There's the rub -- anywhere can be made safe, IF you're willing to pay for it. If it costs $500B to make a new NOLA safe in its old location, or $50B to rebuild it on higher ground, which is more fair to the taxpayers who will doubtless get to foot the bill??
As someone else pointed out, Amsterdam is not in the path of hurricanes. What works for them is woefully inadequate for NOLA.
As to Lake Ponchartrain, that's a much more complex issue in today's America than it was when Holland was deciding how to handle the Zuider Zee. Environmental issues alone (such as waterfowl habitat and flyways) could prohibit messing with the lake itself. And sometimes you learn after you've already messed with such a natural structure, that you've managed to make matters worse by altering current patterns and the like (such as happened with the Long Beach breakwater -- it ultimately *contributed* to the erosion of the beaches it was designed to protect!)
Another problem is that swamps breed mosquitoes, and the NOLA area has historically had severe issues with moquito-borne diseases. Do we really want to expand the breeding grounds for West Nile before we've got a widely-available vaccine? (Hint: horse vaccines aren't required to be tested to the degree those for human use are, yet West Nile vaccine for horses is both hard to get and expensive -- about $15 per dose at wholesale. The normal wholesale price for other vaccines is about a buck. Rabies vac. is about 40 cents/dose in bulk.)
Lots of issues other than just making the physical site secure from flooding. And who's going to foot the bill for that -- taxpayers?? At a guess, and knowing what public-project construction boondog^H^H^H^H^H^H costs run (and overrun) these days, a reasonably flood-secure solution would likely run somewhere upward of $500 BILLION dollars.
Might be better to rebuild the business and residential part of the city upriver or overland a ways, and rebuild the port zone such that when (not if) it floods, the worst that happens is that it'll drain reasonably well after the storm passes, without requiring heroic measures. Provide commuter rail to the port zone, and consider the rail line expendable and replaceable at need, as both the weakest and least-costly link.
I agree that we need the Port of New Orleans, and that it must be rebuilt......but is there some rule that says it must be rebuilt below sea level, so it becomes another disaster-waiting-to-happen right from the start?
Just because the old city grew that way doesn't mean we can't be smarter next time, especially with the need and opportunity to build again from scratch. Why needlessly repeat known mistakes??
As to the cultural loss, that can never be regained. A resurrected culture is just never the same, and even less so in this commercial age.:(
Tho I'll be the first to agree that Lexmark's only interest here is consumer lock-in, by any means possible.
This sort of crap is why 1) I neither buy nor recommend inkjets, and 2) I specifically recommend *against* Lexmark (and would so recommend even if their printers weren't the cheapest pieces of shit I've ever seen).
I haven't read the actual court decision myself, but I did RTFA, and someone in the FA's comment chain claims he did read the court decision and that it means this:
================ The Ninth Circuit's opinion concerns Lexmark's "Prebate" program, in which customers are given a $30 discount on their printer cartridge in exchange for their agreement to return the used cartridge to Lexmark when they are done with it. That's an enforceable contract, plain and simple. Customers had the option of paying $30 more for a cartridge, without being obligated to send it back to Lexmark when they were finished with it. The Ninth Circuit simply held that, in exchange for paying less for the cartridge, customers could be contractually bound to return it to Lexmark. ==================
Now, my question involves the part about being "obligated to return the cartridge to Lexmark when they were finished with it":
Okay, so the consumer gets paid in advance, in exchange for their promise to return the cart to Lexmark, and that's not a problem in itself -- but what if I'm not "finished with it" until after I've refilled it 3 or 4 times? is that prohibited in Lexmark's contract?
[Personally I think it's nothing but another attempt at contactually-enforceable lock-in by Lexmark, but the implications could be very far-reaching. And thanks to past similar horseshit from Lexmark, I specifically recommend that my clients avoid Lexmark products entirely.]
A few minutes with a ballpeen hammer will destroy my PC too, and be a lot more fun:) (I once applied an axe to a typewriter that broke down once too often. Maybe this is why my PCs are all so well-mannered -- plain old fear!:)
As to preventing it from having internet access... I'd guess that if you prevent it from speaking to its remote server, the unit simply won't work at all. Perhaps someone will come up with a hack to work around that, by feeding it what it wants to hear... which is all well and good unless it wants a unique key from the server each and every time you use the player. Then it becomes an arms race, and maybe after NN-many failed attempts it assumes it's been hacked, and self-destructs.
I like my solution better: I won't validate this idiotic corporate misbehaviour by purchasing such a crippled unit in the first place. There is no "creative content" in the world worth bending over for, and I'll find some other non-tape data backup method.
An insightful AC said, ============ *Owner* The person that will replace the unit after my son puts his peanut butter sandwhich in the drive.
If the answer is "me", you better damn not send a self destruct command to my property.
If the answer is "you" --::giggles:: I've got quite a number of things that need replacing. Care to send a check now, or file for bankruptcy ? ===========
That's a damned good idea.:D Not to mention that it would probably cause quite a stir in small claims court. Seriously, this sounds like wonderful lawsuit fodder!
Tho it's been tried -- there are EULAs that have evergreen clauses, and charge you extra if you terminate it at all. I don't have an exact link but it's been bitched about on gripe2ed.com, Ed Foster's consumer advocate site.
That'll be next: "If you fail to watch NN-many hours of properly-licensed DVD material every month, your Blew-Away DVD unit will automatically bill you for the difference."
Maybe not so farfetched, if they can get some PC OEM to agree to it -- it's certainly conceivable that the BIOS, or a TC-style chip, might be rigged to boot *only* with a "recognised" OS. If that happened to be Windows, that would be Ballmer's ultimate wet dream.
[has thought] What about those upcoming Apples with the x86 CPU? will they boot with a non-Mac OS?? I have no idea, anyone care to speculate?
Some Tandy PCs would only boot with their OEM version of DOS 3.x, because part of DOS was in ROM. So it's not like it's terribly difficult to implement. And what's in flashable ROM... well, that's not hard to remotely alter, if you can get access to the hardware.
An AC who will never be seen in daylight says, "It is illegal to remove OEM licenced software from your machine to install other licences."
And I ask... Where is your cite for that?
Under some EULAs, it is typically not be permitted to move OEM-licensed software from an OEM machine to some other machine. But I've never seen anything that says you can't simply delete it.
I dunno who told you that, but it's a trifle exaggerated.
I used to have a flock of culls from someone who bred fighting cocks. These are about as mean as chickens get -- they are bred to be fearless and aggressive, especially with each other.
Anyway, they are not attracted to blood per se, and don't pay any particular attention to it. What chickens WILL do if they don't get enough protein in their diet (as is common if chickens are fed grain alone), is peck at the feathers on each others' butts until their tails are raw and bloody. Feathers are high in proteins that chickens can digest; that's why feather meal is an ingredient in some chicken feeds, and why they try to eat 'em off each other when on inadequate diets. (Remember bugs are much of a chicken's normal diet, and bugs are VERY high in protein.)
And sometimes the flock will gang up on a single half-grown chick and kill it, then string its entrails all over the place (trying to eat them, but guts don't break off like worms do so just wind up dragged around). This is normal culling behaviour in a lot of species -- if an individual shows weakness by going down during a minor spat, the whole flock or pack will gang up on it and kill it. (Dogs do the exact same thing, and even normally non-aggressive dogs will join in.)
Chickens are hell on not only bugs, but also mice and snakes. Snakes will try to steal eggs (no, it's not a myth, I've seen 'em do it), and will go right into the nest to do so. More than once I got woke up in the middle of the night by a hen fighting with a too-bold snake.
When I had chickens I never saw any rattlers. In the two years since the last of my chickens died off, I've killed 21 rattlers right in my yard.
Or even chickens. With mixed-breed, dark coloured, and wild-type chickens (frex, banties), most female chicks hatch in mostly yellow with a few faint markings, but at hatching most male chicks have obvious stripes on the wings, head, and tail. True monocolour yellow chicks, male or female, mainly occurs with purebreds that will be white at maturity.
(New subject line: how to sex chicks without turning them upsidedown:)
There are two comments over on the linked article that struck me as extra-insightful:
#37:
This would be the first case I can think of in which an electronics company actually
destroyed somebody else's physical property for exercising their rights as a property
owner.
It's true that Sony still retains the copyrights to the software inside the machine, but you're not stealing that software by hacking the machine, just replacing it. It's no different than uninstalling Windows from your PC and installing Linux instead - should Microsoft be able to remotely destroy your PC in such a case?
#7:
I guess the concept of ownership is so last century..... Now, instead of owning the equipment that we purchaced from a company, we get to belong to the company that we purchaced the equipment from! YAY! Who needs the CIA anymore when we've got Sony and Toshiba spying on us to make sure we do not violate Copyright laws!
Whats next? If a someone who has children orders an adult Pay Per View before 11 PM your set top box will notify child services that you may be abusing you children? You may say no way but it could happen the way things are going!
But we remember Hitler and Genghis Khan. We don't remember, and don't even know about, the many people who invented useful things that were nonetheless not mainstream in their day.
Point being, whether someone is remembered by history has little to do with their personal merits, and everything to do with how much of a big noise they were.
Now, if at some future date Windows and M$Office implode and vanish, and overnight are replaced everywhere by linux, THEN Torvalds might get the same degree of name-recognition.
Right, but people here were making the assumption that "because it's creative content, it must not be for sale no matter what".
And given that assumption, they'd lost all sight of the several things this guy did that were wrong of themselves (starting with that the game itself wasn't entirely original work to begin with, yet only his own credit is to be found therein -- who's the thief here??)
Rather than this juvenile retaliation stunt for a creative work that technically he doesn't own in the first place (because derivative works are owned by the orignal copyright owner, not by the secondary creator) the smart thing to do would have been to politely inform Fuddruckers that as a fan work, it could not be redistributed commercially, but he'd be happy to make their own branded version which they could do as they wish with -- for a suitable fee, of course.
The guy was bitching on his journal about being underemployed and finally finding work AS a flash games developer, yet he spits in the face of a company that demonstrably finds such games cool (otherwise why link to one?), and might easily be converted into a paying customer for genuninely original work.
IOW, he assumes malice right up front, and reacts with malice, even tho his hands are not entirely clean to start with.
Given that, whether or not he wished sell his games isn't even relevant; it's a side issue that's attractive to juvenile minds who find "getting the other guy but good" the pinnacle of personal achievement.
Some people just can't feel like winners unless they first make someone else into a loser.
Slashdot Mirror
There's the rub -- anywhere can be made safe, IF you're willing to pay for it. If it costs $500B to make a new NOLA safe in its old location, or $50B to rebuild it on higher ground, which is more fair to the taxpayers who will doubtless get to foot the bill??
As someone else pointed out, Amsterdam is not in the path of hurricanes. What works for them is woefully inadequate for NOLA.
As to Lake Ponchartrain, that's a much more complex issue in today's America than it was when Holland was deciding how to handle the Zuider Zee. Environmental issues alone (such as waterfowl habitat and flyways) could prohibit messing with the lake itself. And sometimes you learn after you've already messed with such a natural structure, that you've managed to make matters worse by altering current patterns and the like (such as happened with the Long Beach breakwater -- it ultimately *contributed* to the erosion of the beaches it was designed to protect!)
Another problem is that swamps breed mosquitoes, and the NOLA area has historically had severe issues with moquito-borne diseases. Do we really want to expand the breeding grounds for West Nile before we've got a widely-available vaccine? (Hint: horse vaccines aren't required to be tested to the degree those for human use are, yet West Nile vaccine for horses is both hard to get and expensive -- about $15 per dose at wholesale. The normal wholesale price for other vaccines is about a buck. Rabies vac. is about 40 cents/dose in bulk.)
Lots of issues other than just making the physical site secure from flooding. And who's going to foot the bill for that -- taxpayers?? At a guess, and knowing what public-project construction boondog^H^H^H^H^H^H costs run (and overrun) these days, a reasonably flood-secure solution would likely run somewhere upward of $500 BILLION dollars.
Might be better to rebuild the business and residential part of the city upriver or overland a ways, and rebuild the port zone such that when (not if) it floods, the worst that happens is that it'll drain reasonably well after the storm passes, without requiring heroic measures. Provide commuter rail to the port zone, and consider the rail line expendable and replaceable at need, as both the weakest and least-costly link.
Reminds me of the four California seasons: Fire, Flood, Riot, and Earthquake.
Garner Ted Armstrong, is that you??
Well, the solution is obvious. We need to bring back the sabretooth tiger.
That's why as you approach New Orleans, you'll now see a big sign that reads "FILL DIRT WANTED" ;)
I agree that we need the Port of New Orleans, and that it must be rebuilt... ...but is there some rule that says it must be rebuilt below sea level, so it becomes another disaster-waiting-to-happen right from the start?
:(
Just because the old city grew that way doesn't mean we can't be smarter next time, especially with the need and opportunity to build again from scratch. Why needlessly repeat known mistakes??
As to the cultural loss, that can never be regained. A resurrected culture is just never the same, and even less so in this commercial age.
Yep, it also happens in situations like playground fights, leading to some kid being singled out to be "culled" (bullied).
Typically, unwillingness to defend oneself is itself a trigger for gang-up-and-kill-the-weakling behaviour.
Someone put up a Wikipedia article on the decision under debate:
m anufacturers_Association_Inc._v._Lexmark_Internati onal_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_Cartridge_Re
Tho I'll be the first to agree that Lexmark's only interest here is consumer lock-in, by any means possible.
This sort of crap is why 1) I neither buy nor recommend inkjets, and 2) I specifically recommend *against* Lexmark (and would so recommend even if their printers weren't the cheapest pieces of shit I've ever seen).
I haven't read the actual court decision myself, but I did RTFA, and someone in the FA's comment chain claims he did read the court decision and that it means this:
================
The Ninth Circuit's opinion concerns Lexmark's "Prebate" program, in which customers are given a $30 discount on their printer cartridge in exchange for their agreement to return the used cartridge to Lexmark when they are done with it. That's an enforceable contract, plain and simple. Customers had the option of paying $30 more for a cartridge, without being obligated to send it back to Lexmark when they were finished with it. The Ninth Circuit simply held that, in exchange for paying less for the cartridge, customers could be contractually bound to return it to Lexmark.
==================
Now, my question involves the part about being "obligated to return the cartridge to Lexmark when they were finished with it":
Okay, so the consumer gets paid in advance, in exchange for their promise to return the cart to Lexmark, and that's not a problem in itself -- but what if I'm not "finished with it" until after I've refilled it 3 or 4 times? is that prohibited in Lexmark's contract?
[Personally I think it's nothing but another attempt at contactually-enforceable lock-in by Lexmark, but the implications could be very far-reaching. And thanks to past similar horseshit from Lexmark, I specifically recommend that my clients avoid Lexmark products entirely.]
A few minutes with a ballpeen hammer will destroy my PC too, and be a lot more fun :) (I once applied an axe to a typewriter that broke down once too often. Maybe this is why my PCs are all so well-mannered -- plain old fear! :)
As to preventing it from having internet access... I'd guess that if you prevent it from speaking to its remote server, the unit simply won't work at all. Perhaps someone will come up with a hack to work around that, by feeding it what it wants to hear... which is all well and good unless it wants a unique key from the server each and every time you use the player. Then it becomes an arms race, and maybe after NN-many failed attempts it assumes it's been hacked, and self-destructs.
I like my solution better: I won't validate this idiotic corporate misbehaviour by purchasing such a crippled unit in the first place. There is no "creative content" in the world worth bending over for, and I'll find some other non-tape data backup method.
An insightful AC said,
::giggles:: I've got quite a number of things that need replacing. Care to send a check now, or file for bankruptcy ?
:D Not to mention that it would probably cause quite a stir in small claims court. Seriously, this sounds like wonderful lawsuit fodder!
============
*Owner* The person that will replace the unit after my son puts his peanut butter sandwhich in the drive.
If the answer is "me", you better damn not send a self destruct command to my property.
If the answer is "you" --
===========
That's a damned good idea.
Tho it's been tried -- there are EULAs that have evergreen clauses, and charge you extra if you terminate it at all. I don't have an exact link but it's been bitched about on gripe2ed.com, Ed Foster's consumer advocate site.
That'll be next: "If you fail to watch NN-many hours of properly-licensed DVD material every month, your Blew-Away DVD unit will automatically bill you for the difference."
Maybe not so farfetched, if they can get some PC OEM to agree to it -- it's certainly conceivable that the BIOS, or a TC-style chip, might be rigged to boot *only* with a "recognised" OS. If that happened to be Windows, that would be Ballmer's ultimate wet dream.
[has thought] What about those upcoming Apples with the x86 CPU? will they boot with a non-Mac OS?? I have no idea, anyone care to speculate?
Some Tandy PCs would only boot with their OEM version of DOS 3.x, because part of DOS was in ROM. So it's not like it's terribly difficult to implement. And what's in flashable ROM... well, that's not hard to remotely alter, if you can get access to the hardware.
An AC who will never be seen in daylight says, "It is illegal to remove OEM licenced software from your machine to install other licences."
And I ask... Where is your cite for that?
Under some EULAs, it is typically not be permitted to move OEM-licensed software from an OEM machine to some other machine. But I've never seen anything that says you can't simply delete it.
So, you're saying that literacy is going down the test-tubes? ;)
I dunno who told you that, but it's a trifle exaggerated.
I used to have a flock of culls from someone who bred fighting cocks. These are about as mean as chickens get -- they are bred to be fearless and aggressive, especially with each other.
Anyway, they are not attracted to blood per se, and don't pay any particular attention to it. What chickens WILL do if they don't get enough protein in their diet (as is common if chickens are fed grain alone), is peck at the feathers on each others' butts until their tails are raw and bloody. Feathers are high in proteins that chickens can digest; that's why feather meal is an ingredient in some chicken feeds, and why they try to eat 'em off each other when on inadequate diets. (Remember bugs are much of a chicken's normal diet, and bugs are VERY high in protein.)
And sometimes the flock will gang up on a single half-grown chick and kill it, then string its entrails all over the place (trying to eat them, but guts don't break off like worms do so just wind up dragged around). This is normal culling behaviour in a lot of species -- if an individual shows weakness by going down during a minor spat, the whole flock or pack will gang up on it and kill it. (Dogs do the exact same thing, and even normally non-aggressive dogs will join in.)
Chickens are hell on not only bugs, but also mice and snakes. Snakes will try to steal eggs (no, it's not a myth, I've seen 'em do it), and will go right into the nest to do so. More than once I got woke up in the middle of the night by a hen fighting with a too-bold snake.
When I had chickens I never saw any rattlers. In the two years since the last of my chickens died off, I've killed 21 rattlers right in my yard.
Or even chickens. With mixed-breed, dark coloured, and wild-type chickens (frex, banties), most female chicks hatch in mostly yellow with a few faint markings, but at hatching most male chicks have obvious stripes on the wings, head, and tail. True monocolour yellow chicks, male or female, mainly occurs with purebreds that will be white at maturity.
:)
(New subject line: how to sex chicks without turning them upsidedown
#37:
#7:
Between 'em, these two posters say it all.
garageband.com has a "people who liked this artist have these here playlists" function, which might be worth perusing, if your tastes work that way.
Personally I don't find such things useful, since as it turns out, I tend not to care for most "similar" recommendations, in literature or music.
Exactly.
Remember the article a couple weeks ago here, about sociopathic bosses? I wondered at the time why more people didn't mention Ballmer.
But we remember Hitler and Genghis Khan. We don't remember, and don't even know about, the many people who invented useful things that were nonetheless not mainstream in their day.
Point being, whether someone is remembered by history has little to do with their personal merits, and everything to do with how much of a big noise they were.
Now, if at some future date Windows and M$Office implode and vanish, and overnight are replaced everywhere by linux, THEN Torvalds might get the same degree of name-recognition.
Because some people cannot be "winners" unless they make everyone else into losers.
Ballmer has often displayed that attitude.
ROTFL!! Welcome to the New Cold War.
Right, but people here were making the assumption that "because it's creative content, it must not be for sale no matter what".
And given that assumption, they'd lost all sight of the several things this guy did that were wrong of themselves (starting with that the game itself wasn't entirely original work to begin with, yet only his own credit is to be found therein -- who's the thief here??)
Rather than this juvenile retaliation stunt for a creative work that technically he doesn't own in the first place (because derivative works are owned by the orignal copyright owner, not by the secondary creator) the smart thing to do would have been to politely inform Fuddruckers that as a fan work, it could not be redistributed commercially, but he'd be happy to make their own branded version which they could do as they wish with -- for a suitable fee, of course.
The guy was bitching on his journal about being underemployed and finally finding work AS a flash games developer, yet he spits in the face of a company that demonstrably finds such games cool (otherwise why link to one?), and might easily be converted into a paying customer for genuninely original work.
IOW, he assumes malice right up front, and reacts with malice, even tho his hands are not entirely clean to start with.
Given that, whether or not he wished sell his games isn't even relevant; it's a side issue that's attractive to juvenile minds who find "getting the other guy but good" the pinnacle of personal achievement.
Some people just can't feel like winners unless they first make someone else into a loser.