"Here's the deal. You're going to rent this box from us if you want our service. But we're your only local option aside from satellite. Who, also, will be happy to rent you this box. If you're caught with one that you aren't renting, lets say you bought one from ebay, you'll be charged monthly for it as well."
"But that's not fair."
"What's fair is what we say is fair, because no one's going to stop us. They did it before with CableCard and look what happened. Didn't work out so well, did it? Now they'll leave us to our own methods! Those boxes are soooo expensive anyway, no one would ever give us a 20% bulk discount. And we sure as hell aren't going to give you a discount, either, on the monthly fee."
Is it not a reward to let things like this go unpunished? Even calling them out on it and letting people form their own opinions would be a better form of punishment than nothing at all. Not saying the guy should get ten years in federal prison, but what's he going to do next time? Or the time after that? How long will it take until they're caught?
Some politicians are never caught. They get rich off of bribes, they always get the best seat at the steak house, and they're always driving a new car. Unless we can catch these people early in their political career, we're just setting them up for ill-begotten riches and fame in the future.
Showing that the company can live without you is showing that you're being paid for nothing, according to those zany accountants. Now, I like the idea myself..that you can scale back hours voluntarily as necessary, as opposed to doing that soul crushing busy work.
Accountants ruin it. Whether it be by making the assumption that you're lazy/slacking/unnecessary/etc, or by saying "well since half the department is part time anyway, lets fire everyone and hire a consultant for a third of the total price."
Believe me. It happens all the time. I've known people who were responsible for these types of decisions. They tell me their co-workers get off on having ultimate power over hiring/firing/company policy/etc. The CEO's and higher ups generally go along with it. If your accountant calls you and lets you know that they can cut 30% off your expenses without affecting anything, wouldn't you listen?
I remember when just having the disc in the drive was a step up from having to look up codes on page x line y in some book that came with the game. I remember after that, when copy protection was added, and there was a chance it wouldn't work on your computer, even if you bought it fair and square. I remember when they started adding physical programs that would use memory and make things unstable..sometimes refusing to run if some other legitimate programs were open in the background.
I remember loading up Steam and playing games without any of those, but I lost the ability to sell off my games.
I look back at all that and kindly request a damn code sheet or book so I can get to looking up those codes again.
The higher you climb, the harder your lungs have to work to extract enough oxygen from the air in order to keep you alive. If you don't get enough oxygen, you don't die immediately. Your brain starts becoming less and less efficient, since it cannot produce energy anaerobically, like the rest of your body can.
Of course, this process is invisible to most people. Its comparable to how your brain isn't fully awake if you get woken up suddenly and feeling confused at the simplest tasks. Hypoxia also affects divers.
The leakage of fluid from the vessels in the brain is caused by the same hypoxia, since the blood vessels need energy as well.
The only solution is for climbers to take their own oxygen, or for someone to invent a mobile and low powered oxygen concentrator.
Other than security and some minor details, Windows XP was not broken.
I prefer XP to Vista because, and the most important part is, I already paid for XP and its already installed. There's no need for me to install Vista when everything works, and works well at the moment. Other than Microsoft deciding that DirectX 10 should be Vista only.
Shadowrun, a pretty good game, completely failed because it was Vista only. The only thing they can do to force people to upgrade to Vista is by releasing Windows XP SP4, a mandatory upgrade, that completely breaks the operating system. I wish they would, because I want a nice settlement check.
Or if movie companies decided to trial a service where you could download your movies, pay less, and then burn it to DVD..and their only server was a 56k server sitting in Estonia that had to encode the movie into a 320x200.avi for every download.
Its about protecting the profitability of the companies that have enough money to send lobbyists and make bribes.
The base-energy state of democracy is always having to vote for the lesser of two evils. The energy itself is the population, who has grown to be fat and lazy. As long as the governments of the world ease these changes into place one step at a time, most people won't even notice. If most people don't notice, they won't take action.
You bought the license that dictates what you can and can not do with the physical copy.
Of course the companies are willing to use whichever version of the story you look at to best fit their needs at the time. Like if you tried to rip the movie to play on other devices..sorry..forbidden by license..you're only buying the license! But when you see the commercials, it says you OWN the movie, and at the store they SELL you the movie.
Your best bet is to ignore the rules and don't openly pirate them. If they call you out on it, take it to court.
Buy the movie, then return it to the store demanding a refund because the product did not provide what the store advertised. If they don't take it back, I'd file a lawsuit for false advertising against both the store and the movie company. Since this has been going on for 10+ years now, I'd ask for several million. Since they've been rattling off this bullshit for so long and using whichever side fits best for their current situation..for example..if you own the license you should be able to rip it and play it on other devices, right? Wrong. But you also aren't allowed to show it at a public exhibition, even though you have the physical copy.
So they're trying to tell you that you bought the physical copy AND a license that restricts its usage. So you don't own the data on the DVD, the movie companies do. However, they restrict your rights to watch said data down to the devices that can physically support it, and have the disc physically present.
If other companies did this, you wouldn't be allowed to run your Goodyear sport tires in winter, but instead would have to buy Goodyear winter tires. You'd have to replace both every year, as the company would only supply one-time-use lugnuts that you couldn't buy anywhere else. Failure to do so would result in your tires flying off the side of your car.
It is, in theory, under the best case situation, possible to recover something erased from a solid state device.
Best case situation being that it wasn't overwritten, the 'registers' all had the same thing written over the data (zeros, for example), it was very recent, and there are no bad sectors.
If any one of those was not involved, data recovery is just guessing, and should never be allowed in a court of law. Neither would a note pieced together from letters on uniformly-cut letter-sized bits of paper..as the message could be rearranged from anything to anything.
moderately cheap, huh?
You realize that in many other countries, you get 10x the speed for half the price, right?
And their government didn't give them x billions of dollars to improve their infrastructure.
A life is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay to preserve it. If no one will pay for your life saving operation, your life wasn't worth the cost of said operation, apparently.
People die every day from lack of money.
Either through starvation, lack of medicine, or lack of surgery.
Its sad, but this is what humanity must do until everyone has food/supplies/shelter given to them for free, and can actually donate their time without having to keep a real job just to keep some food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Unless the stuff had been face-meltingly radioactive, the thieves wouldn't care.
After all, a live powerline is a lot more immediately dangerous than something that won't melt your face if you get too close to it..mainly because a live powerline will certainly melt your face off.
That's fine if you don't want to get but if you get you go into quarantine for a month, and your living space is decontaminated. At no cost to you, work can't fire you, etc, but its a month of your life you have to give up.
They'd have their cake, as in not having to be injected with icky disease-causing deadly fatal chemicals omg, and they'd get to eat it too, as in not having to be a biological burden to society.
If the defendant is served papers and then doesn't request an extension or delay and then doesn't show up, generally victory is granted to the present party. Unless there are extenuating circumstances like these.
I personally don't care if he uses heroin, as long as he makes a good leader to the country, and it doesn't affect his policy or leadership abilities.
Now if he started doing things like outlawing iPods and suggesting Zune's as an alternative, I'd care, much like if he had an expensive habit to support and tried to legalize heroin.
Acutally I have seen some stores offer a huge inventory, and then turn around and buy them online for the customer, adding a percent markup for their store. If a store can get within 20% of an online retailer, they're doing good.
I might pay +20% on a video card if I could exchange it at the store if it broke, but I'm damn sure not paying +100% for the store to tell me its not their problem and to contact the manufacturer.
Ultimately, its a business model thing. Brick and mortar stores are still in shock from the whole internet buying thing. A lot of them don't know how to react. Some are doing what I described above, and are finding a slow-down in sales, but not quite drastic enough to put them out of business.
Most computer stores, however, go with the +100% method and won't be around too much longer. Afterall, why would I pay $190 for the el cheapo brand of RAM when I can pay $80 for it from the manufacturer? Why pay $150 for a hard drive when Walmart has the same model for $89.99?
But this analogy is a terrible one when applied to bandwidth. A more suitable analogy would be like taking a toll road. You pay your toll and move on. Then you have to give your ticket stub to your work place, who then has to pay the toll road people as well, since that's where you were going and that's where you'll be leaving from later in the day.
All of that on top of tax money that is used to support the infrastructure anyway.
All of that on top of the 'maximum usage' that applies to the road. You'll be just fine if you only use that toll road twice per day, five days a week. But if you want to get to work on a Saturday, forget it, you'll be turned away at the toll gate.
Several years ago, it wasn't copper theft. It was tool and equipment theft. My father worked for a construction company and everything that couldn't be lifted by the crane and secured in the air was taken home by the workers for safekeeping. The thieves eventually started following people back to their houses to break into their vehicles, and the company they worked for was forced to hire a guard to stay on site at night.
A big ring of equipment thieves popped up a few years later, and it turned out to be two brothers and a father. The would scout out for large construction projects and find out whats going on, and what the schedule was like. Then they would come in and loot everything when they knew it was safe. They had a pretty wide range, and would move to a different city within range from Knoxville. They even used GPS to track the construction sites, and knew which companies were better equipped.
Prior to that, unless the builders had a large quantity of shiny copper sitting out in the open for a few days, copper theft was pretty rare. Copper theft did happen when buildings were being torn down, but most demolition/construction companies have salvage rights anyway.
After all, if something happens to them, they don't particularly care about the Internet, and don't care about people who aren't paying them. Most of the time, they don't care about people that ARE paying them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Here's the deal. You're going to rent this box from us if you want our service. But we're your only local option aside from satellite. Who, also, will be happy to rent you this box. If you're caught with one that you aren't renting, lets say you bought one from ebay, you'll be charged monthly for it as well."
"But that's not fair."
"What's fair is what we say is fair, because no one's going to stop us. They did it before with CableCard and look what happened. Didn't work out so well, did it? Now they'll leave us to our own methods! Those boxes are soooo expensive anyway, no one would ever give us a 20% bulk discount. And we sure as hell aren't going to give you a discount, either, on the monthly fee."
So what?
They should have the maturity to deal with being owned. Any boss that can't handle it either needs to get out of gaming, or learn to play.
You're damn right it will fester.
Is it not a reward to let things like this go unpunished? Even calling them out on it and letting people form their own opinions would be a better form of punishment than nothing at all. Not saying the guy should get ten years in federal prison, but what's he going to do next time? Or the time after that? How long will it take until they're caught?
Some politicians are never caught. They get rich off of bribes, they always get the best seat at the steak house, and they're always driving a new car. Unless we can catch these people early in their political career, we're just setting them up for ill-begotten riches and fame in the future.
This is a bad idea.
Showing that the company can live without you is showing that you're being paid for nothing, according to those zany accountants. Now, I like the idea myself..that you can scale back hours voluntarily as necessary, as opposed to doing that soul crushing busy work.
Accountants ruin it. Whether it be by making the assumption that you're lazy/slacking/unnecessary/etc, or by saying "well since half the department is part time anyway, lets fire everyone and hire a consultant for a third of the total price."
Believe me. It happens all the time. I've known people who were responsible for these types of decisions. They tell me their co-workers get off on having ultimate power over hiring/firing/company policy/etc. The CEO's and higher ups generally go along with it. If your accountant calls you and lets you know that they can cut 30% off your expenses without affecting anything, wouldn't you listen?
I remember when just having the disc in the drive was a step up from having to look up codes on page x line y in some book that came with the game. I remember after that, when copy protection was added, and there was a chance it wouldn't work on your computer, even if you bought it fair and square. I remember when they started adding physical programs that would use memory and make things unstable..sometimes refusing to run if some other legitimate programs were open in the background.
I remember loading up Steam and playing games without any of those, but I lost the ability to sell off my games.
I look back at all that and kindly request a damn code sheet or book so I can get to looking up those codes again.
Then you'd have cities that sell out. Sorry, your last mile is now owned by Comcast. Hey, your cable just went up to $80/month for basic. Tough shit.
The higher you climb, the harder your lungs have to work to extract enough oxygen from the air in order to keep you alive. If you don't get enough oxygen, you don't die immediately. Your brain starts becoming less and less efficient, since it cannot produce energy anaerobically, like the rest of your body can.
Of course, this process is invisible to most people. Its comparable to how your brain isn't fully awake if you get woken up suddenly and feeling confused at the simplest tasks. Hypoxia also affects divers.
The leakage of fluid from the vessels in the brain is caused by the same hypoxia, since the blood vessels need energy as well.
The only solution is for climbers to take their own oxygen, or for someone to invent a mobile and low powered oxygen concentrator.
Other than security and some minor details, Windows XP was not broken.
I prefer XP to Vista because, and the most important part is, I already paid for XP and its already installed. There's no need for me to install Vista when everything works, and works well at the moment. Other than Microsoft deciding that DirectX 10 should be Vista only.
Shadowrun, a pretty good game, completely failed because it was Vista only. The only thing they can do to force people to upgrade to Vista is by releasing Windows XP SP4, a mandatory upgrade, that completely breaks the operating system. I wish they would, because I want a nice settlement check.
Or if movie companies decided to trial a service where you could download your movies, pay less, and then burn it to DVD..and their only server was a 56k server sitting in Estonia that had to encode the movie into a 320x200 .avi for every download.
Its about neither performers nor consumers.
Its about protecting the profitability of the companies that have enough money to send lobbyists and make bribes.
The base-energy state of democracy is always having to vote for the lesser of two evils. The energy itself is the population, who has grown to be fat and lazy. As long as the governments of the world ease these changes into place one step at a time, most people won't even notice. If most people don't notice, they won't take action.
I have no solution to this problem.
Using a phased array of lasers, the write speed would be very fast.
Finding an application that would read .sor (Slab o' Rock) files would be a little harder.
You do NOT have a legal right to do that.
You bought the license that dictates what you can and can not do with the physical copy.
Of course the companies are willing to use whichever version of the story you look at to best fit their needs at the time. Like if you tried to rip the movie to play on other devices..sorry..forbidden by license..you're only buying the license! But when you see the commercials, it says you OWN the movie, and at the store they SELL you the movie.
Your best bet is to ignore the rules and don't openly pirate them. If they call you out on it, take it to court.
Well, someone has to make the first step.
Buy the movie, then return it to the store demanding a refund because the product did not provide what the store advertised. If they don't take it back, I'd file a lawsuit for false advertising against both the store and the movie company. Since this has been going on for 10+ years now, I'd ask for several million. Since they've been rattling off this bullshit for so long and using whichever side fits best for their current situation..for example..if you own the license you should be able to rip it and play it on other devices, right? Wrong. But you also aren't allowed to show it at a public exhibition, even though you have the physical copy.
So they're trying to tell you that you bought the physical copy AND a license that restricts its usage. So you don't own the data on the DVD, the movie companies do. However, they restrict your rights to watch said data down to the devices that can physically support it, and have the disc physically present.
If other companies did this, you wouldn't be allowed to run your Goodyear sport tires in winter, but instead would have to buy Goodyear winter tires. You'd have to replace both every year, as the company would only supply one-time-use lugnuts that you couldn't buy anywhere else. Failure to do so would result in your tires flying off the side of your car.
Try impossible.
It is, in theory, under the best case situation, possible to recover something erased from a solid state device.
Best case situation being that it wasn't overwritten, the 'registers' all had the same thing written over the data (zeros, for example), it was very recent, and there are no bad sectors.
If any one of those was not involved, data recovery is just guessing, and should never be allowed in a court of law. Neither would a note pieced together from letters on uniformly-cut letter-sized bits of paper..as the message could be rearranged from anything to anything.
moderately cheap, huh? You realize that in many other countries, you get 10x the speed for half the price, right? And their government didn't give them x billions of dollars to improve their infrastructure.
They throw you in jail for obstruction of justice and assume that you're guilty of whatever they can dream up. This is Britain, you know.
The place where losing the key to your safe gets you thrown in jail if the police want inside, even after they've cracked it open and found it empty.
You're wrong, however.
A life is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay to preserve it. If no one will pay for your life saving operation, your life wasn't worth the cost of said operation, apparently.
People die every day from lack of money.
Either through starvation, lack of medicine, or lack of surgery.
Its sad, but this is what humanity must do until everyone has food/supplies/shelter given to them for free, and can actually donate their time without having to keep a real job just to keep some food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Unless the stuff had been face-meltingly radioactive, the thieves wouldn't care.
After all, a live powerline is a lot more immediately dangerous than something that won't melt your face if you get too close to it..mainly because a live powerline will certainly melt your face off.
I propose liberal use of quarantine.
That's fine if you don't want to get but if you get you go into quarantine for a month, and your living space is decontaminated. At no cost to you, work can't fire you, etc, but its a month of your life you have to give up.
They'd have their cake, as in not having to be injected with icky disease-causing deadly fatal chemicals omg, and they'd get to eat it too, as in not having to be a biological burden to society.
If the defendant is served papers and then doesn't request an extension or delay and then doesn't show up, generally victory is granted to the present party. Unless there are extenuating circumstances like these.
I personally don't care if he uses heroin, as long as he makes a good leader to the country, and it doesn't affect his policy or leadership abilities.
Now if he started doing things like outlawing iPods and suggesting Zune's as an alternative, I'd care, much like if he had an expensive habit to support and tried to legalize heroin.
Acutally I have seen some stores offer a huge inventory, and then turn around and buy them online for the customer, adding a percent markup for their store. If a store can get within 20% of an online retailer, they're doing good. I might pay +20% on a video card if I could exchange it at the store if it broke, but I'm damn sure not paying +100% for the store to tell me its not their problem and to contact the manufacturer. Ultimately, its a business model thing. Brick and mortar stores are still in shock from the whole internet buying thing. A lot of them don't know how to react. Some are doing what I described above, and are finding a slow-down in sales, but not quite drastic enough to put them out of business. Most computer stores, however, go with the +100% method and won't be around too much longer. Afterall, why would I pay $190 for the el cheapo brand of RAM when I can pay $80 for it from the manufacturer? Why pay $150 for a hard drive when Walmart has the same model for $89.99?
Fairness IS dangerous, I agree.
But this analogy is a terrible one when applied to bandwidth. A more suitable analogy would be like taking a toll road. You pay your toll and move on. Then you have to give your ticket stub to your work place, who then has to pay the toll road people as well, since that's where you were going and that's where you'll be leaving from later in the day.
All of that on top of tax money that is used to support the infrastructure anyway.
All of that on top of the 'maximum usage' that applies to the road. You'll be just fine if you only use that toll road twice per day, five days a week. But if you want to get to work on a Saturday, forget it, you'll be turned away at the toll gate.
That's exactly what they do.
Several years ago, it wasn't copper theft. It was tool and equipment theft. My father worked for a construction company and everything that couldn't be lifted by the crane and secured in the air was taken home by the workers for safekeeping. The thieves eventually started following people back to their houses to break into their vehicles, and the company they worked for was forced to hire a guard to stay on site at night.
A big ring of equipment thieves popped up a few years later, and it turned out to be two brothers and a father. The would scout out for large construction projects and find out whats going on, and what the schedule was like. Then they would come in and loot everything when they knew it was safe. They had a pretty wide range, and would move to a different city within range from Knoxville. They even used GPS to track the construction sites, and knew which companies were better equipped.
Prior to that, unless the builders had a large quantity of shiny copper sitting out in the open for a few days, copper theft was pretty rare. Copper theft did happen when buildings were being torn down, but most demolition/construction companies have salvage rights anyway.
Why should they use BGP?
After all, if something happens to them, they don't particularly care about the Internet, and don't care about people who aren't paying them. Most of the time, they don't care about people that ARE paying them.