familiarity may be worth $200 to a lot of people, but is $400 is $600? Linux ran pretty spiffy on my pentium 120 laptop with 48MB(maximum) ram many many years ago, when debian was say still a 1-2 cd install step. even with a nice little 1MB graphic chipset. the whole point is that in the ultra affordable laptop, you HAVE to run Linux, because Microsoft doesn't sell windows 3.11 anymore.
so let's see you can get a $600 'windows' laptop that has $400 worth of hardware that BARELY runs windows XP acceptably, and you can forget vista compatibility... or you can get a laptop with $150 worth of hardware that runs a specific variant of linux that is streamlined for the 'cheap' system hardware.
this is why sub $200 laptop projects are so dependent on Linux. If you streamline it and skip the modern Linux bloatware, you can probably make an even cheaper Linux laptop. India is focusing on trying to get a sub $20 piece of hardware that can be used as a 'school' computer, at that price point they're looking at little more than a cell phone, redesigned to run educational software, but that's not like it's missions impossible.
if you know what feature set you want to implement, it's really much easier to fix linux to work within your constraints, than to try to make everything work in 'windows ce'
so basically the only competitor to linux on the 'cheap laptop platform' is to make a windows ce device into a laptop... and i have to wonder if the WinCE license lets you run it on a laptop style device at all.
besides which, windows ce is only available from Microsoft (end users can't buy it) so you can't convert say a super cheap linux laptop into a win ce laptop unless you're the company selling it.
windows ce is popular for a windows based thin client (pda's aren't as popular as they once were) and some cell phones run CE, and you definitely could run ce on a stripped-down (hardware wise) windows based laptop, but then you loose all the advantages of open source software.
but realistically if these 'ultra cheap' laptops start coming out in mass quantities, windows CE is the only weapon Microsoft has to try to compete.
i would think that power steering systems in cars... would far outstrip the sales of the 'apple mighty mouse' you know, providing similar force feedback that say a rack and pinion naturally gives the driver.
one of the reasons why Piers Anthony is on my list of favorite authors is he understands that there are a limited number of original stories, so he doesn't let that get to him, rather than struggling to do something 'original' he focuses on making good story lines knowing full well it's going to draw from that familiar concepts of the past. he can make a whole novel on just a title! the struggle to be original is not one he's had as his decades of being an author has shown.
consider if you will how hard JRR Tolkien worked at creating 'something original' he had thousands upon thousands of pages of research material to produce one novel (the hobbit), and a trilogy sequel to that novel. his approach is clearly the harder approach, and if he didn't have his day job he'd never have made it as an author. personally i struggle both with quality story line, and originality which is why at my best I've made a few not so great short stories. I even know what i do wrong, and it's still nearly impossible for me to raise the bar, and write well.
frankly, this could make botnet installs easier to detect. afterall I'm not doing anything wrong, but i've also got a stack of cd's and dvd's i've labeled 'virus' or 'rootkit installer' that automagically install a rootkit EVEN on anti-virus/anti-rootkit protected systems.
would have been nice if the feds had been able to detect the online activities of said rootkit, tracked it down, and told my isp that my system had a rootkit, and thus my isp told me to 'fix that root kit or we'll disconnect your service' it would have saved me from losing almost 12 gb of files to a virus hackers got on my system because i was rooted...
i mean in that sense it doesn't worry me. would be nice if they were that savvy, but even with these setups they're NOT that savvy. so untold millions of people have botnet installers and rootkits on their computers, and the security business can't keep pace. i had to use linux to even attempt to extract the 'rootkit' installer track, and i'm still not sure i got the track, because windows software reports 4 tracks and linux only pulled 3 (windows only pulled 1, but that was probably my software)
really annoying i've tested the media several time, pop it in a pc even one with a full featured a/v and reboot, then wham you can tell it's got the root kit, because stuff like auto run that worked fine before is now disabled, or because on a multi user windows setup you can see 'screen saver' in the 'task manager' like an executable (not default behavior) and only if the screen saver has run a certain amount of time as another user.
the thing is though people tend to think alike. take for instance wal-mart. the same year that Sam Walton founded wal-mart, k-mart and target were founded by people/companies already in existence.
if business models were patentable it's possible that none of the three could have been created, because other companies had 'five and dime' store models, and would have patented the business models needed to create discount chain stores.
this is a prime reason to not allow business model patenting, you simply could kill off the future fortune 500 companies in the favor of the 'old blood' companies. don't bother arguing 'but the models will expire' after all Disney has kept steamboat willie from ever going 'public domain' if a company like wal-mart wanted to keep business model patents from expiring, politicians would be hard pressed to ignore the wants and desires of such a large and powerful corporation.
and actually, there are now 7 fortune 500 'discount chains/dollar stores' and there were quite a few regional or national 5 and dime that 'didn't get it' and stagnated while wal-mart killed off it's competitors.
are you kidding, with 55% packet loss, and 6165731.1 ms lag over 3 miles... i think the little thumb drive method is way easier. not to mention getting carrier pigeons to cross a couple hundred miles of ocean doesn't work very well either. plus carrier pigeons are really bandwidth restricted, they can at most carry.5 ounces of microfilm which then requires a microfilm reader... thumb drives just work in any usb enabled pc, even ones running linux, and you can get a whole month of blog sites, interesting news etc all in one package with a thumb drive. if they're relatives have the cash they can even send feature length films on thumb drives (i've seen 8 GB modules, in divx/xvid format that's a lot of movie)
ahh well, i also have a firewall that blocks all the badies, i didn't say i relied on it, i said i couldn't live without it. people on slashdot often times have very long urls that hide say goatse links. and last i checked, yahoo mail doesn't run javascript. they also (optionally) block the loading of say 1x1 pixels in e-mails, or all loading of pictures from urls etc.
umm aluminum is the most common metal on earth... the only things more common on earth are Oxygen and silicon. there is less carbon than aluminum man... your book says '200 years left' what a shoddy scientist, that's just the projected lifespan of the mines we are operating, there is WAY more aluminum out there way more... because of how light aluminum is it's almost all in the crust. so it's all fairly accessible as deep mining techniques are improved there are countless deposits of aluminum around the world and under the oceans, endless endless amounts of the stuff.
the problem is it takes a lot of electricity to make it, we might not have the energy in 200 years to keep making aluminum. 8.13% of the earth's crust is aluminum. not bauxite, aluminum, it is in the bauxite, but the percentage number is only the amount of aluminum in the bauxite.
mine was similar, only it claimed they were doing a fraud investigation about fraudulent use to my account.
they use the images and everything it looks exactly like a paypal e-mail, only the hyper link when you hover over it says a different website than in the email message. (they're doing a simple html trick, which is always the first thing i look for)
I've seen them do the same thing with say, yahoo mail login sites, etc. one of my less savvy friends got her IM name stolen for use sending IM spam.
safari is bass acwards to not show the real url on a tool bar! i couldn't live a day without that feature.
when I was having trouble with botnet software, the comodo guys recommended Dr. web Cureit which is an anti-virus made in russia... (that computer couldn't even download it though since the software fire walled the site) I eventually just nuked the system with dban, and re-flashed the bioses (they were bad see my Journal) one I switched to linux, one i kept off the net, until i can properly re backup all my old data, and one is clean and sp3ed, I'm hesitant to restore data to that system until i can check the discs though
so apparently in post soviet russia your anti-virus subscription is your anti-botnet subscription too!
I was looking on the site that 'Tennessee' uses, 'overdrive.com' and it seems that many states have deals with overdrive.com, but although Wisconsin public libraries have a deal with them, Not My library association... in my state they did it regionally, rather than state wide, sucks for me....
personally, I'm waiting for the day when public libraries offer books in digital format.
as someone else has said certain university libraries already do this for students.
i live in a a small town, and they have limited library funds, virtually every magazine in the library is 'sponsored' by an individual or a company in town, and the books they buy don't tend to be in the genera i prefer. when major cities are able to digitize vast libraries of books, then rural small town libraries will be able to take advantage of this vast knowledge of wealth, by simply accessing the book that a well funded library was able to purchase for digitization, without having to buy a copy of their own.
even if you can only access these books online at that local library, all I'd have to do is get a cheap wireless enabled laptop, plug into the library's power, and read books as long as i wanted. (if you use their computers your time is limited, but not if you use their wi-fi)
even if they locked up the digital books with drm and such, this would vastly improve access to books in rural America. instead of having to go on a wait list to ship the book from a library that is in partnership with your local library, you could just download it. basically instead of your local library having 10 or 20 thousand books on hand with maybe 200,000 thousand on inter library loan you could download and read one of millions of books... bandwidth is way cheaper than the gas to do Interlibrary loans.
and yeah since it could be used on library owned pcs, then yes it would be accessible to even the poorest Americans. i think that ultimately its the best way for libraries to go. having to keep books on hand is costly, even if people donate books to libraries, many public libraries are too small to shelve many books. this takes away the problem of how to give people more access to reading materials without having to store them all, or to have to build brand new libraries in many counties that don't have the cash for it...
best of all, if it's electronic you don't need to 'return' it, although if they have drm policies you may need to prove that the file was deleted... i don't really care about that, it would make me very happy to learn i could read all sorts of books people have recommended, or that i thought i might want to read...without having to wait a week for an interlibrary loan and then have to return it a week later...
well, i am not a congress person, so it's not my job to write long complicated bills explaining how laws apply and to whom... so i may have simplified things, but still.. the reason software patents are opposed is because of the negative effect on open source. take that away, and you have a few capitalists who know they could make more money if software wasn't patentable.
the man who invented the system of bracing mines so they wouldn't collapse declined to patent his technology, and subsequently virtually every mining company in the world adopted his method withing a few years... god only knows how many mine collapses were prevented because the man wasn't greedy, and firmly insisted on disseminating the technology without patents.
he passed up on making millions of dollars, but if you believe in Buddhism he earned far more karma for improving the lives of miners, than he could have ever earned wealth with his invention.
so, then say pixar is able to produce digital movies with a lower overhead than say if they had to license 20,000 copies of adobe software to do their rendering... this is not really a bad thing, although adobe would have you believe that it is, because then pixar can produce more pictures, without investing as much money in them, so they will have less 'pressure' to produce 'mass market appeal' products. and since they make more money on the mass market appeal projects, they can use that money to produce more films, at lower risk...
since film and tv are one of Americas few areas where we export vastly more than we import, this is a good thing for the us economy. even if one company finds itself trying to justify why people should buy their product when something equally useful exists in open source...
software doesn't have to 'be sold' to benefit the greater good, you know... kind of like 'Christmas carolers' would you expect the riaa to collect license fees for people singing in the cold, wintry streets to create merriment? seriously, we don't have to pay for everything we do for it to be 'good' for the economy.
i remember in recounts they kept having to 'reject' dead peoples voting ballots, but how many of those 'dead' people were simply mistakenly declared dead by the SSA? i wager a good many of them are...
not to mention that when the 'wrong' person is declared dead, that 'means' there is usually a 'dead' person who Has not yet been declared dead. so that undead person can still receive say, social security benefits, which a family member who had been in charge of that persons finances (a representative payee, for instance) would likely be in no hurry to rectify the mistake....
basically the reason why there is a difference is that, software isn't entirely developed by 'for profit' entities. Consider linux, linus torvalds has never made a dime for all the hours he's put into the linux kernel. instead here today he can go around and see all kinds of people like kde, gnome, firefox, debian, ubuntu, etc making open source linux software simply because nobody has to pay anyone for the use of this software.
software patents AT the very least, should NOT APPLY TO OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS. although some companies might rather their employees not help open source projects, there should be some way to to tell the difference between someone who happens to work for a company developing certain software who 'uses the same code' in open source, with permission from their employer, vs someone who does so, without permission, and the person who did so should bear the brunt, rather than the project... at least in a perfect world.
if they made that one little exception in the law, i have a feeling that there wouldn't be nearly as many people crying about removing software patents. i mean really people don't go around making new ways to vacuum up dust to just to give them away free to everybody they meet, but in software there are people who DO because the cost of copying software is nil, zip, zero and zilch.
business models it just becomes insane, because it's hard enough to try to come up with a business that will succeed, having finally built one that makes money only to find out the way you ran your business was patented is well frankly disgusting. think of it, would Culver's be able to sell burgers and 'frozen custard' if McDonald's had been awarded a patent on the 'fast food burger selling business model'?
there are many many restaurant chains that have only recently been created, consider Famous Dave's he spent 30 or so years trying to come up with various businesses, all of them failed, EXCEPT when he decided to buy a run down resort and restaurant in Hayward Wisconsin.. using his own bbq sauce and having from all those years traveling knew what the best bbq shops did to make their meat cook properly, and now he's a millionaire. none of that would have been possible if 100 years ago someone had 'patented' the business model for a 'barbecue restaurant.'
i think fox is run by the guy who kept changing the time slot of 'quantum leap' over on another network that's done this kinda ridiculous stuff before...
i mean naruto and bleach don't have to deal with stuff like this, the only time slot changes are special 1 hour episodes, and of course when naruto went from the evening to prime time.
Smallville fortunately has never had it's time slot played with, as best as i can remember neither cheers nor star trek the next generation had to deal with the 'time slot shuffle'
the time slot shuffle usually kills off a show, and to be totally honest internal network politics is the most likely reason why stupid networks kill off profitable shows. 'oh you cant kiss the butt of the president of this network then Die' is what i imagine something like what happens when a show can't contractually be canceled, but they want it to suffer bad enough that can cancel it at the next option to do so..
By 'pirates' do you mean online banking, online shopping, and logging into web-mail or logging into web fourms. or logging into blog sites... not to mention ssh...
blocking encrypted data isn't realistic, now tallying encrypted traffic, and designing a router the lowers the network priority of people who exceed, say 15 MB of encrypted traffic in one hour... and shuts them off completely if they exceed 100 MB an hour... well that's a whole different ball of wax.
but then people can't effectively use vpn either, at least it's a smaller price to pay.
the trabant is the first car to use recycled materials (wool and the plastic) but has the worst vehicle emissions... but it's fuel economy wasn't half bad, and people kept them running an average of 28 years. what car enthusiast wouldn't want a trabant?
CZ may be fine for wife, but Moissanite is a scientists best friend. since it's about as hard as a diamond, it can be used for 'hardness testing' it's also a semiconductor of temperature and electricity, making it perfect for high-stress electronics, where silicon would break... it's also sold as a jewel.
I'm absolutely certain my drive is incompatible. 3 dvd blanks was all i was willing to waste in attempts to get dvd burning to work, since usb hd support is great, i just burn my dvds in windows. i even did a 'speed' test, and my hd was able to do 16X dvd speed reading, and tried to burn at 8x speed, which coastered...
I'm assuming you're using dual-layer media, but technically, bd-rom and such support Dual sided, dual layer media, as dvd also supports. of course finding writable dual layer dual sided media is different, but assuming you used standard manufacturing of pressed blue ray drives, you could use dual sided dual layer media. that effectively doubles both your figures for bd-rom and dvd-rom (unless you considered the dual sided capabilities i didn't check your dvd numbers)
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familiarity may be worth $200 to a lot of people, but is $400 is $600? Linux ran pretty spiffy on my pentium 120 laptop with 48MB(maximum) ram many many years ago, when debian was say still a 1-2 cd install step. even with a nice little 1MB graphic chipset. the whole point is that in the ultra affordable laptop, you HAVE to run Linux, because Microsoft doesn't sell windows 3.11 anymore.
so let's see you can get a $600 'windows' laptop that has $400 worth of hardware that BARELY runs windows XP acceptably, and you can forget vista compatibility... or you can get a laptop with $150 worth of hardware that runs a specific variant of linux that is streamlined for the 'cheap' system hardware.
this is why sub $200 laptop projects are so dependent on Linux. If you streamline it and skip the modern Linux bloatware, you can probably make an even cheaper Linux laptop. India is focusing on trying to get a sub $20 piece of hardware that can be used as a 'school' computer, at that price point they're looking at little more than a cell phone, redesigned to run educational software, but that's not like it's missions impossible.
if you know what feature set you want to implement, it's really much easier to fix linux to work within your constraints, than to try to make everything work in 'windows ce'
so basically the only competitor to linux on the 'cheap laptop platform' is to make a windows ce device into a laptop... and i have to wonder if the WinCE license lets you run it on a laptop style device at all.
besides which, windows ce is only available from Microsoft (end users can't buy it) so you can't convert say a super cheap linux laptop into a win ce laptop unless you're the company selling it.
windows ce is popular for a windows based thin client (pda's aren't as popular as they once were) and some cell phones run CE, and you definitely could run ce on a stripped-down (hardware wise) windows based laptop, but then you loose all the advantages of open source software.
but realistically if these 'ultra cheap' laptops start coming out in mass quantities, windows CE is the only weapon Microsoft has to try to compete.
i would think that power steering systems in cars... would far outstrip the sales of the 'apple mighty mouse' you know, providing similar force feedback that say a rack and pinion naturally gives the driver.
one of the reasons why Piers Anthony is on my list of favorite authors is he understands that there are a limited number of original stories, so he doesn't let that get to him, rather than struggling to do something 'original' he focuses on making good story lines knowing full well it's going to draw from that familiar concepts of the past. he can make a whole novel on just a title! the struggle to be original is not one he's had as his decades of being an author has shown.
consider if you will how hard JRR Tolkien worked at creating 'something original' he had thousands upon thousands of pages of research material to produce one novel (the hobbit), and a trilogy sequel to that novel. his approach is clearly the harder approach, and if he didn't have his day job he'd never have made it as an author. personally i struggle both with quality story line, and originality which is why at my best I've made a few not so great short stories. I even know what i do wrong, and it's still nearly impossible for me to raise the bar, and write well.
frankly, this could make botnet installs easier to detect. afterall I'm not doing anything wrong, but i've also got a stack of cd's and dvd's i've labeled 'virus' or 'rootkit installer' that automagically install a rootkit EVEN on anti-virus/anti-rootkit protected systems.
would have been nice if the feds had been able to detect the online activities of said rootkit, tracked it down, and told my isp that my system had a rootkit, and thus my isp told me to 'fix that root kit or we'll disconnect your service' it would have saved me from losing almost 12 gb of files to a virus hackers got on my system because i was rooted...
i mean in that sense it doesn't worry me. would be nice if they were that savvy, but even with these setups they're NOT that savvy. so untold millions of people have botnet installers and rootkits on their computers, and the security business can't keep pace. i had to use linux to even attempt to extract the 'rootkit' installer track, and i'm still not sure i got the track, because windows software reports 4 tracks and linux only pulled 3 (windows only pulled 1, but that was probably my software)
really annoying i've tested the media several time, pop it in a pc even one with a full featured a/v and reboot, then wham you can tell it's got the root kit, because stuff like auto run that worked fine before is now disabled, or because on a multi user windows setup you can see 'screen saver' in the 'task manager' like an executable (not default behavior) and only if the screen saver has run a certain amount of time as another user.
the thing is though people tend to think alike. take for instance wal-mart. the same year that Sam Walton founded wal-mart, k-mart and target were founded by people/companies already in existence.
if business models were patentable it's possible that none of the three could have been created, because other companies had 'five and dime' store models, and would have patented the business models needed to create discount chain stores.
this is a prime reason to not allow business model patenting, you simply could kill off the future fortune 500 companies in the favor of the 'old blood' companies. don't bother arguing 'but the models will expire' after all Disney has kept steamboat willie from ever going 'public domain' if a company like wal-mart wanted to keep business model patents from expiring, politicians would be hard pressed to ignore the wants and desires of such a large and powerful corporation.
and actually, there are now 7 fortune 500 'discount chains/dollar stores' and there were quite a few regional or national 5 and dime that 'didn't get it' and stagnated while wal-mart killed off it's competitors.
are you kidding, with 55% packet loss, and 6165731.1 ms lag over 3 miles... i think the little thumb drive method is way easier. not to mention getting carrier pigeons to cross a couple hundred miles of ocean doesn't work very well either. plus carrier pigeons are really bandwidth restricted, they can at most carry .5 ounces of microfilm which then requires a microfilm reader... thumb drives just work in any usb enabled pc, even ones running linux, and you can get a whole month of blog sites, interesting news etc all in one package with a thumb drive. if they're relatives have the cash they can even send feature length films on thumb drives (i've seen 8 GB modules, in divx/xvid format that's a lot of movie)
ahh well, i also have a firewall that blocks all the badies, i didn't say i relied on it, i said i couldn't live without it. people on slashdot often times have very long urls that hide say goatse links. and last i checked, yahoo mail doesn't run javascript. they also (optionally) block the loading of say 1x1 pixels in e-mails, or all loading of pictures from urls etc.
umm aluminum is the most common metal on earth... the only things more common on earth are Oxygen and silicon. there is less carbon than aluminum man... your book says '200 years left' what a shoddy scientist, that's just the projected lifespan of the mines we are operating, there is WAY more aluminum out there way more... because of how light aluminum is it's almost all in the crust. so it's all fairly accessible as deep mining techniques are improved there are countless deposits of aluminum around the world and under the oceans, endless endless amounts of the stuff.
the problem is it takes a lot of electricity to make it, we might not have the energy in 200 years to keep making aluminum. 8.13% of the earth's crust is aluminum. not bauxite, aluminum, it is in the bauxite, but the percentage number is only the amount of aluminum in the bauxite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium
http://www.fightidentitytheft.com/paypal_scam.html
mine was similar, only it claimed they were doing a fraud investigation about fraudulent use to my account.
they use the images and everything it looks exactly like a paypal e-mail, only the hyper link when you hover over it says a different website than in the email message. (they're doing a simple html trick, which is always the first thing i look for)
I've seen them do the same thing with say, yahoo mail login sites, etc. one of my less savvy friends got her IM name stolen for use sending IM spam.
safari is bass acwards to not show the real url on a tool bar! i couldn't live a day without that feature.
when I was having trouble with botnet software, the comodo guys recommended Dr. web Cureit which is an anti-virus made in russia... (that computer couldn't even download it though since the software fire walled the site) I eventually just nuked the system with dban, and re-flashed the bioses (they were bad see my Journal) one I switched to linux, one i kept off the net, until i can properly re backup all my old data, and one is clean and sp3ed, I'm hesitant to restore data to that system until i can check the discs though
so apparently in post soviet russia your anti-virus subscription is your anti-botnet subscription too!
I was looking on the site that 'Tennessee' uses, 'overdrive.com' and it seems that many states have deals with overdrive.com, but although Wisconsin public libraries have a deal with them, Not My library association... in my state they did it regionally, rather than state wide, sucks for me....
First program like this I've heard of, makes me wish i lived in Tennessee.
personally, I'm waiting for the day when public libraries offer books in digital format.
as someone else has said certain university libraries already do this for students.
i live in a a small town, and they have limited library funds, virtually every magazine in the library is 'sponsored' by an individual or a company in town, and the books they buy don't tend to be in the genera i prefer. when major cities are able to digitize vast libraries of books, then rural small town libraries will be able to take advantage of this vast knowledge of wealth, by simply accessing the book that a well funded library was able to purchase for digitization, without having to buy a copy of their own.
even if you can only access these books online at that local library, all I'd have to do is get a cheap wireless enabled laptop, plug into the library's power, and read books as long as i wanted. (if you use their computers your time is limited, but not if you use their wi-fi)
even if they locked up the digital books with drm and such, this would vastly improve access to books in rural America. instead of having to go on a wait list to ship the book from a library that is in partnership with your local library, you could just download it. basically instead of your local library having 10 or 20 thousand books on hand with maybe 200,000 thousand on inter library loan you could download and read one of millions of books... bandwidth is way cheaper than the gas to do Interlibrary loans.
and yeah since it could be used on library owned pcs, then yes it would be accessible to even the poorest Americans. i think that ultimately its the best way for libraries to go. having to keep books on hand is costly, even if people donate books to libraries, many public libraries are too small to shelve many books. this takes away the problem of how to give people more access to reading materials without having to store them all, or to have to build brand new libraries in many counties that don't have the cash for it...
best of all, if it's electronic you don't need to 'return' it, although if they have drm policies you may need to prove that the file was deleted... i don't really care about that, it would make me very happy to learn i could read all sorts of books people have recommended, or that i thought i might want to read...without having to wait a week for an interlibrary loan and then have to return it a week later...
well, i am not a congress person, so it's not my job to write long complicated bills explaining how laws apply and to whom... so i may have simplified things, but still.. the reason software patents are opposed is because of the negative effect on open source. take that away, and you have a few capitalists who know they could make more money if software wasn't patentable.
the man who invented the system of bracing mines so they wouldn't collapse declined to patent his technology, and subsequently virtually every mining company in the world adopted his method withing a few years... god only knows how many mine collapses were prevented because the man wasn't greedy, and firmly insisted on disseminating the technology without patents.
he passed up on making millions of dollars, but if you believe in Buddhism he earned far more karma for improving the lives of miners, than he could have ever earned wealth with his invention.
so, then say pixar is able to produce digital movies with a lower overhead than say if they had to license 20,000 copies of adobe software to do their rendering... this is not really a bad thing, although adobe would have you believe that it is, because then pixar can produce more pictures, without investing as much money in them, so they will have less 'pressure' to produce 'mass market appeal' products. and since they make more money on the mass market appeal projects, they can use that money to produce more films, at lower risk...
since film and tv are one of Americas few areas where we export vastly more than we import, this is a good thing for the us economy. even if one company finds itself trying to justify why people should buy their product when something equally useful exists in open source...
software doesn't have to 'be sold' to benefit the greater good, you know... kind of like 'Christmas carolers' would you expect the riaa to collect license fees for people singing in the cold, wintry streets to create merriment? seriously, we don't have to pay for everything we do for it to be 'good' for the economy.
i remember in recounts they kept having to 'reject' dead peoples voting ballots, but how many of those 'dead' people were simply mistakenly declared dead by the SSA? i wager a good many of them are...
not to mention that when the 'wrong' person is declared dead, that 'means' there is usually a 'dead' person who Has not yet been declared dead. so that undead person can still receive say, social security benefits, which a family member who had been in charge of that persons finances (a representative payee, for instance) would likely be in no hurry to rectify the mistake....
basically the reason why there is a difference is that, software isn't entirely developed by 'for profit' entities. Consider linux, linus torvalds has never made a dime for all the hours he's put into the linux kernel. instead here today he can go around and see all kinds of people like kde, gnome, firefox, debian, ubuntu, etc making open source linux software simply because nobody has to pay anyone for the use of this software.
software patents AT the very least, should NOT APPLY TO OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS. although some companies might rather their employees not help open source projects, there should be some way to to tell the difference between someone who happens to work for a company developing certain software who 'uses the same code' in open source, with permission from their employer, vs someone who does so, without permission, and the person who did so should bear the brunt, rather than the project... at least in a perfect world.
if they made that one little exception in the law, i have a feeling that there wouldn't be nearly as many people crying about removing software patents. i mean really people don't go around making new ways to vacuum up dust to just to give them away free to everybody they meet, but in software there are people who DO because the cost of copying software is nil, zip, zero and zilch.
business models it just becomes insane, because it's hard enough to try to come up with a business that will succeed, having finally built one that makes money only to find out the way you ran your business was patented is well frankly disgusting. think of it, would Culver's be able to sell burgers and 'frozen custard' if McDonald's had been awarded a patent on the 'fast food burger selling business model'?
there are many many restaurant chains that have only recently been created, consider Famous Dave's he spent 30 or so years trying to come up with various businesses, all of them failed, EXCEPT when he decided to buy a run down resort and restaurant in Hayward Wisconsin.. using his own bbq sauce and having from all those years traveling knew what the best bbq shops did to make their meat cook properly, and now he's a millionaire. none of that would have been possible if 100 years ago someone had 'patented' the business model for a 'barbecue restaurant.'
i think fox is run by the guy who kept changing the time slot of 'quantum leap' over on another network that's done this kinda ridiculous stuff before...
i mean naruto and bleach don't have to deal with stuff like this, the only time slot changes are special 1 hour episodes, and of course when naruto went from the evening to prime time.
Smallville fortunately has never had it's time slot played with, as best as i can remember neither cheers nor star trek the next generation had to deal with the 'time slot shuffle'
the time slot shuffle usually kills off a show, and to be totally honest internal network politics is the most likely reason why stupid networks kill off profitable shows. 'oh you cant kiss the butt of the president of this network then Die' is what i imagine something like what happens when a show can't contractually be canceled, but they want it to suffer bad enough that can cancel it at the next option to do so..
the ones that failed i bought um 3-4 months ago, i also bought some recently (from newegg) i don't have any media id programs.
i have bought over 300 tdk discs i've had maybe 3 coasters in that time...
i always verify the data is burned, (with the burning software) and usually manually (by accessing the data stored)
By 'pirates' do you mean online banking, online shopping, and logging into web-mail or logging into web fourms. or logging into blog sites... not to mention ssh...
blocking encrypted data isn't realistic, now tallying encrypted traffic, and designing a router the lowers the network priority of people who exceed, say 15 MB of encrypted traffic in one hour... and shuts them off completely if they exceed 100 MB an hour... well that's a whole different ball of wax.
but then people can't effectively use vpn either, at least it's a smaller price to pay.
the trabant is the first car to use recycled materials (wool and the plastic) but has the worst vehicle emissions... but it's fuel economy wasn't half bad, and people kept them running an average of 28 years. what car enthusiast wouldn't want a trabant?
CZ may be fine for wife, but Moissanite is a scientists best friend. since it's about as hard as a diamond, it can be used for 'hardness testing' it's also a semiconductor of temperature and electricity, making it perfect for high-stress electronics, where silicon would break... it's also sold as a jewel.
I'm absolutely certain my drive is incompatible. 3 dvd blanks was all i was willing to waste in attempts to get dvd burning to work, since usb hd support is great, i just burn my dvds in windows. i even did a 'speed' test, and my hd was able to do 16X dvd speed reading, and tried to burn at 8x speed, which coastered...
I'm assuming you're using dual-layer media, but technically, bd-rom and such support Dual sided, dual layer media, as dvd also supports. of course finding writable dual layer dual sided media is different, but assuming you used standard manufacturing of pressed blue ray drives, you could use dual sided dual layer media. that effectively doubles both your figures for bd-rom and dvd-rom (unless you considered the dual sided capabilities i didn't check your dvd numbers)