And it will continue to grow in popularity. The old paradigm of having a phone hardwired in your house may die off completely considering the declining cost of wireless phones (CDMA and analog) and the increasing use of e-mail and VOIP.
The phone companies will soon have to change their revenue strategies completely in order to enjoy the large market they've had in the past. AT&T continues to raise their prices (up to $.17/minute for long distance now) Pac Bell (here in California) now has value-added services galore. Broadband is being pushed hard (they now have stands set up in the grocery stores for crying out loud)
Just as pagers are slowly becoming obsolete so are home phones. They are still handy, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify the ever-increasing cost of having one, particularly when the taxes on them are starting to become almost as expensive as the service itself. You don't have to take my word for it; anyone reading this who lives in the Bay Area (CA) have a look at the taxes you pay on your phone. Ouch!
Re:What were they showing at the Microsoft Booth?
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They were showing (primarily) Services for Unix 3.01. Not a big deal, all legitimate. The booth was relatively small (maybe 15-20 feet across and only 10 feet deep) The booth was busy and nobody egged the presenters or forcibly tattooed Tux on their foreheads, as much as we all may have enjoyed that.
Jeremy on a winning team for a change!
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Jeremy was on a winning team for a change! The Geeks, in the Golden Penguin Bowl, soundly defeated CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and some guy picked from the audience with questions like:
(?; \d/) Line noise or Perl script?
Bonus question: what does it do?
RedHat handed out...red hats. Ximian was absent for some reason. The EFF seemed a little more sure of themselves this year. IBM didn't hand out t-shirts. Neither did HotLinuxJobs.com.
Anyway, way to go Geeks! See you next year! (and here's hoping Chris can check his repepetitive spelling mistakes)
Your friend was an excellent choice. He had great presence and spoke well, even if he didn't get a chance to answer too many questions.
BTW, I submitted the story of Jeremy being on the winning team for a change...but it hasn't been accepted or rejected just yet. ChrisD may have taken offense at pointing out his "repepetitive" spelling mistakes...
Re:Ever been mobbed by beggars?
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, the government has a lot of money...OUR money, at that. The point here isn't that our government can't afford MS; they can, at our expense. What *IS* important here is that the government would be using a more secure and non-proprietary OS. The fact that our tax dollars would no longer be going to MS would be gravy. The fact that the politicians would find another place to spend that money (and then argue that need even more) is a sad fact.
Twilight Zone is quite possibly *THE* greatest pinball game EVER! It had INCREDIBLE play value, a well-balanced difficulty level, multiple play possibilities, it rarely broke down (I used to run an arcade with one in it) and had Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone" constantly rumbling in the background, along with about a million other great sounds. And it has an intense "ending" that has to be seen to be believed, worthy of its namesake.
At the grocery store pick up: can of refried beans large can of peeled tomatoes, Italian style can of black-eye peas can of mushrooms 1 pound of hamburger
At home have: rice cheap red wine (the cheaper the better) balsamic vinegar hot sauce turmeric celery seed other seasonings per your taste
Start the rice. It will take the longest to cook. (make about 1 cup of rice, remembering that the recipe is 2-to-1 water-to-rice) Then pour some cheap wine, balsamic vinegar, and celery seed over your hamburger meat, letting it soak in for a few minutes (this can be done in-skillet, if you prefer) In a separate large pot combine mushrooms, refried beans, tomatoes, and black-eye peas with some more wine, balsamic vinegar, turmeric, salt, pepper, hot sauce, and whatever else tickles your fancy. Heat it on high, lowering it to medium and then to low as it starts to steam, stirring constantly.
Brown the hamburger. Don't drain the fat. Add it to the mushroom-bean-tomato combination.
With heat on low for bean-tomato-etc. combination, stir occasionally while rice continues to cook. Step outside, have cigarette.
Once rice is done add it to the mix and MIX THOROUGHLY! The result is a feast that can feed two VERY hungry geeks and still leave enough left over for a hearty lunch the next day. Oh, yeah, and it's under $7, tasty as hell, and can be changed as needed.
I STRONGLY recommend using iron pots if you have them. Don't forget to scrub them well (without soap!) when you're done.
Do I have to cut other immortals heads off with a sword? If so, can I use a light saber? They make way cooler sounds.
If you invent a working lightsaber then I want one too! Hey, wait, there we go! The Aussies can work on curing the world's ills, but the nerds here in America can work on the lightsaber! The Moral Majority, et al., should have no problem with that! Meanwhile, here are some that just look really cool. Enjoy!
May I remind you that there are hundreds of Sci-Fi stories (books, TV, movies, etc...) debating the creation of an UNDERCLASS! Whether this be robots, animals, races or CLONES!!!
I think you may have missed the point here. This isn't about creating whole persons with cloning technology, only PARTS of whole persons, e.g. the thymus. New body parts == good thing. Unlimited immortality for the likes of Bill Gates == bad thing. On the whole, though, it will beat the hell out of worrying about donated organs for those who need them. The "underclass" will consist of those unable to pay for it...sort of like it is now.
These CD's aren't about stopping Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/etc, they're about taking away our right to time shift and give the record companies the ability to charge us over and over again for the same music.
I'm not condoning the copyrighted non-CDs here, but the same thing could be said about movies: they charge me again and again to come see a movie, then charge me again if I want to own it on VHS or DVD. These companies have a right to charge as they will for their product and make (or fail to make) a profit doing it. The issue here isn't charging us for "the same music" over and over again. The issue here is companies releasing a product that may not work in your hardware.
The EFF warned about this some months ago and urged a letter-writing campaign to Philips. I see it worked, or, at least, Philips saw it, too, and agreed with the EFF.
Think Philips when you buy electronics, think EFF when donating, folks!
Hallelujah, brother! There were times, when I was paying US$125/month for 348 SDSL, that Code Red made it damned near impossible to get anything done. Thankfully, I was running a Linux box and didn't get infected. And there wasn't anything I could do about it because it was coming from an unused computer in a library in Pig Knees, AK, a library that didn't answer their phone after I finally tracked it down to tell them that their fucking Windoze box was annoying me just because we happen to have similar IP addys! You know, I *STILL* get a few Code Red hits every week! Anyway, if it comes down to a pay-for-use scheme, I may have to hand it back to them and tell them to keep it.
Apple and Sierra have been making attempts at humor, some better than others, for a long time. Of course, this was in the days when computers did very little unto themselves, as opposed to all-inclusive operating systems that had multiple layers. The manuals could be relatively short, even with a joke on every page. As for Sierra, the Leisure Suit Larry series, amongst others, were always spiced with humor.
Who here still has a copy of the Wizardry manual, with the cartoon depicting the casting of Tiltowait, and the ensuing "gesundheit"?
He could release them in original and SE flavors, y'know, make it a menu option.
And if you simply MUST have the original version, check out your local used-record outlet. There are plenty of copies of the old CBS Home Video version of ANH on VHS.
Binks was a necessary part of Palpatine's plan. He's served his purpose. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him after all this. Binks is EVIL, I tells ya! EEEEEVIL! (I just want attention!)
Think about it...Natalie Portman replaces Fisher in the scene in 'Jedi' where Luke explains that he and Leia are brother and sister. Good move! Fisher was awful in that scene.
Portman replaces Leia in the slave outfit. Not that I thought Fisher wasn't hot, but now we get to see Portman as well!
Portman re-enacts the scenes that Fisher was too coked-out to do well...think about it, folks...
The *REPUBLIC* has no standing army. Individual planets do.
The name came from Yoda, who coined, at the end of the film, the phrase Clone War. Why? Who knows? Who cares?
There was nothing special about the clones. There never was meant to *BE* anything special about them, except that they are plentiful, amoral, will follow orders, and come from good genetic stock, i.e. Jango Fett.
Star Wars is just a movie, and it made money, which is the goal of Hollywood, right or wrong. "Out of respect for Tolkien"...there's an interesting concept: the guy wrote a book but, posthumously, gets respect by someone else NOT making money from it?
Is George Lucas greedy? Probably, but it's none of my business, and I don't care one way or the other. What I care about is watching the Jedi with the lightsabers and the vwing, vwing, unnnn-glayvin!
My point here is that there is *STILL* a generation of sad, pathetic little bastards sitting in their parents basement who love Star Wars *AND* Spidey. Don't think that just because Spidey made tons of bucks and AOTC has only made a lot of money that we aren't rabid fan-boys who zealously defend Star Wars in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was a bad movie!
A nice irony: Blizzard sends DMCA nastygram, then DMCA'd by Sony
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 11:59:22 -0400 To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: A nice irony: Blizzard sends DMCA nastygram, then DMCA'd by Sony From: Declan McCullagh
Previous Politech message:
"Blizzard game company uses DMCA to shut down Bnetd emulator app" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03163.html
From: [deleted per request --DBM] To: Subject: Blizzard gets smacked with a DMCA notice of their own. Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 08:55:08 -0700
[Friend is worried this might get him fired. Would you mind hiding my name if you print this? Thanks!]
Thought you might want to see this. Blizzard had earlier sent a DMCA takedown notice to BnetD, a system that would allow gamers to play one another on a networked system. /. covered it earlier in February: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 2/21/013625 6
Blizzard got much flak for the action, and has since recanted on the DMCA threat, and instead tosses out a lawsuit alleging pure Copyright Infringement against the creators of BnetD. The actual filed papers can be found here. http://www.eff.org/sc/bnetd/20020405_blizzard_comp laint.pdf
Well, Karma's a bitch, so to speak. Turns out from a source in blizzard, Sony is going right along and doing the same thing to Blizzard. Likely, the DMCA end of it won't stand. But Sony might have a claim for Copyright Infringement.
The worst thing of this, is that now most of the programmers (who have nothing at all to do with the legal BS) are pretty much cut-off musically speaking. MEMO: Blizzard was recently served with a DMCA ("Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notification from Sony Music for copyright infringement. This infringement was allegedly committed by one of our employees who was purportedly using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program on a Blizzard computer system to share copyrighted music with others over the Internet.
Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted audio, video, graphics, software and/or any other files (e.g., commercial recordings, films, or software) is illegal. Providing these files over the Company network through peer-to-peer file-sharing programs (ie. Kazaa, Morpheus, EDonkey, Gnutella, and similar programs) or by other means puts both the user and Blizzard in jeopardy of being held liable for copyright infringement. As you can imagine, this risk is not one that the company is willing to take.
In addition to the legal ramifications, peer-to-peer file-sharing programs may inadvertently expose confidential and proprietary company files that have been enabled for sharing to the Internet. When you are connected to the Internet, anyone on the Internet may then have access to that data or material. These file sharing programs themselves may install spyware and/or install Trojans, again exposing local and network data to outside access. Further, swapping of files causes higher Internet usage and in many cases utilizes costly network and local hardware resources.
We therefore need to make sure that everyone understands our policy regarding peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and that immediate steps are taken to stop any copyright infringement from taking place at Blizzard.
POLICY. Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs may not be used on any computers connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's networks without the express written approval of Mike Morhaime or Paul Sams. This policy shall go into effect immediately. Exceptions, if any, will be installed and tested in a controlled environment and properly configured to ensure an adequate level of security before implementation. If an adequate level of security cannot be established, such usage will not be approved, and an alternative method will need to be found.
REMOVAL. To ensure currently installed programs have been uninstalled correctly and all associated files have been removed, an Information Systems (IS) staff member should be notified to remove all pieces of the infringing program(s) and make any necessary registry changes. If you currently have any of these peer-to-peer file-sharing programs on your computer, please contact IS to facilitate their proper removal. IS will be able to make sure that any related spyware is removed also.
ENFORCEMENT. Due of the very serious legal and financial harm that Blizzard could experience as a result of an employee infringing upon another company's copyrights in this manner, we have adopted this policy. Please be aware that disciplinary action, up to and including termination, will be taken against any employee that is found to be using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program on computers connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's networks
California Youth Authority and Cover Your Ass. I don't find it surprising at all that any company, large or small, wants to ride the straight and narrow legally. After all, there's DOLLARS at stake!
Look: the guy shows up with a computer, expecting to install a computer, not with an belt full of tools to re-decorate someone's house. If it had been me doing it I would have told her to find a qualified contractor to do this work for her, not some schmuck working for CompUSA. This guy probably had to run back to the store...at his *OWN* expense...several times in order to get this thing right. It's annoying as hell. And the fact that you can't see it probably means you're one of those people that would pull shit like this, and probably not even give the guy any advance warning. If I wanted something special, I would tell the people AHEAD OF TIME about it, not spring it on them when they show up. And wireless speakers don't pay for themselves, you know...
Slashdot Mirror
And it will continue to grow in popularity. The old paradigm of having a phone hardwired in your house may die off completely considering the declining cost of wireless phones (CDMA and analog) and the increasing use of e-mail and VOIP.
The phone companies will soon have to change their revenue strategies completely in order to enjoy the large market they've had in the past. AT&T continues to raise their prices (up to $.17/minute for long distance now) Pac Bell (here in California) now has value-added services galore. Broadband is being pushed hard (they now have stands set up in the grocery stores for crying out loud)
Just as pagers are slowly becoming obsolete so are home phones. They are still handy, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify the ever-increasing cost of having one, particularly when the taxes on them are starting to become almost as expensive as the service itself. You don't have to take my word for it; anyone reading this who lives in the Bay Area (CA) have a look at the taxes you pay on your phone. Ouch!
They were showing (primarily) Services for Unix 3.01. Not a big deal, all legitimate. The booth was relatively small (maybe 15-20 feet across and only 10 feet deep) The booth was busy and nobody egged the presenters or forcibly tattooed Tux on their foreheads, as much as we all may have enjoyed that.
Jeremy was on a winning team for a change! The Geeks, in the Golden Penguin Bowl, soundly defeated CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and some guy picked from the audience with questions like:
(?; \d/) Line noise or Perl script?
Bonus question: what does it do?
RedHat handed out...red hats. Ximian was absent for some reason. The EFF seemed a little more sure of themselves this year. IBM didn't hand out t-shirts. Neither did HotLinuxJobs.com.
Anyway, way to go Geeks! See you next year! (and here's hoping Chris can check his repepetitive spelling mistakes)
Your friend was an excellent choice. He had great presence and spoke well, even if he didn't get a chance to answer too many questions.
BTW, I submitted the story of Jeremy being on the winning team for a change...but it hasn't been accepted or rejected just yet. ChrisD may have taken offense at pointing out his "repepetitive" spelling mistakes...
Yes, the government has a lot of money...OUR money, at that. The point here isn't that our government can't afford MS; they can, at our expense. What *IS* important here is that the government would be using a more secure and non-proprietary OS. The fact that our tax dollars would no longer be going to MS would be gravy. The fact that the politicians would find another place to spend that money (and then argue that need even more) is a sad fact.
Twilight Zone is quite possibly *THE* greatest pinball game EVER! It had INCREDIBLE play value, a well-balanced difficulty level, multiple play possibilities, it rarely broke down (I used to run an arcade with one in it) and had Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone" constantly rumbling in the background, along with about a million other great sounds. And it has an intense "ending" that has to be seen to be believed, worthy of its namesake.
can of refried beans
large can of peeled tomatoes, Italian style
can of black-eye peas
can of mushrooms
1 pound of hamburger
At home have:
rice
cheap red wine (the cheaper the better)
balsamic vinegar
hot sauce
turmeric
celery seed
other seasonings per your taste
Start the rice. It will take the longest to cook. (make about 1 cup of rice, remembering that the recipe is 2-to-1 water-to-rice) Then pour some cheap wine, balsamic vinegar, and celery seed over your hamburger meat, letting it soak in for a few minutes (this can be done in-skillet, if you prefer) In a separate large pot combine mushrooms, refried beans, tomatoes, and black-eye peas with some more wine, balsamic vinegar, turmeric, salt, pepper, hot sauce, and whatever else tickles your fancy. Heat it on high, lowering it to medium and then to low as it starts to steam, stirring constantly.
Brown the hamburger. Don't drain the fat. Add it to the mushroom-bean-tomato combination.
With heat on low for bean-tomato-etc. combination, stir occasionally while rice continues to cook. Step outside, have cigarette.
Once rice is done add it to the mix and MIX THOROUGHLY! The result is a feast that can feed two VERY hungry geeks and still leave enough left over for a hearty lunch the next day. Oh, yeah, and it's under $7, tasty as hell, and can be changed as needed.
I STRONGLY recommend using iron pots if you have them. Don't forget to scrub them well (without soap!) when you're done.
"Name something that members of the Reeves family will never see again!"
If you invent a working lightsaber then I want one too! Hey, wait, there we go! The Aussies can work on curing the world's ills, but the nerds here in America can work on the lightsaber! The Moral Majority, et al., should have no problem with that! Meanwhile, here are some that just look really cool. Enjoy!
I think you may have missed the point here. This isn't about creating whole persons with cloning technology, only PARTS of whole persons, e.g. the thymus. New body parts == good thing. Unlimited immortality for the likes of Bill Gates == bad thing. On the whole, though, it will beat the hell out of worrying about donated organs for those who need them. The "underclass" will consist of those unable to pay for it...sort of like it is now.
I'm not condoning the copyrighted non-CDs here, but the same thing could be said about movies: they charge me again and again to come see a movie, then charge me again if I want to own it on VHS or DVD. These companies have a right to charge as they will for their product and make (or fail to make) a profit doing it. The issue here isn't charging us for "the same music" over and over again. The issue here is companies releasing a product that may not work in your hardware.
Think Philips when you buy electronics, think EFF when donating, folks!
Hallelujah, brother! There were times, when I was paying US$125/month for 348 SDSL, that Code Red made it damned near impossible to get anything done. Thankfully, I was running a Linux box and didn't get infected. And there wasn't anything I could do about it because it was coming from an unused computer in a library in Pig Knees, AK, a library that didn't answer their phone after I finally tracked it down to tell them that their fucking Windoze box was annoying me just because we happen to have similar IP addys! You know, I *STILL* get a few Code Red hits every week! Anyway, if it comes down to a pay-for-use scheme, I may have to hand it back to them and tell them to keep it.
Who here still has a copy of the Wizardry manual, with the cartoon depicting the casting of Tiltowait, and the ensuing "gesundheit"?
He could release them in original and SE flavors, y'know, make it a menu option.
And if you simply MUST have the original version, check out your local used-record outlet. There are plenty of copies of the old CBS Home Video version of ANH on VHS.
Binks was a necessary part of Palpatine's plan. He's served his purpose. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him after all this. Binks is EVIL, I tells ya! EEEEEVIL! (I just want attention!)
Portman replaces Leia in the slave outfit. Not that I thought Fisher wasn't hot, but now we get to see Portman as well!
Portman re-enacts the scenes that Fisher was too coked-out to do well...think about it, folks...
The name came from Yoda, who coined, at the end of the film, the phrase Clone War. Why? Who knows? Who cares?
There was nothing special about the clones. There never was meant to *BE* anything special about them, except that they are plentiful, amoral, will follow orders, and come from good genetic stock, i.e. Jango Fett.
Does this answer your questions?
Is George Lucas greedy? Probably, but it's none of my business, and I don't care one way or the other. What I care about is watching the Jedi with the lightsabers and the vwing, vwing, unnnn-glayvin!
My point here is that there is *STILL* a generation of sad, pathetic little bastards sitting in their parents basement who love Star Wars *AND* Spidey. Don't think that just because Spidey made tons of bucks and AOTC has only made a lot of money that we aren't rabid fan-boys who zealously defend Star Wars in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was a bad movie!
A nice irony: Blizzard sends DMCA nastygram, then DMCA'd by Sony
0 2/21/013625 6
p laint.pdf
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 11:59:22 -0400
To: politech@politechbot.com
Subject: FC: A nice irony: Blizzard sends DMCA nastygram, then DMCA'd by Sony
From: Declan McCullagh
Previous Politech message:
"Blizzard game company uses DMCA to shut down Bnetd emulator app"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03163.html
From: [deleted per request --DBM]
To:
Subject: Blizzard gets smacked with a DMCA notice of their own.
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 08:55:08 -0700
[Friend is worried this might get him fired. Would you mind hiding my name
if you print this? Thanks!]
Thought you might want to see this. Blizzard had earlier sent a DMCA
takedown notice to BnetD, a system that would allow gamers to play one
another on a networked system.
/. covered it earlier in February:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/
Blizzard got much flak for the action, and has since recanted on the DMCA
threat, and instead tosses out a lawsuit alleging pure Copyright
Infringement against the creators of BnetD. The actual filed papers can be
found here. http://www.eff.org/sc/bnetd/20020405_blizzard_com
Well, Karma's a bitch, so to speak. Turns out from a source in blizzard,
Sony is going right along and doing the same thing to Blizzard.
Likely, the DMCA end of it won't stand. But Sony might have a claim for
Copyright Infringement.
The worst thing of this, is that now most of the programmers (who have
nothing at all to do with the legal BS) are pretty much cut-off musically
speaking.
MEMO:
Blizzard was recently served with a DMCA ("Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
notification from Sony Music for copyright infringement. This infringement
was allegedly committed by one of our employees who was purportedly using a
peer-to-peer file-sharing program on a Blizzard computer system to share
copyrighted music with others over the Internet.
Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted audio, video, graphics, software
and/or any other files (e.g., commercial recordings, films, or software) is
illegal. Providing these files over the Company network through peer-to-peer
file-sharing programs (ie. Kazaa, Morpheus, EDonkey, Gnutella, and similar
programs) or by other means puts both the user and Blizzard in jeopardy of
being held liable for copyright infringement. As you can imagine, this risk
is not one that the company is willing to take.
In addition to the legal ramifications, peer-to-peer file-sharing programs
may inadvertently expose confidential and proprietary company files that
have been enabled for sharing to the Internet. When you are connected to the
Internet, anyone on the Internet may then have access to that data or
material. These file sharing programs themselves may install spyware and/or
install Trojans, again exposing local and network data to outside access.
Further, swapping of files causes higher Internet usage and in many cases
utilizes costly network and local hardware resources.
We therefore need to make sure that everyone understands our policy
regarding peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and that immediate steps are
taken to stop any copyright infringement from taking place at Blizzard.
POLICY. Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs may not be used on any computers
connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's networks without the express
written approval of Mike Morhaime or Paul Sams. This policy shall go into
effect immediately. Exceptions, if any, will be installed and tested in a
controlled environment and properly configured to ensure an adequate level
of security before implementation. If an adequate level of security cannot
be established, such usage will not be approved, and an alternative method
will need to be found.
REMOVAL. To ensure currently installed programs have been uninstalled
correctly and all associated files have been removed, an Information Systems
(IS) staff member should be notified to remove all pieces of the infringing
program(s) and make any necessary registry changes. If you currently have
any of these peer-to-peer file-sharing programs on your computer, please
contact IS to facilitate their proper removal. IS will be able to make sure
that any related spyware is removed also.
ENFORCEMENT. Due of the very serious legal and financial harm that Blizzard
could experience as a result of an employee infringing upon another
company's copyrights in this manner, we have adopted this policy. Please be
aware that disciplinary action, up to and including termination, will be
taken against any employee that is found to be using a peer-to-peer
file-sharing program on computers connected to Blizzard or Blizzard North's
networks
California Youth Authority and Cover Your Ass. I don't find it surprising at all that any company, large or small, wants to ride the straight and narrow legally. After all, there's DOLLARS at stake!
Hi-C. Thanks for clearing that up!
Sounds like you have a good start on it. Bravo! Did you actually get it to play in your DVD player, though? You never got that far...
All I can say is:
Read *THIS* one!
Look: the guy shows up with a computer, expecting to install a computer, not with an belt full of tools to re-decorate someone's house. If it had been me doing it I would have told her to find a qualified contractor to do this work for her, not some schmuck working for CompUSA. This guy probably had to run back to the store...at his *OWN* expense...several times in order to get this thing right. It's annoying as hell. And the fact that you can't see it probably means you're one of those people that would pull shit like this, and probably not even give the guy any advance warning. If I wanted something special, I would tell the people AHEAD OF TIME about it, not spring it on them when they show up. And wireless speakers don't pay for themselves, you know...