I only buy the Yoko Ono CD's... they fit better on the shotgun trap-thrower that way, and the shiny surfaces make them more difficult (read: sporting) to hit.
"The following is a partial list of other technologies that began in Microsoft Research and later moved into Microsoft products, demonstrating the extensive success of the company's distinctive technology transfer approach.
[...]
IPv6 is an implementation of the Internet Protocol version 6 that is fully supported in the shipping version of the operating system
"(emphasis mine)
What in the everliving FUCK!? Am I reading that wrong, or is Microsoft literally claiming to have come up with IPv6?
Among other things, they apparently claim to have invented public key cryptography, text-to-speech, spam-filtering, clustering (at least insofar as SQL), and photography analysis tools...
This is the Bush Administration we are talking about. If they wont ship an AMD cpu to Iran, would they really provide inter/intra-orbital software code to be open source ? (Think ICBM)
["bubble-headed total agreement mode" on] ...because, you know, everyone and their dog can get hold of the requisite titanium, rocket fuel, high-precision valves, thermal shielding, Internal Nav Units, and electronics required... You know, all the stuff that makes a delicate and complex-all-to-hell vehicle like, you know, a rocket... fly just fine without exploding in mid-air, or, like, simply catching fire on the launch pad. All we need are, like, you know, these here plans and some duct tape, you know?
[BHTAM off]
Cripes - let's stretch things a bit more to turn promising international cooperation into yet another simple-minded Bush-hating screed, shall we? For once... for once in a great-assed while, the gov (no matter which party) does something right, and you gotta go and hose it up with some purile "OMGz0rs DA BOOSH IZ S0 st00pid!" line.
Don't you have somewhere better to go, like DU, Daily Kos, Townhall-dot-com, or some such political playpen? This is supposed to be geek pr0n here, not the communal partisan drool bucket.
(and yes, I'd really like to see those plans published "open source" style, thanks much - if for no other reason than we geeks out here can avoid having them get obliterated by stupid government officials, as the Saturn V plans were in the 70's).
(and yeah, fuggit - I got karma to burn by the supertanker-load, so all you oh-so-offended 24/7 partisan shitheads w/ points out there can Mod the post down until your dick hurts for all I care.)
I'm thinking that there's no real way of chipping powder (toner) cartridges as readily or easily as it is to chip liquid ink cartridges. It would cost them more to develop and market something like that than it would to simply eat the price diff and sell toner. Laser printers also cost more initially, so the corp gets a huge chunk of their ROI from it up-front.
Also, laser printers are less of a home product than a business product, so pulling stupid stunts on a laser printer means that a printer company could stand to lose a shitload of business as business customers flee to one of many willing and eager competitors. It illustrates one great big facet of consumer types. The home user isn't going to carefully shop around for printers, and there's no real incentive for a consumer-grade printer design to do much more than make pretty pictures and print reasonably fast. At the business level OTOH? Well, most businesses traditionally (and even today) live or die by their ability to put stuff on DeadTree as fast, reliable, and as cheap (per-page cost) as possible, all without sacrificing quality to do that.
At the home level, if my printer dies I throw it out and go buy a new one. At the business level, there's a bazillion local printer/copier/fax repair shops I can contract with.
Short version is, businesses pay more attention, and consider a printer to be an investment, no matter what size or capacity it is. The market to sell (and more importantly, service) businesses printers is also extremely cut-throat and chock-full of competitors, who are more than willing to do whatever it takes to keep you from buying from someone else.
IMHO, I still have a crappy old HP deskjet 940c that does what I need it to. I think I buy a set of new cartridges for it every two years (I rarely if ever need to print anything). If I ever find myself in a position where I know I'll be printing a whole lot more than I do now, I'd rather spend a bit more up-front for a small business-grade laser printer, where I don't end up shelling out for $8k/gal. ink and rigged cartridges. (Seriously - anyone who has seen what HP does to make damned sure you only buy HP-braded RAM in their machinery, shouldn't expect much different from what they do w/ their ink carts...)
Why hasn't this already happened then? How will a injection of new network funds and resources, including the benefit of cross-media promotion, hasten the already non-existant rush from core dailies to free-at-the-Starbucks independents? Wishful thinking.
Not sure which one you're referring to, but I'll take a stab and assume that you're talking ab't regional news channels...
Ironically, when it comes to anything broadcast, the FCC is the biggest obstacle (followed closely by capital funding). Cable channels are OTOH a bit different, at least insofar as it doesn't require the massive amounts of dough for an FCC license, a bit of the spectrum, a metric assload of equipment, etc etc.
NWCN manages it because it's jointly funded by Comcast. That said, I don't see why a small start-up couldn't get just enough funding for a channel, a decent studio, and a small but reliable set of crews and resources. It would cost roughly as much as setting up a new car franchise, say... which puts it well within reach of local funding sources. Team up with the local colleges and use their journalism (and tech) near-grads as cheap but reliable anchors, staff, and talking heads. Get local (but cool) opinionators to come on from time to time, and get people like a local Mayor or city councilcritter to give interviews. Get in good with the cops and firefighters. Having a unique local flavor to it all will get you a better leg-up w/ the local movers and shakers, than some blow-dried putz from halfway across the continent could manage. Team up with the city weeklies. Cripes - the ideas and tips could go on for quite awhile.
Do some dumb stories. Do some funny stories. Look for things which have national as well as regional news-worthiness, so you can pass it along to a similar station somewheres else under Creative Commons or somesuch (that way the big news outlets are forced to credit you properly... which will either chafe them to no end, or they pass up on the content - either way you win if it's entertaining or at least far better than what they can deliver).
The hard part is to get the ball rolling. To get the dough. Hell, start a weekly show on the local cable access channel (but with decent equipment) and take out an ad in the weeklies for it... if it's any good, odds are it will grow. If it sucks, well, it can't be any worse than "Godess Galactica" (no, that's not a typo), and her show's been on public access for eons now.
Sounds like fun, actually... not quite in a creepy "I'll never be Ted Turner but damn it'd be cool to get local chicks who look way better than Fonda ever did" kind of way, but more like in the "hey - I actually attempted something that made a diff for once" kinda way.
AP, UPI, Reuters... they'd all get their dough off of websites if the paper dies, and aside from local articles, they're pretty much all you get in an average paper (some, like the NYT or WashTimes etc. do make a larger effort to get their own writers out in the world, but for the most part, pool reports are pretty much it for anything that isn't specifically local).
Personally, if you want to save print journalism, what you need is a loose network and open source the thing.
No, that's not a buzzword. You get a bunch of folks who can string together some decent HTML, coupled with journalism school students (and grads, and amateurs who can write), decent and somewhat neutral writers or whomever, and pass the info around. For once it would be really cool to get news and info about some politician screwing up, but get that news from people who are there with cameras and laptops. Sports scores? No problem - tabulate 'em and pass 'em into the pool if that's what turns you on.
In short, you make your own pool of volunteers. Pay bounties on verifiable images and stories (e.g. if you get it from more than n sources and it's good info that you can corroborate through independent sources, you pay the best submitter(s) real well). Each reporter has his/her own website, containing news of a standard format that can be shared (into frames or etc), and their own particular site can be arranged however... for your local site, you pick and choose what you want printed that day. Just keep in mind that someone else may do a better job of it than you, and probably will if you suck at it.
Real rough idea and all, but it sounds like fun... I'll have to bang on a lot of details before anything formal gets spat out:)
How the hell does that work, anyhow? Does the ISP start turning down new subscribers ("Sorry folks, we're all full up on business here, please try our competition")?
It means they can't move into new neighborhoods, mostly. For instance, Comcast and Verizon have a thing where one of them isn't allowed to sell service in downtown Portland OR. There's lots of areas that Comcast (or Warner, or any cableco) has never been allowed to go and install infrastructure - either because of previous regulations, or because growth has placed customers well out of existing networks.
Ostensibly it's to allow competition to sneak in (or corporate slugs like Qwest to claim how 'empaupered' they are in the television market, thus moving in as naught more than an excuse to open Yet Another Revenue Stream... "oh, and can we put DSL lines in here too while we're at it? kthx.")
In reality, it's a nasty patchwork in some regions. Real nasty in still others... enough so that you'd pretty much have to be a media megacorp just to afford the infrastructure required to string all those patches together, let alone feed them.
(personally, if a corp gets bigger than 30% of the market, why not just divide the bastard with a machete, a'la the Baby Bells? At least then they'd at least attempt to self-select territories in some sort of halfway logical and coherent pattern...)
Well, it may (probably will) end up being a more propagandized operation, but there are outcomes that most media owners may not have anticipated:
* the newspaper dies, in favor of locally-owned websites that provide the same info, networked across other regional/local sites to become a loosely-knit news org in its own right (and unlike FreeBSD, the megacorp-owned newspaper really is losing relevance and readership to the web site... now if only these sites could start talking to each other).
* the independant papers, stations, and etc. pick up credibility among the more clued-in folks out there (and in many areas, already has. Most big towns/cities have one or more free weekly papers that do very well by giving the paper away for free and charging for ads).
* CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. start losing eyeballs to more regionally-oriented channels (e.g. NWCN in the Portland-Seattle corridor, where you get news that's local enough to matter directly, but regional and global enough to keep you apprised of stuff you might want or need to know. Yes it's run by Comcast, but it does open more than a couple of doors to competing local interests who want to do similar things).
* Local indie stations get a larger audience as propaganda-weary listeners decide that they really don't like their news in 'Clear-Channel-beige' anymore. If my little corner of the planet is any indication, it's already begun to happen.
While these may or may not ever occur, the possibilities are there, and as naive as it may sound, I tend to put at least a little faith in the ability of a contrary and loud-mouthed population such as that found in the US to devise their own alternate solutions to media-megacorp-induced propaganda.
IMHO, Yellow Journalism has never really went away - it merely diversified. We merely get glimpses and bits of occasional integrity swimming in an ocean of propagandistic crap, with alternating currents of barely-masked opinion clashing against each other on a constant basis.
In either case, I get more news off the Internet now, and from non-established sources (e.g. not CNN, not Fox, not the NYT)... I suspect that more of my fellow humans do as well - more than any media corp would ever be willing to admit, even to themselves.
Err, you got that seriously wrong, and on way too many levels.
A subordinate not only has the right, but the responsibility to disobey a clearlyillegal order under the UCMJ (says nothing about morality - otherwise the infantry would be a whole lot smaller than it is now). As a veteran myself, if I were ever given an illegal order, I'd get hold of someone with some actual authority over the illegal-order-giver first and get some damned clarification first, not just sit there and say "nuh-uh!" a lot. There's a system in place for such instances, and you damned well better use it whenever it's available. Also know that if you do refuse, you still have to explain and justify your refusal in a court martial, so simply saying "no" doesn't get you off the hook. You'd better be fully prepared to justify it, because if that order does turn out to be at least somewhat justified and legit, you're fucked (e.g. you refused an order but didn't know the whole story as to why it was given, but it turns out the order was actually legal).
Now... a teacher telling a kid to stop using a program is not an illegal order. The teacher may be ignorant, he may be incompetent, and he may well be a flaming asshat. That said, his authority still rules in the classroom. If the kid had a problem with it, he should've taken it up with the principal and/or the school counselors. There is a system in place, and the kid can use it at any time. There's also this one last niggling detail - the teacher and kid are both civilians, and took no oath to do anything.
I've run a classroom before. I built my own network in it. If the student asked, I encouraged experimentation (Hell, I had images and spare HDD's loaded with them as well). If I told a kid to stop doing something, I explained the reason why I wanted it stopped, and listened for any mitigating circumstance. If that didn't stop him and the explanation wasn't satisfactory, I locked the keyboard and mouse, isolated the box from the network, and had the principal deal with the kid. 99.999% of the time, I never had to deal with it at that level - the kids were smart enough to realize that when I said something of that nature, there was a damned good reason behind it, even if it didn't make sense to them at the time.
I can grok the stupidity involved with banning Firefox and all, and yeah, it is stupid. That said, it's no excuse for a student to disobey the teacher like that. There are avenues and systems that can resolve the situation without some sort of stupid power-play egofest being triggered. That's a game the student will always lose, even if he is in the right. Far better to do the job right and know that you won fairly, than to get in a shouting match and go from a student - to becoming a 'problem' that has to be 'solved'.
While you are correct, I suspect that it would never come to that...
Having seen my fill (and then some) of governmental bureaucracy, I can tell you right now that the very thought of putting video cameras into ever gov't bureaucrat's office would make the gov't workers' union scream bloody murder, and thus if the two were tied together (gov't watching us in public only if we can eyeball our gov't workers in (in)action), neither would get off the ground.
While having 24/7 webcams of hundreds of thousands of napping gov't bureaucrats would be boring to say the least, the bureaucrats themselves would be frightened enough at the prospect to immediately become privacy's biggest ally.
Yes, they can get a whole lot of intimidation of of suing like some soulless steamroller of a litigation machine, but it comes at a high risk and even higher strategic costs.
You simply cannot scare people into buying compact discs. If Joe Sixpack sees the lawsuits and gets scared, odds are good that he's already hit up a not-so-legit download or two. This still means that he has alternatives for free music... he can eschew the Internet route and simply record his music quite legally off of HD Radio, streaming radio, or some other legit means... for free. He can copy/rip his buddies' CD collections, and they can rip off of his. Also, he can buy used music.
Long-term, he starts seeking alternatives... spending his money on indie, non-RIAA music (this whole lawsuit crap made me seek indie music out of sheer indignation a long time ago).
To top all that off, folks who feel threatened tend to band together... like Ray's site for instance, or lots of others like it, where people start pooling information (and the legal profession's equivalent of defensive weaponry).
For instance, if the RIAA came knocking at my door? Well, I live in Oregon. I know there's sites like Ray's up there. I know my state's AG is starting to chafe at the idea that his ultimate employers (the citizens of Oregon) are getting shafted, and apparently he doesn't like it. I now have a nice handful of different and solid strategies for defeating the RIAA thugocracy without even setting foot in a courtroom, or paying them protection money... with TFA being the most effective I've seen so far. The RIAA is likely in a crash program to get MediaSentry licensed in as many states as possible right now, I'm sure of it. But... until that happens (it'll take time), they can't do squat... I figure it'll be about 6-8 months before they can get themselves back up and running as they were. Meanwhile, their empire crumbles away just that much more.
I won't say it's a panacea yet, but TFA (at least IMHO) provides a very effective means of rendering the RIAA toothless in a hurry. As it stands now, they're already avoiding areas where they see the most risk: Harvard (because of the rather defiant stand their law school has taken), Oregon (because we seem to be giving them a shedload of headaches and gumming up their works in the courtroom), and I suspect they'll be withdrawing from Texas pretty soon after this one.
As for pointing out these cases, the logic works the same way as you had presented, but in reverse: If an old lady can kick the RIAA square in the cojones and make it hurt, then surely you and I, with a healthier sense of technology and access to mountains of info on these asshats' moves and motives, can kick those same 'nads clear up into their eyeballs. It provides some things the RIAA would never want you to have: Hope, Inspiration to fight back, and at least some Knowledge as to how you can do so. Their armor isn't as shiny and thick as they want you to believe, and we can see that now.
Of course this isn't carte blanche to go violating copyright left right and sideways, but at least the innocent and the occasional blindsided single mother can stand a decent chance now.
You'll be one of those guys who complains that his job is outsourced overseas and can't get a job after you're fifty.
Fortunately for the rest of us, you're a mere posturing nobody who likes to claim he's some sort of CxO... negotiations do work both ways, and only the weak and the fearful consistently fail to hold up their end of it.
Nah - she was a nurse who worked graveyards a lot... so it left me @ home alone... a lot. Playing Quake/WF kept me out of trouble, kept my brain occupied, and when she was home, I simply didn't go online.
It wasn't a clan per se, but there was once a group of players I regularly hung out with when the ex was at work (I had no real responsibilities back then, and it beat hitting the bars with the buddies). Everyone would hit a Quake 2 WF server in the wee hours, hang out in observation mode, chat, and play... it was like hanging out with friends at a public pool - you blather on w/ each other a lot, and occasionally jump in the pool and goof off - with the added dimension of giving each other a ration of shit when they were playing and did something dumb (which we would all laugh our asses off at - including the one who goofed).
It wasn't about scores, or standings - most of us in there were fairly solid players who could easily hold our own on nearly any public server (lag permitting). It was about hanging out in something that was new and unfamiliar to most of us in there. It was about a female player (she lived in Utah) blurting poetry in rhythmic time to the goofball sounds that would come out of the screen. It was about telling dirty jokes to distract a flag runner while he was trying to hold off three pursuing defenders. It was about seeing who could stick a sentry gun in the most weird-assed place on a map (you could get them to 'stick' to ceilings if you knew how), or getting a flag without ever touching the ground (or flying - grapple only, please). It was about seeing who could make a flag run as the weakest character, with only that shitty no-damage blaster, and with no help doing it... and everyone (including the defending players) cheering like mad when someone pulled it off.
It's things like that you simply cannot fully analyze, but its things like that which are vital to making and keeping a coherent group of players involved and happy.
I saw a lot of clans in Quake 1/2/3 (and weapons factory for 2&#) rise and fall much the same way. It's cool that it has been articulated, though.
The 'culture of success' is no simple analogy, and can have adverse effects as well. There was a Weapons Factory clan that was founded on success at all costs (they went by the symbol "$"), and they managed to claw their way to the top (mostly through questionable and 'slight' game modifications that weren't exactly botting, but weren't exactly fair play, either - e.g. setting the client binds so that a normally silent cloaked spy player would have nice, loud footsteps to the defending player's ears... meaning they're much easier to locate. Just one of a mountain of examples).
This eventually killed off the entire MOD... folks didn't want to have to deal with outright cheaters (not bot-users, just cheaters), so the clans died off one by one, since most of them were only in it for the fun. Once the clans left, the cascade took down a lot of public servers with it (it didn't help that the Quake 3 MOD's main coder eventually became a member of that same clan, and actively implemented changes as suggested by same...) It had been bad enough that the shift from Quake 2 to Quake 3 had done quite a bit of damage to the MOD's player base, but the clan's modus operandi were eventually too much for the community - they still survive as a small shadow group, and occasionally play on a part-time server. Compared to the days when literally thousands of players could be found on hundreds of servers? Just a faint shadow.
Nowadays, most games are fairly cheat and bot-proof (I said fairly, not mostly or certainly). But the same dynamics are at play - a clan/guild/whatever that makes success their only goal will invariably attract the kinds of players you don't want on any server/world/etc, and tends to ruin the gameplay for everyone else while they're at it. While yes they do set themselves up for failure more readily than those who form just for fun, they also tend to start getting desperate when normal gameplay doesn't offer them the success they need to stay alive. This means they may start looking at 'alternatives' to try and keep the mojo going.
IMHO, the best organizations are those who simply do it for fun, and have a cadre of players who are really into the game. Again at the Weapons Factory example, the Quake2 version had a clan that were the friendliest and most respected guys in town... Population Control Incorporated (PCI). These guys had ISDN connections when the vast majority of players were on modems, but they always played fair, and the matches (at that time) were tightly regulated and fair. The funny thing is, this particular clan did it just for the fun of it. They'd go out of their way to mentor new players on a public server, and to make it fun for the whole pile playing (for instance, if more than one were playing on the same public server and it was full of unknowns or newbies, they'd automatically split themselves among the two teams). They were a stand-up group of people, and it showed in their playing style. It's still a pity they disbanded during the Quake 2/3 shift, but as they themselves said - they held the top slot for too long, many members got burned out from playing the game for literally years, and they pretty much came together and decided that it was time. Most stayed played on for fun (but never joined a clan again) in the Quake 2 version with the occasional fun meet-up matches, until the Q2 version of the MOD finally died a quiet death around 2002 or so... 3 years after Quake 3 came out.
I believe that all organizations begin, they (might) rise, and they (certainly) fall. Some do it short, some take awhile. Some end by mutual agreement. Most are benign, some are poisonous. A precious few even shift from one game to another together.
It's a complex dynamic in any organization, but I kinda like how TFA articulated at least one aspect of it...
No, Netscape and Microsoft sold their browsers on CD. Or people got a browser on a setup CD from their ISP. That's how it worked.
You. Must. Be. Joking.
You do realize that browsers came out before most folks in userland even knew what a CD-ROM was, right? Windows 95 was the first time anyone even knew what a CD-ROM was...
Cripes, man... before Windows 95 came out (roughly a year after Netscape was first released), I used Archie to hunt down a free copy of Netscape Navigator over FTP, and I was certainly not alone. I'd heard about it in USENET (via PINE - and stop laughing!), and was sick of wrestling with Mosaic's little bucket of bugaboos (and no, "Mosaic" is not a typo for "Mozilla", either).
You could also get NN on floppies, or (eventually) buy it at the store... either on floppies or on CD-ROM. CD-ROMs weren't commonplace in consumer computers until at least 1996-1997 though, so it was limited at best as to a CD-ROM's saleability.
(and before Windows 95 came out, you had to get hold of Trumpet Winsock just to get online from a 'doze box in the first place, because Windows 3.1 had no such thing as native PPP, TCP/IP, or any of the other crap everyone takes for granted nowadays).
By the by, MSFT IE 2.0 (the first version that didn't completely suck ass, but still did compared to NN's all-in-one suite of email, USENET, and web) didn't come out until late, late, late 1995.
Indeed! I still have the el-cheapo pager, but it does fine for the load I carry (I support R&D now, which is pretty light compared to the previous 24/7 production environment I did).
Now, if the iPhone had a terminal w/ an ssh client installed on it, I'd run out and grab one of those in a heartbeat, even in my specific case... imagine doing a patch-run from the beach.:)
Seriously - Those of us who are SysAdmins have dealt with this for ages...
You negotiate beforehand what happens when the pager goes off - either you get 'overtime', comp-time off, or your salary begins large enough to compensate you for the projected time spent on pager-duty. Not much different w/ a Crackberry...
If you get one issued to you, demand compensation for the added work that's sure to come with it - either through more flexible scheduling, more money, more comp/vacation time, or something substantial.
I have a decent setup where I'm at now - if I get a call, then the time spent gets deducted the next day or day after, or they pay me overtime based on 1.5x my salary broken down to an hourly rate (based on a typical 40hr week). Pretty simple after that.
Now, if you're adamant about delineated time-off vs. time-on, then simply state as much before you start.
But, like the parent said... most employers are perfectly okay with this, and it's only a minimum of haggle. Any employer who isn't needs to be dropped for one who is.
They actually alternate and play with it a bit - sometimes it's 8 songs with a certain musician somewhere in all eight of them (but not all in the same band). Sometimes it's 8 songs by bands that all got their start either locally or some other city. Sometimes it's eight songs which carry a common musical theme, as you've indicated (e.g. similar chord usage and the like). And sometimes (like this morning) it's eight songs with the word "don't" in the title. So to answer your question... maybe. Depends on the DJ's mood I suppose, though this morning he was out sick so the producer was filling in... go blame him.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, YHBT by Dan 'SCO Shill' Lyons. HAND. /P
From your referenced article:
"The following is a partial list of other technologies that began in Microsoft Research and later moved into Microsoft products, demonstrating the extensive success of the company's distinctive technology transfer approach.
[...]
- IPv6 is an implementation of the Internet Protocol version 6 that is fully supported in the shipping version of the operating system
"(emphasis mine)What in the everliving FUCK!? Am I reading that wrong, or is Microsoft literally claiming to have come up with IPv6?
Among other things, they apparently claim to have invented public key cryptography, text-to-speech, spam-filtering, clustering (at least insofar as SQL), and photography analysis tools...
Dude, something ain't right, there...
["bubble-headed total agreement mode" on]
...because, you know, everyone and their dog can get hold of the requisite titanium, rocket fuel, high-precision valves, thermal shielding, Internal Nav Units, and electronics required... You know, all the stuff that makes a delicate and complex-all-to-hell vehicle like, you know, a rocket... fly just fine without exploding in mid-air, or, like, simply catching fire on the launch pad. All we need are, like, you know, these here plans and some duct tape, you know?
[BHTAM off]
Cripes - let's stretch things a bit more to turn promising international cooperation into yet another simple-minded Bush-hating screed, shall we? For once... for once in a great-assed while, the gov (no matter which party) does something right, and you gotta go and hose it up with some purile "OMGz0rs DA BOOSH IZ S0 st00pid!" line.
Don't you have somewhere better to go, like DU, Daily Kos, Townhall-dot-com, or some such political playpen? This is supposed to be geek pr0n here, not the communal partisan drool bucket.
(and yes, I'd really like to see those plans published "open source" style, thanks much - if for no other reason than we geeks out here can avoid having them get obliterated by stupid government officials, as the Saturn V plans were in the 70's).
(and yeah, fuggit - I got karma to burn by the supertanker-load, so all you oh-so-offended 24/7 partisan shitheads w/ points out there can Mod the post down until your dick hurts for all I care.)
Also, laser printers are less of a home product than a business product, so pulling stupid stunts on a laser printer means that a printer company could stand to lose a shitload of business as business customers flee to one of many willing and eager competitors. It illustrates one great big facet of consumer types. The home user isn't going to carefully shop around for printers, and there's no real incentive for a consumer-grade printer design to do much more than make pretty pictures and print reasonably fast. At the business level OTOH? Well, most businesses traditionally (and even today) live or die by their ability to put stuff on DeadTree as fast, reliable, and as cheap (per-page cost) as possible, all without sacrificing quality to do that.
At the home level, if my printer dies I throw it out and go buy a new one. At the business level, there's a bazillion local printer/copier/fax repair shops I can contract with.
Short version is, businesses pay more attention, and consider a printer to be an investment, no matter what size or capacity it is. The market to sell (and more importantly, service) businesses printers is also extremely cut-throat and chock-full of competitors, who are more than willing to do whatever it takes to keep you from buying from someone else.
IMHO, I still have a crappy old HP deskjet 940c that does what I need it to. I think I buy a set of new cartridges for it every two years (I rarely if ever need to print anything). If I ever find myself in a position where I know I'll be printing a whole lot more than I do now, I'd rather spend a bit more up-front for a small business-grade laser printer, where I don't end up shelling out for $8k/gal. ink and rigged cartridges. (Seriously - anyone who has seen what HP does to make damned sure you only buy HP-braded RAM in their machinery, shouldn't expect much different from what they do w/ their ink carts...)
Not sure which one you're referring to, but I'll take a stab and assume that you're talking ab't regional news channels...
Ironically, when it comes to anything broadcast, the FCC is the biggest obstacle (followed closely by capital funding). Cable channels are OTOH a bit different, at least insofar as it doesn't require the massive amounts of dough for an FCC license, a bit of the spectrum, a metric assload of equipment, etc etc.
NWCN manages it because it's jointly funded by Comcast. That said, I don't see why a small start-up couldn't get just enough funding for a channel, a decent studio, and a small but reliable set of crews and resources. It would cost roughly as much as setting up a new car franchise, say... which puts it well within reach of local funding sources. Team up with the local colleges and use their journalism (and tech) near-grads as cheap but reliable anchors, staff, and talking heads. Get local (but cool) opinionators to come on from time to time, and get people like a local Mayor or city councilcritter to give interviews. Get in good with the cops and firefighters. Having a unique local flavor to it all will get you a better leg-up w/ the local movers and shakers, than some blow-dried putz from halfway across the continent could manage. Team up with the city weeklies. Cripes - the ideas and tips could go on for quite awhile.
Do some dumb stories. Do some funny stories. Look for things which have national as well as regional news-worthiness, so you can pass it along to a similar station somewheres else under Creative Commons or somesuch (that way the big news outlets are forced to credit you properly... which will either chafe them to no end, or they pass up on the content - either way you win if it's entertaining or at least far better than what they can deliver).
The hard part is to get the ball rolling. To get the dough. Hell, start a weekly show on the local cable access channel (but with decent equipment) and take out an ad in the weeklies for it... if it's any good, odds are it will grow. If it sucks, well, it can't be any worse than "Godess Galactica" (no, that's not a typo), and her show's been on public access for eons now.
Sounds like fun, actually... not quite in a creepy "I'll never be Ted Turner but damn it'd be cool to get local chicks who look way better than Fonda ever did" kind of way, but more like in the "hey - I actually attempted something that made a diff for once" kinda way.
AP, UPI, Reuters... they'd all get their dough off of websites if the paper dies, and aside from local articles, they're pretty much all you get in an average paper (some, like the NYT or WashTimes etc. do make a larger effort to get their own writers out in the world, but for the most part, pool reports are pretty much it for anything that isn't specifically local).
Personally, if you want to save print journalism, what you need is a loose network and open source the thing.
No, that's not a buzzword. You get a bunch of folks who can string together some decent HTML, coupled with journalism school students (and grads, and amateurs who can write), decent and somewhat neutral writers or whomever, and pass the info around. For once it would be really cool to get news and info about some politician screwing up, but get that news from people who are there with cameras and laptops. Sports scores? No problem - tabulate 'em and pass 'em into the pool if that's what turns you on.
In short, you make your own pool of volunteers. Pay bounties on verifiable images and stories (e.g. if you get it from more than n sources and it's good info that you can corroborate through independent sources, you pay the best submitter(s) real well). Each reporter has his/her own website, containing news of a standard format that can be shared (into frames or etc), and their own particular site can be arranged however... for your local site, you pick and choose what you want printed that day. Just keep in mind that someone else may do a better job of it than you, and probably will if you suck at it.
Real rough idea and all, but it sounds like fun... I'll have to bang on a lot of details before anything formal gets spat out :)
It means they can't move into new neighborhoods, mostly. For instance, Comcast and Verizon have a thing where one of them isn't allowed to sell service in downtown Portland OR. There's lots of areas that Comcast (or Warner, or any cableco) has never been allowed to go and install infrastructure - either because of previous regulations, or because growth has placed customers well out of existing networks.
Ostensibly it's to allow competition to sneak in (or corporate slugs like Qwest to claim how 'empaupered' they are in the television market, thus moving in as naught more than an excuse to open Yet Another Revenue Stream... "oh, and can we put DSL lines in here too while we're at it? kthx.")
In reality, it's a nasty patchwork in some regions. Real nasty in still others... enough so that you'd pretty much have to be a media megacorp just to afford the infrastructure required to string all those patches together, let alone feed them.
(personally, if a corp gets bigger than 30% of the market, why not just divide the bastard with a machete, a'la the Baby Bells? At least then they'd at least attempt to self-select territories in some sort of halfway logical and coherent pattern...)
* the newspaper dies, in favor of locally-owned websites that provide the same info, networked across other regional/local sites to become a loosely-knit news org in its own right (and unlike FreeBSD, the megacorp-owned newspaper really is losing relevance and readership to the web site... now if only these sites could start talking to each other).
* the independant papers, stations, and etc. pick up credibility among the more clued-in folks out there (and in many areas, already has. Most big towns/cities have one or more free weekly papers that do very well by giving the paper away for free and charging for ads).
* CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. start losing eyeballs to more regionally-oriented channels (e.g. NWCN in the Portland-Seattle corridor, where you get news that's local enough to matter directly, but regional and global enough to keep you apprised of stuff you might want or need to know. Yes it's run by Comcast, but it does open more than a couple of doors to competing local interests who want to do similar things).
* Local indie stations get a larger audience as propaganda-weary listeners decide that they really don't like their news in 'Clear-Channel-beige' anymore. If my little corner of the planet is any indication, it's already begun to happen.
While these may or may not ever occur, the possibilities are there, and as naive as it may sound, I tend to put at least a little faith in the ability of a contrary and loud-mouthed population such as that found in the US to devise their own alternate solutions to media-megacorp-induced propaganda.
IMHO, Yellow Journalism has never really went away - it merely diversified. We merely get glimpses and bits of occasional integrity swimming in an ocean of propagandistic crap, with alternating currents of barely-masked opinion clashing against each other on a constant basis.
In either case, I get more news off the Internet now, and from non-established sources (e.g. not CNN, not Fox, not the NYT)... I suspect that more of my fellow humans do as well - more than any media corp would ever be willing to admit, even to themselves.
A subordinate not only has the right, but the responsibility to disobey a clearly illegal order under the UCMJ (says nothing about morality - otherwise the infantry would be a whole lot smaller than it is now). As a veteran myself, if I were ever given an illegal order, I'd get hold of someone with some actual authority over the illegal-order-giver first and get some damned clarification first, not just sit there and say "nuh-uh!" a lot. There's a system in place for such instances, and you damned well better use it whenever it's available. Also know that if you do refuse, you still have to explain and justify your refusal in a court martial, so simply saying "no" doesn't get you off the hook. You'd better be fully prepared to justify it, because if that order does turn out to be at least somewhat justified and legit, you're fucked (e.g. you refused an order but didn't know the whole story as to why it was given, but it turns out the order was actually legal).
Now... a teacher telling a kid to stop using a program is not an illegal order. The teacher may be ignorant, he may be incompetent, and he may well be a flaming asshat. That said, his authority still rules in the classroom. If the kid had a problem with it, he should've taken it up with the principal and/or the school counselors. There is a system in place, and the kid can use it at any time. There's also this one last niggling detail - the teacher and kid are both civilians, and took no oath to do anything.
I've run a classroom before. I built my own network in it. If the student asked, I encouraged experimentation (Hell, I had images and spare HDD's loaded with them as well). If I told a kid to stop doing something, I explained the reason why I wanted it stopped, and listened for any mitigating circumstance. If that didn't stop him and the explanation wasn't satisfactory, I locked the keyboard and mouse, isolated the box from the network, and had the principal deal with the kid. 99.999% of the time, I never had to deal with it at that level - the kids were smart enough to realize that when I said something of that nature, there was a damned good reason behind it, even if it didn't make sense to them at the time.
I can grok the stupidity involved with banning Firefox and all, and yeah, it is stupid. That said, it's no excuse for a student to disobey the teacher like that. There are avenues and systems that can resolve the situation without some sort of stupid power-play egofest being triggered. That's a game the student will always lose, even if he is in the right. Far better to do the job right and know that you won fairly, than to get in a shouting match and go from a student - to becoming a 'problem' that has to be 'solved'.
Having seen my fill (and then some) of governmental bureaucracy, I can tell you right now that the very thought of putting video cameras into ever gov't bureaucrat's office would make the gov't workers' union scream bloody murder, and thus if the two were tied together (gov't watching us in public only if we can eyeball our gov't workers in (in)action), neither would get off the ground.
While having 24/7 webcams of hundreds of thousands of napping gov't bureaucrats would be boring to say the least, the bureaucrats themselves would be frightened enough at the prospect to immediately become privacy's biggest ally.
Yes, they can get a whole lot of intimidation of of suing like some soulless steamroller of a litigation machine, but it comes at a high risk and even higher strategic costs.
You simply cannot scare people into buying compact discs. If Joe Sixpack sees the lawsuits and gets scared, odds are good that he's already hit up a not-so-legit download or two. This still means that he has alternatives for free music... he can eschew the Internet route and simply record his music quite legally off of HD Radio, streaming radio, or some other legit means... for free. He can copy/rip his buddies' CD collections, and they can rip off of his. Also, he can buy used music.
Long-term, he starts seeking alternatives... spending his money on indie, non-RIAA music (this whole lawsuit crap made me seek indie music out of sheer indignation a long time ago).
To top all that off, folks who feel threatened tend to band together... like Ray's site for instance, or lots of others like it, where people start pooling information (and the legal profession's equivalent of defensive weaponry).
For instance, if the RIAA came knocking at my door? Well, I live in Oregon. I know there's sites like Ray's up there. I know my state's AG is starting to chafe at the idea that his ultimate employers (the citizens of Oregon) are getting shafted, and apparently he doesn't like it. I now have a nice handful of different and solid strategies for defeating the RIAA thugocracy without even setting foot in a courtroom, or paying them protection money... with TFA being the most effective I've seen so far. The RIAA is likely in a crash program to get MediaSentry licensed in as many states as possible right now, I'm sure of it. But... until that happens (it'll take time), they can't do squat... I figure it'll be about 6-8 months before they can get themselves back up and running as they were. Meanwhile, their empire crumbles away just that much more.
I won't say it's a panacea yet, but TFA (at least IMHO) provides a very effective means of rendering the RIAA toothless in a hurry. As it stands now, they're already avoiding areas where they see the most risk: Harvard (because of the rather defiant stand their law school has taken), Oregon (because we seem to be giving them a shedload of headaches and gumming up their works in the courtroom), and I suspect they'll be withdrawing from Texas pretty soon after this one.
As for pointing out these cases, the logic works the same way as you had presented, but in reverse: If an old lady can kick the RIAA square in the cojones and make it hurt, then surely you and I, with a healthier sense of technology and access to mountains of info on these asshats' moves and motives, can kick those same 'nads clear up into their eyeballs. It provides some things the RIAA would never want you to have: Hope, Inspiration to fight back, and at least some Knowledge as to how you can do so. Their armor isn't as shiny and thick as they want you to believe, and we can see that now.
Of course this isn't carte blanche to go violating copyright left right and sideways, but at least the innocent and the occasional blindsided single mother can stand a decent chance now.
Fortunately for the rest of us, you're a mere posturing nobody who likes to claim he's some sort of CxO... negotiations do work both ways, and only the weak and the fearful consistently fail to hold up their end of it.
'course, it didn't do the FOSS community any favors by that action...
Somewhere, there are a lot of dead mainframe programmers who just shivered in their graves.... I'm sure of it.
It wasn't a clan per se, but there was once a group of players I regularly hung out with when the ex was at work (I had no real responsibilities back then, and it beat hitting the bars with the buddies). Everyone would hit a Quake 2 WF server in the wee hours, hang out in observation mode, chat, and play... it was like hanging out with friends at a public pool - you blather on w/ each other a lot, and occasionally jump in the pool and goof off - with the added dimension of giving each other a ration of shit when they were playing and did something dumb (which we would all laugh our asses off at - including the one who goofed).
It wasn't about scores, or standings - most of us in there were fairly solid players who could easily hold our own on nearly any public server (lag permitting). It was about hanging out in something that was new and unfamiliar to most of us in there. It was about a female player (she lived in Utah) blurting poetry in rhythmic time to the goofball sounds that would come out of the screen. It was about telling dirty jokes to distract a flag runner while he was trying to hold off three pursuing defenders. It was about seeing who could stick a sentry gun in the most weird-assed place on a map (you could get them to 'stick' to ceilings if you knew how), or getting a flag without ever touching the ground (or flying - grapple only, please). It was about seeing who could make a flag run as the weakest character, with only that shitty no-damage blaster, and with no help doing it... and everyone (including the defending players) cheering like mad when someone pulled it off.
It's things like that you simply cannot fully analyze, but its things like that which are vital to making and keeping a coherent group of players involved and happy.
The 'culture of success' is no simple analogy, and can have adverse effects as well. There was a Weapons Factory clan that was founded on success at all costs (they went by the symbol "$"), and they managed to claw their way to the top (mostly through questionable and 'slight' game modifications that weren't exactly botting, but weren't exactly fair play, either - e.g. setting the client binds so that a normally silent cloaked spy player would have nice, loud footsteps to the defending player's ears... meaning they're much easier to locate. Just one of a mountain of examples).
This eventually killed off the entire MOD... folks didn't want to have to deal with outright cheaters (not bot-users, just cheaters), so the clans died off one by one, since most of them were only in it for the fun. Once the clans left, the cascade took down a lot of public servers with it (it didn't help that the Quake 3 MOD's main coder eventually became a member of that same clan, and actively implemented changes as suggested by same...) It had been bad enough that the shift from Quake 2 to Quake 3 had done quite a bit of damage to the MOD's player base, but the clan's modus operandi were eventually too much for the community - they still survive as a small shadow group, and occasionally play on a part-time server. Compared to the days when literally thousands of players could be found on hundreds of servers? Just a faint shadow.
Nowadays, most games are fairly cheat and bot-proof (I said fairly, not mostly or certainly). But the same dynamics are at play - a clan/guild/whatever that makes success their only goal will invariably attract the kinds of players you don't want on any server/world/etc, and tends to ruin the gameplay for everyone else while they're at it. While yes they do set themselves up for failure more readily than those who form just for fun, they also tend to start getting desperate when normal gameplay doesn't offer them the success they need to stay alive. This means they may start looking at 'alternatives' to try and keep the mojo going.
IMHO, the best organizations are those who simply do it for fun, and have a cadre of players who are really into the game. Again at the Weapons Factory example, the Quake2 version had a clan that were the friendliest and most respected guys in town... Population Control Incorporated (PCI). These guys had ISDN connections when the vast majority of players were on modems, but they always played fair, and the matches (at that time) were tightly regulated and fair. The funny thing is, this particular clan did it just for the fun of it. They'd go out of their way to mentor new players on a public server, and to make it fun for the whole pile playing (for instance, if more than one were playing on the same public server and it was full of unknowns or newbies, they'd automatically split themselves among the two teams). They were a stand-up group of people, and it showed in their playing style. It's still a pity they disbanded during the Quake 2/3 shift, but as they themselves said - they held the top slot for too long, many members got burned out from playing the game for literally years, and they pretty much came together and decided that it was time. Most stayed played on for fun (but never joined a clan again) in the Quake 2 version with the occasional fun meet-up matches, until the Q2 version of the MOD finally died a quiet death around 2002 or so... 3 years after Quake 3 came out.
I believe that all organizations begin, they (might) rise, and they (certainly) fall. Some do it short, some take awhile. Some end by mutual agreement. Most are benign, some are poisonous. A precious few even shift from one game to another together.
It's a complex dynamic in any organization, but I kinda like how TFA articulated at least one aspect of it...
You. Must. Be. Joking.
You do realize that browsers came out before most folks in userland even knew what a CD-ROM was, right? Windows 95 was the first time anyone even knew what a CD-ROM was...
Cripes, man... before Windows 95 came out (roughly a year after Netscape was first released), I used Archie to hunt down a free copy of Netscape Navigator over FTP, and I was certainly not alone. I'd heard about it in USENET (via PINE - and stop laughing!), and was sick of wrestling with Mosaic's little bucket of bugaboos (and no, "Mosaic" is not a typo for "Mozilla", either).
You could also get NN on floppies, or (eventually) buy it at the store... either on floppies or on CD-ROM. CD-ROMs weren't commonplace in consumer computers until at least 1996-1997 though, so it was limited at best as to a CD-ROM's saleability.
(and before Windows 95 came out, you had to get hold of Trumpet Winsock just to get online from a 'doze box in the first place, because Windows 3.1 had no such thing as native PPP, TCP/IP, or any of the other crap everyone takes for granted nowadays).
By the by, MSFT IE 2.0 (the first version that didn't completely suck ass, but still did compared to NN's all-in-one suite of email, USENET, and web) didn't come out until late, late, late 1995.
One could only hope that an OEM (beige-box or not) could...
Perl?
What is this newfangled Perl thingy you're talking crazy nonsense about? ...and get offa my lawn!
Now, if the iPhone had a terminal w/ an ssh client installed on it, I'd run out and grab one of those in a heartbeat, even in my specific case... imagine doing a patch-run from the beach. :)
You negotiate beforehand what happens when the pager goes off - either you get 'overtime', comp-time off, or your salary begins large enough to compensate you for the projected time spent on pager-duty. Not much different w/ a Crackberry...
If you get one issued to you, demand compensation for the added work that's sure to come with it - either through more flexible scheduling, more money, more comp/vacation time, or something substantial.
I have a decent setup where I'm at now - if I get a call, then the time spent gets deducted the next day or day after, or they pay me overtime based on 1.5x my salary broken down to an hourly rate (based on a typical 40hr week). Pretty simple after that.
Now, if you're adamant about delineated time-off vs. time-on, then simply state as much before you start.
But, like the parent said... most employers are perfectly okay with this, and it's only a minimum of haggle. Any employer who isn't needs to be dropped for one who is.