No one has the time to be an expert in everything. That's why we give money to other people. We're paying for their expertise.
Anyone can buy a domain name and setup email forwarding to their ISP account. My grandmother can do it. My 5 year old could do it with little instruction. If someone else can't figure it out, I have zero sympathy.
we geeks have all the cash and all the culture cred, and we're rich and sexy and cool
Is this guy in denial, or what?! Sounds like the wet dreams of (insert favorite tech company CEO/Microsoft poster boy here): "I'm rich.... and SEXY.. and COOL... and I'm an 3l3t3 ha(k0r to boot!"
A good read, though. Nice afternoon entertainment..
My take on the device...
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
My whole take on the device: It will be great for people who live fairly close to work. I think it will quickly become a "must have" for anyone who lives in a big city or lives close to work. You can ride it right up to your apartment, through the halls of your building to your office, etc. When you're done, it can be put in a closet.
Unfortunately, for the most of us, it's going to be an expensive toy. I can't ride it to work due to the limited range. If they could make the thing go 30-40 miles at full speed on a single charge, I'd be onboard. I could ride it to work, I could ride it around town during lunch, and I could ride it home afterwards (on sidewalks and bike paths, of course, not in traffic). Perhaps some better specs will be released soon.
But I have to ask, what's with Deka registering mystirlingscooter.com? Just trying to throw everyone off, or what? It was my understanding that the device itself wasn't going to be all that revolutionary, but rather the technology behind it. If this were powered by an efficient stirling engine, that would make sense. The technology that makes it device stand up is cool, but it's not going to change the world.
Digital music market analyst Lee Black of Webnoize said most people who listen to music on their computers, usually as MP3 files, aren't buying CDs anyway.
Lee Black of Webnoize is a complete fucking moron. Mr. Black, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I don't know anyone who still listens to their original CDs; they convert them to MP3 format the second they buy them and put the CD in a box. How else do you explain the millions of portable, car and home based MP3 players being sold in this country?
OHHhhhh, that's right, you really believe that none of these people buy CDs. Nope - they all steal the music they listen to. I guess the 30GB of MP3 files on my server cancel out the thousand some odd CDs in my collection. Well, Mr. Black, fuck you for accusing me. Fuck you and everyone else who shares your idiotic viewpoint. Crawl back into the hole you came from and don't come out until you've got half a clue.
Like hell it does. Apple sold you the CD. You're choosing to install all but one module. Exactly how is that theft?
You people need to get your words straight. You obviously have no fucking clue what the word "theft" means:
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=t he ft
theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
It's not possible to steal intelluctual property, regardless of what corporate America and the media would have you believe. Unless you want to talk to the folks at Websters about changing the definition of the word?
Assuming the 2400 number is correct, I seriously doubt that the NYPD, FBI, CIA, or any other Black Helicopter organization would have the manpower to watch the 57000 hours of tape collected per day!
The fear is not the current state of the cameras. It's that they'll be used to construct and tie into databases in the future. 57000 hours of tape is worthless to anyone unless they know the time and location that something took place. A huge database full of text info gleaned from those cameras, however (say, using face or behavior recognition technology) is easily searched. Want to know what John Doe did on his lunchbreak? Just search the database and it will return a list of where he was spotted and what he was doing according ("walking", "running", "picking nose", etc).
This technology isn't IF, it's WHEN. Face recognition is already working, albet not perfectly, and they're already talking about behavior recognition software. That's the fear here.
However because his wife knows he's close to the secretary but isnt sure if it's anything more than just friendship the film could quite easily trigger her into beliving it's something closer than that.
That's a marriage problem that centers on trust and has nothing to do with cameras at all.
Imagine your walking down a dark street, unsure of the neighborhood. You don't know whats around the corner, but you pull out your wireless handheld and get the video feed of that upcoming corner.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Great post - and I agree completely. If they're going to put the cameras up there, stream them to the web in real time and let the public use them. Many areas in the state of Washington (and I'm sure throughout the rest of the country as well) already do this. You can see current pass & freeway conditions. You can hop on the state ferry system's website and watch ferry docks and traffic buildup. Great resource.
Imagine the infrastructure required to track EVERY individual
Not all that hard, actually. Assuming the technology works well, the infrastructure (ie, cameras and networking) is already in place in most cities. You don't need to store all of the video, you simply assign a unique identifier to each person and time/date stamp each time they are recognized on a camera. Assuming one person is recognized by 100 camears, he will only generate a few kilobytes of info in the database.
#112742343746 Doe, John 0800 CamID#2534
#112742343746 Doe, John 0815 CamID#2512
#112742343746 Doe, John 0900 CamID#1865
etc. Even in a city the size of New York, the database - while quite large - is manageable with current, off the shelf technology. Video from these cameras is probably stored for a few days to a week already, in case they need to pull the records for some reason. The database could be stored for the same amount of time with a few terrabytes of disk space. The face recognition technology notwithstanding, everything else is trivial.
So what's the paranoia? Nobody is going to want to track ME, right? Probably not. Until, of course, I piss off the wrong person. Maybe I accidentally cutoff one of the sysadmins, or an off duty cop. Maybe a staffer in the office that runs the equipment and I got into a verbal argument in a grocery store. Maybe someone who doesn't like me for whatever reason knows someone who has a brother who has access to the records. What could someone do to me with this data? Lots of things. They could harass me. They could stalk me quite efficiently. They could setup a crime and frame me. The list goes on and on.
I know someone who supervises an office. She was given training on how to avoid retaliation by ex employees. Part of that is to not take the same route home every night. What happens when someone she fired who wants revenge gains copies of her movements throughout the entire city - not video info, just a dump of a few entries in a database printed on a single sheet of paper?
This also isn't relevant. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean you should be able to break it. You know the laws, you choose to live in this country, that's a fairly explicit agreement to abide by the laws.
Most of us aren't little sheep that just go along for the ride. Have you ever read those lists of stupid laws? In some cities, it's still illegal to tie a horse to a pole before noon on a Sunday. If you were to actually sit down and go through the lawbooks, you would find that you are breaking minor laws every single day. Laws that most police officers wouldn't do a damn thing about. But what happens when some jackass politician decides to further his career by "cracking down" on anyone who spits on a sidewalk? "We're going to clean up this town, and we'll use our video cameras to do it." So, you're walking along one day, something gets in your mouth (dust, a mosquito, maybe a piece of food from breakfast that was lodged in your teeth) and you spit it out. Next thing you know, you've got a $500 fine in your mailbox.
Most laws are bullshit. If they were all good, we wouldn't have millions of them, we'd only have a few hundred.
As for your bold statements about abiding by all laws, have you ever exceeded the speed limit? How would you like a network of cameras recording your speed, and mailing tickets if you exceeded the limit even slightly? This already happens in some US cities. I can't count how many times I've looked down and realized I was doing 38 in a 35. Probably happens every day, but I don't give it a second thought. It's only a couple miles per hour - who cares, right? With a CCTV network monitoring this, they'd throw my ass in jail with the rest of the scofflaws.
I bet you tell me next that it would be my own fault, that I should learn to adhere to the speed limit. You know what? I do. But it's impossible to keep a vehicle exactly at 35mph all the time. Everyone - even cruise control systems - will fluxuate a few mph in either direction. It's not an issue for 95% of us because we notice we're speeding and slow back down before a cop sees it. When that cop is an automated camera network, every infraction is a ticket. And everyone on the road would get one.
If DeCSS were declared legal, what would stop a hardware manufacturer from selling DVD players with no licensing from DVDCCA.
To hell with DVDCCA. This was created simply as another revenue stream, and shouldn't be legal, anyway. "Here, we've made these DVD things, but we figure the millions we will make from selling them isn't enough. We're greedy pigs, and we want more. So we're going to encrypt them, and if you want to sell a device to play them, we're going to charge you half a million dollars for the rights to do so."
Screw 'em. If I had the means, I'd sell a high quality standalone "CD player, DVD upgradable" for cheap with empty, flashable firmware. Toss in a firewire cable and a software program to copy DeCSS into the firmware. Sell a million units before anyone knows what happened and let the industry sort it out. Greedy pricks.
I understand that they've got an investment in the technology and they have the right to recoup it and make a good chunk of money. They're already doing that by selling millions of DVDs. Trying to rake in more cash over the sale of every single player, and preventing consumers from playing legally purchased discs wherever they want, well, I'd like to see the responsible party's head on a platter.
The new USPS regulations prohibit the delivery of mail without a return address.
What the hell are you talking about? I rarely put a return address on anything. Mailed a bunch of stuff out just the other day without return addresses and all got to their destinations just fine. I've yet to see anything about return addresses being required. Without some sort of proof, I've got to say, you've been misinformed...
If they can't support X users at Y bandwidth, then they have no business SELLING X users Y bandwidth.
In other venues, it's called fraud.
Sounds like my ISP. They advertise 1Mbps in both directions for $100/month. (I actually pay $120 after taxes & charges for a single static IP) Advertisements also claim "10x faster than DSL!" Reality? I'm lucky to get 500k. Most of the time I get closer to 250k, and sometimes it's well under 100k. I pitched a fit last month and got a $60 credit to my account.
I wonder what it would take to get the city/state to go after them? False advertising and fraud is illegal, but you can't do a damn thing about it, even when there are hundreds of pissed off consumers...
I'd switch ISPs, but this is the only reasonably priced broadband offering available. DSL isn't here. Cable isn't here. It really bites.
Then you'd be reselling your connection - which is clearly labeled as a no-no in most ISP contracts.
Yeah. My ISP has the same "no-no". Fortunately for those bastards, I'm a "bad guy" who is splitting my 1Mbps connection with my neighbor. How is this fortunate for them? Simple: I can't afford the $120 a month on my own. Neither can he. If we didn't split it, they would have one less customer.
A guy down the street has the same service with the same company and he splits it three ways. The three people using it would also not be able to purchase it on their own.
I've spoken with a dozen other people who have the same service and do the same thing. As far as I can tell, if it weren't for us "bad people", this small ISP wouldn't have enough customers to stay in business.
The CB problem is because those truckers are pushing 100-300 watts or more. I think 4 watts or so is legal for CB, but probably 95% of truckers use a amp of some sort.
Yup. When I was a teenager, the people down the street were pushing x hundred watts out of a home CB setup. Every time they would key up, the speakers connected to my Amiga 3000 would amplify their voices at annoyingly high volume levels. Scared the hell out of me the first time it happened. A quick conversation with them solved the problem for good.:)
What the fuck? Someone paid $366 for an empty box - and this time, the seller comes right out and says no less than 3 times, "There is no xbox inside. This is just an empty box."
Whadda ya wanna bet the buyer gets pissed and claims to have been ripped off?
Oh good grief, you didn't buy Microsoft's Proxy server did you?
*I* didn't. My company did despite my insistence that we use something else.
Did you go in and pass all the tests in one day like I did.
Actually, I did it in two days, 2 weeks apart. Took half the tests one day, studied some more, then took the other half.
Sorry, still caught up on that and it's going to take a lot more than doing stuff on your home LAN I was doing back in '92 to prove you know what your talking about.
Look, I don't have to prove anything to you. It really doesn't matter whether you believe me or not: You're a complete stranger who doesn't know me and whom I'll never meet. If you want to be caught up on a single statement, so be it. It's no sweat off my back.
If you are only spending $10k on licenses for software... you aren't working in a corporate world my friend. That's a small business.
$10k on licenses for software for a single proxy server. Half of that is for the web filtering software, the other half for the OS & other misc Microsoft add-ons. I thought I made that perfectly clear; apparently I did not.
I'll bet you couldn't even figure out my simple home LAN, much less a corporate network.
I administer a number of servers on my company's network and run my own "simple" home LAN (12 PCs, 4 of which are at the neighbor's next door). My personal web site is at www.ryanwright.com and is run on a Linux machine that sits in my home. If you don't believe it, check it out for yourself. I also host a number of domains for my buddies and operate my own DNS, mail, and (of course) web servers. And, oh, I'm Microsoft certified, so I know how fucking easy said certification is to obtain.
Nothing they can do will stop friends from sharing, however. At the last office I worked, there was a group of 5 people who had a CD burning club of sorts. They copied anything and everything they could get from friends, then brought them to work and made copies for each other. The net results was that within a few short months, each of them had thousands of CDs they didn't pay a dime for.
This sort of thing has gone on forever. When I was in high school, I had hundreds of copied cassette tapes. I also had hundreds of tapes I'd purchased. The industry has done just fine with this sort of copying going on, and their profits were way up right smack in the middle of Napster's heyday. Why? Because people still buy CDs. I download thousands of files from Napster, and I've also purchased thousands of dollars worth of CDs. I never bought more music than when Napster was online - I found so many new (and old) artists that I hadn't added to my collection, and it's easier to buy the damn CD than spend x hours searching for every track with a flawless rip.
However, I haven't bought a single CD since they shut Napster down, and won't until all of this silliness of lawsuits and copy protecting CDs stops.
Let's say that we had the totally unregulated market. What would happen to the price of really popular music? What would the license stipulate? Would fair use be part of the contract?
Quite frankly, without the control issues, recording and distribution costs the industry imposes upon artists, a good artist could give all of his music away and still rake in millions doing live concerts. One could record a hell of a nice album with their personal computer and give it away in MP3 format. With a large enough following at $20 a head for a concert, they could still be filthy rich.
Corporate execs don't understand how something that is free can be worth a damn. I know; I've tried to get Linux implemented in our enterprise as a basic web proxy. (Instead, we spend almost $10k on licenses for Microsoft software and third party filtering applications.)
Here's the deal: When you pay a cool million bucks for the software to run your enterprise, you have someone to bitch at (Microsoft) should something go horribly wrong. With Linux, the only person you can bitch at is that uber-geek you're paying $50k a year. When millions of dollars are at stake every day, you just can't trust a free piece of software.
Obviously, most of us here know this is bullshit, but it's the excuse given by every exec I've talked to. They won't trust their business to free software and a couple of geeks no matter how compelling the evidence. Even a mention of IRC as a help resource elicits manical laughter. If someone setup a high priced licensing & support system for Linux and gave it a different name, businesses might sign on. Sad but true.
One last issue: MCSEs are a dime a dozen. Any moron can administer a Windows network. I'm the only one in my group that knows enough about Linux to properly setup and maintain an enterprise server. If we implemented Linux and I left, they'd be SOL. Nobody wants to put their faith in one or two employees, especially when those employees have knowledge that is (let's face it) hard to come by. The proportion of people that can adminster a Linux server vs. those that can admin MS is huge. Probably thousands to one. It's just not easy to find a good Linux guy, let alone the 5 to 10 of them it would take to run a medium sized network.
Essentially, what it boils down to is my final line: you're an arrogant young fool who thinks that his own personal notions of 'how things should be' must be applied to every other human being on the planet. The notion is nothing but pure ego forwarded by a technical elitist who can't imagine just how silly he looks making these sorts of claims.
I'd imagine no more silly than you look, being unable to compose an intelligent reply without resorting to ridicule and name calling...
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No one has the time to be an expert in everything. That's why we give money to other people. We're paying for their expertise.
Anyone can buy a domain name and setup email forwarding to their ISP account. My grandmother can do it. My 5 year old could do it with little instruction. If someone else can't figure it out, I have zero sympathy.
we geeks have all the cash and all the culture cred, and we're rich and sexy and cool
Is this guy in denial, or what?! Sounds like the wet dreams of (insert favorite tech company CEO/Microsoft poster boy here): "I'm rich.... and SEXY.. and COOL... and I'm an 3l3t3 ha(k0r to boot!"
A good read, though. Nice afternoon entertainment..
My whole take on the device: It will be great for people who live fairly close to work. I think it will quickly become a "must have" for anyone who lives in a big city or lives close to work. You can ride it right up to your apartment, through the halls of your building to your office, etc. When you're done, it can be put in a closet.
Unfortunately, for the most of us, it's going to be an expensive toy. I can't ride it to work due to the limited range. If they could make the thing go 30-40 miles at full speed on a single charge, I'd be onboard. I could ride it to work, I could ride it around town during lunch, and I could ride it home afterwards (on sidewalks and bike paths, of course, not in traffic). Perhaps some better specs will be released soon.
But I have to ask, what's with Deka registering mystirlingscooter.com? Just trying to throw everyone off, or what? It was my understanding that the device itself wasn't going to be all that revolutionary, but rather the technology behind it. If this were powered by an efficient stirling engine, that would make sense. The technology that makes it device stand up is cool, but it's not going to change the world.
This is a TROLL? Ha! An angry flame, perhaps, but troll? Obviously, whoever moderated this post didn't bother to read the story.
I was going to launch into a tirade here about what a dipshit that moderator is - I've got plenty of karma to spare - but I'll hold back this time.
Digital music market analyst Lee Black of Webnoize said most people who listen to music on their computers, usually as MP3 files, aren't buying CDs anyway.
Lee Black of Webnoize is a complete fucking moron. Mr. Black, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I don't know anyone who still listens to their original CDs; they convert them to MP3 format the second they buy them and put the CD in a box. How else do you explain the millions of portable, car and home based MP3 players being sold in this country?
OHHhhhh, that's right, you really believe that none of these people buy CDs. Nope - they all steal the music they listen to. I guess the 30GB of MP3 files on my server cancel out the thousand some odd CDs in my collection. Well, Mr. Black, fuck you for accusing me. Fuck you and everyone else who shares your idiotic viewpoint. Crawl back into the hole you came from and don't come out until you've got half a clue.
Me (raises hand)
But I doubt it will do us much good.
When Skylarov came to the US and "distributed" his "illegal" product,
You're forgetting the fact that he didn't distribute it. His employer did. He just gave a speech on how it worked.
It amounts to theft.
t he ft
Like hell it does. Apple sold you the CD. You're choosing to install all but one module. Exactly how is that theft?
You people need to get your words straight. You obviously have no fucking clue what the word "theft" means:
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=
theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
It's not possible to steal intelluctual property, regardless of what corporate America and the media would have you believe. Unless you want to talk to the folks at Websters about changing the definition of the word?
Assuming the 2400 number is correct, I seriously doubt that the NYPD, FBI, CIA, or any other Black Helicopter organization would have the manpower to watch the 57000 hours of tape collected per day!
The fear is not the current state of the cameras. It's that they'll be used to construct and tie into databases in the future. 57000 hours of tape is worthless to anyone unless they know the time and location that something took place. A huge database full of text info gleaned from those cameras, however (say, using face or behavior recognition technology) is easily searched. Want to know what John Doe did on his lunchbreak? Just search the database and it will return a list of where he was spotted and what he was doing according ("walking", "running", "picking nose", etc).
This technology isn't IF, it's WHEN. Face recognition is already working, albet not perfectly, and they're already talking about behavior recognition software. That's the fear here.
However because his wife knows he's close to the secretary but isnt sure if it's anything more than just friendship the film could quite easily trigger her into beliving it's something closer than that.
That's a marriage problem that centers on trust and has nothing to do with cameras at all.
Imagine your walking down a dark street, unsure of the neighborhood. You don't know whats around the corner, but you pull out your wireless handheld and get the video feed of that upcoming corner.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Great post - and I agree completely. If they're going to put the cameras up there, stream them to the web in real time and let the public use them. Many areas in the state of Washington (and I'm sure throughout the rest of the country as well) already do this. You can see current pass & freeway conditions. You can hop on the state ferry system's website and watch ferry docks and traffic buildup. Great resource.
Imagine the infrastructure required to track EVERY individual
Not all that hard, actually. Assuming the technology works well, the infrastructure (ie, cameras and networking) is already in place in most cities. You don't need to store all of the video, you simply assign a unique identifier to each person and time/date stamp each time they are recognized on a camera. Assuming one person is recognized by 100 camears, he will only generate a few kilobytes of info in the database.
#112742343746 Doe, John 0800 CamID#2534
#112742343746 Doe, John 0815 CamID#2512
#112742343746 Doe, John 0900 CamID#1865
etc. Even in a city the size of New York, the database - while quite large - is manageable with current, off the shelf technology. Video from these cameras is probably stored for a few days to a week already, in case they need to pull the records for some reason. The database could be stored for the same amount of time with a few terrabytes of disk space. The face recognition technology notwithstanding, everything else is trivial.
So what's the paranoia? Nobody is going to want to track ME, right? Probably not. Until, of course, I piss off the wrong person. Maybe I accidentally cutoff one of the sysadmins, or an off duty cop. Maybe a staffer in the office that runs the equipment and I got into a verbal argument in a grocery store. Maybe someone who doesn't like me for whatever reason knows someone who has a brother who has access to the records. What could someone do to me with this data? Lots of things. They could harass me. They could stalk me quite efficiently. They could setup a crime and frame me. The list goes on and on.
I know someone who supervises an office. She was given training on how to avoid retaliation by ex employees. Part of that is to not take the same route home every night. What happens when someone she fired who wants revenge gains copies of her movements throughout the entire city - not video info, just a dump of a few entries in a database printed on a single sheet of paper?
The whole idea is just bad...
This also isn't relevant. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean you should be able to break it. You know the laws, you choose to live in this country, that's a fairly explicit agreement to abide by the laws.
Most of us aren't little sheep that just go along for the ride. Have you ever read those lists of stupid laws? In some cities, it's still illegal to tie a horse to a pole before noon on a Sunday. If you were to actually sit down and go through the lawbooks, you would find that you are breaking minor laws every single day. Laws that most police officers wouldn't do a damn thing about. But what happens when some jackass politician decides to further his career by "cracking down" on anyone who spits on a sidewalk? "We're going to clean up this town, and we'll use our video cameras to do it." So, you're walking along one day, something gets in your mouth (dust, a mosquito, maybe a piece of food from breakfast that was lodged in your teeth) and you spit it out. Next thing you know, you've got a $500 fine in your mailbox.
Most laws are bullshit. If they were all good, we wouldn't have millions of them, we'd only have a few hundred.
As for your bold statements about abiding by all laws, have you ever exceeded the speed limit? How would you like a network of cameras recording your speed, and mailing tickets if you exceeded the limit even slightly? This already happens in some US cities. I can't count how many times I've looked down and realized I was doing 38 in a 35. Probably happens every day, but I don't give it a second thought. It's only a couple miles per hour - who cares, right? With a CCTV network monitoring this, they'd throw my ass in jail with the rest of the scofflaws.
I bet you tell me next that it would be my own fault, that I should learn to adhere to the speed limit. You know what? I do. But it's impossible to keep a vehicle exactly at 35mph all the time. Everyone - even cruise control systems - will fluxuate a few mph in either direction. It's not an issue for 95% of us because we notice we're speeding and slow back down before a cop sees it. When that cop is an automated camera network, every infraction is a ticket. And everyone on the road would get one.
If DeCSS were declared legal, what would stop a hardware manufacturer from selling DVD players with no licensing from DVDCCA.
To hell with DVDCCA. This was created simply as another revenue stream, and shouldn't be legal, anyway. "Here, we've made these DVD things, but we figure the millions we will make from selling them isn't enough. We're greedy pigs, and we want more. So we're going to encrypt them, and if you want to sell a device to play them, we're going to charge you half a million dollars for the rights to do so."
Screw 'em. If I had the means, I'd sell a high quality standalone "CD player, DVD upgradable" for cheap with empty, flashable firmware. Toss in a firewire cable and a software program to copy DeCSS into the firmware. Sell a million units before anyone knows what happened and let the industry sort it out. Greedy pricks.
I understand that they've got an investment in the technology and they have the right to recoup it and make a good chunk of money. They're already doing that by selling millions of DVDs. Trying to rake in more cash over the sale of every single player, and preventing consumers from playing legally purchased discs wherever they want, well, I'd like to see the responsible party's head on a platter.
The new USPS regulations prohibit the delivery of mail without a return address.
What the hell are you talking about? I rarely put a return address on anything. Mailed a bunch of stuff out just the other day without return addresses and all got to their destinations just fine. I've yet to see anything about return addresses being required. Without some sort of proof, I've got to say, you've been misinformed...
If they can't support X users at Y bandwidth, then they have no business SELLING X users Y bandwidth.
In other venues, it's called fraud.
Sounds like my ISP. They advertise 1Mbps in both directions for $100/month. (I actually pay $120 after taxes & charges for a single static IP) Advertisements also claim "10x faster than DSL!" Reality? I'm lucky to get 500k. Most of the time I get closer to 250k, and sometimes it's well under 100k. I pitched a fit last month and got a $60 credit to my account.
I wonder what it would take to get the city/state to go after them? False advertising and fraud is illegal, but you can't do a damn thing about it, even when there are hundreds of pissed off consumers...
I'd switch ISPs, but this is the only reasonably priced broadband offering available. DSL isn't here. Cable isn't here. It really bites.
Then you'd be reselling your connection - which is clearly labeled as a no-no in most ISP contracts.
Yeah. My ISP has the same "no-no". Fortunately for those bastards, I'm a "bad guy" who is splitting my 1Mbps connection with my neighbor. How is this fortunate for them? Simple: I can't afford the $120 a month on my own. Neither can he. If we didn't split it, they would have one less customer.
A guy down the street has the same service with the same company and he splits it three ways. The three people using it would also not be able to purchase it on their own.
I've spoken with a dozen other people who have the same service and do the same thing. As far as I can tell, if it weren't for us "bad people", this small ISP wouldn't have enough customers to stay in business.
The CB problem is because those truckers are pushing 100-300 watts or more. I think 4 watts or so is legal for CB, but probably 95% of truckers use a amp of some sort.
:)
Yup. When I was a teenager, the people down the street were pushing x hundred watts out of a home CB setup. Every time they would key up, the speakers connected to my Amiga 3000 would amplify their voices at annoyingly high volume levels. Scared the hell out of me the first time it happened. A quick conversation with them solved the problem for good.
What the fuck? Someone paid $366 for an empty box - and this time, the seller comes right out and says no less than 3 times, "There is no xbox inside. This is just an empty box."
Whadda ya wanna bet the buyer gets pissed and claims to have been ripped off?
Oh good grief, you didn't buy Microsoft's Proxy server did you?
*I* didn't. My company did despite my insistence that we use something else.
Did you go in and pass all the tests in one day like I did.
Actually, I did it in two days, 2 weeks apart. Took half the tests one day, studied some more, then took the other half.
Sorry, still caught up on that and it's going to take a lot more than doing stuff on your home LAN I was doing back in '92 to prove you know what your talking about.
Look, I don't have to prove anything to you. It really doesn't matter whether you believe me or not: You're a complete stranger who doesn't know me and whom I'll never meet. If you want to be caught up on a single statement, so be it. It's no sweat off my back.
If you are only spending $10k on licenses for software... you aren't working in a corporate world my friend. That's a small business.
$10k on licenses for software for a single proxy server. Half of that is for the web filtering software, the other half for the OS & other misc Microsoft add-ons. I thought I made that perfectly clear; apparently I did not.
I'll bet you couldn't even figure out my simple home LAN, much less a corporate network.
I administer a number of servers on my company's network and run my own "simple" home LAN (12 PCs, 4 of which are at the neighbor's next door). My personal web site is at www.ryanwright.com and is run on a Linux machine that sits in my home. If you don't believe it, check it out for yourself. I also host a number of domains for my buddies and operate my own DNS, mail, and (of course) web servers. And, oh, I'm Microsoft certified, so I know how fucking easy said certification is to obtain.
Easy. They'll use a three pronged approach:
Nothing they can do will stop friends from sharing, however. At the last office I worked, there was a group of 5 people who had a CD burning club of sorts. They copied anything and everything they could get from friends, then brought them to work and made copies for each other. The net results was that within a few short months, each of them had thousands of CDs they didn't pay a dime for.
This sort of thing has gone on forever. When I was in high school, I had hundreds of copied cassette tapes. I also had hundreds of tapes I'd purchased. The industry has done just fine with this sort of copying going on, and their profits were way up right smack in the middle of Napster's heyday. Why? Because people still buy CDs. I download thousands of files from Napster, and I've also purchased thousands of dollars worth of CDs. I never bought more music than when Napster was online - I found so many new (and old) artists that I hadn't added to my collection, and it's easier to buy the damn CD than spend x hours searching for every track with a flawless rip.
However, I haven't bought a single CD since they shut Napster down, and won't until all of this silliness of lawsuits and copy protecting CDs stops.
Let's say that we had the totally unregulated market. What would happen to the price of really popular music? What would the license stipulate? Would fair use be part of the contract?
Quite frankly, without the control issues, recording and distribution costs the industry imposes upon artists, a good artist could give all of his music away and still rake in millions doing live concerts. One could record a hell of a nice album with their personal computer and give it away in MP3 format. With a large enough following at $20 a head for a concert, they could still be filthy rich.
Corporate execs don't understand how something that is free can be worth a damn. I know; I've tried to get Linux implemented in our enterprise as a basic web proxy. (Instead, we spend almost $10k on licenses for Microsoft software and third party filtering applications.)
Here's the deal: When you pay a cool million bucks for the software to run your enterprise, you have someone to bitch at (Microsoft) should something go horribly wrong. With Linux, the only person you can bitch at is that uber-geek you're paying $50k a year. When millions of dollars are at stake every day, you just can't trust a free piece of software.
Obviously, most of us here know this is bullshit, but it's the excuse given by every exec I've talked to. They won't trust their business to free software and a couple of geeks no matter how compelling the evidence. Even a mention of IRC as a help resource elicits manical laughter. If someone setup a high priced licensing & support system for Linux and gave it a different name, businesses might sign on. Sad but true.
One last issue: MCSEs are a dime a dozen. Any moron can administer a Windows network. I'm the only one in my group that knows enough about Linux to properly setup and maintain an enterprise server. If we implemented Linux and I left, they'd be SOL. Nobody wants to put their faith in one or two employees, especially when those employees have knowledge that is (let's face it) hard to come by. The proportion of people that can adminster a Linux server vs. those that can admin MS is huge. Probably thousands to one. It's just not easy to find a good Linux guy, let alone the 5 to 10 of them it would take to run a medium sized network.
Essentially, what it boils down to is my final line: you're an arrogant young fool who thinks that his own personal notions of 'how things should be' must be applied to every other human being on the planet. The notion is nothing but pure ego forwarded by a technical elitist who can't imagine just how silly he looks making these sorts of claims.
I'd imagine no more silly than you look, being unable to compose an intelligent reply without resorting to ridicule and name calling...