Heh... Just dogs and cats? I'm thinking there'll be quite a mix of mammalian DNA in that sampling- and definitely more than people, dogs, and cats there. >:-D
What we've got with that bill ISN'T reform. Reform is changing it so that the pricing can come back down out of the clouds. (Wanna know how much Medicare pays, typically, on things? 20% of the billed. Wanna know how much the regular insurance pays for things? ~30% of the billed amount. Want to do REAL reform? FIX THAT FIRST.)
And told to someone who did similar through his High-School and College years.
Based on observations I've had the misfortune of having over the last 15-20 years, there's a trend there to hire trained monkeys to pull in more money. Or the shop just doesn't care enough and it makes them more money to rip-n-replace things based off of the OBDII data.
Happens more often in the dealership shops than not (Heh... I've even been told things like Cummins engines just simply throw rods by a Dodge shop- when there was no evidence whatsoever that it'd been "ran without oil", which was the idiot excuse they'd ran up the flagpole before they got shot down by solid arguments against that line of thought. Heh, they even showed me "parts" (a cap for a conrod...) and then the next story was that the cap was still on the conrod...)- and it's something of a recurring theme of late.
There's this trend to cut corners wherever you can to maximize profits- or to "fix" things that're not broken. Not all places do it, but enough do it to call it a majority, even if it's slight. You can take exception to the remarks- but it's off of YOUR experience that you are doing so. Mine shows that it's not quite the story you're painting- and it's to that that I can only refer to.
Oh, you're preaching to the choir there. I may be an IT guy, I've done my fair share of turning wrenches (Heh...if I didn't, I'd have been afoot considering the Vega I had through high-school and the 79 Impala I had through College... I swear, the Vega had to have been made out of floor sweepings from the production line and if ever there was a Lemon, that Impala was one of them- at 75k miles, I was doing a major repair item on the engine about once every 2-3 months.). I'm mainly underwhelmed with the people they've got in many of the shops. There's good people and a lot of iffy or outright bad ones in the mix.
As opposed to without copyright law where the works would be destroyed in exactly the same way, except this time conditional on them existing in the first place?
Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done. Your premise is, sadly, an old saw- and very, very much wrong.
I would say that neither are to be aspired to- and that both are equally a problem.
More to the point, I think you will find that there's little difference between the two concepts; and there is little to no faith or pure religion involved with the latter of the two.
Wonder if these new Texas books teach the Trail of Tears. I have my doubts.
As do I. I find that piece of history one of our darker hours as a country- and would wish that the children could see what we had done at gun and bayonet point, just for the sake of the greed of those in power. (As a side note: It should be observed that the Trail is part of my Heritage, in that I am part Cherokee and parts of my family were part of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma... YES, I'm biased, but there's more to it than this...;-) ) If we don't show them our bad moments, how will they learn from them and NOT repeat them in some manner- as it is very true that those that fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
If you go somewhere in which the guy up front tells you that, you demand that they put your car back together, take it off the rack, and go somewhere else. You didn't take your car to a shop, you took it to a lie.
Thus speaks an HONEST mechanic that I'd probably take my vehicle to. Shame you're hurt like you are- there's entirely too many people out there that're like the lie than the good shop. Seriously.
I take vehicles in, not because I don't know anything- I'm time constrained because I've other things to do. And, I've had shop managers outright lie to my face on things like this. Entirely too many of them, actually.
Sorry to hear you've lost your livelihood for some time to come.
However, you're not the norm. You're the exception to things, sadly.
A disturbing number of the people out there in the shops are "ASE certified" techs that just do things as indicated by those expensive OBDII boxes, never once thinking that it might just be a bad sensor or an unrelated cause that triggered the MIL failure. They don't stop to think what might be wrong- they just go off of what they were told by the computer, blindly trusting in it knowing more than they do about things.
It depends on what you're resetting. If it's the MIL you're wanting to reset, that may be accomplished with a simple OBDII reader that places like Wal-Mart and most reputable auto parts places will sell you for about $60-90. You're going to find that it'll cost more to read CAN or the other protocols than it's worth if all you're looking for is reset capability.
However, if you're into tinkering and are looking for understanding the OBDII or a base platform for getting it into your laptop, you'll spend $200 on the gear however you do it. If you want to DIY an autotap, you'll have fun making one as there are four differing electrical signalling protocols in play on that connector (If you're being specific, you can find out which you're using and provide the interface to that. Now having said this, you can get schematics that will work against all four protocols, firmware that will work with said hardware to drive the ISO specific one, and if you don't want to muck with fully DIY, you can buy the completed device from Stern Technologies for $149 right at the moment (Regular price is $199, but the current design's firmware only supports ISO right now so they're discounting it $50...).
You will find that you're going to have a difficult time finding cheaper or the special connector (and it's a pita- because I'd had a lark of trying to make a CarChip a' la Davis Instruments and found out just how "fun" it could be getting that connector...) that you'll need for the design. It's a pretty nifty deal at $149.
But unlike implanted RFID, you can pitch it, easily switch to throwaways, etc.
This, on the other hand, is a completely differing beast and couldn't really do a good job (Sorry, range limitations would ruin what they're proposing for many of the situations we'd see that they're suggesting this for. I've worked in the RFID industry and there's only so much you can do with an electrically small antenna...) and can be misused in many, many more ways than the proposed idea would able to be used for.
Ah... But if you CAN be tracked like them, you can rest assured your fellow man will DO it to you.
History is replete with vast numbers of instances where something along these lines (no there hasn't been RFID of this nature until our recent times...) has been misused- with arguments like yours getting used to get it accepted first.
SD refers to something that would fit on an NTSC/PAL television set with minimal to no problems. A resolution of 640x480 or something like 704×480 would be SD resolutions. HD would refer to resolutions that are comparable to 720i/720p/1080i/1080p.
What's hilarious is that even the next spin from Nintendo's going HD and they're regressing on something with a service that can't hope to provide more than a couple thousand at any major metropolitan area (An OC-192 will provide 6000 players peak with the service. OC-192's don't grow on trees and saying the ISP will provide it is...heh...entertaining.). And yet the industry that considers 250k units sold being mediocre is falling over themselves with this stupid service. As a tech demo it's nifty, no doubt about it. As a product, it can't scale, can't HOPE to, for it to be anything other than a nifty toy to show off to people to bilk them out of investment dollars, etc.
The "point" to OnLive is to move the game to a server that they can control so you can't "pirate" the game. It has NOTHING to do with what they're claiming it to be.
I'm skeptical because of the brutal NUMBERS involved with this silly thing. In order for it to actually be remotely usable, you need to account for just how many people you can jam onto the pipe and there's this fixed peak value (which you MUST observe or things do go to hell in a handbasket immediately...) that is 1.5 mbits/sec for 640x480 type (SD) resolution and 5 mbits/sec for 1024x768 (HD) type resolution.
For SD resolutions, you can do...
30 people peak at T3 data rates. 103 people peak at OC-3 data rates. 414 people peak at OC-12 data rates. 1666 people peak at OC-48 data rates. 6000 people peak at OC-192 data rates.
Remind yourselves that this is SD resolution for starters. People drubbed the Wii for running with that resolution and while it was the runaway seller, there's a cruel reality with it all as well. The industry's used to having numbers like 250k sold as being only so-so as a run and a million plus as GoTY levels of sales. 6k's a paltry number of people to run with in a given area- and OC-192's are "godlike" bandwidth, not even remotely cheap ($20k/mo would be on the low-end of the pricing on that...), and it's all you can hope for for SD levels of resolution for a minimally credible number of people using the service. Putting it with the ISP is an entertaining direction that some will take it- especially in light of the above numbers basically choking off the pipe to the point that you're better off picking 3/4ths those numbers to ensure you've a smidge of headroom so you don't start losing traffic as the congestion algorithms beat you all to hell. They're already bitching about things like bittorrent, video-on-demand, and sites like Google...
It can't be fixed in a manner that'd scale well. And if anyone did these off the cuff calculations of things would see that it's not going to work. If you knew anything about how TCP/IP networking worked you'd end up with the same conclusions.
Back to your shotgun reference, if mossberg only repaired 40 year old shotguns I think you would find they would either discontinue the service or go bankrupt.
That would depend entirely upon the price they're charging for the repairs and whether people would be willing to pay it. If you've framed it in right, there's a business there that'd be viable for a while yet to come. It's just that businesses rarely frame it in right these days.
Heh... MOST gun manufacturers, if they're still in business and are either making the parts or can make them will service a gun, decades after it's made, for a price. Well, every one of them except the people making saturday night specials, that is.
So i have a trust in "the community". People want to play multiplayer and there's nothing that the publishers of the games can do to stop them.
Wanna bet big money on that? BNetd's no longer maintained by the original developers, who LOST BIG on the suit that Vivendi filed against their happy backsides. Sure it's lurking around- but if Activision so much as smells a big open rollout of that thing like it did previously, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will sue again over it.
The only reason you've got the server engines you've got is that either the server framework was open sourced or the company doesn't give a damn about you making multiplayer or matchmaker servers. If they did care, there's quite a bit they can do to stop them. BNetd's developers found out the hard way about that. If you've never been on the wrong side of a lawsuit, you wouldn't know and you'd be inclined to mouth off like this- but you'd better be sure of your legal standing and have deep pockets before doing so, otherwise someone might show you how wrong you can be about things.
Ah... But that's only with the "oooh...shiny..." stuff that the big-boys are making. The indie space is doing fine and well- and it's doing so well that it scraped up over a million dollars in a couple of days' time.
As long as there's programmable computers, there'll be a market. And there'll be machines you can add an application to for some time to come.
Everyone presumes that it'd be owned by the person paying the check.
This is largely wrong in most jurisdictions. Unless there is an explicit work-for-hire clause stating what gets assigned to whom as a result of work done, there is only an interest to access and use that is given to the employer. Without it being declared work-for-hire explicitly and without the assignment requirements stated up-front, they don't own ANYTHING.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh... Just dogs and cats? I'm thinking there'll be quite a mix of mammalian DNA in that sampling- and definitely more than people, dogs, and cats there. >:-D
What we've got with that bill ISN'T reform. Reform is changing it so that the pricing can come back down out of the clouds. (Wanna know how much Medicare pays, typically, on things? 20% of the billed. Wanna know how much the regular insurance pays for things? ~30% of the billed amount. Want to do REAL reform? FIX THAT FIRST.)
I'd hesitate to call you the best, but you ARE pretty good if you're able to keep that sort of stuff up indefinitely.
Arrgh... Blew the link. Let's try that again, shall we?
How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup
Heh... Try again.
Setting up a (small) Usenet server is as simple as grabbing something like Leafnode on a server and point it to your upstream peer.
Creating new newsgroups...well, there's an art to it. But there IS a HOWTO:
How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup
In short...this was just from googling a smidge. There's quite a bit more info than just these two links.
And told to someone who did similar through his High-School and College years.
Based on observations I've had the misfortune of having over the last 15-20 years, there's a trend there to hire trained monkeys to pull in more money. Or the shop just doesn't care enough and it makes them more money to rip-n-replace things based off of the OBDII data.
Happens more often in the dealership shops than not (Heh... I've even been told things like Cummins engines just simply throw rods by a Dodge shop- when there was no evidence whatsoever that it'd been "ran without oil", which was the idiot excuse they'd ran up the flagpole before they got shot down by solid arguments against that line of thought. Heh, they even showed me "parts" (a cap for a conrod...) and then the next story was that the cap was still on the conrod...)- and it's something of a recurring theme of late.
There's this trend to cut corners wherever you can to maximize profits- or to "fix" things that're not broken. Not all places do it, but enough do it to call it a majority, even if it's slight. You can take exception to the remarks- but it's off of YOUR experience that you are doing so. Mine shows that it's not quite the story you're painting- and it's to that that I can only refer to.
As always, your mileage may vary. ;-)
Oh, you're preaching to the choir there. I may be an IT guy, I've done my fair share of turning wrenches (Heh...if I didn't, I'd have been afoot considering the Vega I had through high-school and the 79 Impala I had through College... I swear, the Vega had to have been made out of floor sweepings from the production line and if ever there was a Lemon, that Impala was one of them- at 75k miles, I was doing a major repair item on the engine about once every 2-3 months.). I'm mainly underwhelmed with the people they've got in many of the shops. There's good people and a lot of iffy or outright bad ones in the mix.
Really now... And I suppose the following:
The Mona Lisa ...are all figments of everyone's imagination.
The Statue of David
Plumbing
The Steam Engine
Vast portions of our art and history had NO Patent or Copyright "protection" to speak of and yet they were done. Your premise is, sadly, an old saw- and very, very much wrong.
I would say that neither are to be aspired to- and that both are equally a problem.
More to the point, I think you will find that there's little difference between the two concepts; and there is little to no faith or pure religion involved with the latter of the two.
As do I. I find that piece of history one of our darker hours as a country- and would wish that the children could see what we had done at gun and bayonet point, just for the sake of the greed of those in power. (As a side note: It should be observed that the Trail is part of my Heritage, in that I am part Cherokee and parts of my family were part of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma... YES, I'm biased, but there's more to it than this... ;-) ) If we don't show them our bad moments, how will they learn from them and NOT repeat them in some manner- as it is very true that those that fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Thus speaks an HONEST mechanic that I'd probably take my vehicle to. Shame you're hurt like you are- there's entirely too many people out there that're like the lie than the good shop. Seriously.
I take vehicles in, not because I don't know anything- I'm time constrained because I've other things to do. And, I've had shop managers outright lie to my face on things like this. Entirely too many of them, actually.
Sorry to hear you've lost your livelihood for some time to come.
However, you're not the norm. You're the exception to things, sadly.
A disturbing number of the people out there in the shops are "ASE certified" techs that just do things as indicated by those expensive OBDII boxes, never once thinking that it might just be a bad sensor or an unrelated cause that triggered the MIL failure. They don't stop to think what might be wrong- they just go off of what they were told by the computer, blindly trusting in it knowing more than they do about things.
It depends on what you're resetting. If it's the MIL you're wanting to reset, that may be accomplished with a simple OBDII reader that places like Wal-Mart and most reputable auto parts places will sell you for about $60-90. You're going to find that it'll cost more to read CAN or the other protocols than it's worth if all you're looking for is reset capability.
However, if you're into tinkering and are looking for understanding the OBDII or a base platform for getting it into your laptop, you'll spend $200 on the gear however you do it. If you want to DIY an autotap, you'll have fun making one as there are four differing electrical signalling protocols in play on that connector (If you're being specific, you can find out which you're using and provide the interface to that. Now having said this, you can get schematics that will work against all four protocols, firmware that will work with said hardware to drive the ISO specific one, and if you don't want to muck with fully DIY, you can buy the completed device from Stern Technologies for $149 right at the moment (Regular price is $199, but the current design's firmware only supports ISO right now so they're discounting it $50...).
You will find that you're going to have a difficult time finding cheaper or the special connector (and it's a pita- because I'd had a lark of trying to make a CarChip a' la Davis Instruments and found out just how "fun" it could be getting that connector...) that you'll need for the design. It's a pretty nifty deal at $149.
But unlike implanted RFID, you can pitch it, easily switch to throwaways, etc.
This, on the other hand, is a completely differing beast and couldn't really do a good job (Sorry, range limitations would ruin what they're proposing for many of the situations we'd see that they're suggesting this for. I've worked in the RFID industry and there's only so much you can do with an electrically small antenna...) and can be misused in many, many more ways than the proposed idea would able to be used for.
Ah... But if you CAN be tracked like them, you can rest assured your fellow man will DO it to you.
History is replete with vast numbers of instances where something along these lines (no there hasn't been RFID of this nature until our recent times...) has been misused- with arguments like yours getting used to get it accepted first.
That's a legal term, actually. It figures a lot in pleadings.
Heh... That's because you're one of the few using it. They can only really properly service 6000 subscribers with an OC-192. Do the numbers there.
No, this is using an industry specific term.
SD refers to something that would fit on an NTSC/PAL television set with minimal to no problems. A resolution of 640x480 or something like 704×480 would be SD resolutions. HD would refer to resolutions that are comparable to 720i/720p/1080i/1080p.
What's hilarious is that even the next spin from Nintendo's going HD and they're regressing on something with a service that can't hope to provide more than a couple thousand at any major metropolitan area (An OC-192 will provide 6000 players peak with the service. OC-192's don't grow on trees and saying the ISP will provide it is...heh...entertaining.). And yet the industry that considers 250k units sold being mediocre is falling over themselves with this stupid service. As a tech demo it's nifty, no doubt about it. As a product, it can't scale, can't HOPE to, for it to be anything other than a nifty toy to show off to people to bilk them out of investment dollars, etc.
The "point" to OnLive is to move the game to a server that they can control so you can't "pirate" the game. It has NOTHING to do with what they're claiming it to be.
Heh...
I'm skeptical because of the brutal NUMBERS involved with this silly thing. In order for it to actually be remotely usable, you need to account for just how many people you can jam onto the pipe and there's this fixed peak value (which you MUST observe or things do go to hell in a handbasket immediately...) that is 1.5 mbits/sec for 640x480 type (SD) resolution and 5 mbits/sec for 1024x768 (HD) type resolution.
For SD resolutions, you can do...
30 people peak at T3 data rates.
103 people peak at OC-3 data rates.
414 people peak at OC-12 data rates.
1666 people peak at OC-48 data rates.
6000 people peak at OC-192 data rates.
Remind yourselves that this is SD resolution for starters. People drubbed the Wii for running with that resolution and while it was the runaway seller, there's a cruel reality with it all as well. The industry's used to having numbers like 250k sold as being only so-so as a run and a million plus as GoTY levels of sales. 6k's a paltry number of people to run with in a given area- and OC-192's are "godlike" bandwidth, not even remotely cheap ($20k/mo would be on the low-end of the pricing on that...), and it's all you can hope for for SD levels of resolution for a minimally credible number of people using the service. Putting it with the ISP is an entertaining direction that some will take it- especially in light of the above numbers basically choking off the pipe to the point that you're better off picking 3/4ths those numbers to ensure you've a smidge of headroom so you don't start losing traffic as the congestion algorithms beat you all to hell. They're already bitching about things like bittorrent, video-on-demand, and sites like Google...
It can't be fixed in a manner that'd scale well. And if anyone did these off the cuff calculations of things would see that it's not going to work. If you knew anything about how TCP/IP networking worked you'd end up with the same conclusions.
That would depend entirely upon the price they're charging for the repairs and whether people would be willing to pay it. If you've framed it in right, there's a business there that'd be viable for a while yet to come. It's just that businesses rarely frame it in right these days.
Heh... MOST gun manufacturers, if they're still in business and are either making the parts or can make them will service a gun, decades after it's made, for a price. Well, every one of them except the people making saturday night specials, that is.
Wanna bet big money on that? BNetd's no longer maintained by the original developers, who LOST BIG on the suit that Vivendi filed against their happy backsides. Sure it's lurking around- but if Activision so much as smells a big open rollout of that thing like it did previously, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will sue again over it.
The only reason you've got the server engines you've got is that either the server framework was open sourced or the company doesn't give a damn about you making multiplayer or matchmaker servers. If they did care, there's quite a bit they can do to stop them. BNetd's developers found out the hard way about that. If you've never been on the wrong side of a lawsuit, you wouldn't know and you'd be inclined to mouth off like this- but you'd better be sure of your legal standing and have deep pockets before doing so, otherwise someone might show you how wrong you can be about things.
Ah... But that's only with the "oooh...shiny..." stuff that the big-boys are making. The indie space is doing fine and well- and it's doing so well that it scraped up over a million dollars in a couple of days' time.
As long as there's programmable computers, there'll be a market. And there'll be machines you can add an application to for some time to come.
Everyone presumes that it'd be owned by the person paying the check.
This is largely wrong in most jurisdictions. Unless there is an explicit work-for-hire clause stating what gets assigned to whom as a result of work done, there is only an interest to access and use that is given to the employer. Without it being declared work-for-hire explicitly and without the assignment requirements stated up-front, they don't own ANYTHING.