I doubt it would be too significant, though I do remember something along those lines from apollo 13 (it's a movie, so it's inherently correct) - they weren't allowed to pee because getting rid of it would mean setting the module off course.
They weren't told to "hold it;" they were told not to dump their piddle-packs as that could've knocked them off-course.
(As far as accuracy in movies goes, you probably meant your "inherently correct" comment as sarcasm WRT movies in general, but I suspect that Apollo 13 comes closer than most movies based on historical events. About the only thing I've heard the movie dinged on was the language, some of which was a bit more heated in the movie than what really happened.)
the only downside of openssh that i've seen was that it was a pain to figure out which compile-time options i needed. make sure you know exactly how your passwords are stored on your box. once i had that figured out, i liked it better than i ever liked the commercial SSH.
As I recall, about the only thing that was needed was to make sure OpenSSL was installed first. Keeping your favorite compiler options in CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS helps, too, as configure (if it's of the GNU variety) will usually pick up whatever is in those variables. It's always figured everything else out by itself. I've installed OpenSSH on SuSE 6.[34] and LFS systems, and have never had any problems with the build.
Back in the early 90's it was supposed to be the next big thing - 21Mb in a 3 1/2" form factor.
Never caught on.
If I remember the way it worked, LS-120 would appear to be a descendant of the Floptical (magnetic storage on one side and optical positioning on the other side of something resembling a 3.5" floppy disk). They had at least a limited amount of popularity among the Apple II crowd at the time (in part because the drives also read ordinary MFM floppies, so you could exchange data with x86 boxen through them). I don't recall offhand which companies were behind the Floptical, but it might be the same as for LS-120.
I pulled out my old amiga last week, the floppies where loose in a cardboard box directly under our central heating boiler and consequently had ash/grit between them. Regardless of condition these floppy disks(that were from as far back as 1995) worked perfectly.
I have even older disks than that that still work...5.25" DD floppies for my Apple IIs that go back as far as 1985 are still readable. OTOH, I've seen current 3.5" floppies go bad just if you look at them funny.:-| I don't know if I would trust data to a floppy over the long run.
Interesting note: This boat seems to have the same series engine as the
Boeing 777, the Rolls-Royce Trent. I don't know how these compare in actual fuel economy, but the ship carries 10,000 tons with five engines, while (I think) the plane carries only 20 tons with four.
Two...the 777 has only two engines. The 707 and 747 are the only jet airliners from Boeing that used/use four engines. (The 727 used three engines, and the 737, 757, and 767 use two.)
IE has little to do with standards, too -- most of pages that don't display properly in Netscape but display in IE, are complete bullshit from any set of standards' point of view. It's possible to make standards-compliant page that doesn't work in Netscape, but in reality I have yet to see it
You must not use CSS much, then, as Nutscrape 4.x's support for CSS sucks colon. Mozilla seems to do a better job of it, but Internet Explorer by far has the most complete support for CSS at this point.
(not to mention that MSIE by itself supports standards poorly, too -- a lot of things will display in Netscape or Mozilla, but won't in MSIE).
Any examples? I think the last time a page rendered in a current version of Nutscrape but not in a current version of IE was at least four or five years ago. It's 2001 now, not 1996.
(FWIW, I'm using Konqueror right now. It does a decent job with most pages I've thrown at it...certainly better than the Linux version of Nutscrape, which renders everything way too small. It segfaults on MSN, though...strange, but I'm not complaining too much. If a page is too weird for Konqueror to handle, I can always boot this box into WinME (aside from weak DOS-mode support, it's really not as bad as some people say) and fire up IE.)
There is a DOS port of Lynx (which, by extension, runs under Windows as well). I use it on some machines I admin remotely to grab files (it's easier to say "lynx -dump http://www.foo.bar/file.exe >file.exe" in a batch file than to make a script to do the same thing with FTP). It wasn't at all difficult to find...try the Lynx website for starters.
Won't the police be missing a huge portion of their revenue with these cars on the road? Will they lower the speed limit to 30mph and catch speeders doing 40?
Maybe things have changed since I lived there in the mid-80s, but in many (most?) European countries, speeding fines aren't regarded as the revenue source that they've become here. The couple of speeding tickets that Dad got while we were in Germany were for some piddly amount of money...something on the order of DM 40 (about $20 at the time), comparable to a parking ticket.
Then again, maybe that's just Germany...they do like their speed, and their roads are up to handling it (or were, until all the borders opened and the roads started clogging up with traffic from all over Europe, but that's starting to get off-topic...).
Secondly, I don't really see what the problem is. These are public roads, I don't see anything wrong with restricting speeds. What people seem to have a problem with is the fact that they can't break a law that they accepted before.
Hmm...let's say some moron creates a situation where you need to accelerate to avoid a collision. If you're already traveling at whatever speed the computer thinks you should be going, you're phuqued.
Consider that accident rates have fallen since the fall of the 55-mph speed limit. With people able to get to their destinations in less time, I'd suspect that fewer drivers are getting tired/frustrated/angry after long trips. Having everybody traveling at about the same speed (whatever that speed happens to be) also helps avoid accidents. Putting governors in some cars will create a mix of cars traveling at different speeds, which is almost guaranteed to lead to more accidents. It's no different than setting different speed limits for cars and trucks, and just as dangerous.
(If such a system ever gets put in place anywhere, expect to see an increase in demand for older cars that haven't been crippled. The only thing electronic under the hood of my '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham is the ignition-control module inside the distributor. While you won't likely see the Brits seek out the few "Yank tanks" that may have been left behind by GIs over the years, I'm sure they have more than a few cars of their own that would not be amenable to remote hobbling.)
Again assuming an average of 4 characters a word thats 16 characters a second. I can't even get 16 characters a second by pressing keys randomly, so how on Earth somne could get 16 when constructing words is beyond me.
Not even randomly? That must be pretty lame, when all you have to do is just mash a bunch of keys at once and let the rollover do its job.
BTW, as others have noted, the standard conversion is 1 word=5 characters. 16 cps works out to 192 wpm, which is lower than what some people here have been saying is the record.
Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple
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OS X on x86?
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I wasn't talking about a K6 - 2, I have one and it works great. I was talking about the original K6 which was about as weak as a 486.
I know you were talking about the K6, and it's nowhere near the wimp that you described. (I have one of each type...a K6-200 that net-boots LFS from a K6-2-300 (which also runs LFS), plus a K6-III-450 that can boot WinME off its hard drive (which is what it's running right now) or net-boots LFS from the aforementioned K6-2.)
For comparison, I also have a P5-200 in a notebook, and the K6 has no problems keeping up with it. Are you sure you're not confusing the K6 with the K5 or an earlier AMD processor? I've never actually run across one myself, but it's my understanding that the K5 was nothing to write home about.
Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple
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OS X on x86?
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· Score: 1
It should be pointed out that K6's were extremely weak chips. It was a mistake to buy one even when they could be bought.
In what way? I've had one for a few years now, and didn't notice any inordinate sluggishness when compared to other contemporary systems. (It still crunches Mersenne primes today, running as a diskless workstation off of a K6-2-based server.)
So the FPU is a little on the weak side...BFD. Not all of us waste time on FPS games. For most other software, it'd keep pace with (or even outrun) a P5.
Also, that
link about the BIND problem calling it a linux problem only has me wondering about the credibility of this article... Sure, linux runs BIND, but don't a few other OSs run it, too?
Not to mention that it's a problem pertaining to older versions of BIND...anything reasonably current isn't affected. (I'm using BIND 9.1 on my home server.)
There's also the small matter of BIND!=Linux (other systems that use old versions of BIND are also vulnerable, and other nameservers (such as djbdns) are available for use under Linux), but since when do FUD-spreaders let such small things as the truth get in the way?
Given the holes I've seen in out-of-the-box NT Server installs (like a sieve) compared to most out-of-the-box Linux installs, Microsoft is the pot that's calling the kettle black.
Andre Hedrick (ide guy)is one strange cookie, here is the slashdot interview with him. Read his answers. Make any sense? Should this man be committed?
[snip]
Andre:
Sorry, I do not feel anything! If you wish to know what I THINK, then I will answer the question. The very nature of asking people how they feel about an issue allows one to wrap it in fuzzy language, and this is how we got into this mess. So THINK DAMN-IT do not FEEL, this is silicon and not flesh!
Makes perfect sense to me. Rush Limbaugh had a similar comment on think-vs.-feel several years ago...maybe Andre Hedrick is a dittohead.:-)
Man -- I have seen a few posts talking about how the new FM renders in IE5....Is it just me -- or is this kind of like a Vegaterian walking into a steak house and complaining how the meat just does not taste right...
The lack of a decent graphical browser in Linux (though Konqueror is OK with a fair number of sites) means that more than a few of us are using IE, either booting into Win[9x|NT|2K|ME] or running it under [VMware|Wine|???]. Lately, I've been booting into WinME and accessing my Linux server with a ssh2 client, though this machine can net-boot Linux off of the server (with all of the latest goodies) and it was previously running SuSE 6.3 and Win98 (the latter under VMware).
Is it just me or are the font sizes absolutely huge?
They're beyond huge...it's like they're designed for 90-year-olds with 14" monitors. On my 19" 1152x864 screen, I have to expand the window to full-screen for the layout to flow properly, and the text in the bar on the right still wraps excessively.
Every other site, OTOH, renders just fine (including/.). I looked at their HTML and CSS, and it didn't look like anything was out of the ordinary as far as size selections go. Stripping out the font-family CSS statements (except for the ones that render fixed-pitch type) so that the browser-default font (typically Times New Roman) was used helped somewhat. All of the sans-serif fonts rendered too large, which suggests that maybe they should crank everything down a notch or two in size.
(Changing the display size in the browser from "Medium" to "Smaller" or (best) "Smallest" helped considerably, but you'd need to change it back to "Medium" for other sites to be readable.)
It should also be noted that I'm using IE 5.5 under Win98 or WinME (depending on whether I'm at home or at work). My past (brief) experiences with Nutscrape under Linux predict that Freshmeat might be one of the few sites that renders acceptably, given Nutscrape's tendency to use fonts that are way too small. I should net-boot my WinME box into Linux to see how Freshmeat comes up in Konqueror; I suspect it'll render more like IE than Nutscrape.
(Hint to the Freshmeat designers: designing your website around a browser that fewer and fewer people use is not a Good Thing.)
On the bright side, at least Lynx handles Freshmeat OK...:-)
In the long term, do you think we'll be synthesizing gasoline? Perhaps wood alcohol, but that'll be a hell of a lot more expensive than the stuff we're currently pumping out of finite ground reserves, and I suspect battery/fuel cell improvements will make all-electric cars superior.
Bio-fuel.
There have been efforts not too far from that description. Biodiesel has been around since at least WWII, when the Nazis used it to fuel their vehicles (nobody in their right mind would supply them with enough oil for all their needs). It can be produced from vegetable oil and a handful of other ingredients, and is nearly a drop-in replacement for diesel fuel. There was even a biodiesel-powered RV that crossed the country on (as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up) restaurants' discarded frying oil.
That, of course, doesn't do you much good right now when most cars don't run on diesel, but it's still an option to consider.
What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (
http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your OWN disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your OWN recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product.
Does anyone else here remember when Apple was actively opposed to copy protection? This would've been maybe as far back as the mid-to-late 80s, and was their position at least to the early-to-mid 90s. I recall reading material aimed at Apple II and Macintosh developers to the effect that Apple wasn't going to take any measures to support the implementation of copy protection and advocated that developers not even try to implement copy protection on software for Apple products. As a result, while there's a fair amount of Apple II software from the early 80s that is copy-protected (never mind the existence of software such as Copy II Plus, EDD, and Locksmith that bypassed most copy-protection schemes), most Apple II software since and nearly all Mac software isn't copy-protected.
Sure you can watch a TV image on a monitor. I like to watch a TV in a small window while doing other work on the PC. Check out
this site for some pretty cheap PCI and USB TV tuners with A/V and coax inputs.
Perhaps I should have specified "without using a PC". My thinking is more "hey, I've got this pretty good 19" CRT that's not hooked up to anything right now, why go to the trouble of getting another CRT just to watch television, which I don't do a whole lot of anyway?"
AITech used to have a box that was basically a TV tuner with a VGA output. A quick check of their website doesn't indicate that it's a current product, but maybe you can turn up a used one someplace. It even had a remote, so it would be perfect for couch-potato mode.:-)
Vanity presses are under threat from the internet, where publishing for yourself is both easy and cheap. Given the techie background of the audience I can't imagine any reason why anyone would want to see a book in print, besides the fetish and fondlement value of the binding.
Books are much easier to page through and glance at than PDFs and text files. I don't know how many manuals I've printed out for reference. If it's small enough, I'll crank it through single-sided and staple it together, but on other occasions I've done manual duplex printing (some advice: inkjet printers seem to do better at this than laser printers as they don't crinkle and crease the paper as much) and even 2-up for some documents (such as PDFs set in godawful-large type), which can then be cut up if necessary and either drilled at home for a 3-ring binder or spiral-bound at Kinko's.
I took a quick glance at Xlibris (having just heard of them through this article), thinking it might be a better way to have stuff printed up than what I've been doing. However, there are some limitations in the cheap formats and additional services that would make it unsuitable for one-off printing of most of the dox I print. For their intended use, it looks like they have a useful service...but for my uses, Lexmark gets to continue making a small fortune off of me.:-)
better yet, buy that book from a second hand book store. Chances are they wont even accept your credit card and they dont pay any royalties.
Bookstores, whether they sell new or used books (or both, as with most college bookstores), don't pay royalties. Publishers pay royalties to authors; they get the money from selling books to stores at a markup.
There's a used bookstore on the other side of town at which I've gotten all sorts of old documentation. I've used a check card (==credit card as far as they're concerned) to pay for stuff there on numerous occasions.
About the only opportunity for publishers (and authors, by extension) to get screwed is with "stripped" books. Many paperbacks are so cheap that it'd cost more to ship overstock back to the publisher than to throw them out. The store rips off the front cover, throws the book out, and reports to the publisher that the book has been destroyed. The publisher then issues a credit for the cost of the book. An unscrupulous bookseller can retrieve those stripped books and sell them. (That's why you see that notice about stripped books near the front of many paperbacks. Hardcover books are expensive enough that they usually don't get this treatment.)
Wow. I had no idea. Do you have to have a license to watch ITV?
No, the license is to operate a TV. Whether you intend to tune in the BBC or not, if you want to fire up a TV and not worry about the detector vans coming around to your neighborhood and hauling you away, you fork over for a TV license. (ITN doesn't see any of the license money...it's privately-owned and advertiser-funded, just like most TV in the States.)
There used to be a difference in the rates depending on whether you had color or B&W. I don't know if that's still true; last time I lived in England was 14 years ago. They might figure that almost nobody has only a B&W TV anymore, so they get the full £102 (or whatever) from everybody.
Fortunately, the people have learned; just one week ago, the Memory Stick Walkman was dropped by CompUSA, and dropped in price from $399.99 to $299.88
Do note that when the price of an item goes from XXX.99 to XXX.88 in most any U.S. store, the 88 cents means the item is either discontinued or the store is reducing the price to get rid of it because they will no longer carry it. It is this way at Wal-Mart, CompUSA, Staples, Office Depot, etc.
There is some variance between stores...at Best Buy, for instance, xx.60 means that an item will be discontinued in the near future (but it hasn't happened yet and the store still has some chance of getting more), and xx.50 means "when it's gone, it's gone." If it's been hanging around a really long time, some really ridiculous price cuts can happen (one time, I picked up a bunch of NiMH cell-phone battery packs at a penny each; the five cells in each can be ripped out and reconfigured to power other devices).
Apple Records was unhappy about onboard sound I/O in Apple Macintoshes
I thought the dispute was over the Apple IIGS, not the Macintosh. The Mac's sound-generation capability is relatively weak (PCM audio at a handful of fixed frequencies), but the IIGS had a fairly advanced (for the time, anyway) wavetable synth chip, the Ensoniq 5503.
Either way, the Beatles (Apple Records was their label) didn't have a case.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't told to "hold it;" they were told not to dump their piddle-packs as that could've knocked them off-course.
(As far as accuracy in movies goes, you probably meant your "inherently correct" comment as sarcasm WRT movies in general, but I suspect that Apollo 13 comes closer than most movies based on historical events. About the only thing I've heard the movie dinged on was the language, some of which was a bit more heated in the movie than what really happened.)
As I recall, about the only thing that was needed was to make sure OpenSSL was installed first. Keeping your favorite compiler options in CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS helps, too, as configure (if it's of the GNU variety) will usually pick up whatever is in those variables. It's always figured everything else out by itself. I've installed OpenSSH on SuSE 6.[34] and LFS systems, and have never had any problems with the build.
If I remember the way it worked, LS-120 would appear to be a descendant of the Floptical (magnetic storage on one side and optical positioning on the other side of something resembling a 3.5" floppy disk). They had at least a limited amount of popularity among the Apple II crowd at the time (in part because the drives also read ordinary MFM floppies, so you could exchange data with x86 boxen through them). I don't recall offhand which companies were behind the Floptical, but it might be the same as for LS-120.
I have even older disks than that that still work...5.25" DD floppies for my Apple IIs that go back as far as 1985 are still readable. OTOH, I've seen current 3.5" floppies go bad just if you look at them funny. :-| I don't know if I would trust data to a floppy over the long run.
Two...the 777 has only two engines. The 707 and 747 are the only jet airliners from Boeing that used/use four engines. (The 727 used three engines, and the 737, 757, and 767 use two.)
You must not use CSS much, then, as Nutscrape 4.x's support for CSS sucks colon. Mozilla seems to do a better job of it, but Internet Explorer by far has the most complete support for CSS at this point.
Any examples? I think the last time a page rendered in a current version of Nutscrape but not in a current version of IE was at least four or five years ago. It's 2001 now, not 1996.
(FWIW, I'm using Konqueror right now. It does a decent job with most pages I've thrown at it...certainly better than the Linux version of Nutscrape, which renders everything way too small. It segfaults on MSN, though...strange, but I'm not complaining too much. If a page is too weird for Konqueror to handle, I can always boot this box into WinME (aside from weak DOS-mode support, it's really not as bad as some people say) and fire up IE.)
There is a DOS port of Lynx (which, by extension, runs under Windows as well). I use it on some machines I admin remotely to grab files (it's easier to say "lynx -dump http://www.foo.bar/file.exe >file.exe" in a batch file than to make a script to do the same thing with FTP). It wasn't at all difficult to find...try the Lynx website for starters.
Maybe things have changed since I lived there in the mid-80s, but in many (most?) European countries, speeding fines aren't regarded as the revenue source that they've become here. The couple of speeding tickets that Dad got while we were in Germany were for some piddly amount of money...something on the order of DM 40 (about $20 at the time), comparable to a parking ticket.
Then again, maybe that's just Germany...they do like their speed, and their roads are up to handling it (or were, until all the borders opened and the roads started clogging up with traffic from all over Europe, but that's starting to get off-topic...).
Hmm...let's say some moron creates a situation where you need to accelerate to avoid a collision. If you're already traveling at whatever speed the computer thinks you should be going, you're phuqued.
Consider that accident rates have fallen since the fall of the 55-mph speed limit. With people able to get to their destinations in less time, I'd suspect that fewer drivers are getting tired/frustrated/angry after long trips. Having everybody traveling at about the same speed (whatever that speed happens to be) also helps avoid accidents. Putting governors in some cars will create a mix of cars traveling at different speeds, which is almost guaranteed to lead to more accidents. It's no different than setting different speed limits for cars and trucks, and just as dangerous.
(If such a system ever gets put in place anywhere, expect to see an increase in demand for older cars that haven't been crippled. The only thing electronic under the hood of my '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham is the ignition-control module inside the distributor. While you won't likely see the Brits seek out the few "Yank tanks" that may have been left behind by GIs over the years, I'm sure they have more than a few cars of their own that would not be amenable to remote hobbling.)
Not even randomly? That must be pretty lame, when all you have to do is just mash a bunch of keys at once and let the rollover do its job.
BTW, as others have noted, the standard conversion is 1 word=5 characters. 16 cps works out to 192 wpm, which is lower than what some people here have been saying is the record.
I know you were talking about the K6, and it's nowhere near the wimp that you described. (I have one of each type...a K6-200 that net-boots LFS from a K6-2-300 (which also runs LFS), plus a K6-III-450 that can boot WinME off its hard drive (which is what it's running right now) or net-boots LFS from the aforementioned K6-2.)
For comparison, I also have a P5-200 in a notebook, and the K6 has no problems keeping up with it. Are you sure you're not confusing the K6 with the K5 or an earlier AMD processor? I've never actually run across one myself, but it's my understanding that the K5 was nothing to write home about.
In what way? I've had one for a few years now, and didn't notice any inordinate sluggishness when compared to other contemporary systems. (It still crunches Mersenne primes today, running as a diskless workstation off of a K6-2-based server.)
So the FPU is a little on the weak side...BFD. Not all of us waste time on FPS games. For most other software, it'd keep pace with (or even outrun) a P5.
Not to mention that it's a problem pertaining to older versions of BIND...anything reasonably current isn't affected. (I'm using BIND 9.1 on my home server.)
There's also the small matter of BIND!=Linux (other systems that use old versions of BIND are also vulnerable, and other nameservers (such as djbdns) are available for use under Linux), but since when do FUD-spreaders let such small things as the truth get in the way?
Given the holes I've seen in out-of-the-box NT Server installs (like a sieve) compared to most out-of-the-box Linux installs, Microsoft is the pot that's calling the kettle black.
Makes perfect sense to me. Rush Limbaugh had a similar comment on think-vs.-feel several years ago...maybe Andre Hedrick is a dittohead. :-)
The lack of a decent graphical browser in Linux (though Konqueror is OK with a fair number of sites) means that more than a few of us are using IE, either booting into Win[9x|NT|2K|ME] or running it under [VMware|Wine|???]. Lately, I've been booting into WinME and accessing my Linux server with a ssh2 client, though this machine can net-boot Linux off of the server (with all of the latest goodies) and it was previously running SuSE 6.3 and Win98 (the latter under VMware).
They're beyond huge...it's like they're designed for 90-year-olds with 14" monitors. On my 19" 1152x864 screen, I have to expand the window to full-screen for the layout to flow properly, and the text in the bar on the right still wraps excessively.
Every other site, OTOH, renders just fine (including /.). I looked at their HTML and CSS, and it didn't look like anything was out of the ordinary as far as size selections go. Stripping out the font-family CSS statements (except for the ones that render fixed-pitch type) so that the browser-default font (typically Times New Roman) was used helped somewhat. All of the sans-serif fonts rendered too large, which suggests that maybe they should crank everything down a notch or two in size.
(Changing the display size in the browser from "Medium" to "Smaller" or (best) "Smallest" helped considerably, but you'd need to change it back to "Medium" for other sites to be readable.)
It should also be noted that I'm using IE 5.5 under Win98 or WinME (depending on whether I'm at home or at work). My past (brief) experiences with Nutscrape under Linux predict that Freshmeat might be one of the few sites that renders acceptably, given Nutscrape's tendency to use fonts that are way too small. I should net-boot my WinME box into Linux to see how Freshmeat comes up in Konqueror; I suspect it'll render more like IE than Nutscrape.
(Hint to the Freshmeat designers: designing your website around a browser that fewer and fewer people use is not a Good Thing.)
On the bright side, at least Lynx handles Freshmeat OK...:-)
That, of course, doesn't do you much good right now when most cars don't run on diesel, but it's still an option to consider.
Now Apple has done an about-face. What a shame.
I took a quick glance at Xlibris (having just heard of them through this article), thinking it might be a better way to have stuff printed up than what I've been doing. However, there are some limitations in the cheap formats and additional services that would make it unsuitable for one-off printing of most of the dox I print. For their intended use, it looks like they have a useful service...but for my uses, Lexmark gets to continue making a small fortune off of me. :-)
There's a used bookstore on the other side of town at which I've gotten all sorts of old documentation. I've used a check card (==credit card as far as they're concerned) to pay for stuff there on numerous occasions.
About the only opportunity for publishers (and authors, by extension) to get screwed is with "stripped" books. Many paperbacks are so cheap that it'd cost more to ship overstock back to the publisher than to throw them out. The store rips off the front cover, throws the book out, and reports to the publisher that the book has been destroyed. The publisher then issues a credit for the cost of the book. An unscrupulous bookseller can retrieve those stripped books and sell them. (That's why you see that notice about stripped books near the front of many paperbacks. Hardcover books are expensive enough that they usually don't get this treatment.)
There used to be a difference in the rates depending on whether you had color or B&W. I don't know if that's still true; last time I lived in England was 14 years ago. They might figure that almost nobody has only a B&W TV anymore, so they get the full £102 (or whatever) from everybody.
Either way, the Beatles (Apple Records was their label) didn't have a case.