If piracy skyrockets, you better believe it will be added back in. If you don't want content owners reacting to the thievery of their material, you should tell the pirates to stop taking stuff without paying for it. It's that simple.
Except that it'll take the actual pirates all of 30 minutes to defeat every single copy protection system the content owners can put in place. Meanwhile, regular people who want to watch the latest movie they bought from best buy, only to find that the $10,000 entertainment system they bought a year ago is inadequate, will get screwed.
To get my Windows desktop on my new wireless network, I plugged a PCI wireless card, followed the instructions on the driver install CD, and it worked.
To get the same box onto my wireless network via Ubuntu, I tried the built-in network wizard thing and it didn't recognize my card. I spent a couple hours messing around with ndis wrappers and online faqs and console commands I didn't understand, and although eventually I got the system to recognize the card, it STILL won't go online. (We're not talking about some esoteric card, either; it's a Linksys 802.11g PCI card connecting to a Linksys router with "excellent" signal reception.)
Hmm.. My experience has been slightly different. To get a windows system on a wireless network, I plug in the PCMCIA wireless card and wait a while for windows to realize it doesn't support the card out of the box. Then I dig around my computer junk box for the CD that came with the wireless card when I bought it 4 years ago. Hmm, it seems to have gone missing. So I get on my linux machine, go to the xircom (now intel) website, hunt around for about 20 minutes and finally track down the drivers. Burn them to CD with nautilus and pop the CD in the windows machine. click my way through several dozen dialog boxes filled with legalese, plus warnings about how microsoft doesn't trust the drivers i'm about to install and that they may destroy my computer, reboot two or three times, and bam, I'm on the internet. Only about an hour, start to finish.
On Ubuntu, I plug the card into the side of the machine. That's it. Linux knows about the hardware I just plugged in (as it does for about 99% of the hardware I've encountered), automatically installed the drivers without even a single dialog box, and started looking for a DHCP lease within seconds. Less than 5 seconds after I plug the card in I'm on the internet.
Plus, if I understand correctly, you'd pay a local tax in PA at about 1%, so it's 4% vs. 5%.
Sales tax: 6% vs. 5% in MA. PA, however, has exemptions for food, clothing, textbooks, and drugs; only exception in MA is food, and judging by my grocery receipts, it's doesn't apply to all food items. Since most of my purchases are food, clothing, or textbooks, PA wins this one.
No sales tax on clothes in MA either. There is sales tax on prepared or "ready to eat" foods in both PA and MA, though. In addition, some counties in PA impose an additional 1% sales tax.
Minimum auto insurance is for lower liability limits and is cheaper in PA; gas is also cheaper. The move cost me about $100 more per annum in insurance.
Interesting; with what I was paying in upstate NY with a national carrier for the lowest possible liability insurace, I could get full comprehensive insurance on both the old car I had in NY plus the new car I bought shortly after moving to MA. In addition, gas is $0.25/gal cheaper in MA then it is in NY.
Let's not forget the annual car tax in MA.
Yep, that's annoying. But still, overall, you're paying less taxes in MA than you would be paying in many other places in the US. PA is, apparently, not one of those places.
I also see you tactfully didn't address the issue of Massholes.
There are assholes everywhere. MA is no different.
I have a choice of two companies for car insurance--because most insurance companies refuse to do business in MA. Why? There is heavy regulation of auto insurance by the state. Not insuring my car, of course, is not an option. It is a financial risk I'm willing to take, but the nanny-state says I can't.
Very, very few states will allow you to have an uninsured registered vehicle; that's nothing special. However, MA's auto insurance regulations, which limit the cost that insurace companies can charge you, are saving you money. People in many other states (including every other state in the northeast) pay significantly more than MA. When I moved from NY to MA, my auto insurace costs halved *and* I'm getting better coverage.
I'm a graduate student earning a pittance of a stipend. The Federal Government seems to think that I needn't pay taxes for the next few years, as I've always gotten a full refund. But what about the People's Republic of Massachusetts? I get a refund of about 20% of what has been withheld from my paycheck. Incidentally, on my pay stub, "MA withholding" is typically about 85-90% of "FED Withholding."
Your taxes are, again, lower than most states in the US, and lower than any other state in the northeast minus New Hampshire. I'm guessing that you just haven't lived anywhere else. Everyone gets their money taken by the government; that's what governments are for.
I don't buy from NYC area sellers. I include New Jersey, Rockland County, and Long Island in that zone. In fact, if I can't get it from somewhere on the left coast, I generally won't buy. FYI, I was raised in Queens.
I'd be careful with places on the west coast too. After two or three bad experiences with places shipping me defective computer parts and refusing to take returns (forcing me to issue chargebacks through my credit card company), I won't buy from any internet retailer with a southern California mailing address. I prefer to buy from someplace local (New England & New York, excluding Brooklyn and Queens), or a known reputable place like Amazon.
Well, that webpage seems to think that my IP (66.92.86.82) is in midtown Manhattan, when it's actually in a suburb 10 miles northwest of Boston. On what sort of scale is 210 miles "decently small"?
More seriously, Vonage knows where I live because I told them when I signed up, and they're properly telling the 911 call center here my address.
Jim Bob goes to Staples, picks a wireless NIC, slaps it in his WinXP machine, inserts the install CD, and that's about all there is to it. Until Linux has that same kind of experience, it will not be mainstream and it will not take over the world.
I don't get it. Why is the CD that important? I like the current approach where I buy a wireless NIC from staples, slap it in my linux machine, and it works all by itself 5 seconds later without me having to do a damn thing. Then I don't need to keep track of both the hardware I bought and the handful of CDs it came with.
I honestly haven't encountered hardware that didn't work under linux, perfectly, right out of the box, in about 4 years. Network cards, printers, cameras, sound cards, whatever it may be, there are already open source drivers out there for anything I buy, and they're already included in my Debian/Ubuntu kernel. I buy a lot of hardware, too. On the other hand, I occasionally try the same hardware under windows, and it never works without the driver disks. The driver disks that got thrown out with the packaging. So I'm left scouring the internet for driver downloads. This is especially fun for network cards.
So if the airbags are triggered, the insurance company buys me a brand new car? And it's clearly a no-fault incident?
Insurance companies don't buy people brand new cars. When you "total" a car, they give you a check for the current value of the car minus your deductable, not what it'd cost to replace it with a brand new one. Cars depreciate *very* quickly within the first year or so.
Basically, if you drive a $30,000 car off the lot and 30 seconds later you're hit by an SUV or something, you're spending another 3 to 5 grand to get into another new car. More, if you drove it around for a few months before the accident.
Maybe these people should be protesting the high income tax, MA pays 5.3% income tax total, PA (where you live) pays 4% combined state and local. Not a huge difference
or sales tax
Sales tax is 5% in MA, 6% in PA.
or high usage fees, or excessive regulation.
Overall, MA and PA residents pay about the same in taxes (MA 9.8%, PA 9.7%.)
Compared to other near by states (New York and New England), only New Hampshire residents pay less in taxes.
If anyone should be protesting high taxes, it should be New York residents under Republican Governer George Pataki.
ORBS, and its later reincarnation, ORBZ, also weren't exactly the nicest players on the field.
ORBZ.org and ORBS had nearly nothing to do with one another. When ORBS went away, an ISP Penguinhosting.net, which was completely unassociated with ORBS in every way, decided to sponsor a new RBL to protect its customers, ORBZ. The listing criteria was completely different; only functioning open relays and open proxies were listed, and it only ever listed individual IP addresses, never netblocks. ORBZ went away because people were upset by unprovoked system/network testing, not because it listed someone improperly.
This articleon the death of ORBZ has some more interesting points regarding the controversy surrounding these lists.
And it seems to have absolutely none of it's facts straight.
"Cummins started to refer to the new site as ORBZ." Paul Cummins never had anything to do with ORBZ, nor did Alan Brown.
" Laurie Akins, newly installed president of the non-profit anti-spam outfit SpamCon Foundation, said the code changes necessary to correct the bug was "trivial," but an error that Gulliver, for one reason or another, was unwilling to correct."
The bug wasn't Ian Gulliver's to correct; It was Lotus's, and they corrected and released a patch for it nearly a year before the incident happened.
I have yet to hear an iPod owner say, "It's a hassle to use, but damn if it doesn't look cool." Have you? Or are you just pulling your stereotypes of iPod owners out of your posterior?
I'm not an iPod owner, but I have used them on multiple occasions and for the life of me, I can't figure the interface out. I have a Rio Karma, whose interface I was able to pick up in about 5 seconds, but with the iPod I've always felt that it was a guessing game as to what was going to happen whenever I pushed a button. Apple could learn a thing or two by looking at the much more intuitive interface on the Karma. The iPod does, however, look pretty cool.
See, what people don't understand is we're mid-way on a journey between "paying" and "everything is free". So, right now low-quality is free and high-quality is paid for. When we finish the journey, high quality will be free and available to everyone.
Actually, with regards to television, it's the reverse. I personally can't legally watch/pay for the TV shows I enjoy in HDTV because the area in which I live has no broadcast HDTV stations, and no real availability of HDTV content via cable. In addition, I don't own an HDTV tuner (I would if there was content available.)
But I can download HDTV copies of the shows I like shortly after they air for free, and watch them on an LCD screen that all but the most expensive TVs can't touch quality-wise.
I do, however, continue to pay for cable TV for things like news and older syndicated content that isn't available in higher quality online. I also have a subscription to blockbuster's DVD rental service to watch movies I'm interested in. I think I'd easily pay a similar (or higher) fee for legal downloadable HDTV television shows.
My school had Macs, which we learned on, and later on I realized that it was a very bad idea. We learned on Macs and then got out into the "real world" where Mac skills were nearly useless. 95% of the market was IBM-compatibles.
Man, I know. Schools are always teaching useless skills like that. For example, when I was in school, a lot of work was done in pencil. But when I got to the real world, they were using pens! pens! I had to throw out everything I learned and start from scratch.
Seriously, learning how to point and click your way around the MacOS wasn't the point of working with computers in school. You were there to learn concepts and general skills, not how to use a specific tool. The tool shouldn't have made a difference, and if it did, you didn't actually learn anything.
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." Robert Anton Wilson
I'm sure this sig of yours seems profound to you, but if you can go 20 years without changing a single idea or opinion, you fit the very definition of a conservative.
These are not Windows machines. *nix does a much better job on ram, so a 256M is ~= to 512M on a windows box.
You don't have a clue of what you're talking about, do you?
Macs gobble RAM. A G4 running OS 10.3 isn't even usable until you've got 512 MB of RAM in the thing. I'd say the normal amount of RAM in a G4 based Mac these days is about 1 GB. Workstations and servers (G5 towers/Xserves) get at least 2 GB.
As to running Linux on a PowerBook... why? GNU tools are available in there, it runs *NIX, and it has a hell of a nice GUI.
Yea, because what works for you, works for everyone, right? OS X isn't for everyone. I own a mac and can't stand the thing; I use my thinkpad running debian every day while the mac collects dust.
They have an OBLIGATION to enforce the laws that protect you and your property from thieves and intruders.
The police really only care about two types of crime: Violent crimes and crimes for which they can impose fines. If your car gets stolen or your home robbed, you can count on the police to fill out a report for you to give to your insurance company and not much more. If they happen upon your stuff while looking for people to fine, they'll hold onto it until it's thoroughly inconvenient and you've had to buy new stuff, and then you just might get it back. Or not. They can really hold onto property as long as they want.
Don't believe me? Ask anyone who has ever had a car stolen.
I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first.
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
The problem I have with gmail is that I get a lot of reports and such mailed to me nightly from servers I manage. With evolution, I can search through them quickly and easily and manage messages by the hundreds. Gmail limits you to working with 50 messages at a time. The last time I logged into my Gmail account, I had ~2000 messages in the inbox and wanted to sort through them. In evolution, I could just type some search terms into the search box and filter out certain messages, deleting or archiving them as I choose. Gmail wanted me to wade through 40 pages of message listings to do the same thing. No thanks.
Beyond that, everyone is going crazy over this "Innovative conversation view", which has been in just about every decent mail client for longer than I can remember. Except Google managed to screw it up by not giving you a proper message tree to see how messages relate to one another, they just show you every related message in one big list. Not usable at all.
Maybe I'm just weird in that I'm subscribed to a lot of high volume discussion lists and a handle a lot of mail over the course of the day, but I find gmail to be completely unacceptable as a replacement for a real mail client. To give you some perspective, I forwarded some of my mail, post spam processing, to gmail for 3 weeks to try it out. I'm already at 500 MB of mail (that I need to keep.) 1GB is not nearly enough.
Any tips on this? I could've used some. My Rio Karma's LCD and battery bit the dust. I sent that unit back, and Rio shipped me a refurbished one - with another dead battery.
Whenever they tell you that you need to pay for repairs, eg. "We'll replace out-of-warranty units for $175", explain that that's not acceptable and that you'd like to speak with a manager. Work your way up the ladder until you get what you want for free and they promise to throw in a bunch of other free stuff too. It helps to sound really really angry.
But they do this because consoles only come with 90 day warrantees. You wouldn't believe how many people come in after 3.5 months with broken consoles, and they can't do anything for them.
It's amazing how far you can extend a short warranty by simply working your way through a call center/store's management. I got my rio's 90 day warranty extended to 7 months just by being persistant.
I've got the same car, but mine's a '94. Unless yours is an older model or something, you should only be able to carry 4 people maximum (adults or children), because there's only 4 seats in the car and 4 seatbelts.
I've got a 93 2 door (Images/review here); I think the 94 and later had replaced the center rear seat with a change dish or something, but I've got 2 rear 3 point belts and one rear center lap belt, in addition to the automatic 3 point belts in the front.
Also, the cargo area is only about 5ft x 4.5 ft.
the 90-93 is a larger car than both the 94 and on models and all previous models, giving you increased cargo room.
My highway mileage is only about 32-33 mpg however; I've never seen it get up to 38.
I've found that the sweet spot for cruising speed is around 75 mph. Below that and I get 30 to 35, significantly above that I get under 30.
I like my Acura Integra (Not a small car, but it's considered a 'compact'.) Riding in a large car makes me feel like I'm going to slam into every single thing on the road, and any sort of wind makes you feel like the car is ready to tumble over at a moments notice. I can see all 4 corners of my Integra from the drivers seat, and because it's not 8 feet tall I don't ever get pushed around the road by high winds.
A Toyota Prius is fine for the hippie bachelor and his new age girlfriend, but if you live in the real world, have 2.5 kids, coach a soccer team, make weekly trips to home depot, and like to take your bass boat to the lake on weekends, a hybrid just isn't going to cut it.
The hybrid probably won't, but a Civic (or civic wagon) would do most of that. My Integra tows a 3,000lb boat+motor+trailer combo hundreds of miles regularly, and gets 28 MPG at 80 MPH while doing it. I can seat 4 adults or 2 adults and 3 children, and a civic wagon could fit more. Because it's a hatchback with fold down flat rear seats, I can fit 6ft by 5 ft by 3 ft of supplies from home depot in the bed; enough for me to fit an entire 8 person dining room table (collapsed), 4 dining room chairs, 4 or 5 random boxes and 2 people in it at once while moving (Like I did this weekend). If I ever need to move more than that, open bed utility trailers are dirt cheap from U-Haul.
No, I can't haul 4 people and soccer gear and drywall from home depot, and a bass boat all at once, but I don't do much drywalling on a boat while playing soccer with 3 other people. I do, however, go camping for weekends with the boat, 4 people plus camping gear (no drywall) and that works well.
And when I'm going to and from work with just me, I get 35 to 38 MPG.
American cars suck
"American" cars are no longer really made in America, they're made in Canada or Mexico. Meanwhile, Hondas and Toyotas and Nissans and Subarus are made in the US. But I agree, cars/SUVs made with Amercian labels are total crap.
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If piracy skyrockets, you better believe it will be added back in. If you don't want content owners reacting to the thievery of their material, you should tell the pirates to stop taking stuff without paying for it. It's that simple.
Except that it'll take the actual pirates all of 30 minutes to defeat every single copy protection system the content owners can put in place. Meanwhile, regular people who want to watch the latest movie they bought from best buy, only to find that the $10,000 entertainment system they bought a year ago is inadequate, will get screwed.
To get my Windows desktop on my new wireless network, I plugged a PCI wireless card, followed the instructions on the driver install CD, and it worked.
To get the same box onto my wireless network via Ubuntu, I tried the built-in network wizard thing and it didn't recognize my card. I spent a couple hours messing around with ndis wrappers and online faqs and console commands I didn't understand, and although eventually I got the system to recognize the card, it STILL won't go online. (We're not talking about some esoteric card, either; it's a Linksys 802.11g PCI card connecting to a Linksys router with "excellent" signal reception.)
Hmm.. My experience has been slightly different. To get a windows system on a wireless network, I plug in the PCMCIA wireless card and wait a while for windows to realize it doesn't support the card out of the box. Then I dig around my computer junk box for the CD that came with the wireless card when I bought it 4 years ago. Hmm, it seems to have gone missing. So I get on my linux machine, go to the xircom (now intel) website, hunt around for about 20 minutes and finally track down the drivers. Burn them to CD with nautilus and pop the CD in the windows machine. click my way through several dozen dialog boxes filled with legalese, plus warnings about how microsoft doesn't trust the drivers i'm about to install and that they may destroy my computer, reboot two or three times, and bam, I'm on the internet. Only about an hour, start to finish.
On Ubuntu, I plug the card into the side of the machine. That's it. Linux knows about the hardware I just plugged in (as it does for about 99% of the hardware I've encountered), automatically installed the drivers without even a single dialog box, and started looking for a DHCP lease within seconds. Less than 5 seconds after I plug the card in I'm on the internet.
Income tax: 3.07% vs. 5.3% in MA. Both are flat.
Plus, if I understand correctly, you'd pay a local tax in PA at about 1%, so it's 4% vs. 5%.
Sales tax: 6% vs. 5% in MA. PA, however, has exemptions for food, clothing, textbooks, and drugs; only exception in MA is food, and judging by my grocery receipts, it's doesn't apply to all food items. Since most of my purchases are food, clothing, or textbooks, PA wins this one.
No sales tax on clothes in MA either. There is sales tax on prepared or "ready to eat" foods in both PA and MA, though. In addition, some counties in PA impose an additional 1% sales tax.
Minimum auto insurance is for lower liability limits and is cheaper in PA; gas is also cheaper. The move cost me about $100 more per annum in insurance.
Interesting; with what I was paying in upstate NY with a national carrier for the lowest possible liability insurace, I could get full comprehensive insurance on both the old car I had in NY plus the new car I bought shortly after moving to MA. In addition, gas is $0.25/gal cheaper in MA then it is in NY.
Let's not forget the annual car tax in MA.
Yep, that's annoying. But still, overall, you're paying less taxes in MA than you would be paying in many other places in the US. PA is, apparently, not one of those places.
I also see you tactfully didn't address the issue of Massholes.
There are assholes everywhere. MA is no different.
Ever been to Massachusetts?
Ever lived anywhere else?
I have a choice of two companies for car insurance--because most insurance companies refuse to do business in MA. Why? There is heavy regulation of auto insurance by the state. Not insuring my car, of course, is not an option. It is a financial risk I'm willing to take, but the nanny-state says I can't.
Very, very few states will allow you to have an uninsured registered vehicle; that's nothing special. However, MA's auto insurance regulations, which limit the cost that insurace companies can charge you, are saving you money. People in many other states (including every other state in the northeast) pay significantly more than MA. When I moved from NY to MA, my auto insurace costs halved *and* I'm getting better coverage.
I'm a graduate student earning a pittance of a stipend. The Federal Government seems to think that I needn't pay taxes for the next few years, as I've always gotten a full refund. But what about the People's Republic of Massachusetts? I get a refund of about 20% of what has been withheld from my paycheck. Incidentally, on my pay stub, "MA withholding" is typically about 85-90% of "FED Withholding."
Your taxes are, again, lower than most states in the US, and lower than any other state in the northeast minus New Hampshire. I'm guessing that you just haven't lived anywhere else. Everyone gets their money taken by the government; that's what governments are for.
I don't buy from NYC area sellers. I include New Jersey, Rockland County, and Long Island in that zone. In fact, if I can't get it from somewhere on the left coast, I generally won't buy. FYI, I was raised in Queens.
I'd be careful with places on the west coast too. After two or three bad experiences with places shipping me defective computer parts and refusing to take returns (forcing me to issue chargebacks through my credit card company), I won't buy from any internet retailer with a southern California mailing address. I prefer to buy from someplace local (New England & New York, excluding Brooklyn and Queens), or a known reputable place like Amazon.
with a decently small margin of error.
Well, that webpage seems to think that my IP (66.92.86.82) is in midtown Manhattan, when it's actually in a suburb 10 miles northwest of Boston. On what sort of scale is 210 miles "decently small"?
More seriously, Vonage knows where I live because I told them when I signed up, and they're properly telling the 911 call center here my address.
Jim Bob goes to Staples, picks a wireless NIC, slaps it in his WinXP machine, inserts the install CD, and that's about all there is to it. Until Linux has that same kind of experience, it will not be mainstream and it will not take over the world.
I don't get it. Why is the CD that important? I like the current approach where I buy a wireless NIC from staples, slap it in my linux machine, and it works all by itself 5 seconds later without me having to do a damn thing. Then I don't need to keep track of both the hardware I bought and the handful of CDs it came with.
I honestly haven't encountered hardware that didn't work under linux, perfectly, right out of the box, in about 4 years. Network cards, printers, cameras, sound cards, whatever it may be, there are already open source drivers out there for anything I buy, and they're already included in my Debian/Ubuntu kernel. I buy a lot of hardware, too. On the other hand, I occasionally try the same hardware under windows, and it never works without the driver disks. The driver disks that got thrown out with the packaging. So I'm left scouring the internet for driver downloads. This is especially fun for network cards.
So if the airbags are triggered, the insurance company buys me a brand new car? And it's clearly a no-fault incident?
Insurance companies don't buy people brand new cars. When you "total" a car, they give you a check for the current value of the car minus your deductable, not what it'd cost to replace it with a brand new one. Cars depreciate *very* quickly within the first year or so.
Basically, if you drive a $30,000 car off the lot and 30 seconds later you're hit by an SUV or something, you're spending another 3 to 5 grand to get into another new car. More, if you drove it around for a few months before the accident.
Maybe these people should be protesting the high income tax,
MA pays 5.3% income tax total, PA (where you live) pays 4% combined state and local. Not a huge difference
or sales tax
Sales tax is 5% in MA, 6% in PA.
or high usage fees, or excessive regulation.
Overall, MA and PA residents pay about the same in taxes (MA 9.8%, PA 9.7%.)
Compared to other near by states (New York and New England), only New Hampshire residents pay less in taxes.
If anyone should be protesting high taxes, it should be New York residents under Republican Governer George Pataki.
Nantucket is an island. Think about it.
Exactly. The rest of MA is paying ~$2.20/gal for regular. MA's gas taxes are lower than, say, NY, where they're paying well over $2.50/gal.
ORBS, and its later reincarnation, ORBZ, also weren't exactly the nicest players on the field.
ORBZ.org and ORBS had nearly nothing to do with one another. When ORBS went away, an ISP Penguinhosting.net, which was completely unassociated with ORBS in every way, decided to sponsor a new RBL to protect its customers, ORBZ. The listing criteria was completely different; only functioning open relays and open proxies were listed, and it only ever listed individual IP addresses, never netblocks. ORBZ went away because people were upset by unprovoked system/network testing, not because it listed someone improperly.
This articleon the death of ORBZ has some more interesting points regarding the controversy surrounding these lists.
And it seems to have absolutely none of it's facts straight.
"Cummins started to refer to the new site as ORBZ." Paul Cummins never had anything to do with ORBZ, nor did Alan Brown.
" Laurie Akins, newly installed president of the non-profit anti-spam outfit SpamCon Foundation, said the code changes necessary to correct the bug was "trivial," but an error that Gulliver, for one reason or another, was unwilling to correct."
The bug wasn't Ian Gulliver's to correct; It was Lotus's, and they corrected and released a patch for it nearly a year before the incident happened.
I have yet to hear an iPod owner say, "It's a hassle to use, but damn if it doesn't look cool." Have you? Or are you just pulling your stereotypes of iPod owners out of your posterior?
I'm not an iPod owner, but I have used them on multiple occasions and for the life of me, I can't figure the interface out. I have a Rio Karma, whose interface I was able to pick up in about 5 seconds, but with the iPod I've always felt that it was a guessing game as to what was going to happen whenever I pushed a button. Apple could learn a thing or two by looking at the much more intuitive interface on the Karma. The iPod does, however, look pretty cool.
See, what people don't understand is we're mid-way on a journey between "paying" and "everything is free". So, right now low-quality is free and high-quality is paid for. When we finish the journey, high quality will be free and available to everyone.
Actually, with regards to television, it's the reverse. I personally can't legally watch/pay for the TV shows I enjoy in HDTV because the area in which I live has no broadcast HDTV stations, and no real availability of HDTV content via cable. In addition, I don't own an HDTV tuner (I would if there was content available.)
But I can download HDTV copies of the shows I like shortly after they air for free, and watch them on an LCD screen that all but the most expensive TVs can't touch quality-wise.
I do, however, continue to pay for cable TV for things like news and older syndicated content that isn't available in higher quality online. I also have a subscription to blockbuster's DVD rental service to watch movies I'm interested in. I think I'd easily pay a similar (or higher) fee for legal downloadable HDTV television shows.
My school had Macs, which we learned on, and later on I realized that it was a very bad idea. We learned on Macs and then got out into the "real world" where Mac skills were nearly useless. 95% of the market was IBM-compatibles.
Man, I know. Schools are always teaching useless skills like that. For example, when I was in school, a lot of work was done in pencil. But when I got to the real world, they were using pens! pens! I had to throw out everything I learned and start from scratch.
Seriously, learning how to point and click your way around the MacOS wasn't the point of working with computers in school. You were there to learn concepts and general skills, not how to use a specific tool. The tool shouldn't have made a difference, and if it did, you didn't actually learn anything.
The comic and the followup
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." Robert Anton Wilson
I'm sure this sig of yours seems profound to you, but if you can go 20 years without changing a single idea or opinion, you fit the very definition of a conservative.
These are not Windows machines. *nix does a much better job on ram, so a 256M is ~= to 512M on a windows box.
You don't have a clue of what you're talking about, do you?
Macs gobble RAM. A G4 running OS 10.3 isn't even usable until you've got 512 MB of RAM in the thing. I'd say the normal amount of RAM in a G4 based Mac these days is about 1 GB. Workstations and servers (G5 towers/Xserves) get at least 2 GB.
As to running Linux on a PowerBook... why? GNU tools are available in there, it runs *NIX, and it has a hell of a nice GUI.
Yea, because what works for you, works for everyone, right? OS X isn't for everyone. I own a mac and can't stand the thing; I use my thinkpad running debian every day while the mac collects dust.
They have an OBLIGATION to enforce the laws that protect you and your property from thieves and intruders.
The police really only care about two types of crime: Violent crimes and crimes for which they can impose fines. If your car gets stolen or your home robbed, you can count on the police to fill out a report for you to give to your insurance company and not much more. If they happen upon your stuff while looking for people to fine, they'll hold onto it until it's thoroughly inconvenient and you've had to buy new stuff, and then you just might get it back. Or not. They can really hold onto property as long as they want.
Don't believe me? Ask anyone who has ever had a car stolen.
Three examples of legitimate use. Three.
Four.
I've heard a lot about the lack of folders but once you get used to the lables you wonder why nobody else had implemented it first.
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
The problem I have with gmail is that I get a lot of reports and such mailed to me nightly from servers I manage. With evolution, I can search through them quickly and easily and manage messages by the hundreds. Gmail limits you to working with 50 messages at a time. The last time I logged into my Gmail account, I had ~2000 messages in the inbox and wanted to sort through them. In evolution, I could just type some search terms into the search box and filter out certain messages, deleting or archiving them as I choose. Gmail wanted me to wade through 40 pages of message listings to do the same thing. No thanks.
Beyond that, everyone is going crazy over this "Innovative conversation view", which has been in just about every decent mail client for longer than I can remember. Except Google managed to screw it up by not giving you a proper message tree to see how messages relate to one another, they just show you every related message in one big list. Not usable at all.
Maybe I'm just weird in that I'm subscribed to a lot of high volume discussion lists and a handle a lot of mail over the course of the day, but I find gmail to be completely unacceptable as a replacement for a real mail client. To give you some perspective, I forwarded some of my mail, post spam processing, to gmail for 3 weeks to try it out. I'm already at 500 MB of mail (that I need to keep.) 1GB is not nearly enough.
Any tips on this? I could've used some. My Rio Karma's LCD and battery bit the dust. I sent that unit back, and Rio shipped me a refurbished one - with another dead battery.
Whenever they tell you that you need to pay for repairs, eg. "We'll replace out-of-warranty units for $175", explain that that's not acceptable and that you'd like to speak with a manager. Work your way up the ladder until you get what you want for free and they promise to throw in a bunch of other free stuff too. It helps to sound really really angry.
But they do this because consoles only come with 90 day warrantees. You wouldn't believe how many people come in after 3.5 months with broken consoles, and they can't do anything for them.
It's amazing how far you can extend a short warranty by simply working your way through a call center/store's management. I got my rio's 90 day warranty extended to 7 months just by being persistant.
I've got the same car, but mine's a '94. Unless yours is an older model or something, you should only be able to carry 4 people maximum (adults or children), because there's only 4 seats in the car and 4 seatbelts.
I've got a 93 2 door (Images/review here); I think the 94 and later had replaced the center rear seat with a change dish or something, but I've got 2 rear 3 point belts and one rear center lap belt, in addition to the automatic 3 point belts in the front.
Also, the cargo area is only about 5ft x 4.5 ft.
the 90-93 is a larger car than both the 94 and on models and all previous models, giving you increased cargo room.
My highway mileage is only about 32-33 mpg however; I've never seen it get up to 38.
I've found that the sweet spot for cruising speed is around 75 mph. Below that and I get 30 to 35, significantly above that I get under 30.
Americans like big cars.
I like my Acura Integra (Not a small car, but it's considered a 'compact'.) Riding in a large car makes me feel like I'm going to slam into every single thing on the road, and any sort of wind makes you feel like the car is ready to tumble over at a moments notice. I can see all 4 corners of my Integra from the drivers seat, and because it's not 8 feet tall I don't ever get pushed around the road by high winds.
A Toyota Prius is fine for the hippie bachelor and his new age girlfriend, but if you live in the real world, have 2.5 kids, coach a soccer team, make weekly trips to home depot, and like to take your bass boat to the lake on weekends, a hybrid just isn't going to cut it.
The hybrid probably won't, but a Civic (or civic wagon) would do most of that. My Integra tows a 3,000lb boat+motor+trailer combo hundreds of miles regularly, and gets 28 MPG at 80 MPH while doing it. I can seat 4 adults or 2 adults and 3 children, and a civic wagon could fit more. Because it's a hatchback with fold down flat rear seats, I can fit 6ft by 5 ft by 3 ft of supplies from home depot in the bed; enough for me to fit an entire 8 person dining room table (collapsed), 4 dining room chairs, 4 or 5 random boxes and 2 people in it at once while moving (Like I did this weekend). If I ever need to move more than that, open bed utility trailers are dirt cheap from U-Haul.
No, I can't haul 4 people and soccer gear and drywall from home depot, and a bass boat all at once, but I don't do much drywalling on a boat while playing soccer with 3 other people. I do, however, go camping for weekends with the boat, 4 people plus camping gear (no drywall) and that works well.
And when I'm going to and from work with just me, I get 35 to 38 MPG.
American cars suck
"American" cars are no longer really made in America, they're made in Canada or Mexico. Meanwhile, Hondas and Toyotas and Nissans and Subarus are made in the US. But I agree, cars/SUVs made with Amercian labels are total crap.