They still offer lifetime subscriptions today. Not that you'd know,
you haven't checked within the last two years...
Thank you for pointing that out. You have it correct, I do not check their website regularly. I have
absolutely no loyalty to companies themselves, and tend to only search for "physical things I buy" on sites
that directly sell those things, such as Amazon. And I base my original objection on the fact that
TiVo's product listings on such sites, if they mention service at all, always say "TiVo service
subscription required".
I do think I've looked within the past two years, but cannot argue that they currently offer exactly
what you say they do. Of course, they also want $300 for it, or 50% more than what I paid for my
current unit with lifetime service included. But yeah, they do offer it.
Re:Sorry, what you're asking for is too easy to ab
on
Reusing Old TiVo Hardware?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
Absolutely, positively false.
I personally own a Toshiba-branded TiVo series 2 box, which came with free lifetime basic service (which
essentially means the channel guide and nothing else, but that works for me just fine).
I have never paid a dime directly to TiVo (though no doubt Toshiba paid some form of licensing fee), and
use one of their their products 100% legitimately. I do note, however, that they appear to no longer offer
their "basic" service, nor any "lifetime" terms - Their loss, because I will never buy another box from
them (and really, I would upgrade at this point, what with no digital or HD support in my box;
but as TiVo clearly doesn't want to sell to me, I will probably end up screwing around with Myth again
in a year or two instead, and have a lot more motivation this time to make it work as I want).
That said, if you remove the channel guide from that (and yeah, I know about the "advanced" features like remoting
and such, but I've never found myself "needing" to watch a recorded show anywhere but home), what
does TiVo really sell? If you turn their box into a time-based (rather than content-based via the channel
guide) digital VCR, you've "stolen" absolutely nothing. They sold you hardware, you used it in a way they might
not like but don't really have any right to complain about (again, key point, without using any of the
features of their subscription). See:CueCat for a preemptive rebuttal to any arguments to the contrary.
Re:While I don't have any use for the program
on
Microsoft COFEE Leaked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's a bit short-sighted to say that nobody does. I'm sure there are lots of people
out there with material on their machines that they wouldn't want a law enforcement
officer to find. This tool would be perfect for their needs.
As a fan of maximizing my privacy, I would find such a tool useful just for auditing the
effectiveness of my standard cleanup procedures.
You don't need to break the law to have an interest in others not seeing what you do with
your computer. Whether making sure you haven't left personal financial information unencrypted
on your machine, or have accidentally clicked "yes" to have your browser remember your
passwords, or simply your taste in porn stars... All legal, yet things you probably would
rather not leave lying around for anyone other than yourself.
Now, aside from that, don't forget that police exist to help prosecute cases, not to protect us
or find the guilty party or any fluffy BS like that. Once they have you in their sights, the less
they can dig up, the better. "Good news - Your alibi checked out, you didn't kill that girl. Bad
news - Your computer proves that you played poker online once last year, enjoy your 2+ year federal
sentence".
And hey, who better to know where Windows leaks information than Microsoft itself? Not
that I would trust them as my sole source of privacy maintenance, but as I said,
for auditing "best practices", such a tool would appear fairly useful.
Pre-existing conditions is a wonderful way of saying that none of your previous doctors noticed
it so we're not paying either.
Come again?
Preexisting conditions mean exactly the opposite of that - It means you did have the condition
diagnosed before getting your current run of uninterrupted insurance coverage. The original idea behind such
clauses actually had some merit - You couldn't skip out on having insurance, find out you have cancer, then
get insurance solely to pay for your treatment.
Of course, the insurance companies, interested solely in profit
rather than patient outcomes (hey, I hate them as much as anyone, but won't fault them (just) for doing exactly
what they exist to do - Make money), discovered they could use this not just for acute conditions, but to deny
treatment for things like diabetes or the standard cardiac cocktails most older males take, based on nothing more
than the fact that you went one day too long without coverage between jobs.
But if no doctor ever diagnosed your condition, consider yourself good to go. Now, we do have some grey area
here... If you had an X-Ray for a broken arm ten years ago, and it has a fuzzy patch near your current tumor,
well, the insurance companies have whole teams of people looking for just such meaningless data as an excuse
to deny benefits.
You want a "distribution amplifier". These usually downmix to mono (seriously - You want mono for this purpose. Stereo
coming at you from several direction at unbalanced distances will get annoying fast), and have a large number of
channels (12-16 would work well for most houses, unless you really need it in every corner of every room including
the attic, basement, and garage).
They don't cost all that much, which leaves you to spend your money on decent speakers. Depending on your home layout, you may
want surface-mount, or recessed, or just cube-in-the-corner. As for wires - Keep in mind you either have signal, or power, or
both going to them. So wireless doesn't really buy you all that much unless you absolutely positively cannot make discrete 1/8"
holes hidden in the corner/wall/floor/ceiling/whatever. Personally, I consider speaker-wire easier to hide than power, so have
chosen to just run an array of speaker wire through the basement up through small holes between the floorboards (old-style
New England house with a decent gap between floorboards, so as close to invisible holes as you could ever want).
But yeah, you don't want a high-tech solution, you want an old-school distro amp. What you feed it with depends on what the
wife will put up with, but you can find a huge number of digital car audio solutions that provide minimalist interfaces with
decent functionality.
Simple. Use audio cues instead of visual ones. TFA mentioned an audio compass and voice-over as being examples.
An audio compass to do... what, exactly?
Drive around a racetrack you can't see, in a car you can't see, avoiding obstacles you can't see?
Navigate a 2d landscape you can't see to find items you can't see, avoid monsters you can't see, and reach
destinations you can't see (yeah, knowing you've gone "North" does a whole lot of good when
you pass one pixel from your destination but don't know it)?
And if it tells you which way to go, well that seems to completely strip most games of 99% of what makes
them "entertainment"... If you turn the player into a wetware interface between the compass and the controller... Wow,
what a *fun* game! We could rename any such game "Working For Nanomanagement 3: Press These Buttons In Order When We
Tell You To". Might as well "play" medical transcriptionist and get paid for having the same level of "fun".
I think we can identify the fundamental problem here right from the name - "VIDEO game". Let's look that word
up, shall we? From the Latin videre, "to see" + -o (as in audio). "The visible part
of a television transmission". "The technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing,
transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion."
I have nothing against making essential services and some public areas (as a hiker, I dread the day they
start installing elevators up the sides of mountains to make them ADA-compliant) accessible to the disabled. But
when dealing with mediums that almost ubiquitously require a given physical ability - Such as "video games"
and "vision", which I would have thought goes without saying - I say we have to draw the line between accommodation
and absurdity.
They were later released after it turned out they were simply wearing Axe deodorant
Clearly you haven't paid attention to the War on Ourselves yet...
They wouldn't release them. They'd deport them to Gitmo (closing... Riiiiiight, let me know
any year now when it actually happens) for Conspiracy to Make Defense Contractors Look Bad. Or perhaps
Possession of a Substance Banned by Secret Laws You Can't Know About.
Or they might stick with what they know best and just make something absurd up on the spot, taze your ass, then
release you with no charges exactly 17 seconds after your flight takes off without you... Why change from a good
routine when it works so well to keep us "safe" from old ladies with nail clippers and 4oz bottles of hand lotion?
Go look at the cost of a T1 and realize it is only 1.5 Mbps, now look at the cost of that 12 Mbps rsidential cable. Why
do you think the T1 is so much more expensive for almost 1/10th the speed?
Okay... Now factor in Moore's Law.
So yeah - Explain to me why Comcast can't guarantee 10x the throughput of a 30+ year old commodity-class
connection.
As anyone on a cable or DSL connection will readily tell you, the advertised throughput means fuck all. It actually does
surprise me that Comcast can throttle anyone, even at local-2am, based on their criteria. How badly it crawls from 6-9pm,
however, counts as an entirely different matter.
Oh, right, cheap, peak speed, shared, yadda-yadda-yadda. Yet Japan and quite a few other "civilized" countries manage to offer
real-100MBit for a fraction of our cost. Hey, I'll admit that the US's less dense population presents its own problems, but
don't insult us by apologizing for the ISPs. Even the closest we have, FIOS, only available in fairly dense markets, doesn't
come for under $20/mo.
Tell that to my electric bill, which dropped roughly 25% when I switched to (almost) all CFLs. And as for lifespan, I still have half of my original set of them fully functional (almost a decade ago now). And quick tip, don't just buy twenty of them and replace all your lights en masse, do it as they burn out (otherwise, you've thrown away a perfectly good $0.50 bulb).
For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production
Yup. You caught 'em. All those evil corporations actually sell their products at a loss compared to the cost of energy required to produce them - Because your statement implies exactly that. Same for all those naughty solar panels, dontchaknow. And yes, I appreciate all too well how massively unfairly the utilities favor corporate customers over mere humans - But even considering that, if GE could make more reselling electricity than selling CFLs, don't you think they would?
not to mention disposal.
Ahh, the specter of all that spooooky mercury. That 100% recyclable mercury. Along with the 100% recyclable phosphorus coating the 100% recyclable glass. And the (merely) 99% recyclable fiberglass and plastic in the base, don't forget that.
Yes, CFLs have their shortcomings - And most people get them totally wrong (with the exception of how poorly they work with dimmers, that alone holds true). They start right up, they only take a few seconds to reach full brightness, they do save money, they do last 10x (or more) longer (though they do admittedly have a slightly higher out-of-box failure rate), they come in full-spectrum versions (and something incandescents don't, they come in germicidal versions as well). They even come in every common form factor now, from candelabra to GX53 (I learned that part when I discovered my new house had all candelabra-base lights).
DHS slapped them down saying that not only is it not their job, it's probably not even possible.
Which, with the DHS' track record, tells us two things...
One, it counts as possible. And two, the GAO should do the job.
And we can probably infer something about a hidden motive of making it easier to enforce
a news blackout over an overloaded unprepared internet, but I'll stick to just the obvious
conclusions, for now.
Could a mesh network of cell phones function independent of towers? Does
anybody who has more knowledge of networking than I do want to chime in?
One word - Latency.
Good quality voice communication has fairly low bandwidth requirements, but very tight latency limits. Above 20ms,
you start to notice the lag. Above 50ms, it gets rather annoying. Beyond 150ms, you wouldn't want to use it for
anything but absolute emergencies.
Not to mention, you would have the same problem with finding peers that you do now with finding towers - In densely populated
areas, you'll have no problems finding them; In rural areas (the same places you can't get a signal now), you
likely won't find enough peers to maintain a connection anyway. The one exception to this, peering would probably help
somewhat with dead spots inside areas that otherwise have a great signal (basements in a city, for example).
Each one comes with extra songs that you only get if you plunk down nearly $20 on the whole album -- you can't
download these individually.
Wanna bet?
Those "only included with the special limited gold plated Japanese release" tracks count as really my single most
unabashed reason for resorting to piracy.
Yes, I will pay to support the bands I enjoy, by buying their CDs and
going to their concerts; No, I won't pay $40 for one extra track, pictures of the (male) band wearing lingerie,
and a cheap tin cellphone charm. And I sure as hell won't sign up for iTunes (or any other particular
service or store) just to get a track "exclusive" to that store.
I will, however, pay a few bucks more to buy a real, physical, resellable (not that I ever do sell them, just a matter
of having the option) CD - Which I
will then rip and file away never to open again. And if you want to know why I'll pay more for that, you need look no
further than Amazon's handling of '1984' for the Kindle. I control my media and media players, not Amazon, not
Apple, not Microsoft, not Sony.
That's illegal pretty much everywhere. You won't find those machines in Vegas.
Um, wrong - Most jurisdictions require that level of control, and yes,
that includes Vegas.
Don't get me wrong - I didn't say the machines "cheat"... They arguably play the fairest
games ever in the history of gambling. But "fair" in that you will win and lose exactly
as much as dictated by the relevant regulatory bodies.
What, do you work for the gaming commission and don't want your little secrets getting
out for bad PR? Guess what, any NDAs on me expired half a decade ago, so, boo-hoo for
you, AC.
You may roll those dice, but depending upon your assignment, you may never touch
a slot machine again as a customer.
Having worked in this exact field, let me assure you - After implementing jurisdictional payout tables on
a video lottery terminal (poker, slots, pretty much includes anything you'd find in a modern casino),
you'll never want to play the slots again.
At least the old mechanical ones merely favored the house, but "honestly" spun the wheels. Modern
machines decide how little you've won and then pick a configuration to match the take.
Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time.
With games, they arguably have a fair point.
With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both
DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.
People bought CDs of music they already had on vinyl or cassette or what-have-you because they had noticeably better
quality (don't give me that vinyl-beats-CD crap, which even if it did hold true on a virgin record, doesn't
once a diamond needle has ripped down all those those nice soft grooves). Once you talk about the same quality in
20 different physical formats, however, don't expect people to subsidize you for the rest of eternity rebuying your
existing library in incrementally better formats.
Aren't you completely indignant that you had to pay that much?
I would feel indignant, if I did pay that much.
I'd much rather buy a 2YO car for half the "new" price yet still having a good three quarters of
its useful lifetime remaining.
Now apply that same reasoning to software, and you'll understand why Vista flopped, why people will
continue using XP despite Win7 possibly not sucking (especially if they have to pay for
the upgrade as TFA suggests), and for that matter why a surprisingly large number of people still run
Windows 95 boxen (and companies still run NT4 servers).
The average Joe doesn't want "bleeding edge", he wants "good enough".
and they expect to cover the costs of marketing their product in the sales price!? Well, that's outrageous!
Yes, actually, that part does inspire me to outrage... And also to favor products that use a minimum of
marketing (generics, the "fleet" models of most vehicles, underdogs with features over flash, etc).
I see your bigger point, that the cost of manufacturing alone doesn't include the cost of R&D. But consider, if
Microsoft can afford to sell the vast majority of Windows licenses for a pittance to OEMs, why the hell can't the
rest of us get the same? I don't even want a box and a CD, just sell me an ISO and a one-machine license for the
same $7 Dell or HP would pay.
You do know that almost never happens, right? most doctors take nothing from these
companies, and other doctors would scoff at the idea they would let that determine a patients treatment.
...And yet, the FDA just recently completed a study on exactly that, which led to them banning drug reps
from giving away branded-swag - Precisely because, despite their claims to the contrary, doctors
do prescribe based on who gives them the best toys (or in this case, has the most well-endowed
reps).
So as a result, you can expect the cup-sizes to increase to compensate for the lack of swag.
And hey, don't take it personally... We all like toys and free stuff (and attention from
well-endowed booth-bunnies). If you give me a free copy of your new dev suite, you can bet that
you've increased the odds of my using it from "near zero unless a client requires it" to "pretty damned
likely I'll at least install it". And if you get Megan Fox to personally deliver it to me, well,
it wouldn't hurt your cause.
Serling and the writers he got make scripts were some of the best the business ever had.
Believe it or not, the majority of Twilight Zone episodes merely adapted episodes of the
radio series Dimension-X (and X Minus One, itself both continuing and drawing
heavily on Dimension-X material) to TV.
But aside from that detail, yeah, I'll agree, some of the best.
Generally, if you want to learn the content of a bill, you can read the plain language
version that's passed out of committee.
I think you missed the bigger picture here. Not whether or not we can read the plain language version, but that
our elected representatives in the government only read that version, and won't even let us see
the final product until we have to obey it as the Law of the Land.
FTA: "The idea of reading the legislative language: It's just anyone who says that they can do that and actually
get much out of it is trying to pull the wool over our eyes."
I see three problems here.
First - They do this as their fucking job. In this interview, Carper just admitted (and implicated pretty
much all of his colleagues) to gross incompetence as regards the performance of their duties. Just - wow.
Second - They use a plain English version. He mentions forcing credit card companies to use plain
English. Has it occurred to the honorable Senator Asshat(D) that, just possibly, they should force congress
to use plain English for the final version? Or would that just make too much sense to tolerate?
Finally - These monkeys actually voted to deny the public the right to see this abomination, on the grounds that if
they can't understand it, neither can we? Read a tech manual sometime (oh wait, they most likely couldn't).
Phenomenally boring,
yes. Often poorly written, even. But unlike politicians, I know when I've skimped and don't know the material, and I
damned well take the necessary steps to correct that (ie, re-read it until I do "get" it). I find it insulting that
they project their own massive inadequacy on the rest of us.
Then again, to pull the wool off the blind elephant in the
room, we all know why they don't want the public seeing the "real" bill, and I only wish our country allowed
lynching for betrayal of public trust by an elected toadie.
I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months?
A 24x DVD writer commits 32MB/s. At that speed, it would take just over nine hours to write one terabyte.
However, keep in mind that the biggest limitation to write speed in optical media comes from the maximum rotation
speed possible (discs tend to explode above 10k RPM) combined with the areal density. The former we can't get around
without switching to something more durable than cheap polycarbonate sandwiches; the latter necessarily increases
with capacity. So, a disc that holds more can write more without spinning faster. At 220x the areal density of a
single sided single layer DVD, you would expect a write rate on the order of 7GB/s (once the technology matures and
drive interfaces can actually sustain such a throughput).
So the short answer - Just as with CDs and DVDs, it'll probably take around an hour at first; after a few years,
that will drop to a modest 2-5 minutes. And by then, we'll all complain about the uselessness of a mere terabyte
disc when we have multi-petabyte primary storage devices to back up onto them.
Sales people's job is to move widgets. Sell more widgets == more take-home pay.
A good salesman doesn't sell refrigerators to Esquimos, because he'll only ever sell
them one. If you provide people with what they need, they'll come back
next time they need something.
This is the same all over. Laptops, packaged investments,
American health insurance. Doesn't matter.
My "job" entails giving the customer what they need (not even necessarily what
they "want", and yes, I have talked the customer into buying a far cheaper
solution).
For my last job, the client wanted what amounted to a fairly simple network
installation. I beat the next quote by a full order of magnitude (base-10, even!), and
it still surpassed their expectations. And don't think I sold myself into penury - I made
quite a nice chunk of change off it.
Now, could I have made a lot more? Hell yeah! I could have lied to my client and sold them
a system massively more complicated than they needed. I could have thrown on thousand-dollar
markups that they wouldn't even question - Or ever use.
And they also wouldn't have sent me a dozen other referrals.
Doesn't work for everyone (especially those where group policy disables lock)
Okay, I realize you can disable locking via GP, but why would you? Most IT staffs fight with their
users to lock their machines, or try to negotiate a reasonable timeout (I keep my own workstation at a timeout
of one minute, with a lock-grace period of 15 seconds (so if it accidentally comes on while reading something, I can
just bump the mouse without needing to reenter my password).
Not like the admins can't get into your machine when they need to anyway, which seems like the only possible
reason for such a policy...
Then again, in fairness, the admins may well not know how to get into your account. I used to work for a multinational
as an engineer, and once got into an argument with IT staff over an email asking for passwords so they could do maintenance at
night. I responded that they should feel free to change my password to whatever they liked, but no, they could not have my
normal password (I also explained that their request looked exactly like a classic phishing expedition, but can't claim
to have actually managed to convince them of the error of their ways in that regard). This did not go over well, but I did
"win" the battle (which went up a good three or four layers of management before someone sane noticed that it would take considerably
more effort to maintain an up-to-date list of passwords than to simply reset them as (rarely) needed).
You have the right to speak. You don't have the right to make yourself a public nuisance.
I actually meant that to refer to our right to "peaceably assemble", not speech.
Not in a "free speech" zone, not with a "protest permit", not in a different city - But impromptu and
outside city hall when it most embarrasses the mayor to have people holding up signs asking about
his 27 mistresses; when it makes the rest of the G20 nations wonder "does our host really
speak for his nation?"; when it makes normal life in a city grind to a halt, making that city and others
seriously question if they want to host this thing again in the future.
I will agree that breaking windows and looting goes too far - But we still have an entire legal system geared
around ideas of "guilt vs innocence" and "burden of proof". The fact that a few criminals have joined the protest
should never give carte blanche to start using weaponry (lethal or otherwise) against the rest of the
crowd, or you have a very simple DoS attack against any protest - Pepper it with "authorized" vandals
as an excuse to clear them all away (and if you don't think the government uses exactly that technique,
I have a bridge to sell you).
Slashdot Mirror
They still offer lifetime subscriptions today. Not that you'd know, you haven't checked within the last two years...
Thank you for pointing that out. You have it correct, I do not check their website regularly. I have absolutely no loyalty to companies themselves, and tend to only search for "physical things I buy" on sites that directly sell those things, such as Amazon. And I base my original objection on the fact that TiVo's product listings on such sites, if they mention service at all, always say "TiVo service subscription required".
I do think I've looked within the past two years, but cannot argue that they currently offer exactly what you say they do. Of course, they also want $300 for it, or 50% more than what I paid for my current unit with lifetime service included. But yeah, they do offer it.
If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
:CueCat for a preemptive rebuttal to any arguments to the contrary.
Absolutely, positively false.
I personally own a Toshiba-branded TiVo series 2 box, which came with free lifetime basic service (which essentially means the channel guide and nothing else, but that works for me just fine).
I have never paid a dime directly to TiVo (though no doubt Toshiba paid some form of licensing fee), and use one of their their products 100% legitimately. I do note, however, that they appear to no longer offer their "basic" service, nor any "lifetime" terms - Their loss, because I will never buy another box from them (and really, I would upgrade at this point, what with no digital or HD support in my box; but as TiVo clearly doesn't want to sell to me, I will probably end up screwing around with Myth again in a year or two instead, and have a lot more motivation this time to make it work as I want).
That said, if you remove the channel guide from that (and yeah, I know about the "advanced" features like remoting and such, but I've never found myself "needing" to watch a recorded show anywhere but home), what does TiVo really sell? If you turn their box into a time-based (rather than content-based via the channel guide) digital VCR, you've "stolen" absolutely nothing. They sold you hardware, you used it in a way they might not like but don't really have any right to complain about (again, key point, without using any of the features of their subscription). See
It's a bit short-sighted to say that nobody does. I'm sure there are lots of people out there with material on their machines that they wouldn't want a law enforcement officer to find. This tool would be perfect for their needs.
As a fan of maximizing my privacy, I would find such a tool useful just for auditing the effectiveness of my standard cleanup procedures.
You don't need to break the law to have an interest in others not seeing what you do with your computer. Whether making sure you haven't left personal financial information unencrypted on your machine, or have accidentally clicked "yes" to have your browser remember your passwords, or simply your taste in porn stars... All legal, yet things you probably would rather not leave lying around for anyone other than yourself.
Now, aside from that, don't forget that police exist to help prosecute cases, not to protect us or find the guilty party or any fluffy BS like that. Once they have you in their sights, the less they can dig up, the better. "Good news - Your alibi checked out, you didn't kill that girl. Bad news - Your computer proves that you played poker online once last year, enjoy your 2+ year federal sentence".
And hey, who better to know where Windows leaks information than Microsoft itself? Not that I would trust them as my sole source of privacy maintenance, but as I said, for auditing "best practices", such a tool would appear fairly useful.
Pre-existing conditions is a wonderful way of saying that none of your previous doctors noticed it so we're not paying either.
Come again?
Preexisting conditions mean exactly the opposite of that - It means you did have the condition diagnosed before getting your current run of uninterrupted insurance coverage. The original idea behind such clauses actually had some merit - You couldn't skip out on having insurance, find out you have cancer, then get insurance solely to pay for your treatment.
Of course, the insurance companies, interested solely in profit rather than patient outcomes (hey, I hate them as much as anyone, but won't fault them (just) for doing exactly what they exist to do - Make money), discovered they could use this not just for acute conditions, but to deny treatment for things like diabetes or the standard cardiac cocktails most older males take, based on nothing more than the fact that you went one day too long without coverage between jobs.
But if no doctor ever diagnosed your condition, consider yourself good to go. Now, we do have some grey area here... If you had an X-Ray for a broken arm ten years ago, and it has a fuzzy patch near your current tumor, well, the insurance companies have whole teams of people looking for just such meaningless data as an excuse to deny benefits.
You want a "distribution amplifier". These usually downmix to mono (seriously - You want mono for this purpose. Stereo coming at you from several direction at unbalanced distances will get annoying fast), and have a large number of channels (12-16 would work well for most houses, unless you really need it in every corner of every room including the attic, basement, and garage).
They don't cost all that much, which leaves you to spend your money on decent speakers. Depending on your home layout, you may want surface-mount, or recessed, or just cube-in-the-corner. As for wires - Keep in mind you either have signal, or power, or both going to them. So wireless doesn't really buy you all that much unless you absolutely positively cannot make discrete 1/8" holes hidden in the corner/wall/floor/ceiling/whatever. Personally, I consider speaker-wire easier to hide than power, so have chosen to just run an array of speaker wire through the basement up through small holes between the floorboards (old-style New England house with a decent gap between floorboards, so as close to invisible holes as you could ever want).
But yeah, you don't want a high-tech solution, you want an old-school distro amp. What you feed it with depends on what the wife will put up with, but you can find a huge number of digital car audio solutions that provide minimalist interfaces with decent functionality.
Simple. Use audio cues instead of visual ones. TFA mentioned an audio compass and voice-over as being examples.
An audio compass to do... what, exactly?
Drive around a racetrack you can't see, in a car you can't see, avoiding obstacles you can't see?
Navigate a 2d landscape you can't see to find items you can't see, avoid monsters you can't see, and reach destinations you can't see (yeah, knowing you've gone "North" does a whole lot of good when you pass one pixel from your destination but don't know it)?
And if it tells you which way to go, well that seems to completely strip most games of 99% of what makes them "entertainment"... If you turn the player into a wetware interface between the compass and the controller... Wow, what a *fun* game! We could rename any such game "Working For Nanomanagement 3: Press These Buttons In Order When We Tell You To". Might as well "play" medical transcriptionist and get paid for having the same level of "fun".
I think we can identify the fundamental problem here right from the name - "VIDEO game". Let's look that word up, shall we? From the Latin videre, "to see" + -o (as in audio). "The visible part of a television transmission". "The technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion."
I have nothing against making essential services and some public areas (as a hiker, I dread the day they start installing elevators up the sides of mountains to make them ADA-compliant) accessible to the disabled. But when dealing with mediums that almost ubiquitously require a given physical ability - Such as "video games" and "vision", which I would have thought goes without saying - I say we have to draw the line between accommodation and absurdity.
They were later released after it turned out they were simply wearing Axe deodorant
Clearly you haven't paid attention to the War on Ourselves yet...
They wouldn't release them. They'd deport them to Gitmo (closing... Riiiiiight, let me know any year now when it actually happens) for Conspiracy to Make Defense Contractors Look Bad. Or perhaps Possession of a Substance Banned by Secret Laws You Can't Know About.
Or they might stick with what they know best and just make something absurd up on the spot, taze your ass, then release you with no charges exactly 17 seconds after your flight takes off without you... Why change from a good routine when it works so well to keep us "safe" from old ladies with nail clippers and 4oz bottles of hand lotion?
Go look at the cost of a T1 and realize it is only 1.5 Mbps, now look at the cost of that 12 Mbps rsidential cable. Why do you think the T1 is so much more expensive for almost 1/10th the speed?
Okay... Now factor in Moore's Law.
So yeah - Explain to me why Comcast can't guarantee 10x the throughput of a 30+ year old commodity-class connection.
As anyone on a cable or DSL connection will readily tell you, the advertised throughput means fuck all. It actually does surprise me that Comcast can throttle anyone, even at local-2am, based on their criteria. How badly it crawls from 6-9pm, however, counts as an entirely different matter.
Oh, right, cheap, peak speed, shared, yadda-yadda-yadda. Yet Japan and quite a few other "civilized" countries manage to offer real-100MBit for a fraction of our cost. Hey, I'll admit that the US's less dense population presents its own problems, but don't insult us by apologizing for the ISPs. Even the closest we have, FIOS, only available in fairly dense markets, doesn't come for under $20/mo.
Oh, not this crap again...
you do not save money with CFLs.
Tell that to my electric bill, which dropped roughly 25% when I switched to (almost) all CFLs. And as for lifespan, I still have half of my original set of them fully functional (almost a decade ago now). And quick tip, don't just buy twenty of them and replace all your lights en masse, do it as they burn out (otherwise, you've thrown away a perfectly good $0.50 bulb).
For that matter, any energy savings is also questionable, once you account for the energy used in production
Yup. You caught 'em. All those evil corporations actually sell their products at a loss compared to the cost of energy required to produce them - Because your statement implies exactly that. Same for all those naughty solar panels, dontchaknow. And yes, I appreciate all too well how massively unfairly the utilities favor corporate customers over mere humans - But even considering that, if GE could make more reselling electricity than selling CFLs, don't you think they would?
not to mention disposal.
Ahh, the specter of all that spooooky mercury. That 100% recyclable mercury. Along with the 100% recyclable phosphorus coating the 100% recyclable glass. And the (merely) 99% recyclable fiberglass and plastic in the base, don't forget that.
Yes, CFLs have their shortcomings - And most people get them totally wrong (with the exception of how poorly they work with dimmers, that alone holds true). They start right up, they only take a few seconds to reach full brightness, they do save money, they do last 10x (or more) longer (though they do admittedly have a slightly higher out-of-box failure rate), they come in full-spectrum versions (and something incandescents don't, they come in germicidal versions as well). They even come in every common form factor now, from candelabra to GX53 (I learned that part when I discovered my new house had all candelabra-base lights).
DHS slapped them down saying that not only is it not their job, it's probably not even possible.
Which, with the DHS' track record, tells us two things...
One, it counts as possible. And two, the GAO should do the job.
And we can probably infer something about a hidden motive of making it easier to enforce a news blackout over an overloaded unprepared internet, but I'll stick to just the obvious conclusions, for now.
Could a mesh network of cell phones function independent of towers? Does anybody who has more knowledge of networking than I do want to chime in?
One word - Latency.
Good quality voice communication has fairly low bandwidth requirements, but very tight latency limits. Above 20ms, you start to notice the lag. Above 50ms, it gets rather annoying. Beyond 150ms, you wouldn't want to use it for anything but absolute emergencies.
Not to mention, you would have the same problem with finding peers that you do now with finding towers - In densely populated areas, you'll have no problems finding them; In rural areas (the same places you can't get a signal now), you likely won't find enough peers to maintain a connection anyway. The one exception to this, peering would probably help somewhat with dead spots inside areas that otherwise have a great signal (basements in a city, for example).
Each one comes with extra songs that you only get if you plunk down nearly $20 on the whole album -- you can't download these individually.
Wanna bet?
Those "only included with the special limited gold plated Japanese release" tracks count as really my single most unabashed reason for resorting to piracy.
Yes, I will pay to support the bands I enjoy, by buying their CDs and going to their concerts; No, I won't pay $40 for one extra track, pictures of the (male) band wearing lingerie, and a cheap tin cellphone charm. And I sure as hell won't sign up for iTunes (or any other particular service or store) just to get a track "exclusive" to that store.
I will, however, pay a few bucks more to buy a real, physical, resellable (not that I ever do sell them, just a matter of having the option) CD - Which I will then rip and file away never to open again. And if you want to know why I'll pay more for that, you need look no further than Amazon's handling of '1984' for the Kindle. I control my media and media players, not Amazon, not Apple, not Microsoft, not Sony.
That's illegal pretty much everywhere. You won't find those machines in Vegas.
Um, wrong - Most jurisdictions require that level of control, and yes, that includes Vegas.
Don't get me wrong - I didn't say the machines "cheat"... They arguably play the fairest games ever in the history of gambling. But "fair" in that you will win and lose exactly as much as dictated by the relevant regulatory bodies.
What, do you work for the gaming commission and don't want your little secrets getting out for bad PR? Guess what, any NDAs on me expired half a decade ago, so, boo-hoo for you, AC.
You may roll those dice, but depending upon your assignment, you may never touch a slot machine again as a customer.
Having worked in this exact field, let me assure you - After implementing jurisdictional payout tables on a video lottery terminal (poker, slots, pretty much includes anything you'd find in a modern casino), you'll never want to play the slots again.
At least the old mechanical ones merely favored the house, but "honestly" spun the wheels. Modern machines decide how little you've won and then pick a configuration to match the take.
Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time.
With games, they arguably have a fair point.
With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.
People bought CDs of music they already had on vinyl or cassette or what-have-you because they had noticeably better quality (don't give me that vinyl-beats-CD crap, which even if it did hold true on a virgin record, doesn't once a diamond needle has ripped down all those those nice soft grooves). Once you talk about the same quality in 20 different physical formats, however, don't expect people to subsidize you for the rest of eternity rebuying your existing library in incrementally better formats.
Aren't you completely indignant that you had to pay that much?
I would feel indignant, if I did pay that much.
I'd much rather buy a 2YO car for half the "new" price yet still having a good three quarters of its useful lifetime remaining.
Now apply that same reasoning to software, and you'll understand why Vista flopped, why people will continue using XP despite Win7 possibly not sucking (especially if they have to pay for the upgrade as TFA suggests), and for that matter why a surprisingly large number of people still run Windows 95 boxen (and companies still run NT4 servers).
The average Joe doesn't want "bleeding edge", he wants "good enough".
and they expect to cover the costs of marketing their product in the sales price!? Well, that's outrageous!
Yes, actually, that part does inspire me to outrage... And also to favor products that use a minimum of marketing (generics, the "fleet" models of most vehicles, underdogs with features over flash, etc).
I see your bigger point, that the cost of manufacturing alone doesn't include the cost of R&D. But consider, if Microsoft can afford to sell the vast majority of Windows licenses for a pittance to OEMs, why the hell can't the rest of us get the same? I don't even want a box and a CD, just sell me an ISO and a one-machine license for the same $7 Dell or HP would pay.
Sorry, make that the PhRMA, not the FDA. Same results, implications, and effects, however.
You do know that almost never happens, right? most doctors take nothing from these companies, and other doctors would scoff at the idea they would let that determine a patients treatment.
...And yet, the FDA just recently completed a study on exactly that, which led to them banning drug reps
from giving away branded-swag - Precisely because, despite their claims to the contrary, doctors
do prescribe based on who gives them the best toys (or in this case, has the most well-endowed
reps).
So as a result, you can expect the cup-sizes to increase to compensate for the lack of swag.
And hey, don't take it personally... We all like toys and free stuff (and attention from well-endowed booth-bunnies). If you give me a free copy of your new dev suite, you can bet that you've increased the odds of my using it from "near zero unless a client requires it" to "pretty damned likely I'll at least install it". And if you get Megan Fox to personally deliver it to me, well, it wouldn't hurt your cause.
Serling and the writers he got make scripts were some of the best the business ever had.
Believe it or not, the majority of Twilight Zone episodes merely adapted episodes of the radio series Dimension-X (and X Minus One, itself both continuing and drawing heavily on Dimension-X material) to TV.
But aside from that detail, yeah, I'll agree, some of the best.
Generally, if you want to learn the content of a bill, you can read the plain language version that's passed out of committee.
I think you missed the bigger picture here. Not whether or not we can read the plain language version, but that our elected representatives in the government only read that version, and won't even let us see the final product until we have to obey it as the Law of the Land.
FTA: "The idea of reading the legislative language: It's just anyone who says that they can do that and actually get much out of it is trying to pull the wool over our eyes."
I see three problems here.
First - They do this as their fucking job. In this interview, Carper just admitted (and implicated pretty much all of his colleagues) to gross incompetence as regards the performance of their duties. Just - wow.
Second - They use a plain English version. He mentions forcing credit card companies to use plain English. Has it occurred to the honorable Senator Asshat(D) that, just possibly, they should force congress to use plain English for the final version? Or would that just make too much sense to tolerate?
Finally - These monkeys actually voted to deny the public the right to see this abomination, on the grounds that if they can't understand it, neither can we? Read a tech manual sometime (oh wait, they most likely couldn't). Phenomenally boring, yes. Often poorly written, even. But unlike politicians, I know when I've skimped and don't know the material, and I damned well take the necessary steps to correct that (ie, re-read it until I do "get" it). I find it insulting that they project their own massive inadequacy on the rest of us.
Then again, to pull the wool off the blind elephant in the room, we all know why they don't want the public seeing the "real" bill, and I only wish our country allowed lynching for betrayal of public trust by an elected toadie.
I mean, how long would it take to burn one of those suckers, five, maybe six months?
A 24x DVD writer commits 32MB/s. At that speed, it would take just over nine hours to write one terabyte.
However, keep in mind that the biggest limitation to write speed in optical media comes from the maximum rotation speed possible (discs tend to explode above 10k RPM) combined with the areal density. The former we can't get around without switching to something more durable than cheap polycarbonate sandwiches; the latter necessarily increases with capacity. So, a disc that holds more can write more without spinning faster. At 220x the areal density of a single sided single layer DVD, you would expect a write rate on the order of 7GB/s (once the technology matures and drive interfaces can actually sustain such a throughput).
So the short answer - Just as with CDs and DVDs, it'll probably take around an hour at first; after a few years, that will drop to a modest 2-5 minutes. And by then, we'll all complain about the uselessness of a mere terabyte disc when we have multi-petabyte primary storage devices to back up onto them.
Sales people's job is to move widgets. Sell more widgets == more take-home pay.
A good salesman doesn't sell refrigerators to Esquimos, because he'll only ever sell them one. If you provide people with what they need, they'll come back next time they need something.
This is the same all over. Laptops, packaged investments, American health insurance. Doesn't matter.
My "job" entails giving the customer what they need (not even necessarily what they "want", and yes, I have talked the customer into buying a far cheaper solution).
For my last job, the client wanted what amounted to a fairly simple network installation. I beat the next quote by a full order of magnitude (base-10, even!), and it still surpassed their expectations. And don't think I sold myself into penury - I made quite a nice chunk of change off it.
Now, could I have made a lot more? Hell yeah! I could have lied to my client and sold them a system massively more complicated than they needed. I could have thrown on thousand-dollar markups that they wouldn't even question - Or ever use.
And they also wouldn't have sent me a dozen other referrals.
Doesn't work for everyone (especially those where group policy disables lock)
Okay, I realize you can disable locking via GP, but why would you? Most IT staffs fight with their users to lock their machines, or try to negotiate a reasonable timeout (I keep my own workstation at a timeout of one minute, with a lock-grace period of 15 seconds (so if it accidentally comes on while reading something, I can just bump the mouse without needing to reenter my password).
Not like the admins can't get into your machine when they need to anyway, which seems like the only possible reason for such a policy...
Then again, in fairness, the admins may well not know how to get into your account. I used to work for a multinational as an engineer, and once got into an argument with IT staff over an email asking for passwords so they could do maintenance at night. I responded that they should feel free to change my password to whatever they liked, but no, they could not have my normal password (I also explained that their request looked exactly like a classic phishing expedition, but can't claim to have actually managed to convince them of the error of their ways in that regard). This did not go over well, but I did "win" the battle (which went up a good three or four layers of management before someone sane noticed that it would take considerably more effort to maintain an up-to-date list of passwords than to simply reset them as (rarely) needed).
it will hopefully educate webmasters to stop programming their sites in a way that requires javascript even for basic functionality.
*cough*Slashdot*cough*
You have the right to speak. You don't have the right to make yourself a public nuisance.
I actually meant that to refer to our right to "peaceably assemble", not speech.
Not in a "free speech" zone, not with a "protest permit", not in a different city - But impromptu and outside city hall when it most embarrasses the mayor to have people holding up signs asking about his 27 mistresses; when it makes the rest of the G20 nations wonder "does our host really speak for his nation?"; when it makes normal life in a city grind to a halt, making that city and others seriously question if they want to host this thing again in the future.
I will agree that breaking windows and looting goes too far - But we still have an entire legal system geared around ideas of "guilt vs innocence" and "burden of proof". The fact that a few criminals have joined the protest should never give carte blanche to start using weaponry (lethal or otherwise) against the rest of the crowd, or you have a very simple DoS attack against any protest - Pepper it with "authorized" vandals as an excuse to clear them all away (and if you don't think the government uses exactly that technique, I have a bridge to sell you).