Isn't it more likely that the merchant will just drop your account when you fail to pay, then send a collection agency after you for the unpaid part (and presumably early termination fees, administrative fees, etc...)? Anything else would seem insane to me.
Attempting to extort them into providing you with more service by not paying seems counterproductive at best.
Apparently Verizon still gives most FiOS customers IPv4 only routers because they're some custom conglomeration of an incredibly low end home router and in-home data-over-coax setup so they can sell you horrible movies at terrible quality and high prices on their PPV system.
Seriously Verzion, I know that PPV is supposed to be a big moneymaker for you, but why is it every time you advertise it, you're showing us movies that nobody could possibly want to watch? "Mr. Popplers Penguins, Watch this incredible blockbuster now with FiOS On Demand!" (for $6). It's a running joke in my house how bad movies they advertise on those spots are.
For what it's worth, IPv6 world day went quite smoothly back in June. My only complaint is that they turned IPv6 back off at the end of the day instead of leaving it on and getting people started with actually fixing their broken stuff.
In my experience the difficulty with IPv6 translation isn't at the socket layer--all of that stuff was figured out ages ago and only requires a few tweaks here and there to support both easily--the difficulty is with parsing configuration files, creating dialog boxes, etc... Lots of UI elements were spaced assuming that an IP address would only need 15 digits to be fully displayed, and IPv6 breaks that.
The upshot is that converting an application over to IPv6 is rarely as easy as it should be.
Not easily if the end user is prone to changing out their hardware (plugging in only one thing at a time into the router, like the instructions told them to do).
If you have a dispute and wanted to hold your fee for leverage (this is dumb and doesn't work like you think it does), why not just turn off auto-pay? If they charge your credit card without your authorization, then that's something you can bring to court.
Those freezes are probably the driver crashing and resetting itself. It used to be that a driver crash brought down your whole system, but now they can do it in the background silently and all you'll notice is some stuttering (or a short freeze).
I suspect that ATI and nVidia have been able to use the silent-restart feature to sell more defective cards. If your system totally locks up every half hour when playing a game, you're going to return the card. If it freezes but then resumes silently you may be annoyed but not pin the blame on the card, and not be annoyed enough to actually take action. It could be the disk, motherboard, or something else too, you don't get an indication that it was a video card problem. The very first revisions of this feature used to pop up a box telling you what happened, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
The problem is that speed is only one part of the equation. that 8800GT only supports DX10.0. DX10.1 games may run, but you'll find them crashing after awhile unless the developer was very careful (they were not). DX11 games won't work at all.
You're much better off with a modern card that just has fewer execution units if you want to save money. They won't be out right away (the first release is always near the top end), but they will eventually show up. Since you're worried about saving money/power, you don't want to be an early adopter anyway. Oftentimes the very first releases will have worse power/performance ratios than the respins of the same board a few months down the road.
Near the end of its life I overclocked my original model iPhone (I only replaced it a couple of weeks ago) to extend its life slightly with various game apps. The battery life took a hit, but since I tossed it on the charger every night anyway it wasn't unmanageable. It basically became an iPhone 3G once you overclocked it. Amusingly, it wasn't actually an overclock in the traditional sense, Apple underclocked the CPU to save battery life and all I did was revert the chip to its native clock rate.
Other than that, the last time I messed with overclocking was on my old Pentium 75 (it ran smoothly at 100Mhz) because it was dogging on some games I wanted to play. Overclocking for the sake over overclocking never seemed worth it to me. It's mostly just a free way to wring a few more months/years out of a system before upgrading.
Poor bad block management causing slowdowns over time even if you have trim enabled. Also stuttering during write operations. It was a huge problem on the first generation Airs.
Seems likely to me that Apple has had enough of crappy SSD controllers causing problems on its notebooks (especially the Air) and wants to finally get it done right. It could also be a competitive advantage to be the company with the best drive controllers.
A movie-style self destruction system like you're imagining (effectively computer controlled bombs planted all over the device) are a lot more dangerous to the ground crew than is really acceptable for all but the most closely guarded secrets. Having the computers and crypto gear self-wipe in event of capture is already standard procedure and probably happened here, but having the thing go up in a giant fireball because some tech accidentally shorted something while working on the bird is just not acceptable.
GPS is mostly unencrypted. There are some bits (the highest precision bits) that can be pseudo-encrypted so only the military has the most accurate positioning information available, but that obfuscation has been turned off for a number of years now. The GPS signal is too weak and low bitrate to make super secure. Drowning out GPS is relatively easy to do too, because the signal is so ridiculously weak to begin with.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation drones (and revisions of the current gen) have more inertial navigation equipment that is trusted over GPS in cases where the GPS suddenly shifts position in flight. Inertial navigation won't get a bird home safely (the error bars get really really big over time), but it might let the thing fly away from the GPS jammer/spoofer.
You clicked "I agree", which counts. You can complain about EULAs all you want, but they have not failed in court yet, and have several successes. If you don't like them, don't buy products or services that have them (sorry, no Phone, Computer, Gadgets, Games, etc... for you).
The shrinkwrap agreement on the PS3 says they can change anything they want about the device at any time.
Sony didn't advertise the OtherOS feature after they removed it, so trying to get them on false advertising is a stretch.
I think the upshot is that you agreed to the EULA, and the EULA said Sony can do this, so the Judge doesn't see what leg you have to stand on. It was unpopular, but they didn't break any law. This is actually an important test for EULAs, since normally removing functionality from a device after the sale would cause legal problems, but the EULA prevented that.
One interesting tidbit is that the CIA/NRO is not part of the military. That is how we were able to do U2 overflights of the Soviet Union without it being technically considered an act of war.
It most likely did, most all military equipment has a zeroize feature designed to be used in situations like this. It probably did not have bombs planted all around the aircraft designed to blow it up because that's dangerous to the operators and maintenance people. Plus it would add weight and take up space. You can bet that any crypto gear in the bird has rendered itself dumb already.
Most of the danger of having this thing caught would revolve around the Iranians discovering a flaw in the camera they can exploit (make their camo absorb certain frequencies better than others) or dissemination of the Radar Absorbing Material specifications, or figuring out flaws in the C&C channel protocol that lets them take over the drones for real (instead of likely just jamming it and running it out of fuel). The airframe itself, the engine, avionics, etc... are probably not particularly special.
Wouldn't the big music companies just sue you then when your random monkey composer creates Beethoven's 8th and you try to claim it as an original work?
Bingo! You've discovered the basic problem with spaces in names, space is reserved as a delimiter and thus you're forced to quote anything you type that has a space in the name. It's the textbook example of the awkward workaround. If it were rare it wouldn't be a big deal (like on most Unix systems), but in Windows you end up having to use it all the damn time if you do any work at all on the commandline, even for simple operations. It's bad ergonomics.
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Isn't it more likely that the merchant will just drop your account when you fail to pay, then send a collection agency after you for the unpaid part (and presumably early termination fees, administrative fees, etc...)? Anything else would seem insane to me.
Attempting to extort them into providing you with more service by not paying seems counterproductive at best.
Apparently Verizon still gives most FiOS customers IPv4 only routers because they're some custom conglomeration of an incredibly low end home router and in-home data-over-coax setup so they can sell you horrible movies at terrible quality and high prices on their PPV system.
Seriously Verzion, I know that PPV is supposed to be a big moneymaker for you, but why is it every time you advertise it, you're showing us movies that nobody could possibly want to watch? "Mr. Popplers Penguins, Watch this incredible blockbuster now with FiOS On Demand!" (for $6). It's a running joke in my house how bad movies they advertise on those spots are.
For what it's worth, IPv6 world day went quite smoothly back in June. My only complaint is that they turned IPv6 back off at the end of the day instead of leaving it on and getting people started with actually fixing their broken stuff.
In my experience the difficulty with IPv6 translation isn't at the socket layer--all of that stuff was figured out ages ago and only requires a few tweaks here and there to support both easily--the difficulty is with parsing configuration files, creating dialog boxes, etc... Lots of UI elements were spaced assuming that an IP address would only need 15 digits to be fully displayed, and IPv6 breaks that.
The upshot is that converting an application over to IPv6 is rarely as easy as it should be.
Not easily if the end user is prone to changing out their hardware (plugging in only one thing at a time into the router, like the instructions told them to do).
If you have a dispute and wanted to hold your fee for leverage (this is dumb and doesn't work like you think it does), why not just turn off auto-pay? If they charge your credit card without your authorization, then that's something you can bring to court.
Those freezes are probably the driver crashing and resetting itself. It used to be that a driver crash brought down your whole system, but now they can do it in the background silently and all you'll notice is some stuttering (or a short freeze).
I suspect that ATI and nVidia have been able to use the silent-restart feature to sell more defective cards. If your system totally locks up every half hour when playing a game, you're going to return the card. If it freezes but then resumes silently you may be annoyed but not pin the blame on the card, and not be annoyed enough to actually take action. It could be the disk, motherboard, or something else too, you don't get an indication that it was a video card problem. The very first revisions of this feature used to pop up a box telling you what happened, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
The problem is that speed is only one part of the equation. that 8800GT only supports DX10.0. DX10.1 games may run, but you'll find them crashing after awhile unless the developer was very careful (they were not). DX11 games won't work at all.
You're much better off with a modern card that just has fewer execution units if you want to save money. They won't be out right away (the first release is always near the top end), but they will eventually show up. Since you're worried about saving money/power, you don't want to be an early adopter anyway. Oftentimes the very first releases will have worse power/performance ratios than the respins of the same board a few months down the road.
Assuming you're willing to run at lower resolutions and framerates, yes.
Near the end of its life I overclocked my original model iPhone (I only replaced it a couple of weeks ago) to extend its life slightly with various game apps. The battery life took a hit, but since I tossed it on the charger every night anyway it wasn't unmanageable. It basically became an iPhone 3G once you overclocked it. Amusingly, it wasn't actually an overclock in the traditional sense, Apple underclocked the CPU to save battery life and all I did was revert the chip to its native clock rate.
Other than that, the last time I messed with overclocking was on my old Pentium 75 (it ran smoothly at 100Mhz) because it was dogging on some games I wanted to play. Overclocking for the sake over overclocking never seemed worth it to me. It's mostly just a free way to wring a few more months/years out of a system before upgrading.
Poor bad block management causing slowdowns over time even if you have trim enabled. Also stuttering during write operations. It was a huge problem on the first generation Airs.
That summary gave me brain damage.
Seems likely to me that Apple has had enough of crappy SSD controllers causing problems on its notebooks (especially the Air) and wants to finally get it done right. It could also be a competitive advantage to be the company with the best drive controllers.
A movie-style self destruction system like you're imagining (effectively computer controlled bombs planted all over the device) are a lot more dangerous to the ground crew than is really acceptable for all but the most closely guarded secrets. Having the computers and crypto gear self-wipe in event of capture is already standard procedure and probably happened here, but having the thing go up in a giant fireball because some tech accidentally shorted something while working on the bird is just not acceptable.
GPS is mostly unencrypted. There are some bits (the highest precision bits) that can be pseudo-encrypted so only the military has the most accurate positioning information available, but that obfuscation has been turned off for a number of years now. The GPS signal is too weak and low bitrate to make super secure. Drowning out GPS is relatively easy to do too, because the signal is so ridiculously weak to begin with.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation drones (and revisions of the current gen) have more inertial navigation equipment that is trusted over GPS in cases where the GPS suddenly shifts position in flight. Inertial navigation won't get a bird home safely (the error bars get really really big over time), but it might let the thing fly away from the GPS jammer/spoofer.
Still a steal at $20 million. There are some private yachts that cost more than that.
I'm willing to buy that it is a research vessel, as long as you call "figuring out how to build and operate a military aircraft carrier" research.
You clicked "I agree", which counts. You can complain about EULAs all you want, but they have not failed in court yet, and have several successes. If you don't like them, don't buy products or services that have them (sorry, no Phone, Computer, Gadgets, Games, etc... for you).
Probably not, but car manufacturers and dealers don't have shrinkwrap legal agreements on their vehicles (yet), so it's really not the same thing.
The shrinkwrap agreement on the PS3 says they can change anything they want about the device at any time.
Sony didn't advertise the OtherOS feature after they removed it, so trying to get them on false advertising is a stretch.
I think the upshot is that you agreed to the EULA, and the EULA said Sony can do this, so the Judge doesn't see what leg you have to stand on. It was unpopular, but they didn't break any law. This is actually an important test for EULAs, since normally removing functionality from a device after the sale would cause legal problems, but the EULA prevented that.
One interesting tidbit is that the CIA/NRO is not part of the military. That is how we were able to do U2 overflights of the Soviet Union without it being technically considered an act of war.
It most likely did, most all military equipment has a zeroize feature designed to be used in situations like this. It probably did not have bombs planted all around the aircraft designed to blow it up because that's dangerous to the operators and maintenance people. Plus it would add weight and take up space. You can bet that any crypto gear in the bird has rendered itself dumb already.
Most of the danger of having this thing caught would revolve around the Iranians discovering a flaw in the camera they can exploit (make their camo absorb certain frequencies better than others) or dissemination of the Radar Absorbing Material specifications, or figuring out flaws in the C&C channel protocol that lets them take over the drones for real (instead of likely just jamming it and running it out of fuel). The airframe itself, the engine, avionics, etc... are probably not particularly special.
So what you're saying is that once you've mastered all of the hard parts, Math is easy. That's good to know.
I don't know. Saying it isn't a skirt because it has 8+ yards of material seems pretty weak to me. Are hoop skirts not skirts?
Also saying that it's not a skirt because women don't wear them, except when they do...
From what I can tell they're not "skirts" because the Scots don't want them to be called skirts.
Wouldn't the big music companies just sue you then when your random monkey composer creates Beethoven's 8th and you try to claim it as an original work?
Bingo! You've discovered the basic problem with spaces in names, space is reserved as a delimiter and thus you're forced to quote anything you type that has a space in the name. It's the textbook example of the awkward workaround. If it were rare it wouldn't be a big deal (like on most Unix systems), but in Windows you end up having to use it all the damn time if you do any work at all on the commandline, even for simple operations. It's bad ergonomics.