Just out of curiosity, have you made a lot of use out of that AP Chem class? Out of all the classes I took in high school, typing was far and away the one from which I've gotten the most use. I apply what I learned in that class at least eight to ten hours every day. I couldn't begin to tell you the last time I used algebra or trig or chemistry.
If Hollywood wins, maybe I'll file a suit claiming that Hollywood and I had an implied contract that I never have to watch the commercials.
I think you'd have better luck claiming the networks have an implied contract to put on quality programming that's actually worth watching. They've obviously not kept up their end of the contract.
Morpheus, which essentially was the same as Kazaa, allowed you to use a "wizard" kind of thing to share files or a typical directory tree thing to identify the directories you wanted to share. The wizard had some kind of bug or at least poorly worded option that made it very easy to end up sharing everything on your system. Experienced users would ignore the wizard and go right to the directory tree, but most of the less experienced used the wizard.
I pointed out to several people that they were sharing files they probably didn't intend. Walking them through the steps needed to undo the damage was not always pleasant.
From what I read a couple years ago, it's supposed to record the amount of time you spend doing different types of driving, allegedly to determine how much you're polluting. The idea of attaching a GPS to the black box has also been discussed. I'm sure police organizations are drooling over that idea.
Nah, they'll just have to get more inventive with the ads. Increase the number of product placements within the show. Have the actors do the commercials as part of the show, like in "The Truman Show". Put the ads in crawl text across the bottom of the screen. Put the show on in split screen, with a commercial on one screen and the show on the other. Or simply go back to the days when an entire show was paid for by one sponsor whose name became part of the show.
The ReplayTV has been capable of "standalone" operation for quite a while. In this mode you get essentially the same programming capability you have with a basic VCR -- record channel X on this day and time for Y minutes. It's like a VCR with a 60-hour (YMMV) capacity. A VCR you totally own.
The schedule service is what sets the ReplayTV apart from the VCR. Well, that and the instant 30-second advance button. The 4000 series also has commercial skip where you essentially watch TV like it had no commercials at all. Oh, there's also that ability to watch one thing while the box is still recording. I guess I'm so used to the way the ReplayTV works I've forgotten some of the less attractive characteristics of the VCR. If I had to go back to watching TV without ReplayTV, I think I'd give up on TV altogether.
It's part of the deal the cable company cuts with the broadcaster. As part of the contract they're allowed to replace some of the broadcaster's commercials with ads sold by the cable company. There is no stealing involved.
Price caps alone did not cause the electricity shortage. The situation was much, much more complicated than that. Blaming price caps for what happened is a gross over-simplification.
Also, the state of California has no cap on the price of housing. Some communities do have rent control and some very strictly limit the number of building permits they issue, but this is on a city-by-city basis.
While many communities in California seem to have rather communistic tendencies, please don't assume all of California is that way. There really are a few places where reality-based logic usually prevails.
The other aspect of the price caps that always seems to be overlooked by the media is that customers of PG&E and SoCal Edison were for years paying artificially inflated prices so the power companies could re-coup the alleged losses from selling off most of their power generating facilities. This windfall allowed SoCal Edison to do ridiculous things like paying $millions to change the name of Anaheim Stadium to Edison International Monument to Idiotic Power Company Executives and to transfer literally $billions to Edison International, their parent company. The real joke of the whole thing is that they sold some of the power plants to their own parent, so they were allowed to re-coup "losses" that were nothing more than a transfer of property from one division to another.
The power companies happily overcharged us for years, but when prices took a turn they didn't expect, they came crying to the state to help bail them out. What they should have done was use some of those $billions of excess profits from previous years to cover their operating losses from last year. Now, thanks to the amazing negotiating skills of Governor Low-Beam, we'll be paying ridiculously high electric rates for the next 20 years.
Those blackouts most certainly DID occur. They didn't hit residential areas quite as much because during the day those areas don't use all that much electricity. Some businesses got hit pretty hard and had to spend $millions to bring in their own generators to keep the lights on. This was great for the manufacturers of generators; bad for nearly everyone else.
Bubble sort is frequently the right choice and, more often, the "good enough" choice. I learned this the hard way a long time ago. Unless you're sorting at least tens of thousands of items, with today's computers it's unlikely the user will notice any difference in execution time regardless of the sort algorithm used.
Bubble sort has the huge advantage that it can be programmed in about five minutes without reference to any algorithm book and it's simple enough you're unlikely to make any mistakes.
Academia has incorrectly given bubble sort a bad rap. The same could be said about the "goto", but that's a different discussion.
His system sounds a bit like the "all you can eat" buffet. After too many trips to the buffet the manager comes out and tells you, "That's all you can eat."
I've been with six different ISPs during my time on the Internet, including a major phone company, two small, local ISPs, and two giant, international ISPs. Of all these, my Time Warner/Road Runner service has been far and away the best, both in terms of reliability and of service provided (email, newsgroups, etc). And that's not even considering the speed. I know a lot of cable companies have done a very poor job at providing Internet service, but they aren't all total dunces. Time Warner took their time with it, but from what I've seen over the last couple years they've done it right.
The "Wired" quote, while accurate, is somewhat out of context. The article concerns companies being investigated as the result of a disgruntled employee filing a report with the BSA.
There's a huge difference between the BSA showing up due to a specific complaint and the BSA just walking in off the street. One assumes the whistle-blower would be willing to testify in court to infractions by the company in question and this gives them something to take to a judge. The BSA just walking in off the street would be a fishing expedition and I suspect few judges would issue a court order on the basis of a company simply not wanting to be bothered by the BSA.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the mirrors are used to position those keys on the outside. ;-)
Just out of curiosity, have you made a lot of use out of that AP Chem class? Out of all the classes I took in high school, typing was far and away the one from which I've gotten the most use. I apply what I learned in that class at least eight to ten hours every day. I couldn't begin to tell you the last time I used algebra or trig or chemistry.
Morpheus, which essentially was the same as Kazaa, allowed you to use a "wizard" kind of thing to share files or a typical directory tree thing to identify the directories you wanted to share. The wizard had some kind of bug or at least poorly worded option that made it very easy to end up sharing everything on your system. Experienced users would ignore the wizard and go right to the directory tree, but most of the less experienced used the wizard.
I pointed out to several people that they were sharing files they probably didn't intend. Walking them through the steps needed to undo the damage was not always pleasant.
From what I read a couple years ago, it's supposed to record the amount of time you spend doing different types of driving, allegedly to determine how much you're polluting. The idea of attaching a GPS to the black box has also been discussed. I'm sure police organizations are drooling over that idea.
Nah, they'll just have to get more inventive with the ads. Increase the number of product placements within the show. Have the actors do the commercials as part of the show, like in "The Truman Show". Put the ads in crawl text across the bottom of the screen. Put the show on in split screen, with a commercial on one screen and the show on the other. Or simply go back to the days when an entire show was paid for by one sponsor whose name became part of the show.
The ReplayTV has been capable of "standalone" operation for quite a while. In this mode you get essentially the same programming capability you have with a basic VCR -- record channel X on this day and time for Y minutes. It's like a VCR with a 60-hour (YMMV) capacity. A VCR you totally own.
The schedule service is what sets the ReplayTV apart from the VCR. Well, that and the instant 30-second advance button. The 4000 series also has commercial skip where you essentially watch TV like it had no commercials at all. Oh, there's also that ability to watch one thing while the box is still recording. I guess I'm so used to the way the ReplayTV works I've forgotten some of the less attractive characteristics of the VCR. If I had to go back to watching TV without ReplayTV, I think I'd give up on TV altogether.
It's part of the deal the cable company cuts with the broadcaster. As part of the contract they're allowed to replace some of the broadcaster's commercials with ads sold by the cable company. There is no stealing involved.
Price caps alone did not cause the electricity shortage. The situation was much, much more complicated than that. Blaming price caps for what happened is a gross over-simplification.
Also, the state of California has no cap on the price of housing. Some communities do have rent control and some very strictly limit the number of building permits they issue, but this is on a city-by-city basis.
While many communities in California seem to have rather communistic tendencies, please don't assume all of California is that way. There really are a few places where reality-based logic usually prevails.
The other aspect of the price caps that always seems to be overlooked by the media is that customers of PG&E and SoCal Edison were for years paying artificially inflated prices so the power companies could re-coup the alleged losses from selling off most of their power generating facilities. This windfall allowed SoCal Edison to do ridiculous things like paying $millions to change the name of Anaheim Stadium to Edison International Monument to Idiotic Power Company Executives and to transfer literally $billions to Edison International, their parent company. The real joke of the whole thing is that they sold some of the power plants to their own parent, so they were allowed to re-coup "losses" that were nothing more than a transfer of property from one division to another.
The power companies happily overcharged us for years, but when prices took a turn they didn't expect, they came crying to the state to help bail them out. What they should have done was use some of those $billions of excess profits from previous years to cover their operating losses from last year. Now, thanks to the amazing negotiating skills of Governor Low-Beam, we'll be paying ridiculously high electric rates for the next 20 years.
Those blackouts most certainly DID occur. They didn't hit residential areas quite as much because during the day those areas don't use all that much electricity. Some businesses got hit pretty hard and had to spend $millions to bring in their own generators to keep the lights on. This was great for the manufacturers of generators; bad for nearly everyone else.
Bubble sort is frequently the right choice and, more often, the "good enough" choice. I learned this the hard way a long time ago. Unless you're sorting at least tens of thousands of items, with today's computers it's unlikely the user will notice any difference in execution time regardless of the sort algorithm used.
Bubble sort has the huge advantage that it can be programmed in about five minutes without reference to any algorithm book and it's simple enough you're unlikely to make any mistakes.
Academia has incorrectly given bubble sort a bad rap. The same could be said about the "goto", but that's a different discussion.
His system sounds a bit like the "all you can eat" buffet. After too many trips to the buffet the manager comes out and tells you, "That's all you can eat."
I've been with six different ISPs during my time on the Internet, including a major phone company, two small, local ISPs, and two giant, international ISPs. Of all these, my Time Warner/Road Runner service has been far and away the best, both in terms of reliability and of service provided (email, newsgroups, etc). And that's not even considering the speed. I know a lot of cable companies have done a very poor job at providing Internet service, but they aren't all total dunces. Time Warner took their time with it, but from what I've seen over the last couple years they've done it right.
The "Wired" quote, while accurate, is somewhat out of context. The article concerns companies being investigated as the result of a disgruntled employee filing a report with the BSA. There's a huge difference between the BSA showing up due to a specific complaint and the BSA just walking in off the street. One assumes the whistle-blower would be willing to testify in court to infractions by the company in question and this gives them something to take to a judge. The BSA just walking in off the street would be a fishing expedition and I suspect few judges would issue a court order on the basis of a company simply not wanting to be bothered by the BSA.