Are you volunteering to maintain a copy of Gaim for my shop? You won't be paid, because there isn't money for that, but you can maintain it. Now, repeat that for just about every other business out there, and you see why that is a ridiculous option. IM is nifty, but it's also disruptive, a security hole, and an easy avenue for data to escape. It's a productivity sink, and, in many industries, yet another thing you have to log, as it is an electronic correspondance.
Just because *you* are obsessed with IM does not mean that it is immediately the next big revolution, that everyone simply needs it, and anyone that doesn't have it will die. When you're in business, you're always competing, so you're almost certainly competing against someone that uses IM. And then you realize that IM is not a make it or break it application, so you don't toss $65,000+/yr out the window to have a supposedly secure IM program. Neither do the competitors that use IM; they just have that extra productivity sink and security hole.
You really just must not have anything to do with maintaining a secure and stable network, nor with data protection, archiving of communications, or running a business. You come across as a spoiled teenager that demands to have their way. Now I might be wrong, but when you ignore the myriad of reasons why *not* to do something, but you insist because you just want it want it want it, it does not make you look rational or mature.
The *only* way to have a secure IM system is to not allow it to have internet connectivity. That stops the issues with exploits, reduces time wasting, and allows you to have archives, if necessary. The same sort of thing is true for anything else. Once you connect it to the internet, you cannot guarantee security. It doesn't matter how good you are, it is simply not possible.
Mt. St. Helens is in Washington, Microsoft is in Washington. Bill is the Devil, the Devil runs Hell. Hell has lava, so Microsoft must be reponsible for Mt. St. Helens!
That's obviously an revision of the code. Do you know for sure what law changed Title 17 to read that way? DMCA or whatnot?
I remember that at least in the early 90's, it was certainly not a criminal act to infringe on copyright. It looks like the change may have been HR2265, passed December 1997.
The technology that was supposed to be in Vista was supposed to be part of Windows around 1994/1995. They did press releases and gave talks about it and everything. It was the whole Cairo vision... They started talking about that before NT 3.5 was released, maybe even before NT was released at all.
NT5 was in usuable beta form in 1997, while Win98 was still being called Memphis and Windows97. The only big promised change they did for NT5 was really the addition of Active Directory. NT4 was released around the same time (within a year) as Win95.
Heh, we'll both probably end up modded down, but I share your pain. Even the ATI drivers under Linux suck completely. With NVIDIA on Linux, I run the installer and restart X. With NVIDIA on Windows, I run the installer and restart Windows. With ATI on either, I run the installer, get reminded to uninstall the old drivers, try to uninstall them, have it not uninstall completely, try to install the new drivers, get either a BSOD or a VGA screen, screw around some more, grab an older version, and eventually it works.
I was initially bitten by the poorly designed mach32, with their lack of full support for the VLB standard. Then, occasionally, a friend would get an ATI card. A mach128, which was OK, but had crappy drivers, a couple of radeons, with similarly crappy driver experiences. I chanced getting a radeon all-in-wonder, and ended up scrapping it for a Hauppuage after about a month. The drivers never worked properly. Sometimes I could get TV signal, but the video would be unaccellerated. Sometimes I could use a third-party TV utility, sometimes I couldn't. I'd get the driver to work, and the crappy control software would trash something. It was ridiculous. I've never had a problem when going with NVIDIA, or Matrox, or hell, even S3, as compared to ATI, where I've had a problem every time I've had to work with their stuff.
According to the US ATF (Beaureu of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms), in excess of 93% of all violent crimes involving a firearm have been committed using an illegal firearm. In the places in the US where gun ownership is not restricted, there is nearly no violent crime.
The fact is that if you get rid of guns, then you have stabbings, bludgeonings, etc. You transform "gun violence" into "something else violence". In return for the no reduction of crime, you have lost a vital tool for defence, and, in rare situations, necessary offence. There are very good reasons why the right to own and use guns was put into the US Bill of Rights, as the second change to the Constitution.
A gun doesn't make someone safe. It gives someone the ability to defend themselves when they would be unable to do so by pure physical ability. That is why it has been referred to as "the great equalizer".
If I were attacked, I would defend myself. If the person attacking me got killed, then I would feel bad for having killed someone. I would, however, not feel that I did something wrong. It was wrong for them to have attacked me, and natural for me to defend myself.
I also don't have a problem with having guns around, or carrying guns. Like any weapon, if you respect it, and you don't play with it, you'll be fine. I also don't have a problem with personal responsibility, nor am I going to kill someone for pissing me off. If you think that this is a real possibility for yourself, then you should seek professional advice on your anger management problem. Not having a gun will not stop you from acting on a whim and injuring someone.
Teach your kids about weapons, and teach them respect for those weapons. Keep your weapons in a safe place where nobody is going to happen upon them. This is true for any dangerous thing. Would you want to chance some kid finding your car keys, and running someone over? Of course not, so why do you leave your keys on the table, or the dresser, etc? It's because you (hopefully) taught your kids to not steal things, and not to play with dangerous things.
As for the gun going off accidentally... why did you keep a round chambered and ready? Unless you're planning to use a gun, you should not do this. Regardless of the incredibly low possibility of a round spontaneously discharging, you just don't leave ammunition laying around; that's stupid.
Really, there are dozens of ways that a person could die in a normal day of their lives. Guns are not really one of them.
Perhaps you think that because your country doesn't have guns, that no country should. If that's the case, then I recommend you look into the events after your country banned guns. If you're talking England, then there was a tremendous rise in illegal gun ownership and use by gangs in several cities; the gangs knew that nobody has guns, so they were immediately super-men compared to the populace. Similar antics have occurred in every place that has banned guns, including some places were massacres occurred as a result. (Think Sierra Leone.)
Yes, it would have to be built in, but I'd still consider it to be trivial. You have the time zone setting, and the language setting. You could form a guess based on those as a suggestion to the user when you ask the user where they use the machine most. You could even have it as a custom setup flag in the installer, to automate this during builds by OEMs.
When you consider the complexity of the player, adding a function to track a single digit number is not very difficult.:)
It's always been more than a semantic difference. Theft is a criminal charge, and copyright infringment is a civil infraction. The State can't arrest you and try you for infringment; you have to be sued by the copyright holder. That is a *huge* difference.
Piracy, on the other hand, is that whole robbery at sea thing. It has other connotations, of course, but the high seas robbery is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as something the Federal is allowed to deal with. To quote: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations".
To differentiate between RPC1 and RPC2 so as to not support RPC1 is an additional conditional in the driver. To support both drives is to not have that conditional in the driver, and to add a conditional to the player. So the same number of conditionals.
You could say that it is no more work for MS to support both types than it is to support only RPC2. When you have multiple DVD player programs, then you have theoretically more work to support both, since you have to do the region check in each player.
However, every DVD player program out there is going to do this check, because they aren't going to lock themselves into a minimal market share position by only supporting Vista. Taking that into account, MS is certainly doing this for DRM, and nothing more.
Sometimes you can't allow a technology while still keeping things secure. In the example of IM, you could run an internal IM server on Jabber, or what not, and avoid many potential problems. If you want access to AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc with the outside world, then you open up another avenue for compromise, and one that you can't secure. You might not lose an entire machine, but the user account is compromised, and any data they have access to. Once that compromise is on the network, it can move to try to compromise other hosts. This is a very severe problem, and you have to do what you can to avoid it.
Content filtering is another wonderful item. Sometimes you are required by law to filter, sometimes the order comes from upper management, seeking to reduce unproductive hours. A whole lot of users will play games and surf the web for hours a day. Management doesn't like that. Most of the time, the decision to filter content does not come from IT, but from above them.
It's the same story when users find out what kind of data you have to log (depending on what sector you're in). This could be anything from backups of all data, to what internet sites are being access, to emails, and the content of those emails, perhaps phone call logs, etc. In general, IT doesn't want to log this stuff, because doing that, and backing it all up, is a big hassle. Sometimes you just have to do it, though.
PERL - not installed on some UNIXes Python - not installed on most UNIXes Ruby - not installed on any UNIXes
If your app won't run in the default environment of your target platform, you create a lot more work to change the environment. Or you could write the app in a way so that it *will* run in the default environment, which means using C or shell. Usually, PERL will work, but there are several places that it isn't installed by default, even today.
The reason that people get uppity about RIAA released stuff as being crap isn't unfounded, you know. You get thirty bands that are all doing the same type of lyrics, with the same type of music, and they all use synthesized beats and lyrics written by the studio. They aren't artists, and that is precisely what makes them crap. They don't care about what they're doing in the slightest, past thinking that they'll get rich off it.
If you want to talk about older music RIAA members have published, then you will find a lot of good music by real artists. You'll find the occasional gem in their current releases, too. In the stuff they release that becomes advertised, radio played, and hyped up in stores and on MTV, you don't find this, though. There is no feeling or innovation or real character to this music.
Also, like I'd said before, RIAA members do publish new acts that are good, but most of the new stuff that they publish is not. Notice I never said that *everything* they publish crap, nor did I go merely on vacuous opinion. There are real reasons why these acts aren't good music.
I happen to think stuff like Johnny Cash or Tina Turner is good music; I don't really like their music, mind you, but it's good music. They wrote their own songs, lyrics and all. There's meaning and feeling to their music. This is opposite of much of your RIAA-members stuff.
This is aside from the absolute disgustingness of what passes for people in these new bands. You get the stupidity of the rappers, with their gang wars, backward ways of brutality, and the driving need to kill each other off. There could be the high profile singer, that will disappear in a few years when the next plastic diva shows up. They have issues with sleeping with everyone around them, massive amount of drugs, and again, total stupidity. How about the boy bands, with the vapid personalities, lack of intelligence, and selling their bodies to the media. Then you get them pushing lyrics that would disgust half their audience, if you could understand them, of if the average person would pay attention to what their singing along with.
IOW, fine, enjoy your cookie-cutter bands. Just don't call much of that stuff good *music* until they manage to actually start playing music, or at least writing their own content.
Or perhaps the GP thinks that studio written rap, studio written boy bands, and studio written pop sucks? The best music out there really tends to be not RIAA member published, and not because of some magical RIAA-sucks property, but because the musicians actually wrote the music.
The studios are perfectly willing to sign something exactly the same as what they already have, but rarely do they sign something new and interesting. Look at crap like J-Lo, Brittany Spears, etc, or the trite boy-band bilge that goes for music, or the ridiculous rap bullshit that MTV constantly plays. None of it is original, and most of it isn't even written by the bands.
Also, it's no "college boy" attitude. It's a more common statement from older people, and from people, in general, that have experienced music as art.
Perhaps you should consider that other people have their own opinions yourself? Perhaps you could even consider that a whole lot of them think the RIAA member cookie-cutter stuff really does suck? Or perhaps you would like to debate whether any of their crap fits with music theory, or whether it counts as music at all? After all, what else is a band with no composer, no song writer, and nobody playing an instrument?
Hmm, that's interesting... the best you'll usually find in the US is 93*. Right now that's around $2.40USD/gal in my area, which equates to $0.634USD/L, or 0.535 euros per liter.
Most of the engines available in the US are designed with the idea you're going to be running 87* fuel in them. You'll get slightly better fuel economy out of them by running higher octane, as well as slighly better engine life and performance. Very few cars in the US have high enough compression to require higher octane than the 87*.
Yes, there's a correlation, but you're just missing a lot of things, both on the inventions, and on the reasons.
Some other factors that come to mind: greater population, stable governments, stable economies, safety, rising standards of living, rapid communication, rapid travel, etc. A few inventions enabled us to produce many many other inventions.
You also forget that inventions before used to be huge things, too. The wheel, fire starters, crop technique, medical basics, optics (glasses, microscope, telescope). There was also the development of math, science, medicine, etc.
I'd say we've had a pretty steady rate of invention to population over our history. Today, we have more population, so you have more inventions. Now we're seeing invention slow down, since it is extraordinarily difficult for a random person to have a quantum physics breakthrough, or design a new semiconductor. Just coming up with a possible new invention or discovery requires more resources and more knowledge than ever before.
When you add in the difficulty of actually marketing a product because of the patent/copyright minefield, it gets much worse. Now you have to be quite wealthy to afford the patent search, to fend off the leeches like NTP/SCO/RTI, and to fight with or license other patents that may actually be sensible. Most of the problem is a direct result of "intellectual property". When you had to patent a specific design for a device, it mean someone could get to the same result in a different way, without infringing. The crap that constitutes IP does not have specific designs. The patents are broad, often obvious, and never necessary when it comes to IP.
I think you will find that the advent of IP and IP protection slowed down development, and is going to result in a decline in innovation in the countries that fell into its trap.
Yeah, I did mean gallon, sorry about that.:) The other poster did point out that when you take into account my unit error, it's 3-4 euros per gallon in tax.
1 gallon of 87* gas in my part of the US is $2.15. The same gallon in Europe would be $5.61 USD. 75% of that is $4.21 USD, which is 3.55 euros.
That can be explained trivially: Europe taxes gasoline much more heavily than the US. You'll occasionally see the EU-nuts on here spout off on how Americans wouldn't waste gas so much if the US would tax it as much as the EU. They accept the government taxing the crap out of them as not only normal, but perfectly reasonable, and sometimes desired. Some of those gas taxes are on the order of 3 euros per liter.
Also, the government taxes cars because they can, and no other reason. There are subsidies for oil companies, but car taxes are not where they are. Your subsidies come in the form of tax breaks, military actions, political pressure, cuts in import tariff, etc. They are not so obvious as "here is ten billion dollars so that gas is cheaper".
As far as roads, public money builds them, and often gas tax and toll are offered up as paying to maintain them. Regardless of how they're paid for, they are necessary infrastructure, so we have to pay for them somehow. Even if we didn't drive cars around all the time, we'd still require the roads. Or are you suggesting that public transit is so good in Europe, that they don't have and maintain roads?
That's a management problem. They need to hire more staff so that the job can actually get done. Allowing the situation to become half-assed because of that will not only get production shut down, but it will let management know that they don't have to solve the problem, because you will "solve" it for them.
Part of the reason that "IT Lackey" has a job is because ego-inflated "Software Developer" screws the machine up on a regular basis. "Software Developer" does not get to have admin access to machines that other people use. They get to submit their build to be tested and staged into production.
The real reason that "IT Lackey" has a job is because someone has to know how to admin the system, and the developers certainly don't. They keep the system running, and that means not letting people, like developers, do whatever they please.
I'll tell you a little something about the real world: Most any company that gets a developer with your attitude is a company that's about to put out an ad for a new developer.
Having experienced both the BOSE system and the Monsoon system that VW/Audi has used, I find that I definitely prefer the Monsoon equipment. The BOSE stuff really does seem underwhelming.
Most of these non-experts actually run WinXP in with the native XP theme, because they don't know how to change it.
I prefer efficiency to worthless eye-candy. I hate all the screen waste and clutter that the XP interface throws at me. It also sucks a lot of time down and provides the potential for inconsistency among users. I have a mix of NT4, 2000, and XP desktops, and trying to troubleshoot a user is a pain. The largest reason for this is the different UI on each. It's just easier to VNC in and fix it myself than to try to get any information out of the user.
When I set up an XP machine, after I clear all the pop-ups that MS throws at me, I set the system to use the classic 2000 theme, turn off the HTML explorer views, and set the start menu to classic. Of course, I also have to turn on file extensions, hidden files, system files, yes really system files, and browsing in a separate process. Then I have to turn off sounds, all the *other* annoying MS pop-ups, and all the fading effects.
People will stick to 2k or XP until they need a new computer. People just don't upgrade their OS. You're talking about people that buy a new computer rather than format/reinstall.
Nah, the reason for a tollbooth is increased revenue. There is never a government expectation of removing the toll from a road. Public funds already paid for the project, so you can't really justify putting a toll on it to "pay for it". The closest you get is by trying to say that you're paying off bond interest and/or project maintanance with the toll. Galileo is very similar, in this way.
The other poster that replied to me gives a good rationale for having the subscription service.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to prefer the Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350 or 500 cards. They're easily available and have good quality. They all do MPEG encoding on-board.
You can find a databases and software at:
www.mythtv.org
www.freevo.org
http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/bttv.html
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page
I also spelled offense and defense wrong. :P
Are you volunteering to maintain a copy of Gaim for my shop? You won't be paid, because there isn't money for that, but you can maintain it. Now, repeat that for just about every other business out there, and you see why that is a ridiculous option. IM is nifty, but it's also disruptive, a security hole, and an easy avenue for data to escape. It's a productivity sink, and, in many industries, yet another thing you have to log, as it is an electronic correspondance.
Just because *you* are obsessed with IM does not mean that it is immediately the next big revolution, that everyone simply needs it, and anyone that doesn't have it will die. When you're in business, you're always competing, so you're almost certainly competing against someone that uses IM. And then you realize that IM is not a make it or break it application, so you don't toss $65,000+/yr out the window to have a supposedly secure IM program. Neither do the competitors that use IM; they just have that extra productivity sink and security hole.
You really just must not have anything to do with maintaining a secure and stable network, nor with data protection, archiving of communications, or running a business. You come across as a spoiled teenager that demands to have their way. Now I might be wrong, but when you ignore the myriad of reasons why *not* to do something, but you insist because you just want it want it want it, it does not make you look rational or mature.
The *only* way to have a secure IM system is to not allow it to have internet connectivity. That stops the issues with exploits, reduces time wasting, and allows you to have archives, if necessary. The same sort of thing is true for anything else. Once you connect it to the internet, you cannot guarantee security. It doesn't matter how good you are, it is simply not possible.
Mt. St. Helens is in Washington, Microsoft is in Washington. Bill is the Devil, the Devil runs Hell. Hell has lava, so Microsoft must be reponsible for Mt. St. Helens!
That's obviously an revision of the code. Do you know for sure what law changed Title 17 to read that way? DMCA or whatnot?
I remember that at least in the early 90's, it was certainly not a criminal act to infringe on copyright. It looks like the change may have been HR2265, passed December 1997.
The technology that was supposed to be in Vista was supposed to be part of Windows around 1994/1995. They did press releases and gave talks about it and everything. It was the whole Cairo vision... They started talking about that before NT 3.5 was released, maybe even before NT was released at all.
NT5 was in usuable beta form in 1997, while Win98 was still being called Memphis and Windows97. The only big promised change they did for NT5 was really the addition of Active Directory. NT4 was released around the same time (within a year) as Win95.
Heh, we'll both probably end up modded down, but I share your pain. Even the ATI drivers under Linux suck completely. With NVIDIA on Linux, I run the installer and restart X. With NVIDIA on Windows, I run the installer and restart Windows. With ATI on either, I run the installer, get reminded to uninstall the old drivers, try to uninstall them, have it not uninstall completely, try to install the new drivers, get either a BSOD or a VGA screen, screw around some more, grab an older version, and eventually it works.
I was initially bitten by the poorly designed mach32, with their lack of full support for the VLB standard. Then, occasionally, a friend would get an ATI card. A mach128, which was OK, but had crappy drivers, a couple of radeons, with similarly crappy driver experiences. I chanced getting a radeon all-in-wonder, and ended up scrapping it for a Hauppuage after about a month. The drivers never worked properly. Sometimes I could get TV signal, but the video would be unaccellerated. Sometimes I could use a third-party TV utility, sometimes I couldn't. I'd get the driver to work, and the crappy control software would trash something. It was ridiculous. I've never had a problem when going with NVIDIA, or Matrox, or hell, even S3, as compared to ATI, where I've had a problem every time I've had to work with their stuff.
According to the US ATF (Beaureu of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms), in excess of 93% of all violent crimes involving a firearm have been committed using an illegal firearm. In the places in the US where gun ownership is not restricted, there is nearly no violent crime.
The fact is that if you get rid of guns, then you have stabbings, bludgeonings, etc. You transform "gun violence" into "something else violence". In return for the no reduction of crime, you have lost a vital tool for defence, and, in rare situations, necessary offence. There are very good reasons why the right to own and use guns was put into the US Bill of Rights, as the second change to the Constitution.
A gun doesn't make someone safe. It gives someone the ability to defend themselves when they would be unable to do so by pure physical ability. That is why it has been referred to as "the great equalizer".
If I were attacked, I would defend myself. If the person attacking me got killed, then I would feel bad for having killed someone. I would, however, not feel that I did something wrong. It was wrong for them to have attacked me, and natural for me to defend myself.
I also don't have a problem with having guns around, or carrying guns. Like any weapon, if you respect it, and you don't play with it, you'll be fine. I also don't have a problem with personal responsibility, nor am I going to kill someone for pissing me off. If you think that this is a real possibility for yourself, then you should seek professional advice on your anger management problem. Not having a gun will not stop you from acting on a whim and injuring someone.
Teach your kids about weapons, and teach them respect for those weapons. Keep your weapons in a safe place where nobody is going to happen upon them. This is true for any dangerous thing. Would you want to chance some kid finding your car keys, and running someone over? Of course not, so why do you leave your keys on the table, or the dresser, etc? It's because you (hopefully) taught your kids to not steal things, and not to play with dangerous things.
As for the gun going off accidentally... why did you keep a round chambered and ready? Unless you're planning to use a gun, you should not do this. Regardless of the incredibly low possibility of a round spontaneously discharging, you just don't leave ammunition laying around; that's stupid.
Really, there are dozens of ways that a person could die in a normal day of their lives. Guns are not really one of them.
Perhaps you think that because your country doesn't have guns, that no country should. If that's the case, then I recommend you look into the events after your country banned guns. If you're talking England, then there was a tremendous rise in illegal gun ownership and use by gangs in several cities; the gangs knew that nobody has guns, so they were immediately super-men compared to the populace. Similar antics have occurred in every place that has banned guns, including some places were massacres occurred as a result. (Think Sierra Leone.)
Yes, it would have to be built in, but I'd still consider it to be trivial. You have the time zone setting, and the language setting. You could form a guess based on those as a suggestion to the user when you ask the user where they use the machine most. You could even have it as a custom setup flag in the installer, to automate this during builds by OEMs.
:)
When you consider the complexity of the player, adding a function to track a single digit number is not very difficult.
It's always been more than a semantic difference. Theft is a criminal charge, and copyright infringment is a civil infraction. The State can't arrest you and try you for infringment; you have to be sued by the copyright holder. That is a *huge* difference.
Piracy, on the other hand, is that whole robbery at sea thing. It has other connotations, of course, but the high seas robbery is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as something the Federal is allowed to deal with. To quote: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations".
To differentiate between RPC1 and RPC2 so as to not support RPC1 is an additional conditional in the driver. To support both drives is to not have that conditional in the driver, and to add a conditional to the player. So the same number of conditionals.
You could say that it is no more work for MS to support both types than it is to support only RPC2. When you have multiple DVD player programs, then you have theoretically more work to support both, since you have to do the region check in each player.
However, every DVD player program out there is going to do this check, because they aren't going to lock themselves into a minimal market share position by only supporting Vista. Taking that into account, MS is certainly doing this for DRM, and nothing more.
Just a couple of comments...
Sometimes you can't allow a technology while still keeping things secure. In the example of IM, you could run an internal IM server on Jabber, or what not, and avoid many potential problems. If you want access to AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc with the outside world, then you open up another avenue for compromise, and one that you can't secure. You might not lose an entire machine, but the user account is compromised, and any data they have access to. Once that compromise is on the network, it can move to try to compromise other hosts. This is a very severe problem, and you have to do what you can to avoid it.
Content filtering is another wonderful item. Sometimes you are required by law to filter, sometimes the order comes from upper management, seeking to reduce unproductive hours. A whole lot of users will play games and surf the web for hours a day. Management doesn't like that. Most of the time, the decision to filter content does not come from IT, but from above them.
It's the same story when users find out what kind of data you have to log (depending on what sector you're in). This could be anything from backups of all data, to what internet sites are being access, to emails, and the content of those emails, perhaps phone call logs, etc. In general, IT doesn't want to log this stuff, because doing that, and backing it all up, is a big hassle. Sometimes you just have to do it, though.
And here is the problem with that:
PERL - not installed on some UNIXes
Python - not installed on most UNIXes
Ruby - not installed on any UNIXes
If your app won't run in the default environment of your target platform, you create a lot more work to change the environment. Or you could write the app in a way so that it *will* run in the default environment, which means using C or shell. Usually, PERL will work, but there are several places that it isn't installed by default, even today.
The reason that people get uppity about RIAA released stuff as being crap isn't unfounded, you know. You get thirty bands that are all doing the same type of lyrics, with the same type of music, and they all use synthesized beats and lyrics written by the studio. They aren't artists, and that is precisely what makes them crap. They don't care about what they're doing in the slightest, past thinking that they'll get rich off it.
If you want to talk about older music RIAA members have published, then you will find a lot of good music by real artists. You'll find the occasional gem in their current releases, too. In the stuff they release that becomes advertised, radio played, and hyped up in stores and on MTV, you don't find this, though. There is no feeling or innovation or real character to this music.
Also, like I'd said before, RIAA members do publish new acts that are good, but most of the new stuff that they publish is not. Notice I never said that *everything* they publish crap, nor did I go merely on vacuous opinion. There are real reasons why these acts aren't good music.
I happen to think stuff like Johnny Cash or Tina Turner is good music; I don't really like their music, mind you, but it's good music. They wrote their own songs, lyrics and all. There's meaning and feeling to their music. This is opposite of much of your RIAA-members stuff.
This is aside from the absolute disgustingness of what passes for people in these new bands. You get the stupidity of the rappers, with their gang wars, backward ways of brutality, and the driving need to kill each other off. There could be the high profile singer, that will disappear in a few years when the next plastic diva shows up. They have issues with sleeping with everyone around them, massive amount of drugs, and again, total stupidity. How about the boy bands, with the vapid personalities, lack of intelligence, and selling their bodies to the media. Then you get them pushing lyrics that would disgust half their audience, if you could understand them, of if the average person would pay attention to what their singing along with.
IOW, fine, enjoy your cookie-cutter bands. Just don't call much of that stuff good *music* until they manage to actually start playing music, or at least writing their own content.
Or perhaps the GP thinks that studio written rap, studio written boy bands, and studio written pop sucks? The best music out there really tends to be not RIAA member published, and not because of some magical RIAA-sucks property, but because the musicians actually wrote the music.
The studios are perfectly willing to sign something exactly the same as what they already have, but rarely do they sign something new and interesting. Look at crap like J-Lo, Brittany Spears, etc, or the trite boy-band bilge that goes for music, or the ridiculous rap bullshit that MTV constantly plays. None of it is original, and most of it isn't even written by the bands.
Also, it's no "college boy" attitude. It's a more common statement from older people, and from people, in general, that have experienced music as art.
Perhaps you should consider that other people have their own opinions yourself? Perhaps you could even consider that a whole lot of them think the RIAA member cookie-cutter stuff really does suck? Or perhaps you would like to debate whether any of their crap fits with music theory, or whether it counts as music at all? After all, what else is a band with no composer, no song writer, and nobody playing an instrument?
The closest Costco to me is around 40mi. The cheapest gas I've found is a BJs for 2.09, though.
Hmm, that's interesting... the best you'll usually find in the US is 93*. Right now that's around $2.40USD/gal in my area, which equates to $0.634USD/L, or 0.535 euros per liter.
Most of the engines available in the US are designed with the idea you're going to be running 87* fuel in them. You'll get slightly better fuel economy out of them by running higher octane, as well as slighly better engine life and performance. Very few cars in the US have high enough compression to require higher octane than the 87*.
Yes, there's a correlation, but you're just missing a lot of things, both on the inventions, and on the reasons.
Some other factors that come to mind: greater population, stable governments, stable economies, safety, rising standards of living, rapid communication, rapid travel, etc. A few inventions enabled us to produce many many other inventions.
You also forget that inventions before used to be huge things, too. The wheel, fire starters, crop technique, medical basics, optics (glasses, microscope, telescope). There was also the development of math, science, medicine, etc.
I'd say we've had a pretty steady rate of invention to population over our history. Today, we have more population, so you have more inventions. Now we're seeing invention slow down, since it is extraordinarily difficult for a random person to have a quantum physics breakthrough, or design a new semiconductor. Just coming up with a possible new invention or discovery requires more resources and more knowledge than ever before.
When you add in the difficulty of actually marketing a product because of the patent/copyright minefield, it gets much worse. Now you have to be quite wealthy to afford the patent search, to fend off the leeches like NTP/SCO/RTI, and to fight with or license other patents that may actually be sensible. Most of the problem is a direct result of "intellectual property". When you had to patent a specific design for a device, it mean someone could get to the same result in a different way, without infringing. The crap that constitutes IP does not have specific designs. The patents are broad, often obvious, and never necessary when it comes to IP.
I think you will find that the advent of IP and IP protection slowed down development, and is going to result in a decline in innovation in the countries that fell into its trap.
Yeah, I did mean gallon, sorry about that. :) The other poster did point out that when you take into account my unit error, it's 3-4 euros per gallon in tax.
1 gallon of 87* gas in my part of the US is $2.15. The same gallon in Europe would be $5.61 USD. 75% of that is $4.21 USD, which is 3.55 euros.
That can be explained trivially: Europe taxes gasoline much more heavily than the US. You'll occasionally see the EU-nuts on here spout off on how Americans wouldn't waste gas so much if the US would tax it as much as the EU. They accept the government taxing the crap out of them as not only normal, but perfectly reasonable, and sometimes desired. Some of those gas taxes are on the order of 3 euros per liter.
Also, the government taxes cars because they can, and no other reason. There are subsidies for oil companies, but car taxes are not where they are. Your subsidies come in the form of tax breaks, military actions, political pressure, cuts in import tariff, etc. They are not so obvious as "here is ten billion dollars so that gas is cheaper".
As far as roads, public money builds them, and often gas tax and toll are offered up as paying to maintain them. Regardless of how they're paid for, they are necessary infrastructure, so we have to pay for them somehow. Even if we didn't drive cars around all the time, we'd still require the roads. Or are you suggesting that public transit is so good in Europe, that they don't have and maintain roads?
That's a management problem. They need to hire more staff so that the job can actually get done. Allowing the situation to become half-assed because of that will not only get production shut down, but it will let management know that they don't have to solve the problem, because you will "solve" it for them.
Part of the reason that "IT Lackey" has a job is because ego-inflated "Software Developer" screws the machine up on a regular basis. "Software Developer" does not get to have admin access to machines that other people use. They get to submit their build to be tested and staged into production.
The real reason that "IT Lackey" has a job is because someone has to know how to admin the system, and the developers certainly don't. They keep the system running, and that means not letting people, like developers, do whatever they please.
I'll tell you a little something about the real world: Most any company that gets a developer with your attitude is a company that's about to put out an ad for a new developer.
Having experienced both the BOSE system and the Monsoon system that VW/Audi has used, I find that I definitely prefer the Monsoon equipment. The BOSE stuff really does seem underwhelming.
Most of these non-experts actually run WinXP in with the native XP theme, because they don't know how to change it.
I prefer efficiency to worthless eye-candy. I hate all the screen waste and clutter that the XP interface throws at me. It also sucks a lot of time down and provides the potential for inconsistency among users. I have a mix of NT4, 2000, and XP desktops, and trying to troubleshoot a user is a pain. The largest reason for this is the different UI on each. It's just easier to VNC in and fix it myself than to try to get any information out of the user.
When I set up an XP machine, after I clear all the pop-ups that MS throws at me, I set the system to use the classic 2000 theme, turn off the HTML explorer views, and set the start menu to classic. Of course, I also have to turn on file extensions, hidden files, system files, yes really system files, and browsing in a separate process. Then I have to turn off sounds, all the *other* annoying MS pop-ups, and all the fading effects.
People will stick to 2k or XP until they need a new computer. People just don't upgrade their OS. You're talking about people that buy a new computer rather than format/reinstall.
Nah, the reason for a tollbooth is increased revenue. There is never a government expectation of removing the toll from a road. Public funds already paid for the project, so you can't really justify putting a toll on it to "pay for it". The closest you get is by trying to say that you're paying off bond interest and/or project maintanance with the toll. Galileo is very similar, in this way.
The other poster that replied to me gives a good rationale for having the subscription service.