Tivo had features never implimented on DirecTIVO because DirecTV didn't allow Tivo to impliment them. Network connection, sharing between boxes, removing video from the box, all those feature pus many many more DirecTV prevented, not TIVO. Tivo acknowledges DRM, but the real lackeys of DRM are the content providers, and their distributers. DirecTV wouldn't allow moving video off the DVR for fear of people buying pay-per-view and sharing the recorded content, they did this at the behest of the MPAA, not Tivo.
Mid 90's. Tivo pioneered the DVR when your average home computer was a shade above 90mhz. What they did at the time no one thought was possible in anything less than $10,000 and the size of a fridge.
Wikipedia wrong? Never! You are a liar if you think an entry that could have been created by anyone with any agenda could somehow be incorrect! Dish fans aren't rabid enough to lie about or manipulate the record so that it appears they are saints.
Dish fans are almost as bad as Faux news watchers.
Another American company failing that had most of it's design and manufacturing in Germany. AMD sold itself to the Europeans years ago. Do you really think the EU would bring an anti-trust case against AMD if there weren't German jobs on the line?
Don't kid yourself, the death of AMD will be good news for US jobs.
Coal power plants output the same amount of power all day long. You CAN'T turn them down or off unless you want to wait 3 days for them to reach operating temperatures again. They might turn the generators off (I don't know, last I heard they don't because they can't spin them down without running the risk of needing maintenance), but the coal is still being consumed. Nuclear can increase and decrease output to a certain level but still has the maintenance issues with the turbines, gas power plants can relatively easily adjust output (and comprise less than 5% of power output in the US) and hydro is the most efficient peaking power system as hoover and glen canyon dams were notoriously used for peak output in LA until discharge rate limits were applied for environmental reasons completely killing the ability to use Hydro for peaking power.
Being that most of the power in the US is coal means the power output at night doesn't change much at all. When the potential in the line is unused it's simply converted into waste heat on the transmission lines. It DOESN'T raise voltages as you incorrectly believe.
The rest of your post is garbage as you know nothing about the transmission of power and appear to know nothing about even simple electrical principles like ohms law. Before you comment on such things you should actually study how power plants function and how electricity works.
Recent studies show that the unused power generated every night that is converted into waste heat because there isn't demand to use it is sufficient to power every american owning a plug in hybrid without the construction of a single new power plant if people charge their vehicles at night.
Right now the power generated by US power plants at night becomes waste heat because there is no demand for it, that power right now could be driving you to work without the use of a single additional ounce of coal or nuclear waste. Everyone arguing over this issue of where the energy comes from seems to forget that right now gigawatts of power go unused every single night. That power is essentially free because it's already being generated and going unused. Plug your car in at night and use that power to drive to work the next day and you just prevented all that power from being wasted.
You people that keep saying boycotts don't work have no idea what a boycott is. A boycott isn't not buying a product. As an example let me give you a historical reference to a few boycotts. When you boycott something you don't just not purchase it. What you do is not buy the product, tell everyone else not to buy the product and why, and create as much publicity for the boycott as you can.
In the old days before everyone ranting in their basement at their computer screen a boycott involved two things. Not buying the product and making a sign that you then took and stood in front of a store with and explained to shoppers what you were boycotting and why. When the southern Baptists announced their boycott of Disney for giving benefits to same sex couples they didn't just stop going to Disney parks and buying Disney movies and products they made a bunch of signs and picketed in front of Disney World, called the press so they reported on it AND then picketed for months in front of the property. They also leafleted and got in front of the media at every opportunity.
So lets summarize. It's not a boycott unless their is publicity and your Mother is talking to her friends about it over the weekly Bridge game. Without broad publicity a boycott is nothing more than a change in purchase habits and is meaningless. It's not a Boycott if the CEO of the company doesn't know WHY you stopped buying products.
So all you people that keep saying boycotts don't work, you either don't know what a boycott is or you don't understand what's needed to make it a boycott. Properly executed boycotts are often highly successful, only in situations where succumbing to the boycott demands would cost more customers will the boycott fail.
The love affair with overpriced auction winnings is waning. More and more people are realizing that most of the stuff on ebay that you can get at your local store or at another retailer on the internet is usually ridiculously overpriced. The days of paying 105% of new price for used goods are over. This realization by the consumer is hurting ebay's bottom line. They are no longer growing at double digit percentages and I would argue trends show all growth will halt in less than a year. To continue to grow revenue they have to try to take a bigger cut of every sale. They have already raised prices so the next step is to take a cut of every payment transaction. That was the entire strategy with the paypal acquisition. It's simply been a matter of time before they ban every payment method other than paypal.
The question is will there be a drop is use of the site as a result, or whether there will be a lawsuit. Ebay has always run into this issue that someday a lawyer is going to get everyone together who's been scammed and file a class action suit that targets them for all the things they could do to prevent fraud and don't. It's going to be a BIG lawsuit someday so the executives have it in mind to bump the stock price as much as possible and make sure they get their bonuses before the shit hits the fan. That and making sure there is still growth in a company where there is no growth.
The point is that if things are realistic it makes the game that much more fun and immersive. So as you cast chain lightening at the frogs you might actually feel like it's a real world and you are really the hero and provides the same type of escapism of a movie. That immersion makes the game that much funner and enjoyable.
Frankly, it's far more simple to simply mandate the installation of a data logger, GPS and communication system in every vehicle. You may think this is impossible, but I would argue that the need to generate use based tax revenue for the use of roadways as fuel efficiency climbs is going to drive many proposals for exactly this. I simply assert that as more of the driving public gets fuel efficient econoboxs there will be a drive from the wealthy to eliminate the gas tax and make it mile based tax because the wealthy will continue to drive low mileage high performance vehicles and they won't want to be stuck paying the most in taxes to support the roadways. The lojack type system will also be driven by law enforcement that would want to use the system in criminal investigations just like they use the toll passes now in investigations. The insurance industry will also support the idea as the loggers could be used in accident investigations to establish the responsibility for the accident and could be used to raise rates on those that speed.
Personally I give it about 10 years and all vehicles will be mandated to have a GPS, data logger and reporting system installed. The preliminary ground work has already been laid as at least half a dozen states have already proposed per mile taxes instead of per gallon taxes. Civil liberties will likely be at the bottom of the pool as driving is considered a privilege, not a right under US common law.
A hundred a day? I can count on both hands the number installed in my state. Not only that they are only installed in the freeway in the metro area where monitoring vehicle speed is imperative for traffic management. It's fun to exaggerate claims to make them seem more than they are. I'd also wager that to upgrade the data receivers to handle such information would be rather costly as currently the systems can only detect speed. Being proprietery systems would mean you would have to buy the new system from the previous vendor and install all new cabinets and processing systems in addition to the data transmitters and possibly even upgrade the communication hubs to handle the extra data traffic. Given that tax dollars are involved there would have to be an appropriation, and given federal policies you would need to do a study to justify the expenditure, the FHWA would have to approve which means the federal congress would probably have to get involved. Given that there would need to be standards and such the systems to do what you propose would likely cost millions to 10's of millions for a moderately small system. All in all you make it sound much easier than it is. The likely hood without political pressure of some national defense character would in reality preclude it from happening.
I hope Disney notices her blatant abuse of copyright in using the image from the Incredibles. If she thinks the cities suit is bad, wait till Disney sues her. And she deserves to be sued for using frontpage and stealing other people's images.
A good example of this is Costco. A company run by a founder, a man who believes strongly in limiting profits to retain consumers. A man that believes in no restriction returns, even food. A man that believes a well paid employee is a happy and helpful employee. I see the difference every single time I go to Costco. You have a pleasant helpful staff, unlike stores like walmart where you are lucky to find anyone. You have customers like myself who don't worry too much about the prices because I know I'm not paying more than 10% above Costco's cost and spend in excess of 5 figures a year there. Wall Street loves to hound him in the quarterly calls about raising prices or membership fees to increase returns, his response is that raising prices is a seductive path to slow growth.
The short term growth model wall street has developed over the past 20-30 years doesn't mean all companies are like that. In fact find the companies that aren't and invest in them, because their long term growth will surpass any short term profit seeker by leaps and bounds. Costco alone is making serious returns that exceed market average because the CEO doesn't follow the path to easy profit which destroy long term growth. Invest in those companies now and sell them when the short term profit CEO eventually gets hired and you will retire early, I guarantee it.
If you couldn't train your brain to think the way you want then machine control via thought wouldn't be possible. The OCZ Nia computer control wouldn't exist. You can train your brain to fire certain neurons just as easily as you can train your hand to react to stimuli. All you need is feedback, maybe learning to beat this system requires to time on the system to learn to think the right way, but any system that relies on a human reaction can be fooled. Something as simple as dreams could throw a system off that relied on use of certain portions of the brain.
And all that person needs to know is how the machine works and construct their thoughts during the calibration in a manner that makes the machine read the data incorrectly. It's the same principle behind a lie detector, step on a sharp tack during the calibration and during any "true" question such that the reading is the same regardless of truth.
No judge in the US will order a lie detector test. They are inadmissible in trial by supreme court ruling. Not only can they be faked, as in if you are lieing you can fake a true answer, but they routinely return false answers on people that are overtly nervous or affected emotionally by the question.
Like most machines, once you know how the machine works they are easy to subvert.
And most importantly, as a public company Redhat likely notified the FBI of the breach and the FBI told them they couldn't reveal any details until the investigation was complete under penalty of being charged with interfering with an investigation. This is SOP for the FBI, they don't want details out there so that if they question the actual person that did the break in and he/she reveals details that aren't public they can use it against him/her in court.
The original framers never conceived of a US millitary base off US soil. We were a neutral nation until WWII and we really should move back to being a neutral nation again.
People forget that the Amazon Comment storm stopped Quicken from continuing to impliment similar draconian DRM on TurboTax. In fact said comments and reduced sales actually caused them to reverse previous policies. They completely removed the DRM and actually allowed via the EULA more copy rights to the owner than previously existed in the next years version. I was part of that boycott, choosing that year to use TaxCut instead of TurboTax. Not only that but the executives at Quicken got the wake up call that the guys selling them the DRM were snake oil salesmen.
Don't discount the power of a comment boycott. It hurts a publisher in the pocketbook directly by informing customers of the DRM before purchase, rather than after. These potential customers now aware of the problems before purchase then avoid the game entirely choosing not to deal with the problem. Even if there are still sales the real power of the boycott can only be seen in the total sales, not the day to day sales. Amazon's comments are a powerful medium to educate consumers. Amazon comments in the case of quicken caused a media storm and dramatically hurt sales of the DRM laden TurboTax.
Based on previous comments from the executives of EA it will probably not make an impact on their decisions and motives, unlike Quicken. But if it keeps happening on every game they distribute then they will either vacate the PC game market or quit using DRM. Both scenarios are good for PC gamers as they are currently the biggest DRM publisher and PC Game developers will choose to use other publishers.
If Sony is actually going to change their ratings it's out of fear of a class action lawsuit or the result of a class action lawsuit. In the age of the Bush administration and the GOP's effort to eliminate the FTC, truth in advertising is now only the result of lawsuits.
You would think the GOP would be in favor of more regulation about truth in advertising as it would clearly reduce lawsuits. Instead they want to eliminate truth and lawsuits. The GOP clearly supports quackery.
The problem with that analogy is that it's so hammered into doctors that they don't ever see zebras. The world becomes full of horses and the zebras that are out there never get recognized and innocent patients suffer, often for very long times while they try to find a doctor that can recognize when it's not a horse and to start looking for zebras. For people with rare conditions it probably averages over 3 years and 5 doctors to get a diagnosis, if they ever get one.
The Ironically named People's alliance for democracy is trying to do away with democracy. The problem is the rich elite are faced with a government that is being elected and supported by the poor rural majority. As a result this government is appealing to their support base and providing lots of support for rural folks including financial help and incentives. The rich elite call that corruption and want to eliminate democracy because they don't want the poor majority in control.
Like most thermal compounds it may conduct heat better than most non-metals but unless it's a brand new material everything on the market currently is going to be a far worse conducter of heat than air. Encasing thermal components in a material with worse performance than air is going to make them get much hotter.
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Tivo had features never implimented on DirecTIVO because DirecTV didn't allow Tivo to impliment them. Network connection, sharing between boxes, removing video from the box, all those feature pus many many more DirecTV prevented, not TIVO. Tivo acknowledges DRM, but the real lackeys of DRM are the content providers, and their distributers. DirecTV wouldn't allow moving video off the DVR for fear of people buying pay-per-view and sharing the recorded content, they did this at the behest of the MPAA, not Tivo.
Mid 90's. Tivo pioneered the DVR when your average home computer was a shade above 90mhz. What they did at the time no one thought was possible in anything less than $10,000 and the size of a fridge.
Wikipedia wrong? Never! You are a liar if you think an entry that could have been created by anyone with any agenda could somehow be incorrect! Dish fans aren't rabid enough to lie about or manipulate the record so that it appears they are saints.
Dish fans are almost as bad as Faux news watchers.
Another American company failing that had most of it's design and manufacturing in Germany. AMD sold itself to the Europeans years ago. Do you really think the EU would bring an anti-trust case against AMD if there weren't German jobs on the line?
Don't kid yourself, the death of AMD will be good news for US jobs.
Coal power plants output the same amount of power all day long. You CAN'T turn them down or off unless you want to wait 3 days for them to reach operating temperatures again. They might turn the generators off (I don't know, last I heard they don't because they can't spin them down without running the risk of needing maintenance), but the coal is still being consumed. Nuclear can increase and decrease output to a certain level but still has the maintenance issues with the turbines, gas power plants can relatively easily adjust output (and comprise less than 5% of power output in the US) and hydro is the most efficient peaking power system as hoover and glen canyon dams were notoriously used for peak output in LA until discharge rate limits were applied for environmental reasons completely killing the ability to use Hydro for peaking power.
Being that most of the power in the US is coal means the power output at night doesn't change much at all. When the potential in the line is unused it's simply converted into waste heat on the transmission lines. It DOESN'T raise voltages as you incorrectly believe.
The rest of your post is garbage as you know nothing about the transmission of power and appear to know nothing about even simple electrical principles like ohms law. Before you comment on such things you should actually study how power plants function and how electricity works.
Recent studies show that the unused power generated every night that is converted into waste heat because there isn't demand to use it is sufficient to power every american owning a plug in hybrid without the construction of a single new power plant if people charge their vehicles at night.
Right now the power generated by US power plants at night becomes waste heat because there is no demand for it, that power right now could be driving you to work without the use of a single additional ounce of coal or nuclear waste. Everyone arguing over this issue of where the energy comes from seems to forget that right now gigawatts of power go unused every single night. That power is essentially free because it's already being generated and going unused. Plug your car in at night and use that power to drive to work the next day and you just prevented all that power from being wasted.
You people that keep saying boycotts don't work have no idea what a boycott is. A boycott isn't not buying a product. As an example let me give you a historical reference to a few boycotts. When you boycott something you don't just not purchase it. What you do is not buy the product, tell everyone else not to buy the product and why, and create as much publicity for the boycott as you can.
In the old days before everyone ranting in their basement at their computer screen a boycott involved two things. Not buying the product and making a sign that you then took and stood in front of a store with and explained to shoppers what you were boycotting and why. When the southern Baptists announced their boycott of Disney for giving benefits to same sex couples they didn't just stop going to Disney parks and buying Disney movies and products they made a bunch of signs and picketed in front of Disney World, called the press so they reported on it AND then picketed for months in front of the property. They also leafleted and got in front of the media at every opportunity.
So lets summarize. It's not a boycott unless their is publicity and your Mother is talking to her friends about it over the weekly Bridge game. Without broad publicity a boycott is nothing more than a change in purchase habits and is meaningless. It's not a Boycott if the CEO of the company doesn't know WHY you stopped buying products.
So all you people that keep saying boycotts don't work, you either don't know what a boycott is or you don't understand what's needed to make it a boycott. Properly executed boycotts are often highly successful, only in situations where succumbing to the boycott demands would cost more customers will the boycott fail.
The love affair with overpriced auction winnings is waning. More and more people are realizing that most of the stuff on ebay that you can get at your local store or at another retailer on the internet is usually ridiculously overpriced. The days of paying 105% of new price for used goods are over. This realization by the consumer is hurting ebay's bottom line. They are no longer growing at double digit percentages and I would argue trends show all growth will halt in less than a year. To continue to grow revenue they have to try to take a bigger cut of every sale. They have already raised prices so the next step is to take a cut of every payment transaction. That was the entire strategy with the paypal acquisition. It's simply been a matter of time before they ban every payment method other than paypal.
The question is will there be a drop is use of the site as a result, or whether there will be a lawsuit. Ebay has always run into this issue that someday a lawyer is going to get everyone together who's been scammed and file a class action suit that targets them for all the things they could do to prevent fraud and don't. It's going to be a BIG lawsuit someday so the executives have it in mind to bump the stock price as much as possible and make sure they get their bonuses before the shit hits the fan. That and making sure there is still growth in a company where there is no growth.
The point is that if things are realistic it makes the game that much more fun and immersive. So as you cast chain lightening at the frogs you might actually feel like it's a real world and you are really the hero and provides the same type of escapism of a movie. That immersion makes the game that much funner and enjoyable.
Frankly, it's far more simple to simply mandate the installation of a data logger, GPS and communication system in every vehicle. You may think this is impossible, but I would argue that the need to generate use based tax revenue for the use of roadways as fuel efficiency climbs is going to drive many proposals for exactly this. I simply assert that as more of the driving public gets fuel efficient econoboxs there will be a drive from the wealthy to eliminate the gas tax and make it mile based tax because the wealthy will continue to drive low mileage high performance vehicles and they won't want to be stuck paying the most in taxes to support the roadways. The lojack type system will also be driven by law enforcement that would want to use the system in criminal investigations just like they use the toll passes now in investigations. The insurance industry will also support the idea as the loggers could be used in accident investigations to establish the responsibility for the accident and could be used to raise rates on those that speed.
Personally I give it about 10 years and all vehicles will be mandated to have a GPS, data logger and reporting system installed. The preliminary ground work has already been laid as at least half a dozen states have already proposed per mile taxes instead of per gallon taxes. Civil liberties will likely be at the bottom of the pool as driving is considered a privilege, not a right under US common law.
A hundred a day? I can count on both hands the number installed in my state. Not only that they are only installed in the freeway in the metro area where monitoring vehicle speed is imperative for traffic management. It's fun to exaggerate claims to make them seem more than they are. I'd also wager that to upgrade the data receivers to handle such information would be rather costly as currently the systems can only detect speed. Being proprietery systems would mean you would have to buy the new system from the previous vendor and install all new cabinets and processing systems in addition to the data transmitters and possibly even upgrade the communication hubs to handle the extra data traffic. Given that tax dollars are involved there would have to be an appropriation, and given federal policies you would need to do a study to justify the expenditure, the FHWA would have to approve which means the federal congress would probably have to get involved. Given that there would need to be standards and such the systems to do what you propose would likely cost millions to 10's of millions for a moderately small system. All in all you make it sound much easier than it is. The likely hood without political pressure of some national defense character would in reality preclude it from happening.
I hope Disney notices her blatant abuse of copyright in using the image from the Incredibles. If she thinks the cities suit is bad, wait till Disney sues her. And she deserves to be sued for using frontpage and stealing other people's images.
A good example of this is Costco. A company run by a founder, a man who believes strongly in limiting profits to retain consumers. A man that believes in no restriction returns, even food. A man that believes a well paid employee is a happy and helpful employee. I see the difference every single time I go to Costco. You have a pleasant helpful staff, unlike stores like walmart where you are lucky to find anyone. You have customers like myself who don't worry too much about the prices because I know I'm not paying more than 10% above Costco's cost and spend in excess of 5 figures a year there. Wall Street loves to hound him in the quarterly calls about raising prices or membership fees to increase returns, his response is that raising prices is a seductive path to slow growth.
The short term growth model wall street has developed over the past 20-30 years doesn't mean all companies are like that. In fact find the companies that aren't and invest in them, because their long term growth will surpass any short term profit seeker by leaps and bounds. Costco alone is making serious returns that exceed market average because the CEO doesn't follow the path to easy profit which destroy long term growth. Invest in those companies now and sell them when the short term profit CEO eventually gets hired and you will retire early, I guarantee it.
If you couldn't train your brain to think the way you want then machine control via thought wouldn't be possible. The OCZ Nia computer control wouldn't exist. You can train your brain to fire certain neurons just as easily as you can train your hand to react to stimuli. All you need is feedback, maybe learning to beat this system requires to time on the system to learn to think the right way, but any system that relies on a human reaction can be fooled. Something as simple as dreams could throw a system off that relied on use of certain portions of the brain.
And all that person needs to know is how the machine works and construct their thoughts during the calibration in a manner that makes the machine read the data incorrectly. It's the same principle behind a lie detector, step on a sharp tack during the calibration and during any "true" question such that the reading is the same regardless of truth.
No judge in the US will order a lie detector test. They are inadmissible in trial by supreme court ruling. Not only can they be faked, as in if you are lieing you can fake a true answer, but they routinely return false answers on people that are overtly nervous or affected emotionally by the question.
Like most machines, once you know how the machine works they are easy to subvert.
And most importantly, as a public company Redhat likely notified the FBI of the breach and the FBI told them they couldn't reveal any details until the investigation was complete under penalty of being charged with interfering with an investigation. This is SOP for the FBI, they don't want details out there so that if they question the actual person that did the break in and he/she reveals details that aren't public they can use it against him/her in court.
The original framers never conceived of a US millitary base off US soil. We were a neutral nation until WWII and we really should move back to being a neutral nation again.
People forget that the Amazon Comment storm stopped Quicken from continuing to impliment similar draconian DRM on TurboTax. In fact said comments and reduced sales actually caused them to reverse previous policies. They completely removed the DRM and actually allowed via the EULA more copy rights to the owner than previously existed in the next years version. I was part of that boycott, choosing that year to use TaxCut instead of TurboTax. Not only that but the executives at Quicken got the wake up call that the guys selling them the DRM were snake oil salesmen.
Don't discount the power of a comment boycott. It hurts a publisher in the pocketbook directly by informing customers of the DRM before purchase, rather than after. These potential customers now aware of the problems before purchase then avoid the game entirely choosing not to deal with the problem. Even if there are still sales the real power of the boycott can only be seen in the total sales, not the day to day sales. Amazon's comments are a powerful medium to educate consumers. Amazon comments in the case of quicken caused a media storm and dramatically hurt sales of the DRM laden TurboTax.
Based on previous comments from the executives of EA it will probably not make an impact on their decisions and motives, unlike Quicken. But if it keeps happening on every game they distribute then they will either vacate the PC game market or quit using DRM. Both scenarios are good for PC gamers as they are currently the biggest DRM publisher and PC Game developers will choose to use other publishers.
If Sony is actually going to change their ratings it's out of fear of a class action lawsuit or the result of a class action lawsuit. In the age of the Bush administration and the GOP's effort to eliminate the FTC, truth in advertising is now only the result of lawsuits.
You would think the GOP would be in favor of more regulation about truth in advertising as it would clearly reduce lawsuits. Instead they want to eliminate truth and lawsuits. The GOP clearly supports quackery.
The problem with that analogy is that it's so hammered into doctors that they don't ever see zebras. The world becomes full of horses and the zebras that are out there never get recognized and innocent patients suffer, often for very long times while they try to find a doctor that can recognize when it's not a horse and to start looking for zebras. For people with rare conditions it probably averages over 3 years and 5 doctors to get a diagnosis, if they ever get one.
You don't see me criticizing your job do you?
Only the fleshy part.
The Ironically named People's alliance for democracy is trying to do away with democracy. The problem is the rich elite are faced with a government that is being elected and supported by the poor rural majority. As a result this government is appealing to their support base and providing lots of support for rural folks including financial help and incentives. The rich elite call that corruption and want to eliminate democracy because they don't want the poor majority in control.
Like most thermal compounds it may conduct heat better than most non-metals but unless it's a brand new material everything on the market currently is going to be a far worse conducter of heat than air. Encasing thermal components in a material with worse performance than air is going to make them get much hotter.