I want but I choose to pay other people to do that kind of work for me. The fact that I understand how engines work gives me the ability to screen mechanics and find one who won't rip me off. One who will just do the work that needs to be done and charge for the true value of that work.
I honestly can't comprehend people who don't take the time to learn how things work. These days, most white collar jobs require extensive use of computers. People rely on these devices to feed their families and put a roof over their heads yet they make no effort to understand how they work. It's... I have no words. I just don't understand how people can be content to live in a fog of ignorance.
WTF? Am I missing something? Last time I got insurance for a vehicle (in California!), the guy writing the policy asked me how many miles I expect to drive per year. They have a number of mileage brackets that are used in the calculation of your premium. The more miles you drive in a year, the more money you pay. Back in the before time, I had a classic car that was a weekend ride. Insurance was cheap because it was classified as "pleasure use" and driven less than a thousand miles per year. I don't think I've ever had a situation where the estimated annual mileage wasn't used to calculate the premium.
Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. Except opendns is very clear about what they're doing and any computer or network using opendns must explicity configure their system to use the opends servers. Heck, I'm looking at an opendns redirect right now. It's hard to miss the big opendns logo. And the "Why am I here?" link. And the "did you mean" links. Yeah. Exactly the same "dirty trick".
Seriously. Allowing an hour for lunch, you're describing a schedule that's 44 hours per week minimum. Even in the US, full time is 40 hours per week. If you're working a 4 day week, the standard is TEN (10) hours per day, not 12. And you claim you sometimes work a week or longer on this schedule without a break? Your salary had better be well into 6 figures to put up with that kind of crap.
Second, why the hell do you live 1.5 hours away from work after 7 months? That's absolutely insane. MOVE! I could understand waiting a month or two to see how things go or even until a 90 day probationary period is over but 7 months?
You're getting fucked. Right in the ass. With no lube. And, as long as you continue to grab your ankles and grit your teeth, you'll continue to get fucked. Stop it.
I never said anything about it being a good idea. In fact I specifically stated that I wasn't making an argument that this is a good idea. I was simply commenting on the recurring theme of "there's no practical way to get the data out of these huge ranches in the middle of nowhere" that was running heavy in the thread. If you're going to argue with me, please do me the courtesy of arguing against what I'm talking about, not some other random issue. Thanks.
If hikers can upload their positional data in real time via satellite for $150/year, ranchers can afford to upload their stock data via satellite. (BTW, so you can look it up, it's called the SPOT Satellite Personal Messenger. About $150 for the device, $100 for basic emergency service, $50 to add real-time tracking to the basic service.) It's not a high-volume data transmission system but it should be sufficient for sending an RFID strings and time/date stamps and it can work in the field without the need for a fixed dish or big power supply. An adapted device could be hand-held and run on AA batteries. Just add the RFID scanner, rudimentary code to filter/format the data, and it's good.
Not that I'm all excited about the idea of mobile RFID tracking or anything like that. Just saying the technical hurdles are fairly small.
When I was a kid, I had an electric toothbrush that charged via induction. Not the same thing this article is about but it seemed like magic at the time. Set the plastic toothbrush in its plastic base with no metallic contacts on either and it would charge. I was just a kid but even I knew you needed conductive material to conduct electricity and plastic wasn't conductive. (I thought my grandpa was pulling my leg and taking the battery out and charging it at night while I was asleep.)
They gave him TWO (2) alternate methods and he declined both. He could have paid the base rate of his 2 year contract in full or he could have given them a $500 deposit. Either method would have bypassed the credit check. I'm sure he could have also paid the "no contract" cost of the phone and walked away with the phone but no service.
Obviously, the credit check is for the CREDIT they're extending, not the phone. They're giving him a $2000 line of unsecured credit with a 2 year payment plan. He's obligated to pay that amount in installments or pay a 10% termination fee and return the equipment. Sprint has every right to verify that they can count on him to pay off his debt. If he's not willing to allow that verification, he's welcome to put them at ease by either declining the credit and paying in full or providing 25% of the amount as collateral.
Um. My user number's WAY lower than yours. I know I can cuss and swear. I choose not to spell out the profanity unless it's really called for.
As for not buying DRM-laden media, that's fine. I don't do it often. However, when I do, I make sure I'll be able to access it on my own terms. Most of what I strip these days is actually free audio book rentals from the library. I can't play protected.wma in my car but I can play.mp3 and unprotected.wma no problem. So I strip the DRM, burn a CDRW, then listen to the book. When I'm done, I overwrite the disc with the next book. Probably breaking the law but, if I am, it's a stupid law.
The first thing I do when I download media with DRM these days is strip the DRM. If I can't figure out how to strip it before I lay down my money, I pass. DRM does nothing to enhance my experience and can only serve to detract from my experience.
Back 7 or 8 years ago, when ebooks were making their first surge, I bought about $50 worth from various vendors and didn't strip the DRM. It was a bit of an experiment to see how it would turn out. One of the vendors shut down just weeks after I made my purchase. I hadn't even activated one of the titles yet so it was a total loss. The other one was only readable as long as that computer lived. Same happened with the rest of the titles eventually. So $50 worth of ebooks I purchased just a few years ago are gone forever. Meanwhile, paperbacks I purchased when I was a kid still work just as well as the day I bought them. Nevermind the hassle of keeping track of each vendor's authentication system and the crap-ton of different software packages I had to install to handle all of those methods.
The funny thing is this isn't even the first time a major online music "seller" has screwed people by revoking access to purchased media. Wasn't it just a few years ago that some big seller shut down or changed their authentication system and the users got a big FU for all of their lost music?
I'm not saying there's nothing fishy but there's no reason that votes can't be hand-counted very quickly. Let's make up some numbers. Each polling station had 10000 votes. Each polling station has 20 people to count the ballots. That's 500 votes per person. Give them 15 seconds to process each ballot. That's a little over 2 hours for a first full count. Maybe another hour to obtain the counts from all of the polling stations. And that's assuming they wait until the polls close to start counting and numbers of voters far higher than I'd expect to show up at any single polling station and a very high voter:pollster ratio.
The whole idea that manual counts require days is silly if the count is done in an efficient manner using the people already on hand running the polling places.
They're making money because you're now paying for 2 data plans plus 1 tethering plan rather than one of each. If you're geek enough to want tethering, you're also going to want data on your phone for those times when it's not worth the hassle of lugging a laptop. So instead of adding the tethering option to your phone's data plan, you're adding the $50-60 plan for a cellular card/dongle.
Using AT&T prices:
The cheapest phone/text/data/tethering plan runs around $105/month. 450 minutes, minimal text package, unlimited (5 gigs) data, tethering.
The cheapest phone/text/data plan runs around $60/month. The DataConnect plan is $60/month. That's a total of $120/month.
AT&T gets an extra $15/month, $180/year, $360/contract. It's not the cards that they care about. It's the monthly bill. The cards can't cost them much at all in the quantities that they purchase.
Sure. Or they can add a routine to their firmware that looks for this type of connection and, when detected, cripple the phone. I grabbed a 3G iphone the week they were jailbroke and ran one of the socks proxy programs that was available. The iphone would not charge when data was being passed through the socks proxy. I could have the data connection active and do all the streaming audio I wanted on the phone through Pandora (hours and hours and hours) and it charged fine. But, as soon as I started putting data through the socks proxy, the phone stopped taking external power. Tried a number of socks proxys (all that were available at the time) and the behavior was the same. Data passing to/from the phone = battery charges. Data passing THROUGH the phone = no charging. Just having a telnet session open was enough to disable charging. So active tethering sessions were limited to a few hours. That may not sound like a big deal but it really kills the phone. A couple hours of tethered access and the battery's almost dead and you can't swap it out even if you were willing to schlep around extra batteries.
This is much more devious than making such use outright impossible. Since most people don't know what the heck they're doing, they won't be able to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. Maybe they'll think tethering just takes too much power and that's why it's not supported. [cough]bullshit[/cough] AT&T and Apple get to keep their revenue stream while the customer gets conditioned to avoid the behavior AT&T dislikes. The customer give up on tethering or only use it as a last resort.
I took the phone back after a few days of testing my charging theory. Currently using a Blackjack 2 which had to be mildly hacked to restore band selection and a couple other options. Tethered 8-10 hours a day as a method of external access testing.
If I had all that extra telephone wire in my walls, you know what I'd do with it? The same thing I did 10 years ago.
Nothing.
The best you could do is use it to pull more useful wire through the walls but it's probably been stapled down in places and run through tiny holes so that's not likely to work very well. Pour one on the curb and let the old wire rest in piece.
I got on the wrong bus once because they lined up in a different order and I wasn't paying attention. "Um...Jeff doesn't ride my bus." After a brief moment of panic, Jeff and I figured I may as well go over to his house. When I got there, I called home and mom was so relieved that she didn't get mad at all. So I got to play at Jeff's house that afternoon and it was a really cool adventure. And I never [accidentally] got on the wrong bus again.:)
And what would my mom have done if she'd had a GPS tracker on me? Jump in her car and chase the bus all over the valley? Talk about scarred for life. "Hey, isn't that your mom chasing us?" Even the best case scenario is pretty damaging. It would have taught me that, if I mess up, all I have to do is sit quietly until someone comes to rescue me.
"Computers use will mainly be for communications and writing."
Then they can use whatever OS he wants to install. If the field people aren't capable of clicking on the "EMAIL" and "WORD PROCESSING" icons and using whatever program pops up to do their email and writing tasks, they shouldn't be in the field. The IT guy says absolutely nothing about editing in the field. Other than to say that the editing is not part of the equation.
If there are other issues like transferring data from recording devices, syncing or tethering blackberries, reviewing footage, etc., then the platform is determined by those factors. Provide whatever is needed to do those tasks.
I'm tired of the excuses. If you rely on a particular device to put food on your table and a roof over your family's head, you damn well better understand how that device works. There's nothing secret or classified about personal computers. All of the information needed to gain a basic understanding of the technology is freely available and explained in terms as complicated or simple as anyone could want. You can look up "Go, Dog. Go!" level guides or read the engineering documentation.
I don't understand how people can willingly live in such a thick fog of ignorance. It must make the world an incredibly frightening place.
I'm totally floored that so many people here seem to think that.08 is some magic number that decides the ultimate fate of the world. Do you really think if you blow a.07 that the cop is going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry sir! Please accept my apology and here's a complimentary ticket to the policeman's ball. You have a nice day." DUI/DWI/etc. charges are about impairment. You can be considered impaired at 0.00 if you're unable to safely operate the vehicle. 0.06, 0.07, 0.08, 0.09 is all pretty much the same thing if you're staggering around and unable to function. The number on that unit is just one piece of evidence.
I agree wholeheartedly that the code on these devices (and radar guns and any other device used to collect evidence) must be subject to public scrutiny and should meet strict specifications and requirements. But this decision doesn't mean it's open season on drunk driving. The cops can still arrest you and they can still use proven methods like blood analysis to support their case. Just means they'll have to take you to the station and they won't have the results right away. Which is totally irrelevant because, once they tell you to step out of the car to evaluate your sobriety, you're almost certainly going to jail. And, if you refuse the blood test, you still get a year of bussing it around town.
I have absolutely no ethical qualms about downloading the electronic version of a book I've purchased in dead-tree form. I paid for the words presented in text form. Whether I read them on paper or a screen, it's the same performance of the same work. It's like ripping my own CDs so I can load them on my MP3 player except someone else did the ripping. In fact, I don't even have many of my physical books or CDs on hand. They're tucked away in boxes at a relative's house. (A relative who has a lot more storage space than me.) I ripped all my CDs years ago and haven't touched the physical media since. If I want to read a book I own (and I know which books I own), I download a pdf, prc, rtf, doc, html, etc. I haven't resold or disposed of any of them so, legally, I still own a copy and nobody's using the physical copy at the same time that I'm using the electronic copy. But I'm sure what I'm doing would piss off some copyright holders.
If I owned a kindle, you can bet I'd use my ethical loophole to bypass their $10/title charge for most books. I'd rather pay $5-7 for a paperback and download a "pirated" electronic version. Heck, even if they only charged $2/title for ebooks, I'd still download a pirated version after paying my $2 so I could be sure I'd have access to the product after the DRM screws me 5-10 years down the road.
Copyright holders and IP distributors need to clue in to the fact that reproducing information is cheap and easy. They can't legislate away that reality. Produce a quality product at a reasonable price and it'll sell. Try to charge more than people feel an easily-reproduced product is worth and they'll steal it or ignore it. Refuse to provide the product in a form that they want or make the process too cumbersome and they'll bypass you entirely.
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Yeah, 'cause the various arms of government have such a great track record when it comes to network security. Remember when the department of the interior was so monumentally hosed that all internet activity was banned? They weren't even allowed to have their public websites online.
Actually, I do understand the basic concepts of plaster, plumbing, heating, cooking, electronics, telephones, construction, first aid, sales, accounting, and many many other fields. I'm also pretty well versed on physics, physiology, gardening, sewing, boating, flying (tho I admit that I would be uncomfortable if forced to fly a helicopter solo), nutrition, weight training (I haven't been actively practicing either of the last two in recent years), geometry, animal training, fishing, hunting, asteroids (on the 2600, not the arcade version), and Jebus knows what else. However, I tend to focus on the things most relevant to my immediate and future needs.
I know how the stuff that is relevant to my life works at a basic level and there's no reason for anything relevant to my life to be a mystery. Anyone who says, "I can't possibly understand that" is either lazy or unintelligent. I may not be able to hold my own in a conversation with physicists at CERN but it's not because I don't have the potential. It's because I didn't dedicate my life to the same thing they did. Give me five years or so and I could get up to speed enough to not sound like a mentally challenged chimp. But I'd never say, "I can't possibly understand that."
Mod me "troll" if you want but there is nothing magical about computers. If someone feels it's not worth their time and effort to learn how computers work, that's their prerogative. But, when they make the choice to remain ignorant, they need to man up and accept that this is going to cost them. They will be at the complete mercy of people who made the effort to understand how these devices work.
Heck, I can tear down an engine and rebuild it if I want but I choose to pay other people to do that kind of work for me. The fact that I understand how engines work gives me the ability to screen mechanics and find one who won't rip me off. One who will just do the work that needs to be done and charge for the true value of that work.
I honestly can't comprehend people who don't take the time to learn how things work. These days, most white collar jobs require extensive use of computers. People rely on these devices to feed their families and put a roof over their heads yet they make no effort to understand how they work. It's ... I have no words. I just don't understand how people can be content to live in a fog of ignorance.
WTF? Am I missing something? Last time I got insurance for a vehicle (in California!), the guy writing the policy asked me how many miles I expect to drive per year. They have a number of mileage brackets that are used in the calculation of your premium. The more miles you drive in a year, the more money you pay. Back in the before time, I had a classic car that was a weekend ride. Insurance was cheap because it was classified as "pleasure use" and driven less than a thousand miles per year. I don't think I've ever had a situation where the estimated annual mileage wasn't used to calculate the premium.
Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. Except opendns is very clear about what they're doing and any computer or network using opendns must explicity configure their system to use the opends servers. Heck, I'm looking at an opendns redirect right now. It's hard to miss the big opendns logo. And the "Why am I here?" link. And the "did you mean" links. Yeah. Exactly the same "dirty trick".
Seriously. Allowing an hour for lunch, you're describing a schedule that's 44 hours per week minimum. Even in the US, full time is 40 hours per week. If you're working a 4 day week, the standard is TEN (10) hours per day, not 12. And you claim you sometimes work a week or longer on this schedule without a break? Your salary had better be well into 6 figures to put up with that kind of crap.
Second, why the hell do you live 1.5 hours away from work after 7 months? That's absolutely insane. MOVE! I could understand waiting a month or two to see how things go or even until a 90 day probationary period is over but 7 months?
You're getting fucked. Right in the ass. With no lube. And, as long as you continue to grab your ankles and grit your teeth, you'll continue to get fucked. Stop it.
I never said anything about it being a good idea. In fact I specifically stated that I wasn't making an argument that this is a good idea. I was simply commenting on the recurring theme of "there's no practical way to get the data out of these huge ranches in the middle of nowhere" that was running heavy in the thread. If you're going to argue with me, please do me the courtesy of arguing against what I'm talking about, not some other random issue. Thanks.
If hikers can upload their positional data in real time via satellite for $150/year, ranchers can afford to upload their stock data via satellite. (BTW, so you can look it up, it's called the SPOT Satellite Personal Messenger. About $150 for the device, $100 for basic emergency service, $50 to add real-time tracking to the basic service.) It's not a high-volume data transmission system but it should be sufficient for sending an RFID strings and time/date stamps and it can work in the field without the need for a fixed dish or big power supply. An adapted device could be hand-held and run on AA batteries. Just add the RFID scanner, rudimentary code to filter/format the data, and it's good.
Not that I'm all excited about the idea of mobile RFID tracking or anything like that. Just saying the technical hurdles are fairly small.
So...What? You're going to go out and buy Snow Leopard for your PC? Let us know how that turns out.
D'oh! Mom always said I was special. Now I know why she used the air quotes.
When I was a kid, I had an electric toothbrush that charged via induction. Not the same thing this article is about but it seemed like magic at the time. Set the plastic toothbrush in its plastic base with no metallic contacts on either and it would charge. I was just a kid but even I knew you needed conductive material to conduct electricity and plastic wasn't conductive. (I thought my grandpa was pulling my leg and taking the battery out and charging it at night while I was asleep.)
They gave him TWO (2) alternate methods and he declined both. He could have paid the base rate of his 2 year contract in full or he could have given them a $500 deposit. Either method would have bypassed the credit check. I'm sure he could have also paid the "no contract" cost of the phone and walked away with the phone but no service.
Obviously, the credit check is for the CREDIT they're extending, not the phone. They're giving him a $2000 line of unsecured credit with a 2 year payment plan. He's obligated to pay that amount in installments or pay a 10% termination fee and return the equipment. Sprint has every right to verify that they can count on him to pay off his debt. If he's not willing to allow that verification, he's welcome to put them at ease by either declining the credit and paying in full or providing 25% of the amount as collateral.
Um. My user number's WAY lower than yours. I know I can cuss and swear. I choose not to spell out the profanity unless it's really called for.
As for not buying DRM-laden media, that's fine. I don't do it often. However, when I do, I make sure I'll be able to access it on my own terms. Most of what I strip these days is actually free audio book rentals from the library. I can't play protected .wma in my car but I can play .mp3 and unprotected .wma no problem. So I strip the DRM, burn a CDRW, then listen to the book. When I'm done, I overwrite the disc with the next book. Probably breaking the law but, if I am, it's a stupid law.
There are tons of DVD rippers and 1.5tb drives are regularly on sale for $120. Sometimes even $110. Dual layer burners are $20-25.
The first thing I do when I download media with DRM these days is strip the DRM. If I can't figure out how to strip it before I lay down my money, I pass. DRM does nothing to enhance my experience and can only serve to detract from my experience.
Back 7 or 8 years ago, when ebooks were making their first surge, I bought about $50 worth from various vendors and didn't strip the DRM. It was a bit of an experiment to see how it would turn out. One of the vendors shut down just weeks after I made my purchase. I hadn't even activated one of the titles yet so it was a total loss. The other one was only readable as long as that computer lived. Same happened with the rest of the titles eventually. So $50 worth of ebooks I purchased just a few years ago are gone forever. Meanwhile, paperbacks I purchased when I was a kid still work just as well as the day I bought them. Nevermind the hassle of keeping track of each vendor's authentication system and the crap-ton of different software packages I had to install to handle all of those methods.
The funny thing is this isn't even the first time a major online music "seller" has screwed people by revoking access to purchased media. Wasn't it just a few years ago that some big seller shut down or changed their authentication system and the users got a big FU for all of their lost music?
I'm not saying there's nothing fishy but there's no reason that votes can't be hand-counted very quickly. Let's make up some numbers. Each polling station had 10000 votes. Each polling station has 20 people to count the ballots. That's 500 votes per person. Give them 15 seconds to process each ballot. That's a little over 2 hours for a first full count. Maybe another hour to obtain the counts from all of the polling stations. And that's assuming they wait until the polls close to start counting and numbers of voters far higher than I'd expect to show up at any single polling station and a very high voter:pollster ratio.
The whole idea that manual counts require days is silly if the count is done in an efficient manner using the people already on hand running the polling places.
They're making money because you're now paying for 2 data plans plus 1 tethering plan rather than one of each. If you're geek enough to want tethering, you're also going to want data on your phone for those times when it's not worth the hassle of lugging a laptop. So instead of adding the tethering option to your phone's data plan, you're adding the $50-60 plan for a cellular card/dongle.
Using AT&T prices:
The cheapest phone/text/data/tethering plan runs around $105/month. 450 minutes, minimal text package, unlimited (5 gigs) data, tethering.
The cheapest phone/text/data plan runs around $60/month. The DataConnect plan is $60/month. That's a total of $120/month.
AT&T gets an extra $15/month, $180/year, $360/contract. It's not the cards that they care about. It's the monthly bill. The cards can't cost them much at all in the quantities that they purchase.
Sure. Or they can add a routine to their firmware that looks for this type of connection and, when detected, cripple the phone. I grabbed a 3G iphone the week they were jailbroke and ran one of the socks proxy programs that was available. The iphone would not charge when data was being passed through the socks proxy. I could have the data connection active and do all the streaming audio I wanted on the phone through Pandora (hours and hours and hours) and it charged fine. But, as soon as I started putting data through the socks proxy, the phone stopped taking external power. Tried a number of socks proxys (all that were available at the time) and the behavior was the same. Data passing to/from the phone = battery charges. Data passing THROUGH the phone = no charging. Just having a telnet session open was enough to disable charging. So active tethering sessions were limited to a few hours. That may not sound like a big deal but it really kills the phone. A couple hours of tethered access and the battery's almost dead and you can't swap it out even if you were willing to schlep around extra batteries.
This is much more devious than making such use outright impossible. Since most people don't know what the heck they're doing, they won't be able to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. Maybe they'll think tethering just takes too much power and that's why it's not supported. [cough]bullshit[/cough] AT&T and Apple get to keep their revenue stream while the customer gets conditioned to avoid the behavior AT&T dislikes. The customer give up on tethering or only use it as a last resort.
I took the phone back after a few days of testing my charging theory. Currently using a Blackjack 2 which had to be mildly hacked to restore band selection and a couple other options. Tethered 8-10 hours a day as a method of external access testing.
If they want a piece of the used game market, they can open their own stores and compete against GameStop just like everyone else.
If I had all that extra telephone wire in my walls, you know what I'd do with it? The same thing I did 10 years ago.
Nothing.
The best you could do is use it to pull more useful wire through the walls but it's probably been stapled down in places and run through tiny holes so that's not likely to work very well. Pour one on the curb and let the old wire rest in piece.
A hundred times, THIS.
I got on the wrong bus once because they lined up in a different order and I wasn't paying attention. "Um...Jeff doesn't ride my bus." After a brief moment of panic, Jeff and I figured I may as well go over to his house. When I got there, I called home and mom was so relieved that she didn't get mad at all. So I got to play at Jeff's house that afternoon and it was a really cool adventure. And I never [accidentally] got on the wrong bus again. :)
And what would my mom have done if she'd had a GPS tracker on me? Jump in her car and chase the bus all over the valley? Talk about scarred for life. "Hey, isn't that your mom chasing us?" Even the best case scenario is pretty damaging. It would have taught me that, if I mess up, all I have to do is sit quietly until someone comes to rescue me.
Then they can use whatever OS he wants to install. If the field people aren't capable of clicking on the "EMAIL" and "WORD PROCESSING" icons and using whatever program pops up to do their email and writing tasks, they shouldn't be in the field. The IT guy says absolutely nothing about editing in the field. Other than to say that the editing is not part of the equation. If there are other issues like transferring data from recording devices, syncing or tethering blackberries, reviewing footage, etc., then the platform is determined by those factors. Provide whatever is needed to do those tasks.
I'm tired of the excuses. If you rely on a particular device to put food on your table and a roof over your family's head, you damn well better understand how that device works. There's nothing secret or classified about personal computers. All of the information needed to gain a basic understanding of the technology is freely available and explained in terms as complicated or simple as anyone could want. You can look up "Go, Dog. Go!" level guides or read the engineering documentation.
I don't understand how people can willingly live in such a thick fog of ignorance. It must make the world an incredibly frightening place.
I'm totally floored that so many people here seem to think that .08 is some magic number that decides the ultimate fate of the world. Do you really think if you blow a .07 that the cop is going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry sir! Please accept my apology and here's a complimentary ticket to the policeman's ball. You have a nice day." DUI/DWI/etc. charges are about impairment. You can be considered impaired at 0.00 if you're unable to safely operate the vehicle. 0.06, 0.07, 0.08, 0.09 is all pretty much the same thing if you're staggering around and unable to function. The number on that unit is just one piece of evidence.
I agree wholeheartedly that the code on these devices (and radar guns and any other device used to collect evidence) must be subject to public scrutiny and should meet strict specifications and requirements. But this decision doesn't mean it's open season on drunk driving. The cops can still arrest you and they can still use proven methods like blood analysis to support their case. Just means they'll have to take you to the station and they won't have the results right away. Which is totally irrelevant because, once they tell you to step out of the car to evaluate your sobriety, you're almost certainly going to jail. And, if you refuse the blood test, you still get a year of bussing it around town.
I have absolutely no ethical qualms about downloading the electronic version of a book I've purchased in dead-tree form. I paid for the words presented in text form. Whether I read them on paper or a screen, it's the same performance of the same work. It's like ripping my own CDs so I can load them on my MP3 player except someone else did the ripping. In fact, I don't even have many of my physical books or CDs on hand. They're tucked away in boxes at a relative's house. (A relative who has a lot more storage space than me.) I ripped all my CDs years ago and haven't touched the physical media since. If I want to read a book I own (and I know which books I own), I download a pdf, prc, rtf, doc, html, etc. I haven't resold or disposed of any of them so, legally, I still own a copy and nobody's using the physical copy at the same time that I'm using the electronic copy. But I'm sure what I'm doing would piss off some copyright holders.
If I owned a kindle, you can bet I'd use my ethical loophole to bypass their $10/title charge for most books. I'd rather pay $5-7 for a paperback and download a "pirated" electronic version. Heck, even if they only charged $2/title for ebooks, I'd still download a pirated version after paying my $2 so I could be sure I'd have access to the product after the DRM screws me 5-10 years down the road.
Copyright holders and IP distributors need to clue in to the fact that reproducing information is cheap and easy. They can't legislate away that reality. Produce a quality product at a reasonable price and it'll sell. Try to charge more than people feel an easily-reproduced product is worth and they'll steal it or ignore it. Refuse to provide the product in a form that they want or make the process too cumbersome and they'll bypass you entirely.