>> you could make your cartoon into a normal video and post that.
> This bloats the file size by a factor of ten, which costs the publisher > ten times as much to send and the viewers ten times as much to receive.
If you *MERELY WANT TO PLAY AN SWF AUDIO/VIDEO STREAM*, you can use mplayer or XBMC, etc, etc to render the stream. That is your answer.
Schlockwave Trash is aimed at autoplaying, at scripting (with inherent security holes), and at creating banner ads that float all over the screen. It also enables such "features" as clicking on a running video launching a webpage. The sooner it dies, the better.
The pox on both your houses, KDE and GNOME. I run ICEWM with my most-commonly-used apps in the launch bar. KDE jumped the shark when Kmail started requiring an effing SQL database!!! KDE and GNOME have the Microsoft disease... every year or two "everything you know is wrong". You have to unlearn navigating/using the desktop and learn a whole new paradigm. Having *ONE* learning curve to get into linux is bad enough. Having to repeat it every 18 months is insane.
> Once you get going, first impressions may not live up to expectations - > and it's important to understand why. The big issue with Raspberry Pi > in the here and now is that there is no hardware acceleration of the desktop > and as such the OS feels clunky and very unresponsive, with navigation and > movement of windows often feeling lumpen and slow. Functionality > elsewhere is also limited. The Midori browser included doesn't support > HTML5 or Java, and there is no support for Flash (and the Adobe platform > is unlikely to be implemented). Web browsing is therefore an exercise in > patience and you'll need to be prepared for the fact that there's a lot > of online content you won't be able to access.
> The vision of the Raspberry Pi as an everyman computer capable of > web-browsing, office work and media playback really isn't there yet - but it's > important to stress that the software is in the very early stages of development.
> Why would you need a desktop to listen to music, watch movies, triviality > exchange at Facebook and Twiter and play the occasional game?
Because it beats the daylights out of having multiple machines that do only one thing. And, oh yeah, "keyboarding" on a tablet or smartphone sucks. It is absolutely painful composing anything longer than a Twitter post.
> As far as displays go, why are you adverse to buying TVs? TVs are much > cheaper than comparable computer monitors, and if you do your research. > For example, a 32" monitor will run you between $700-$900, but you can > get a very nice LED TV you can use as a monitor for half that.
a) Computer monitors tend to be much sharper than TV displays. Fuzzy displays don't work for computing
b) TV sets are still being manufactured with overscan http://hd.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/ just like they were 50 and 60 years ago... "because we've always done it that way". I have a 50" HDTV that's useless as a computer monitor, because the edges are all cut off, and the menu bar at the bottom is mostly invisible. It's great for feeding NHL Gamecenter Live into the HDMI (Flash inside a resizable Firefox window), but for spreadsheets/email/etc, it sucks.
A slightly fuzzy display is perfectly OK for motion (e.g. TV or streaming internet video), becuase you don't notice it with all the movement. But it bites when you read straight text.
> Microsoft being unaware for thw last few years that hundreds of computers are > infected with a 20 MB spyware pack bearing a security certifice of their own? Come on...
Don't laugh. Microsoft Excel 97 had an "Easter Egg" flight simulator game hidden in the code. http://eeggs.com/items/718.html
> Somehow we need non-biased people in this incident but when it comes to > professions we let them police themselves (doctors, accountants, lawyers etc).
Not only do you need an impartial 3rd party, they also have to have the necessary expertise. Who else do you know of who is qualified to and capable of conducting the air crash investigation? It's a specialized field with a very limited number of qualified people. And the vast majority of them work for either the FAA or NTSB.
If it's a Java or Flash exploit, yes it can. I haven't had Java on my linux machine for years. And while I generally disagree with a lot of Steve Jobs' ideas, getting rid of Flash was a brilliant idea. A container file for audio/video does *NOT* need an embedded scriptable language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actionscript as part of the spec. The scripts that execute as part of the Flash spec are the root of the vulnerability, OS notwithstanding.
Not only that, the newer HTML5 video codecs are more efficient. My 6 megabit ADSL connection nets 4.98 megabits down. It can almost keep up with 1080p Flash videos. E.g. if I let a video buffer for 30 seconds, it can play 5 minutes before the playback overtakes the downloading video. But HTML5 1080p WebM videos can easily be played without buffering at all.
> You assume the FAA and NTSB can investigate the incident objectively? > No? Sheesh, can the US become more of a third world country?
The mere appearance of conflict of interest would greatly reduce public confidence in the results of the investigation. This is a long-standing legal principal, e.g. judicial "recusal" (disqualification from judging a legal case) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_disqualification. This attempts to ensure that a judge doesn't preside over a case where s/he is related to or has had business dealings with the defendant (criminal trial) or either party in a civil dispute, or even the law firms representing them. This principal also applies to other professions.
2) An HTC Desire HD http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire_hd-3468.php I bought 2nd-hand. I use it as an FM radio, camera, ebook reader, and wifi-based web browser. I haven't bothered getting a SIM card and connecting to a carrier.
> (A huge suspension of disbelief for this next bit please) If you fix a girls computer
You provided a service. How much (in cash) would Geek Squad charge? That's how much she should've paid you in cash.
> and she give you a blow job as thanks (I know - hold on)
How much does the local whorehouse charge for that? That's how much you should've paid her in cash.
Note that if she paid in cash, only that would've been taxable. If you barter services, both transactions are taxable. If they found out, the tax people would get you coming and going (sorry about that).
> Locking oneself away and jacking off to porn every day - and subsequently becoming increasingly > numb to the same sexual stimulus that a real sex in a real relationship, especially those who > feel guilty about it because they've been told it's wrong - is not good for healthy relationships as adults.
> Also, instead of practicing talking to people ("cool" people or not), people take the easier > route and spend hours and play video games. As a result, many people can't as easily > communicate in person as those who spend more time in social situations.
OK, I'm admitting that I'm 60. What's changed in the past 50 or so years?
When I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, parents did *NOT* freak out and have the police send out search parties if little Johnny went to play with the neighbourhood kids 10:00 AM on a summer (school vacation) day, and didn't come back till dinner at 5:30 PM. And we did not have cellphones back then, so there wasn't any contact possible until they came back. Parents actually allowed their children to freely interact with other children, unsupervised by adults. Taking a bus to the other side of town to run an errand was not a problem.
Today with "a perv under every rock", a woman who lets her 9-year-old son take the subway by himself creates a scandal and is labelled "world's worst mom". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
Don't blame the boys. Why do people find it so surprising that a boy who is effectively kept under house arrest during much of his younger years... * is socially akward (with people in general, not just girls) * gets bored sitting around at home, and turns to the only things he can enjoy by himself, i.e. internet and jerking off
Many "for profit" newspapers are are the wrong kind of "non profit", and quite a few have gone under. The vast majority of newspaper revenues are from advertising. The sum total of USA newspaper advertising revenue has dropped from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011.
Subscriptions are peanuts in comparison. Subscriptions might pay enough to have the paper delivered. They come nowhere near enough to pay for newsprint, printing machines and printing staff, secretaries, janitors, phone bills, office equipment+rentals, let alone correspondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, etc. Newspapers have lost their monopoly on advertising, and can't charge the extortionate rates they used to.
> For centuries we have been paying for news by buying > newspapers - paying for news sites is pretty much the same thing
Fact... your subscription comes *NOWHERE NEAR* the full cost of a newspaper (buying paper, paying reporters, editors, printers, delivery trucks, janitors, secretaries, etc, etc). The vast majority of newspaper revenue has been from advertising. Newspaper ad revenue in the USA has fallen from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011 http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca/2012/03/newspaper-sales-slid-to-1984-level-in.html The last time it was that low was in 1984. That's *WITHOUT ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION*.
Just like Facebook, subscribers were never the real customers. Advertisers were the real customers, and subscribers' eyeballs were the product that newspapers sold to advertisers. In "the good ole days" newspapers had a virtual monopoly on advertising. They were able to charge extortionate rates for advertising. This allowed them pay for correpondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, and at state/provincial legislatures, and at city halls, and still turn a big fat profit. Department stores, auto dealers, and home sellers were effectively paying an "advertising tax" to sell their products.
Where there's a tax, someone will look for tax loopholes ("advertising tax avoidance"). * "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See... http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates. It ate newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and supper as far as used-car ads were concerned.
* Right now, where I live, there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc
* Back in the mid-1980's, "The Real Estate Weekly" came out in Toronto. It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real estate firms came out ahead.
* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). This cost less than having the newspapers print them. Next step was, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either... - have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units) - or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings
Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.
To summarize newspapers main problem... their business model requires selling advertising at rates way in excess of cost, and using that margin to pay journalists. That works only as long as you have a monopoly/cartel situation. Once newspapers lost
The fact that he gets a light fine means nothing when the *CIVIL LAWSUIT* is prepared. Unless otherwise mentioned, I assume he has liability insurance. His insurance company will probably settle out of court with the motorcyclists. They have an open+shut case, and a jury will be very sympathetic to them, so the insurance company will probably pay very close to their initial demands.
Going after his girlfriend is sleazy, however. That crosses the line.
If I recognize the voice speaking, I pick up the phone and answer the call. If I don't recognize it, I let it go to voice mail. Actually, most robo-diallers seem to recognize answering machines, so I don't too many telemarketing messages on the voicemail.
> But what if they start selling background check services to corporations? > Or live monitoring of employees/customers/competitors/whatever? > "Peeking" into teens life for parents (and teachers?) for a hefty fee. Fear sells!
Those sevices would become worthless in a few months, once it became widely known they do this. People will start getting more discreet, or dumping Facebook altogether. Remember the recent rash of stories about prospective employers wanting access to job applicants' Facebook accounts? Every highschool and university student advisor and every job board will be advising applicants to scrub their profiles squeaky clean. Some applicants will go even further, and delete their Facebook accounts altogether.
> I doubt it will affect regular users of facebook much; I assume the kinds of people that would > pay money to let their posts be seen more would be blocked already from most people's feeds....
But blocking of premium users would only be allowed if *YOU* paid a premium. Sorta like arms manufacturers selling weapons to both sides of a war. Cynical? Moi?
> In the U.S. I live in, practically everyone and their grandmom is on Facebook.
According to http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ the number of Facebook ***ACCOUNTS*** corresponds to 50.72% of the US population. That includes... * all the under-13 kids who lie about their ages http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/facebook-underage-users_n_839437.html * all the people who have a squeaky-clean "employment friendly" account plus a "real account" * all the people who have multiple accounts for Farmville. Apparently the game requires friends to do stuff for you, which is why people get annoying requests from friends playing the game. * ever seen the ads on underground forums, selling "Likes" from 10,000 USA Facebook accounts? The only way they can deliver is by having these thousands of fake accounts under their control.
In a country with over 300 million population, all these fake accounts may only take the number up from a real 40% to a fake 50%. In much smaller countries, the fake accounts stick out like a sore thumb. At the same URL as above, Monaco shows up with 124.31% of its population on Facebook. I treat the 901 million number like an EPA gas milage estimate... always exagerated.
> Of course you can. You can jack up the minimum price for a smartphone data plan so that > it's more expensive than unlimited texting, forcing cost-conscious customers onto dumbphones.
So I end up with a Nokia 6015i as my cellphone http://www.mobiledia.com/phones/nokia/6015i.html and an unconnected HTC Desire from an Ebay reseller as my wifi web-browser/email/camera/FM radio/ebook reader/kitchen-sink.
Follow the money. Remember how SCO couldn't compete with free linux, and tried to shut it down? Well, the IPTV and cableco and satellite providers are trying to the shut down free OTA TV so they can charge an arm and a leg for their services. Follow the money... * USA AT&T has Uverse * USA Verizon has FIOS * Canada Rogers has Rogers Cable * Canada BCE has Bell Fibe and Bell satellite
But people like me, in and around major cities, can get 10 to 20 or more channels of free legal OTA TV. And OTA high-definition TV is way better than the compressed crap you get from the cable/satellite/IPTV providers. They hate this for exactly the same reason that SCO hates free linux. Many people won't buy your product if they can get a similar product for free.
No matter how much spectrum they have, they'll always be clamouring for more TV spectrum, until every last free OTA TV station shuts down. Then watch cable/satellite/IPTV rates shoot through the roof. I'm old enough to remember the days of UHF channel 83. Then cellular grabbed the 800 mhz band, and UHF ended at channel 69. Then they grabbed the 700 mhz band and UHF now ends at channel 51. They're trying to shut down free OTA TV, 100 mhz at a time.
> Telcos paid over $15 billion for spectrum they are not using. AT&T is > the worst offender, sitting on more than $10 billion in spectrum. The > FCC seems to encourage this kind of speculation, and is doing the > Telco's bidding by opening more spectrum for corporations to sit on.
This is not about meeting real demand, this is about shutting down free OTA TV.
Slashdot Mirror
...router configures you.
>> you could make your cartoon into a normal video and post that.
> This bloats the file size by a factor of ten, which costs the publisher
> ten times as much to send and the viewers ten times as much to receive.
If you *MERELY WANT TO PLAY AN SWF AUDIO/VIDEO STREAM*, you can use mplayer or XBMC, etc, etc to render the stream. That is your answer.
Schlockwave Trash is aimed at autoplaying, at scripting (with inherent security holes), and at creating banner ads that float all over the screen. It also enables such "features" as clicking on a running video launching a webpage. The sooner it dies, the better.
The pox on both your houses, KDE and GNOME. I run ICEWM with my most-commonly-used apps in the launch bar. KDE jumped the shark when Kmail started requiring an effing SQL database!!! KDE and GNOME have the Microsoft disease... every year or two "everything you know is wrong". You have to unlearn navigating/using the desktop and learn a whole new paradigm. Having *ONE* learning curve to get into linux is bad enough. Having to repeat it every 18 months is insane.
> Feel free to point out necessary part of a desktop system it is missing,.
Have you tried to run Linux on 256 megabytes of RAM recently? Forget about recent versions of KDE or GNOME or even XFCE or LXDE. Check out this review http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-raspberry-pi-review
> Once you get going, first impressions may not live up to expectations -
> and it's important to understand why. The big issue with Raspberry Pi
> in the here and now is that there is no hardware acceleration of the desktop
> and as such the OS feels clunky and very unresponsive, with navigation and
> movement of windows often feeling lumpen and slow. Functionality
> elsewhere is also limited. The Midori browser included doesn't support
> HTML5 or Java, and there is no support for Flash (and the Adobe platform
> is unlikely to be implemented). Web browsing is therefore an exercise in
> patience and you'll need to be prepared for the fact that there's a lot
> of online content you won't be able to access.
> The vision of the Raspberry Pi as an everyman computer capable of
> web-browsing, office work and media playback really isn't there yet - but it's
> important to stress that the software is in the very early stages of development.
> Why would you need a desktop to listen to music, watch movies, triviality
> exchange at Facebook and Twiter and play the occasional game?
Because it beats the daylights out of having multiple machines that do only one thing. And, oh yeah, "keyboarding" on a tablet or smartphone sucks. It is absolutely painful composing anything longer than a Twitter post.
> As far as displays go, why are you adverse to buying TVs? TVs are much
> cheaper than comparable computer monitors, and if you do your research.
> For example, a 32" monitor will run you between $700-$900, but you can
> get a very nice LED TV you can use as a monitor for half that.
a) Computer monitors tend to be much sharper than TV displays. Fuzzy displays don't work for computing
b) TV sets are still being manufactured with overscan http://hd.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/ just like they were 50 and 60 years ago... "because we've always done it that way". I have a 50" HDTV that's useless as a computer monitor, because the edges are all cut off, and the menu bar at the bottom is mostly invisible. It's great for feeding NHL Gamecenter Live into the HDMI (Flash inside a resizable Firefox window), but for spreadsheets/email/etc, it sucks.
A slightly fuzzy display is perfectly OK for motion (e.g. TV or streaming internet video), becuase you don't notice it with all the movement. But it bites when you read straight text.
...the Jews, But I wasn't a Jew so I didn't speak up. Then they flagged the Communists, but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up... etc.
> Microsoft being unaware for thw last few years that hundreds of computers are
> infected with a 20 MB spyware pack bearing a security certifice of their own? Come on...
Don't laugh. Microsoft Excel 97 had an "Easter Egg" flight simulator game hidden in the code. http://eeggs.com/items/718.html
> Somehow we need non-biased people in this incident but when it comes to
> professions we let them police themselves (doctors, accountants, lawyers etc).
Not only do you need an impartial 3rd party, they also have to have the necessary expertise. Who else do you know of who is qualified to and capable of conducting the air crash investigation? It's a specialized field with a very limited number of qualified people. And the vast majority of them work for either the FAA or NTSB.
> ...will it run on Linux?
If it's a Java or Flash exploit, yes it can. I haven't had Java on my linux machine for years. And while I generally disagree with a lot of Steve Jobs' ideas, getting rid of Flash was a brilliant idea. A container file for audio/video does *NOT* need an embedded scriptable language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actionscript as part of the spec. The scripts that execute as part of the Flash spec are the root of the vulnerability, OS notwithstanding.
Not only that, the newer HTML5 video codecs are more efficient. My 6 megabit ADSL connection nets 4.98 megabits down. It can almost keep up with 1080p Flash videos. E.g. if I let a video buffer for 30 seconds, it can play 5 minutes before the playback overtakes the downloading video. But HTML5 1080p WebM videos can easily be played without buffering at all.
> You assume the FAA and NTSB can investigate the incident objectively?
> No? Sheesh, can the US become more of a third world country?
The mere appearance of conflict of interest would greatly reduce public confidence in the results of the investigation. This is a long-standing legal principal, e.g. judicial "recusal" (disqualification from judging a legal case) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_disqualification. This attempts to ensure that a judge doesn't preside over a case where s/he is related to or has had business dealings with the defendant (criminal trial) or either party in a civil dispute, or even the law firms representing them. This principal also applies to other professions.
> hell YES!!! Just because I have a "smart" phone, which I only do non-call
> things where wifi is present, yet they insist on a fucking data package.
I have 2 (count-em; TWO) cellphones.
1) An el-cheapo pre-paid voice plan on an old Nokia 6015i. http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=514
2) An HTC Desire HD http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire_hd-3468.php I bought 2nd-hand. I use it as an FM radio, camera, ebook reader, and wifi-based web browser. I haven't bothered getting a SIM card and connecting to a carrier.
> (A huge suspension of disbelief for this next bit please) If you fix a girls computer
You provided a service. How much (in cash) would Geek Squad charge? That's how much she should've paid you in cash.
> and she give you a blow job as thanks (I know - hold on)
How much does the local whorehouse charge for that? That's how much you should've paid her in cash.
Note that if she paid in cash, only that would've been taxable. If you barter services, both transactions are taxable. If they found out, the tax people would get you coming and going (sorry about that).
http://it.slashdot.org/story/08/01/28/1517254/nyc-wants-to-ban-geiger-counters
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-01-08/news/nypd-seeks-an-air-monitor-crackdown-for-new-yorkers/
> Locking oneself away and jacking off to porn every day - and subsequently becoming increasingly
> numb to the same sexual stimulus that a real sex in a real relationship, especially those who
> feel guilty about it because they've been told it's wrong - is not good for healthy relationships as adults.
> Also, instead of practicing talking to people ("cool" people or not), people take the easier
> route and spend hours and play video games. As a result, many people can't as easily
> communicate in person as those who spend more time in social situations.
OK, I'm admitting that I'm 60. What's changed in the past 50 or so years?
When I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, parents did *NOT* freak out and have the police send out search parties if little Johnny went to play with the neighbourhood kids 10:00 AM on a summer (school vacation) day, and didn't come back till dinner at 5:30 PM. And we did not have cellphones back then, so there wasn't any contact possible until they came back. Parents actually allowed their children to freely interact with other children, unsupervised by adults. Taking a bus to the other side of town to run an errand was not a problem.
Today with "a perv under every rock", a woman who lets her 9-year-old son take the subway by himself creates a scandal and is labelled "world's worst mom". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy
Don't blame the boys. Why do people find it so surprising that a boy who is effectively kept under house arrest during much of his younger years...
* is socially akward (with people in general, not just girls)
* gets bored sitting around at home, and turns to the only things he can enjoy by himself, i.e. internet and jerking off
Many "for profit" newspapers are are the wrong kind of "non profit", and quite a few have gone under. The vast majority of newspaper revenues are from advertising. The sum total of USA newspaper advertising revenue has dropped from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011.
Subscriptions are peanuts in comparison. Subscriptions might pay enough to have the paper delivered. They come nowhere near enough to pay for newsprint, printing machines and printing staff, secretaries, janitors, phone bills, office equipment+rentals, let alone correspondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, etc. Newspapers have lost their monopoly on advertising, and can't charge the extortionate rates they used to.
> For centuries we have been paying for news by buying
> newspapers - paying for news sites is pretty much the same thing
Fact... your subscription comes *NOWHERE NEAR* the full cost of a newspaper (buying paper, paying reporters, editors, printers, delivery trucks, janitors, secretaries, etc, etc). The vast majority of newspaper revenue has been from advertising. Newspaper ad revenue in the USA has fallen from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011 http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca/2012/03/newspaper-sales-slid-to-1984-level-in.html The last time it was that low was in 1984. That's *WITHOUT ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION*.
Just like Facebook, subscribers were never the real customers. Advertisers were the real customers, and subscribers' eyeballs were the product that newspapers sold to advertisers. In "the good ole days" newspapers had a virtual monopoly on advertising. They were able to charge extortionate rates for advertising. This allowed them pay for correpondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, and at state/provincial legislatures, and at city halls, and still turn a big fat profit. Department stores, auto dealers, and home sellers were effectively paying an "advertising tax" to sell their products.
Where there's a tax, someone will look for tax loopholes ("advertising tax avoidance").
* "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See...
http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates. It ate newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and supper as far as used-car ads were concerned.
* Right now, where I live, there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc
* Back in the mid-1980's, "The Real Estate Weekly" came out in Toronto. It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real estate firms came out ahead.
* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). This cost less than having the newspapers print them. Next step was, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either...
- have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units)
- or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings
Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.
To summarize newspapers main problem... their business model requires selling advertising at rates way in excess of cost, and using that margin to pay journalists. That works only as long as you have a monopoly/cartel situation. Once newspapers lost
The fact that he gets a light fine means nothing when the *CIVIL LAWSUIT* is prepared. Unless otherwise mentioned, I assume he has liability insurance. His insurance company will probably settle out of court with the motorcyclists. They have an open+shut case, and a jury will be very sympathetic to them, so the insurance company will probably pay very close to their initial demands.
Going after his girlfriend is sleazy, however. That crosses the line.
If I recognize the voice speaking, I pick up the phone and answer the call. If I don't recognize it, I let it go to voice mail. Actually, most robo-diallers seem to recognize answering machines, so I don't too many telemarketing messages on the voicemail.
N/T
> But what if they start selling background check services to corporations?
> Or live monitoring of employees/customers/competitors/whatever?
> "Peeking" into teens life for parents (and teachers?) for a hefty fee. Fear sells!
Those sevices would become worthless in a few months, once it became widely known they do this. People will start getting more discreet, or dumping Facebook altogether. Remember the recent rash of stories about prospective employers wanting access to job applicants' Facebook accounts? Every highschool and university student advisor and every job board will be advising applicants to scrub their profiles squeaky clean. Some applicants will go even further, and delete their Facebook accounts altogether.
> I doubt it will affect regular users of facebook much; I assume the kinds of people that would
> pay money to let their posts be seen more would be blocked already from most people's feeds....
But blocking of premium users would only be allowed if *YOU* paid a premium. Sorta like arms manufacturers selling weapons to both sides of a war. Cynical? Moi?
> In the U.S. I live in, practically everyone and their grandmom is on Facebook.
According to http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/ the number of Facebook ***ACCOUNTS*** corresponds to 50.72% of the US population. That includes...
* all the under-13 kids who lie about their ages http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/facebook-underage-users_n_839437.html
* all the people who have a squeaky-clean "employment friendly" account plus a "real account"
* all the people who have multiple accounts for Farmville. Apparently the game requires friends to do stuff for you, which is why people get annoying requests from friends playing the game.
* ever seen the ads on underground forums, selling "Likes" from 10,000 USA Facebook accounts? The only way they can deliver is by having these thousands of fake accounts under their control.
In a country with over 300 million population, all these fake accounts may only take the number up from a real 40% to a fake 50%. In much smaller countries, the fake accounts stick out like a sore thumb. At the same URL as above, Monaco shows up with 124.31% of its population on Facebook. I treat the 901 million number like an EPA gas milage estimate... always exagerated.
> Of course you can. You can jack up the minimum price for a smartphone data plan so that
> it's more expensive than unlimited texting, forcing cost-conscious customers onto dumbphones.
So I end up with a Nokia 6015i as my cellphone http://www.mobiledia.com/phones/nokia/6015i.html and an unconnected HTC Desire from an Ebay reseller as my wifi web-browser/email/camera/FM radio/ebook reader/kitchen-sink.
Follow the money. Remember how SCO couldn't compete with free linux, and tried to shut it down? Well, the IPTV and cableco and satellite providers are trying to the shut down free OTA TV so they can charge an arm and a leg for their services. Follow the money...
* USA AT&T has Uverse
* USA Verizon has FIOS
* Canada Rogers has Rogers Cable
* Canada BCE has Bell Fibe and Bell satellite
But people like me, in and around major cities, can get 10 to 20 or more channels of free legal OTA TV. And OTA high-definition TV is way better than the compressed crap you get from the cable/satellite/IPTV providers. They hate this for exactly the same reason that SCO hates free linux. Many people won't buy your product if they can get a similar product for free.
No matter how much spectrum they have, they'll always be clamouring for more TV spectrum, until every last free OTA TV station shuts down. Then watch cable/satellite/IPTV rates shoot through the roof. I'm old enough to remember the days of UHF channel 83. Then cellular grabbed the 800 mhz band, and UHF ended at channel 69. Then they grabbed the 700 mhz band and UHF now ends at channel 51. They're trying to shut down free OTA TV, 100 mhz at a time.
According to http://www.dailywireless.org/2010/06/18/phoney-spectrum-scarcity/
> Telcos paid over $15 billion for spectrum they are not using. AT&T is
> the worst offender, sitting on more than $10 billion in spectrum. The
> FCC seems to encourage this kind of speculation, and is doing the
> Telco's bidding by opening more spectrum for corporations to sit on.
This is not about meeting real demand, this is about shutting down free OTA TV.