but I'm no longer clear on what 'buying' a CD actually buys me.
The last time I looked into it, the closest I could get to what the RIAA seems to put forward as a legal position is this:
When you buy an audio CD, you are buying a license to that music on that format. The physical form of the license is a functional audio CD, and when that license is no longer a functional audio CD (if the CD breaks or no longer plays), then you no longer have a license, and need to buy a new license.
Put in more technical terms, the license (in the form of that functional audio CD) you are buying is for that particular stream of bits. Ripping the CD to MP3 (or other audio codec) is making a derivative work of that bitstream, which your license does not permit you to do.
That's as close as I can get to figuring out what they say. Or at least, when they want.
All clear now?
Excuse me, I feel dirty. I need to go wash my hands now. And maybe take a bath in some chlorine bleach.
There will still be wrecks, but I think we'll have fewer of 'em. I'll take my chances with the robots.
I agree that a computer doesn't get distracted or tired. It does require proper maintenance, but then so do your brakes.
We are in the unfortunate time right now, where the systems are only useful under limited real-world conditions, basically in good weather on highways with no construction. That's still a big chunk of driving miles, and I'd love to be able to use something like this while I'm doing highway driving in good weather on interstates with no construction. (There must be a couple of miles of interstate not under construction somewhere near here... right?) And this system, due to using radar for speed control, is probably safe for night driving too. That's really cool.
But right now, the systems are good for "closed track" driving with other well-behaved cars. It doesn't know street signs, so handling the 4-way Stop intersection would be a bit of a problem. Ditto with traffic lights. Give it another 10 years, and those will become solved problems too.
Then you have to be able to handle kids running into the road in front of you when the ball rolls down the driveway. That's harder.
I'm not bashing these things. I like them. I want them. Really... I drive a Ford F-150, and when Ford did a recall on the old-tech cruise control, I found just how much I use the cruise control as a crutch. They disabled my cruise control for 4 months, while they worked on fixing the problem and distributing parts to the service centers. Try driving 400 miles without cruise control sometime, it's amazing how tired my leg got, just keeping steady pressure on the gas pedal for 7 hours. Ouch.
But these things are still at a point that they require an alert attentive driver watching things. Just like... regular cruise control. Wow. When a car on normal cruise control plows into another vehicle, that is the driver's fault, not the car maker's (assuming that the cruise control did not refuse to disengage). If one of these new-tech cruise controls does the same thing... that is still the driver's fault, and not the car maker's.
But I'm sure a jury would still be happy to award a "Oh, we feel bad for you" award of a few tens of millions of dollars to the family of the first person killed by one of these.
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
Actually, if you look at how most (large) colleges are run, you'll see that there is a lot of pressure to let in marginal students, and flunk them out after a year.
Let them come in for a year, pay full tuition-hour rates for classes that are 100 students per teacher, and then kick them out before they get to the second year where classes have a more reasonable student:teacher ratio.
Freshmen are a definite profit center for most large colleges.
The further into college you get, the more you cost a university, until you get to the point that a grad student is actually being paid by the university to go to school. (Okay, it's practically slave wages, and they have to teach courses, but it is still an overall cost to the university.) Those grad students are paid using money the university gets from the freshmen that will be dropping out at the end of the year.
In the US, the average cost to the consumer per kW is about 12 cents.
That's 12 cents per kWh, $0.12 per kiloWatt-hour. Not per kiloWatt. That's a kiloWatt generated (or used) consistently for an hour. (Or 10kW used for 6 minutes, or however you want to multiply kW and time.)
I find it hard to believe that $1.20 worth of electricity can be generated from a car passing over a bump.
I see where you got this $1.20. You are assuming this idiotic speedbump (not biased at all, am I?) is providing this 10kW of claimed energy consistently for an hour for each car that passes. You see where this seems ridiculous?
I'd find it more likely that the thing provides a spike of 10kW of energy for a few seconds. That is, maybe 3/3600 of an hour (3 seconds out of 3600 seconds in an hour). Or, rather, closer to...
$0.12/kWh * 10kW * 3 seconds / (3600seconds/1hour) = $0.001, or about a tenth of a cent per car passing over a bump.
I agree with the GP, it probably costs more than this in wear and tear on the tires and shocks... But the city doesn't pay that. You do.
A local or regional municipality might want to add traffic signals and lights for visibility to an intersection that's not near the local grid.
The problem with this thinking is that it needs to be a well-trafficked intersection for this to work. Otherwise, you need power storage (batteries) also, because without power storage, you will get power to light up the traffic signals after the car passes the intersection, which, you might agree, is... less than optimal.
But would make for some great arguments with the cops about if you really did run a red light.
Extending the power grid gives you consistent power, not pulsed power (ignoring grid power failures). This is more useful for an always-on service like a traffic signal.
People here might be forced to buy new TVs when the FCC forces broadcasters to transmit in high definition only (Thanks FCC. I had some money saved up, and I was feeling guilty about it.)
That's a definite possiblity, but I've been having some interesting conversations about the whole 'forced conversion' to digital. It will be nearly impossible to make millions of people go out and purchase a new TV overnight just because the FCC says everything has to be digital.
Why would you need to buy a new TV? The only people that will need to buy a new TV are those people that get their TV from over-the-air broadcasts.
If you have cable TV, you don't need to buy a new TV. If you have satellite TV service (Dish, DirecTV, etc), you don't need to buy a new TV.
Yes, there are a lot of people that only watch TV from over-the-air broadcasts... but it's not everyone. Interestingly, it is mostly those people that don't have disposable income that will be most affected by this. Ain't it always the way?
But even there, you will be able to, instead, buy a converter box that will convert the digital (HD or SD) over-the-air signal into standard-def analog signal. And use your old TV.
Cable TV penetration is about 70% of US households.
There are three flavors of a security pass: 1. Something you have, like badge or actual key. 2. Something you know, like a password or pass phrase. 3. Something you are, like a General, Doctor, or American citizen.
Well, 2 out of 3 isn't bad.
"Something you are" is not a position you hold, such as Doctor or General. It is independent of your position or profession. That General's uniform is something you have, not something you are.
Think more along the lines of "your face" or "your fingerprints" or "your DNA" or something like that. It is inherent to your physical body.
Biometrics is trying to do "something you are"... it just isn't doing it very well right now.
A badge (can be) 2-factor authentication. It is something you have, and it has a picture of your face on it, making it something you are.
Of course, identity validation in the hands of the person requesting identification is inherently insecure, which is why all the best SciFi movies have a badge that, somehow, pulls up your picture from a central computer database, and the hero's sidekick changes the image in the database milliseconds before the guard looks at the image on his display.
Yesterday I bought a camcorder from Canon even though both Canon and Sony were final runner ups, I put my 800$ on a Canon for one reason... Sony DRM is an insult to consumers
Good. You voted with your dollars. That's great.
Now, do the next step.
Write a letter (yes, on actual paper). Be polite and professional.
Mail it here: Howard Stringer Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Sony Corporation of America Sony Drive Park Ridge, NJ 07656
Tell him about your purchase, and your reason for it. He won't read it, of course, but he has staff whose purpose is to handle mail like this.
Anyone you know that makes a similar buying decision, encourage them to do the same.
Simply not buying from them is good... but you won't change the company's behavior if you don't tell them *why* they are not getting your money.
If you (and 50,000 of your closest friends) send a letter to Sony saying "I bought your competitor's product because of your corporate practices" they will look very carefully at changing how they do business. When they realize that they lost money because of scummy decisions like this, they will change policy.
The phone network bug was a misplaced { character in a nested if-else construct.
Is that what it was? I thought I'd heard that the AT&T outage was from a missing break; in a switch-case statement.
I found that more believable, because a missing { would cause a compiler error, where a missing break; is a valid way to purposely fall into the next case.
Though, really, I suspect both of us are just repeating rumors we heard.
This is, mostly, true. However, profits are maximized when only one side has access to that information.
You see this type of thing a lot with large corporations. Region coding is a great example of this, actually. Globalization is a wonderful thing... but only for large companies buying supplies and labor. For selling product, globablization is bad, because it removes the ability to extract the largest possible profit from local markets.
This is generally the case for any item where the price is different based on geography, but the availability is not based on geography, but on some other artificial control.
If that doesn't find anything, and you've tried everything you said, you got some smart malicious rootkit-usin' virus that knows how to trick Revealer, or your system is the proto for some new form of evilness.
Or you forgot that your antivirus software does network activity.
I had that happen a couple weeks ago, I just happened to be watching my network activity light and it lit up when I wasn't doing anything. This bothered me, as you might expect.
Took me a couple minnutes of poking around to figure out that my Norton AntiVirus had just done a live update and grabbed a new virus signature file.
Yes, my AV software did something that made me worry I might have a virus. After I got done feeling embarrassed, I chuckled at that.:)
Though, back on topic for this Ask Slashdot, what I'd really like is a bootable CD that I can use to check my system, because, as so many here have already commented, you can't trust your installed OS to tell you if it is compromised.
For example: I might be tempted to buy, on DVD, the complete season of "One Day To Defeat The Terrorists By Whispering Everything", the new hit Fox show, if I missed various episodes. Fox might release the DVD set with that in mind. However, if one can simply program their DVR to record every single show, they're not likely to buy it, especially if they can transfer the show to tape or DVD-R afterwards. Thus, one of the measures SCOTUS used in making the Betamax decision simply isn't true any more, as technology has improved.
So, we lost a Constitutionally-guaranteed right (vaguely, Fair Use is Court-interpretted, not explicitly mentioned, I admit) due to an advance in technology.
Why doesn't this work to expand Constitutional rights too? Shouldn't a well regulated militia have nuclear arms? How come my electronic communications are not free from unreasonable searches?
First, a couple of differences that are (I admit) mostly beside the point. A) We don't know when the next attempt to assassinate the president will occur, but we know it has happened before, enough times to make the next occurence a matter of when, not if. We have no such knowledge with human-influenced global warming. B) We protect a single important resource (the president) with a level of effort that is not reasonable to apply to the populace in general, even if the entire populace actually shares in the threat. (Check murder stats... more than the president needs to worry about being purposely killed.) (Hey, I told you this would be beside the point.) This is concentrating resources from many to protect few or one. But that's not what you are advocating... you want to concentrate resources from many to protect... all. (Huh?)
That's a very valid approach - overprotect where the downside of a realized small risk would be great.
And we do, where it makes sense. Do you know anything about building codes in Florida? They've changed rather a lot in the last 10-15 years, directly in response to damage from hurricanes and beliefs of reasonable responses to that threat.
But we don't require every building within 5 miles of the coast to be able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, because that is not seen to be a reasonable response.
That "where it makes sense" part is where reasonable people disagree. And that's very significant, when you are talking about "overprotecting" to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And, before you start attacking me, understand that I do tend to believe humans are having a longterm effect on our environment. I just question what effect that will have. Global warming climatologists have a poor track record in predicting changes in advance. They tend to be much better at pointing to stuff after the fact and saying "My model (that I just changed to take account of this new data) agrees with this new data!" This makes me extremely hesitant to support spending those hundreds of billions of my tax dollars on a big question mark that might have an exclamation mark at the end.
Quite frankly, we have too little data to know what's going on. The problem is that, by the time we have enough data to know what is happening (instead of just that *something* is happening, which may or may not be bad) it will be too late to prevent... whatever. That tends to make the decision-making process more a matter of Whoever shouts loudest wins.
I really tend to be more of a believer in a robust earth... But I don't necessarily think that humans will like surviving while the earth gets itself back into a normal cycle. Realize that "robust" does not equate to "conducive to human life."
It amazes me to no end what ipod users are willing to defend. "Hey, check out my new ipod disposable, its so cool!"
And I don't completely disagree with you. If I didn't understand what it was and that Apple planned it to be used for a while and thrown away, I'd be upset. And yes, I fully believe Apple knew what they were doing when they designed it with a non-user-replacable battery. They made a decision of style over product lifespan.
However, as I said, I knew what I was getting before I bought it. I got it knowing that in 6 years it would be a paperweight.
As has been commented before, building it with a battery cover would change the shape (slightly), change the environmental sealing (negligibly) and eventually give you another piece of consumer electronics with a damn broken battery door. Of course, those wouldn't get a class action lawsuit.
I'll agree that Apple should have said something about battery life from the beginning. But I'll also say that anyone hearing "rechargable battery" should understand the implicit "limited lifespan" when they see there is no battery door.
I have a 2nd Gen iPod (10gig with the touchpad scrollwheel, or is that a 1st gen?) bought Dec 2002. My parents got it as a Christmas present for me.
I charge it, on average, once a week. Use it in the gym, for about 6-7 hours between weekly charges. In the summer, I might use it at the beach for an extra hour or two, still only charge it once a week.
It's still doing fine.
Which is just what I'd expect, really. It has a Lithium Ion recharagable battery. As such, it's good for about 300 charge cycles (full discharge) or about 500 charge cycles (half discharge). It at rate of 80% discharge recharged weekly, I expect it to last me about 6-7 years total, or another 3-4 years, at which point I'll want a 100gig version anyway.
I knew that when I got it. I don't consider that a defective product.
For people that use it 8 hours a day, and recharge daily... that's a considerably different matter. But that's not what I do.
Buy something that makes sense for how you'll use it. And do some research before you buy something, so you'll know if it matches your usage.
A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.
Probably a companion joke to yours...
The worst thing that ever happened to the Federal government was air conditioning coming to Washington, D.C.
But why, if you actually want to purchase a copy of it would you care that its copyright has expired?
Mostly just because Disney has pissed me off that much. Okay, so that's not a very good reason...
Much as I dislike the current copyright law, I try to respect it anyway. So, given that I might want to run some of these maps through a color copier, I like knowing it is legal to do so. Buying this version allows that. Knowing that I could buy a more recent edition, containing the same maps, and lose that right, kinda sucked. (I'm honestly unclear on whether I really would lose that right... the actual maps, if unchanged, would still be of the earlier copyright, just the collection would get the new copyright protection, correct? Along with any new maps added, of course.)
Actually, this turned out to be the least-cost copy available, $8 + S&H. The most recent printing (the 9th Edition, in 1980) was mostly available for somewhere north of $40, up to $110. I assume the book I have (5th Edition, 1926) was bought as part of a pallet-load from an estate auction, but that's just a guess.
Really, its historical maps... in the last 80 years, a map of Europe from 1300 hasn't changed that much.:) Admittedly, getting this edition does mean I didn't get updates from World War II, but it did have changes from World War I.
Besides, there was a certain draw to having an 80 year old book in my library.:)
I suppose the answer to your question comes out as "Various reasons, but mostly just because."
I've got some books that I've been looking for for years and won't find anywhere for any amount of money.
Look on ABE Books and see if you can find it listed there. It's a website listing, as they say "13,000 booksellers selling 70 million books" and is a decent place to get older and otherwise unavailable books.
I picked up a copy of the 1926 printing of The Historical Atlas by William Shepherd through them for $8, just because it has some absolutely cool maps of Europe from the first millenium A.D. Most of the maps are available at the UTexas Library website but I wanted a copy to hold in my hands. The 1926 printing is significant, it is the latest edition that is out of copyright.
You're picking and choosing for your comparison, I think.
1 CD (650 MB) could hold 451 floppies (1.44 MB)
You skipped an intervening step here. 100MB Iomega Zip drives were practically standard before CD burners became really common. They held about 60 floppies worth of stuff. And a CD only held 6 100MB Zips worth of stuff. I see that you skipped the Zips on purpose... but I don't really think it was appropriate to skip them.
1 DVD (9 GB) could hold 14 CDs
I'd really do this with the single-layer DVD-R standard, which was a little less than 5GB. It therefore only held 7 CDs of stuff. Or do you want to talk about double-sided dual-layer DVDs, which hold 18GB, and make Blu-Ray look even worse? (Can you even buy recordable double-sided dual-layer DVD-R discs?)
I don't know if I'd count the 100GB version of Blu-Ray Disc, as it is currently not a product. You can at least buy 25GB single-layer BD recordable discs and drives. Not sure about dual-layer 50GB BD recordable discs right now, I'm not going to bother doing a google search to check either.
But that 25GB Blu-Ray only holds 5 5GB DVDs worth of stuff.
So it is slowing down a bit... but only from "factor of 7" to "factor of 5" which isn't that much of a slowdown, assuming you ignore the jump away from floppies.
As to "how long to burn 100GB of data"... The Register article says TDK claims they burn at 6X (216Mbps) or about an hour.
I mostly like having separate devices. I usually have good reasons for this, though sometimes it is "just cause!"
I'll always have a separate digital camera. My celphone might have a digital camera built in also, but I doubt I'll ever see an underwater housing for my cellphone that lets me take pictures with it. My digital camera has one.
I'll probably have an iPod or equivalent for quite a while, even if my cellphone can play MP3s. Because I don't want to be hassled by flight attendants on airplanes because they think I'm using my cellphone in-flight, and the airline rules don't allow that. (Though, I'd hope that the cellphone maker will think enough to give the user the ability to turn off the antenna in case you are stuck using the MP3 player function in-flight. Remember to turn it back on when you land, though...) I can play music on my iPod on an airplane with no problems.
There are are lot of good things about having a lot of basic functionality in an all-in-one device, especially if that device can easily sync with your specialty devices also.
However, I'm a Verizon Wireless customer... I know better than to think the phone will be allowed to operate with anything other than the Verizon central servers, where they can charge you for access. Yeah, I really want to pay $0.25 per song to transfer 3,000 songs onto my harddrive-equipped MP3-playing cellphone. I complain about that enough trying to transfer photos off the cameraphone. The phone has a data-transfer cable... and Verizon crippled the phone's firmware so it can only sync the address book, and not do anything else with the cable.
Where I live now, anyone and their mom's dog can look up the tax records of my property. This database is searchable by either name or address and returns how much a given property has been accessed for (plus the five year history), how much the current taxes are, a picture of the property (which is often the front of the house), and sometimes the floorplan of the house. Not only would I never provide this information to any of my friends (much less a stranger), but I'd consider it rude if they were to ask.
My county property appaiser's office has this information on their website also. (Well, most of it... no picture of the property or interior floor plan, but they do have the exterior dimensions for showing heated and total square footage.) Search by name, address, and... something else. Property sales information going back about 10 years.
It's rather useful if you want to know your approximate current appraisal without paying for an actual appraisal. Find 3 houses near your house with similar square footage that sold recently, and you can get a decent idea of the current value of your home. (It tells me that my home's value has probably doubled in the last 3 years. Frankly, I consider that unsustainable, and it worries me.)
In fact, this is part of how a paid-for appraiser calculates your home's appraised value. This is public information.
And this is information that the government needs to operate, in many cases. Or, in the case of political contributions, to ensure that the government operates fairly and openly. And because we live in a republic (cue arguments about a republic vs democracy) this should be publicly-available information so that citizens can know how their government operates.
The objection isn't so much that it is public information... like a lot of public information, the objection is that, suddenly, it is so easy and convenient to access that information. You used to have to go down to the county office, and either request the information from busy office staff, or go crawling through the stacks yourself to find the right entry in the right book. Now a couple minutes on a web site gets you the same thing.
Before, only people with a serious interest in how the government operated bothered to access that information, or people with enough money on the line to make it worth paying someone to go look. Now your nosey neighbor or coworker can check up on you. Easily.
And it doesn't need a ton of lead for the batteries, that you would need to dispose of when the car is "retired".
That isn't nearly the issue that you think it is. Lead-acid batteries in industrial use (and, make no mistake, the batteries in hybrid cars count as industrial use) are recycled almost 100%. Realistically, probably about 98%.
Ditto with the lead-acid batteries in your UPS. Instead of throwing them away when the UPS dies, take the batteries to a local machinery shop, they'll likely take them off your hands and send them in for recycling.
So, what's the point of having a hybrid?
It makes people feel good.
That's about it, really. (Oh, and it lets some people drive in the HOV lane.)
If you think about them seriously... hybrids make most of their efficiency gains in stop-n-go city traffic with regenerative braking and electric-assist starts. The difference in initial cost ($3000-5000 extra for a hybrid version of the same vehicle) is such that you have to drive a lot of miles to make up that initial extra cost (somewhere around 150,000 to 300,000 depending on gas prices) and the fastest way to make up that is with highway miles, where the hybrid does less for you.
They don't come close to paying for themselves. But they make people feel good.
However, in order the subsidize their phones, they have to lock consumers into a contract. and Besides, most will allow you to go contract-free, but you won't qualify for discounted phones or their most aggressive rates.
Try to be consistent.
This is the part that makes it blatantly obvious that the cell phone companies are ripping off consumers.
If the contract and usage/per-minute rates are what they are to subsidize the cost of the phones, then at the end of the contract period, the phone is paid off, and you are off your contract, you should go to a discounted rate which no longer includes those subsidies to pay for the phone.
But you don't get any sort of discounted rate after your contract expires.
Can you explain this without using the phrase "evil cellphone companies"? Feel free to use "bloodsucking leech" though.:)
There is a valid argument for having "known" usage and network load limits based on contracts, so that they can properly provision an area for towers and other capacity... But that argument tends to become much less useful when the popularity of nationalwide plans is factored in.
All of these corridors are a bit too small for efficient flight, and have enough traffic to support a train system.
There are more people going for shorter distances than there are going for long ones. The trains are supposed to provide exactly that travel which is a bit too long for the car, and a bit too expensive and inefficient when flying.
Part of the problem here is one of economics. I don't really dispute that there is sufficient traffic to support these not-quite-local distance travellers. However, there's only enough traffic to support these people in one (or maybe two) travel methods, but not in three.
Car, train, plane. Pick any 2.
You can have either a good interstate system, a good rail system, or a good air travel system, but not all three. Highways cost a lot of money, rail systems cost a lot of money, and airports cost a lot of money. Supporting all three just isn't going to happen.
You're pretty much forced to have a decent airport. You can see where the choice is.
The Europeans chose rail and air, and the public roads there mostly suck. The US chose car and air, and the rail system sucks.
Also, if you look at air travel, most of the major US air carriers would be bleeding even more red ink if they were only around for long-haul business. Think what air travel prices would be if they had to make up their costs just with coast to coast flights, and no regional jet service.
The other problem (related to Americans' love affair with the car, admittedly) is that most cities have absolutely awful local public transit systems. If you are doing regional travel and need to rent a car anyway... You may as well drive.
I have that as a issue with some personal travel. I routinely travel 400 miles (each way) for a weekend. It takes about 6.5 hours to drive, and I need a vehicle there anyway, so I'd be renting if I didn't drive. I can't fly directly, I have to go through a hub city.
By time, it's about equal... Arrive at airport an hour early, an hour to the hub, wait an hour, an hour to the destination, 30 minutes for baggage claim... assuming my bags make it on 2 regional hops with Delta. And that puts me an hour away from my actual destination. That's 5.5 hours instead of 6.5, and I have to deal with airport security.
A train? Where I am, and where I'm going, I'd be going through a train hub anyway, and doing even more miles.
I'll drive.
And, since I need to drive anyway, and I don't like the funding options for air travel or interstates if a rail system picks up... I'm actually against having a rail system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little confused.
You think maybe that's on purpose?
but I'm no longer clear on what 'buying' a CD actually buys me.
The last time I looked into it, the closest I could get to what the RIAA seems to put forward as a legal position is this:
When you buy an audio CD, you are buying a license to that music on that format. The physical form of the license is a functional audio CD, and when that license is no longer a functional audio CD (if the CD breaks or no longer plays), then you no longer have a license, and need to buy a new license.
Put in more technical terms, the license (in the form of that functional audio CD) you are buying is for that particular stream of bits. Ripping the CD to MP3 (or other audio codec) is making a derivative work of that bitstream, which your license does not permit you to do.
That's as close as I can get to figuring out what they say. Or at least, when they want.
All clear now?
Excuse me, I feel dirty. I need to go wash my hands now. And maybe take a bath in some chlorine bleach.
There will still be wrecks, but I think we'll have fewer of 'em. I'll take my chances with the robots.
I agree that a computer doesn't get distracted or tired. It does require proper maintenance, but then so do your brakes.
We are in the unfortunate time right now, where the systems are only useful under limited real-world conditions, basically in good weather on highways with no construction. That's still a big chunk of driving miles, and I'd love to be able to use something like this while I'm doing highway driving in good weather on interstates with no construction. (There must be a couple of miles of interstate not under construction somewhere near here... right?) And this system, due to using radar for speed control, is probably safe for night driving too. That's really cool.
But right now, the systems are good for "closed track" driving with other well-behaved cars. It doesn't know street signs, so handling the 4-way Stop intersection would be a bit of a problem. Ditto with traffic lights. Give it another 10 years, and those will become solved problems too.
Then you have to be able to handle kids running into the road in front of you when the ball rolls down the driveway. That's harder.
I'm not bashing these things. I like them. I want them. Really... I drive a Ford F-150, and when Ford did a recall on the old-tech cruise control, I found just how much I use the cruise control as a crutch. They disabled my cruise control for 4 months, while they worked on fixing the problem and distributing parts to the service centers. Try driving 400 miles without cruise control sometime, it's amazing how tired my leg got, just keeping steady pressure on the gas pedal for 7 hours. Ouch.
But these things are still at a point that they require an alert attentive driver watching things. Just like... regular cruise control. Wow. When a car on normal cruise control plows into another vehicle, that is the driver's fault, not the car maker's (assuming that the cruise control did not refuse to disengage). If one of these new-tech cruise controls does the same thing... that is still the driver's fault, and not the car maker's.
But I'm sure a jury would still be happy to award a "Oh, we feel bad for you" award of a few tens of millions of dollars to the family of the first person killed by one of these.
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
Actually, if you look at how most (large) colleges are run, you'll see that there is a lot of pressure to let in marginal students, and flunk them out after a year.
Let them come in for a year, pay full tuition-hour rates for classes that are 100 students per teacher, and then kick them out before they get to the second year where classes have a more reasonable student:teacher ratio.
Freshmen are a definite profit center for most large colleges.
The further into college you get, the more you cost a university, until you get to the point that a grad student is actually being paid by the university to go to school. (Okay, it's practically slave wages, and they have to teach courses, but it is still an overall cost to the university.) Those grad students are paid using money the university gets from the freshmen that will be dropping out at the end of the year.
Just nitpicking...
In the US, the average cost to the consumer per kW is about 12 cents.
That's 12 cents per kWh, $0.12 per kiloWatt-hour. Not per kiloWatt. That's a kiloWatt generated (or used) consistently for an hour. (Or 10kW used for 6 minutes, or however you want to multiply kW and time.)
I find it hard to believe that $1.20 worth of electricity can be generated from a car passing over a bump.
I see where you got this $1.20. You are assuming this idiotic speedbump (not biased at all, am I?) is providing this 10kW of claimed energy consistently for an hour for each car that passes. You see where this seems ridiculous?
I'd find it more likely that the thing provides a spike of 10kW of energy for a few seconds. That is, maybe 3/3600 of an hour (3 seconds out of 3600 seconds in an hour). Or, rather, closer to...
$0.12/kWh * 10kW * 3 seconds / (3600seconds/1hour) = $0.001, or about a tenth of a cent per car passing over a bump.
I agree with the GP, it probably costs more than this in wear and tear on the tires and shocks... But the city doesn't pay that. You do.
A local or regional municipality might want to add traffic signals and lights for visibility to an intersection that's not near the local grid.
The problem with this thinking is that it needs to be a well-trafficked intersection for this to work. Otherwise, you need power storage (batteries) also, because without power storage, you will get power to light up the traffic signals after the car passes the intersection, which, you might agree, is... less than optimal.
But would make for some great arguments with the cops about if you really did run a red light.
Extending the power grid gives you consistent power, not pulsed power (ignoring grid power failures). This is more useful for an always-on service like a traffic signal.
That's a definite possiblity, but I've been having some interesting conversations about the whole 'forced conversion' to digital. It will be nearly impossible to make millions of people go out and purchase a new TV overnight just because the FCC says everything has to be digital.
Why would you need to buy a new TV? The only people that will need to buy a new TV are those people that get their TV from over-the-air broadcasts.
If you have cable TV, you don't need to buy a new TV.
If you have satellite TV service (Dish, DirecTV, etc), you don't need to buy a new TV.
Yes, there are a lot of people that only watch TV from over-the-air broadcasts... but it's not everyone. Interestingly, it is mostly those people that don't have disposable income that will be most affected by this. Ain't it always the way?
But even there, you will be able to, instead, buy a converter box that will convert the digital (HD or SD) over-the-air signal into standard-def analog signal. And use your old TV.
Cable TV penetration is about 70% of US households.
There are three flavors of a security pass:
1. Something you have, like badge or actual key.
2. Something you know, like a password or pass phrase.
3. Something you are, like a General, Doctor, or American citizen.
Well, 2 out of 3 isn't bad.
"Something you are" is not a position you hold, such as Doctor or General. It is independent of your position or profession. That General's uniform is something you have, not something you are.
Think more along the lines of "your face" or "your fingerprints" or "your DNA" or something like that. It is inherent to your physical body.
Biometrics is trying to do "something you are"... it just isn't doing it very well right now.
A badge (can be) 2-factor authentication. It is something you have, and it has a picture of your face on it, making it something you are.
Of course, identity validation in the hands of the person requesting identification is inherently insecure, which is why all the best SciFi movies have a badge that, somehow, pulls up your picture from a central computer database, and the hero's sidekick changes the image in the database milliseconds before the guard looks at the image on his display.
Yesterday I bought a camcorder from Canon even though both Canon and Sony were final runner ups, I put my 800$ on a Canon for one reason... Sony DRM is an insult to consumers
Good. You voted with your dollars. That's great.
Now, do the next step.
Write a letter (yes, on actual paper). Be polite and professional.
Mail it here:
Howard Stringer
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Sony Corporation of America
Sony Drive
Park Ridge, NJ 07656
Tell him about your purchase, and your reason for it. He won't read it, of course, but he has staff whose purpose is to handle mail like this.
Anyone you know that makes a similar buying decision, encourage them to do the same.
Simply not buying from them is good... but you won't change the company's behavior if you don't tell them *why* they are not getting your money.
If you (and 50,000 of your closest friends) send a letter to Sony saying "I bought your competitor's product because of your corporate practices" they will look very carefully at changing how they do business. When they realize that they lost money because of scummy decisions like this, they will change policy.
But they won't know if you don't tell them.
The phone network bug was a misplaced { character in a nested if-else construct.
Is that what it was? I thought I'd heard that the AT&T outage was from a missing break; in a switch-case statement.
I found that more believable, because a missing { would cause a compiler error, where a missing break; is a valid way to purposely fall into the next case.
Though, really, I suspect both of us are just repeating rumors we heard.
so capitalism is best with perfect information
This is, mostly, true. However, profits are maximized when only one side has access to that information.
You see this type of thing a lot with large corporations. Region coding is a great example of this, actually. Globalization is a wonderful thing... but only for large companies buying supplies and labor. For selling product, globablization is bad, because it removes the ability to extract the largest possible profit from local markets.
This is generally the case for any item where the price is different based on geography, but the availability is not based on geography, but on some other artificial control.
If that doesn't find anything, and you've tried everything you said, you got some smart malicious rootkit-usin' virus that knows how to trick Revealer, or your system is the proto for some new form of evilness.
:)
Or you forgot that your antivirus software does network activity.
I had that happen a couple weeks ago, I just happened to be watching my network activity light and it lit up when I wasn't doing anything. This bothered me, as you might expect.
Took me a couple minnutes of poking around to figure out that my Norton AntiVirus had just done a live update and grabbed a new virus signature file.
Yes, my AV software did something that made me worry I might have a virus. After I got done feeling embarrassed, I chuckled at that.
Though, back on topic for this Ask Slashdot, what I'd really like is a bootable CD that I can use to check my system, because, as so many here have already commented, you can't trust your installed OS to tell you if it is compromised.
For example: I might be tempted to buy, on DVD, the complete season of "One Day To Defeat The Terrorists By Whispering Everything", the new hit Fox show, if I missed various episodes. Fox might release the DVD set with that in mind. However, if one can simply program their DVR to record every single show, they're not likely to buy it, especially if they can transfer the show to tape or DVD-R afterwards. Thus, one of the measures SCOTUS used in making the Betamax decision simply isn't true any more, as technology has improved.
So, we lost a Constitutionally-guaranteed right (vaguely, Fair Use is Court-interpretted, not explicitly mentioned, I admit) due to an advance in technology.
Why doesn't this work to expand Constitutional rights too? Shouldn't a well regulated militia have nuclear arms? How come my electronic communications are not free from unreasonable searches?
Just doesn't seem fair.
First, a couple of differences that are (I admit) mostly beside the point.
A) We don't know when the next attempt to assassinate the president will occur, but we know it has happened before, enough times to make the next occurence a matter of when, not if. We have no such knowledge with human-influenced global warming.
B) We protect a single important resource (the president) with a level of effort that is not reasonable to apply to the populace in general, even if the entire populace actually shares in the threat. (Check murder stats... more than the president needs to worry about being purposely killed.) (Hey, I told you this would be beside the point.) This is concentrating resources from many to protect few or one. But that's not what you are advocating... you want to concentrate resources from many to protect... all. (Huh?)
That's a very valid approach - overprotect where the downside of a realized small risk would be great.
And we do, where it makes sense. Do you know anything about building codes in Florida? They've changed rather a lot in the last 10-15 years, directly in response to damage from hurricanes and beliefs of reasonable responses to that threat.
But we don't require every building within 5 miles of the coast to be able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, because that is not seen to be a reasonable response.
That "where it makes sense" part is where reasonable people disagree. And that's very significant, when you are talking about "overprotecting" to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And, before you start attacking me, understand that I do tend to believe humans are having a longterm effect on our environment. I just question what effect that will have. Global warming climatologists have a poor track record in predicting changes in advance. They tend to be much better at pointing to stuff after the fact and saying "My model (that I just changed to take account of this new data) agrees with this new data!" This makes me extremely hesitant to support spending those hundreds of billions of my tax dollars on a big question mark that might have an exclamation mark at the end.
Quite frankly, we have too little data to know what's going on. The problem is that, by the time we have enough data to know what is happening (instead of just that *something* is happening, which may or may not be bad) it will be too late to prevent... whatever. That tends to make the decision-making process more a matter of Whoever shouts loudest wins.
I really tend to be more of a believer in a robust earth... But I don't necessarily think that humans will like surviving while the earth gets itself back into a normal cycle. Realize that "robust" does not equate to "conducive to human life."
And I don't completely disagree with you. If I didn't understand what it was and that Apple planned it to be used for a while and thrown away, I'd be upset. And yes, I fully believe Apple knew what they were doing when they designed it with a non-user-replacable battery. They made a decision of style over product lifespan.
However, as I said, I knew what I was getting before I bought it. I got it knowing that in 6 years it would be a paperweight.
As has been commented before, building it with a battery cover would change the shape (slightly), change the environmental sealing (negligibly) and eventually give you another piece of consumer electronics with a damn broken battery door. Of course, those wouldn't get a class action lawsuit.
I'll agree that Apple should have said something about battery life from the beginning. But I'll also say that anyone hearing "rechargable battery" should understand the implicit "limited lifespan" when they see there is no battery door.
There is shared responsibility here.
You too?
I have a 2nd Gen iPod (10gig with the touchpad scrollwheel, or is that a 1st gen?) bought Dec 2002. My parents got it as a Christmas present for me.
I charge it, on average, once a week. Use it in the gym, for about 6-7 hours between weekly charges. In the summer, I might use it at the beach for an extra hour or two, still only charge it once a week.
It's still doing fine.
Which is just what I'd expect, really. It has a Lithium Ion recharagable battery. As such, it's good for about 300 charge cycles (full discharge) or about 500 charge cycles (half discharge). It at rate of 80% discharge recharged weekly, I expect it to last me about 6-7 years total, or another 3-4 years, at which point I'll want a 100gig version anyway.
I knew that when I got it. I don't consider that a defective product.
For people that use it 8 hours a day, and recharge daily... that's a considerably different matter. But that's not what I do.
Buy something that makes sense for how you'll use it. And do some research before you buy something, so you'll know if it matches your usage.
There are so many things to say here. I'll start with
This sentence no verb.
But that's okay, I think it was missing an object too.
This entire story is going to be nothing but well-deserved bashing of Slashdot editors.
A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.
Probably a companion joke to yours...
The worst thing that ever happened to the Federal government was air conditioning coming to Washington, D.C.
But why, if you actually want to purchase a copy of it would you care that its copyright has expired?
:) Admittedly, getting this edition does mean I didn't get updates from World War II, but it did have changes from World War I.
:)
Mostly just because Disney has pissed me off that much. Okay, so that's not a very good reason...
Much as I dislike the current copyright law, I try to respect it anyway. So, given that I might want to run some of these maps through a color copier, I like knowing it is legal to do so. Buying this version allows that. Knowing that I could buy a more recent edition, containing the same maps, and lose that right, kinda sucked. (I'm honestly unclear on whether I really would lose that right... the actual maps, if unchanged, would still be of the earlier copyright, just the collection would get the new copyright protection, correct? Along with any new maps added, of course.)
Actually, this turned out to be the least-cost copy available, $8 + S&H. The most recent printing (the 9th Edition, in 1980) was mostly available for somewhere north of $40, up to $110. I assume the book I have (5th Edition, 1926) was bought as part of a pallet-load from an estate auction, but that's just a guess.
Really, its historical maps... in the last 80 years, a map of Europe from 1300 hasn't changed that much.
Besides, there was a certain draw to having an 80 year old book in my library.
I suppose the answer to your question comes out as "Various reasons, but mostly just because."
I've got some books that I've been looking for for years and won't find anywhere for any amount of money.
Look on ABE Books and see if you can find it listed there. It's a website listing, as they say "13,000 booksellers selling 70 million books" and is a decent place to get older and otherwise unavailable books.
I picked up a copy of the 1926 printing of The Historical Atlas by William Shepherd through them for $8, just because it has some absolutely cool maps of Europe from the first millenium A.D. Most of the maps are available at the UTexas Library website but I wanted a copy to hold in my hands. The 1926 printing is significant, it is the latest edition that is out of copyright.
You're picking and choosing for your comparison, I think.
1 CD (650 MB) could hold 451 floppies (1.44 MB)
You skipped an intervening step here. 100MB Iomega Zip drives were practically standard before CD burners became really common. They held about 60 floppies worth of stuff. And a CD only held 6 100MB Zips worth of stuff. I see that you skipped the Zips on purpose... but I don't really think it was appropriate to skip them.
1 DVD (9 GB) could hold 14 CDs
I'd really do this with the single-layer DVD-R standard, which was a little less than 5GB. It therefore only held 7 CDs of stuff. Or do you want to talk about double-sided dual-layer DVDs, which hold 18GB, and make Blu-Ray look even worse? (Can you even buy recordable double-sided dual-layer DVD-R discs?)
I don't know if I'd count the 100GB version of Blu-Ray Disc, as it is currently not a product. You can at least buy 25GB single-layer BD recordable discs and drives. Not sure about dual-layer 50GB BD recordable discs right now, I'm not going to bother doing a google search to check either.
But that 25GB Blu-Ray only holds 5 5GB DVDs worth of stuff.
So it is slowing down a bit... but only from "factor of 7" to "factor of 5" which isn't that much of a slowdown, assuming you ignore the jump away from floppies.
As to "how long to burn 100GB of data"... The Register article says TDK claims they burn at 6X (216Mbps) or about an hour.
I mostly like having separate devices. I usually have good reasons for this, though sometimes it is "just cause!"
I'll always have a separate digital camera. My celphone might have a digital camera built in also, but I doubt I'll ever see an underwater housing for my cellphone that lets me take pictures with it. My digital camera has one.
I'll probably have an iPod or equivalent for quite a while, even if my cellphone can play MP3s. Because I don't want to be hassled by flight attendants on airplanes because they think I'm using my cellphone in-flight, and the airline rules don't allow that. (Though, I'd hope that the cellphone maker will think enough to give the user the ability to turn off the antenna in case you are stuck using the MP3 player function in-flight. Remember to turn it back on when you land, though...) I can play music on my iPod on an airplane with no problems.
There are are lot of good things about having a lot of basic functionality in an all-in-one device, especially if that device can easily sync with your specialty devices also.
However, I'm a Verizon Wireless customer... I know better than to think the phone will be allowed to operate with anything other than the Verizon central servers, where they can charge you for access. Yeah, I really want to pay $0.25 per song to transfer 3,000 songs onto my harddrive-equipped MP3-playing cellphone. I complain about that enough trying to transfer photos off the cameraphone. The phone has a data-transfer cable... and Verizon crippled the phone's firmware so it can only sync the address book, and not do anything else with the cable.
Where I live now, anyone and their mom's dog can look up the tax records of my property. This database is searchable by either name or address and returns how much a given property has been accessed for (plus the five year history), how much the current taxes are, a picture of the property (which is often the front of the house), and sometimes the floorplan of the house. Not only would I never provide this information to any of my friends (much less a stranger), but I'd consider it rude if they were to ask.
My county property appaiser's office has this information on their website also. (Well, most of it... no picture of the property or interior floor plan, but they do have the exterior dimensions for showing heated and total square footage.) Search by name, address, and... something else. Property sales information going back about 10 years.
It's rather useful if you want to know your approximate current appraisal without paying for an actual appraisal. Find 3 houses near your house with similar square footage that sold recently, and you can get a decent idea of the current value of your home. (It tells me that my home's value has probably doubled in the last 3 years. Frankly, I consider that unsustainable, and it worries me.)
In fact, this is part of how a paid-for appraiser calculates your home's appraised value. This is public information.
And this is information that the government needs to operate, in many cases. Or, in the case of political contributions, to ensure that the government operates fairly and openly. And because we live in a republic (cue arguments about a republic vs democracy) this should be publicly-available information so that citizens can know how their government operates.
The objection isn't so much that it is public information... like a lot of public information, the objection is that, suddenly, it is so easy and convenient to access that information. You used to have to go down to the county office, and either request the information from busy office staff, or go crawling through the stacks yourself to find the right entry in the right book. Now a couple minutes on a web site gets you the same thing.
Before, only people with a serious interest in how the government operated bothered to access that information, or people with enough money on the line to make it worth paying someone to go look. Now your nosey neighbor or coworker can check up on you. Easily.
And it doesn't need a ton of lead for the batteries, that you would need to dispose of when the car is "retired".
That isn't nearly the issue that you think it is. Lead-acid batteries in industrial use (and, make no mistake, the batteries in hybrid cars count as industrial use) are recycled almost 100%. Realistically, probably about 98%.
Ditto with the lead-acid batteries in your UPS. Instead of throwing them away when the UPS dies, take the batteries to a local machinery shop, they'll likely take them off your hands and send them in for recycling.
So, what's the point of having a hybrid?
It makes people feel good.
That's about it, really. (Oh, and it lets some people drive in the HOV lane.)
If you think about them seriously... hybrids make most of their efficiency gains in stop-n-go city traffic with regenerative braking and electric-assist starts. The difference in initial cost ($3000-5000 extra for a hybrid version of the same vehicle) is such that you have to drive a lot of miles to make up that initial extra cost (somewhere around 150,000 to 300,000 depending on gas prices) and the fastest way to make up that is with highway miles, where the hybrid does less for you.
They don't come close to paying for themselves. But they make people feel good.
Hmm...
:)
However, in order the subsidize their phones, they have to lock consumers into a contract.
and
Besides, most will allow you to go contract-free, but you won't qualify for discounted phones or their most aggressive rates.
Try to be consistent.
This is the part that makes it blatantly obvious that the cell phone companies are ripping off consumers.
If the contract and usage/per-minute rates are what they are to subsidize the cost of the phones, then at the end of the contract period, the phone is paid off, and you are off your contract, you should go to a discounted rate which no longer includes those subsidies to pay for the phone.
But you don't get any sort of discounted rate after your contract expires.
Can you explain this without using the phrase "evil cellphone companies"? Feel free to use "bloodsucking leech" though.
There is a valid argument for having "known" usage and network load limits based on contracts, so that they can properly provision an area for towers and other capacity... But that argument tends to become much less useful when the popularity of nationalwide plans is factored in.
high travel 500 mile corridors.
[snip]
All of these corridors are a bit too small for efficient flight, and have enough traffic to support a train system.
There are more people going for shorter distances than there are going for long ones. The trains are supposed to provide exactly that travel which is a bit too long for the car, and a bit too expensive and inefficient when flying.
Part of the problem here is one of economics. I don't really dispute that there is sufficient traffic to support these not-quite-local distance travellers. However, there's only enough traffic to support these people in one (or maybe two) travel methods, but not in three.
Car, train, plane. Pick any 2.
You can have either a good interstate system, a good rail system, or a good air travel system, but not all three. Highways cost a lot of money, rail systems cost a lot of money, and airports cost a lot of money. Supporting all three just isn't going to happen.
You're pretty much forced to have a decent airport. You can see where the choice is.
The Europeans chose rail and air, and the public roads there mostly suck. The US chose car and air, and the rail system sucks.
Also, if you look at air travel, most of the major US air carriers would be bleeding even more red ink if they were only around for long-haul business. Think what air travel prices would be if they had to make up their costs just with coast to coast flights, and no regional jet service.
The other problem (related to Americans' love affair with the car, admittedly) is that most cities have absolutely awful local public transit systems. If you are doing regional travel and need to rent a car anyway... You may as well drive.
I have that as a issue with some personal travel. I routinely travel 400 miles (each way) for a weekend. It takes about 6.5 hours to drive, and I need a vehicle there anyway, so I'd be renting if I didn't drive. I can't fly directly, I have to go through a hub city.
By time, it's about equal... Arrive at airport an hour early, an hour to the hub, wait an hour, an hour to the destination, 30 minutes for baggage claim... assuming my bags make it on 2 regional hops with Delta. And that puts me an hour away from my actual destination. That's 5.5 hours instead of 6.5, and I have to deal with airport security.
A train? Where I am, and where I'm going, I'd be going through a train hub anyway, and doing even more miles.
I'll drive.
And, since I need to drive anyway, and I don't like the funding options for air travel or interstates if a rail system picks up... I'm actually against having a rail system.