It seems reasonable for law enforcement to expect "cooperation" with investigations, I can get with that.
But it seems at this point they want everyone to cater to them, to make their jobs as easy as possible. "At the press of a button" - who do they think they are, George Jetson? Who's going to make MY job easier? And why do I have to pay to make THEIR job easier?
I seem to recall something in Britain a few hundred years ago, the Quartering Act I believe it was called. It said something to the effect that if asked, any citizen had to provide free room and board to soldiers of the British Army. Why? To keep the peace of course. What's different today? People being forced to spend time and money to make the police's jobs easier. It's just not a good enogh reason. The police have an important job, but it's not one that should have any special elevation above the rest and receive all this assistance and soforth.
The law really can't care less about what you "expect" the program to do. As has been covered ad-nausium already, they print it out for you in black and white and you have to acknowledge that you've read it. (click agree) If you zombie out and just hammer the PgDn button until Agree becomes available and click it, heck, you may have just signed away your next year's pay to them. You said you have an "explicite understanding" with a virus scanner.... what makes it that way? It's just as explicite as the games are. The only difference is one is doing something you like, and one is doing something you like and also something you don't like. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it should not apply to you. You agreed to it. Unless it violates a law or your civil rights, you agreed to it and have no right to whine.
When I buy a car, I sign an agreement to get a car, AND to pay for it. Later do you think I can just say "thanks for the car but I've decided I'm not paying for it."? You agreed to be charged monthly in exchange for the car. You can't just decide later which terms of the agreement should apply and which should not. If you don't like getting a bill every month, don't sign the contract. Same thing, your choice.
This is not MicroSoft fighting for your rights. This is MicroSoft working to get legislation passed that clearly establishes the rules and defines the loopholes through which they will legally violate your privacy. That's how it always works. Sort of like how the Do Not Call list made certain calls illegal, and at the same time made it legal for politicians to campaign you over the phone all day long. Sort of a variant on "bait and switch".
Lets see how big the battery is. I think a 5 amp draw is about as much as they'd dare pull on a 120v house line. That's 600 watts. Now for 5 minutes, (1/20th hr) that's 50 watt hours. That's about the capacity of a typical computer laptop battery.
This is of course assuming 100% efficiency, and you KNOW it's gonna get hotter than a grease fire while it's charging, so efficiency is probably more in the 70% and below range. So it'd require more like 7 amps off the 120 to push 50wh into the battery.
My grandmother was paranoid about her SSN and its privacy. She did not give it out to anyone. Most people's drivers license numbers are their ssn too, but hers was a different number by her request.
She spent about an hour at Sears one day, trying to apply for a Sears charge card. They requested her ssn, but she would not give it. After about an hour of them calling around to figure out what to do about it, she did get the charge card and did not have to give her ssn, but the drones at the counter had to scramble for an entire hour to figure out how to get her the card without her ssn.
So while this may be possible, it is not always easy.
Also remember, for things like business transactions, in most cases they can require you to do anything short of violate your civil rights. Your option of course is to just not do business with them. AFAIK, not having to give out your ssn is not a civil right, so they could make this a requirement for them to do business with you?
Also, it's possible that what you are getting (cc, or whatever) is using your ssn as a unique identifier. So if you use a popular ssn, or really anything short of your ssn, you are risking duplication in their database. It won't be so funny when you start receiving credit card bills from 10 other people that are all using Nixon's ssn for their IDs. It looks reasonably safe to make up a number starting with 000, since that region code was not used. For simplicity sake you might just change the first three to 000. Again this could potentially produce database duplication, but the odds would be greatly reduced.
It's also possible that some automated processing may choke on a number that starts with 000, simply because according to the rules it's not supposed to exist. (that could actually be somewhat humorous, I bet you could crash numerous data processing systems with an array-out-of-bounds error when it tries to hash sort your SSN)
I have done some digging into the less accessible files in the OS, and was quite surprised to find US government things buried deep within the OS. The first thing I found were two images of key cards, and the code to support their use. The other fun thing I ran into were large emblems of the army, navy, air force, marines, FBI, noaa, coast guard, DoD, public health service, and several other US government departments. Clearly OS X has some built-in support for use in US government roles. (no images from non-US governments were found) This is in client as well as server. I'd love to know how to enable those features. Anyone happen to run across this info anywhere?
(for those interested, in 10.3, do Go, Go to Folder.../System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/ SCLoginPlugin.bundle/Contents/Resources/)
sexual reproduction, while old, is not the root of life. All early life was asexual. Sex was just an evolutionary breakthrough that allowed more rapid evolution. So calling this gene the "start of life" is not really all that accurate.
Actually not true. The president (and maybe others?) has the authority to label a person or a group as "enemy combatants". At that point it does not matter WHO you are. You can be a tourist from Europe, a 4th generation Texan, or the Czar of Russia, it really does not matter. Once you are an Enemy Combatant, you are nobody. They can kill you, lock you up and throw away the key, and basically you have no rights. No right to habeus corpus (sp?), no right of attourney, no right of trial by jury, and certainly no right to a speedy trial. Your life and fredom is their whim at that point.
Because of this, no one has guaranteed fredom or guaranteed rights in the US anymore. With those two words all your rights get taken away and you just basically don't exist anymore. There is no appeal, no review, no limits. If it happens to you, there is simply nothing anyone can do to help you. To say someone has rights, EXCEPT if someone decides they don't, means you never had any rights to begin with. Anything so easily taken away does not truly exist.
Sounds like you know a lot more about physics than me. I just know the questions to ask, I'll let someone else work out the answers.;)
Speaking of that... one question I had was how does the energy density of gasoline compare to the (potential) energy from water? Now I realize gas already has the energy, and water is the low energy state, but lets just assume on one hand you have an unlimited source of gas, and on the other hand you have an unlimited source of water and electricity. What is the energy you can obtain from say, one galon of gas? Then, how much water woud you need to produce enough hydrogen/oxygen (or at least hydrogen) to equal the energy in that one galon of gas? I honestly have no idea what to expect. It would be interesting if a galon of water was capable of being used as a catalyst of sorts to produce more energy than a galon of gas.
Though this being a closed system, and assuming we don't have water evaporation or leakage, the water is therefore essentially unlimited, being used as a catalyst.
The next step then would be to work out how much hydrogen a given amount of "wire" could produce. Then you could establish a fair comparison between miles/galon and miles/pound, or basically get a comparison to say that to equal the energy of 1 galon of gas would require xx pounds of wire.
a) yes Al takes a lot of energy to make. we would call this a "high energy density" material. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. It means we can put more energy in a smaller (or lighter) package. Gasoline is not incredbily energy-dense. One way or another you have to put energy into the process of creating fuel. The only difference with petrolium is the energy has already been put in, and it just needs to be processed for us to use easily. Since you have to put energy into it, a source like nuclear power actually makes a great deal of sense. It's highly renewable, low pollution, and provides a very large amount of energy.
b) um, the trucks can be wire-powered too, y'know. It'd be kinda silly for them NOT to be wire powered.
c) Water will add to the weight, yes. I don't know all the physics, but in general I know you can get a LOT of hydrogen out of a little water. A system like this may require occasional refilling. On a guess I'd say you might need to tank up on water every 100 miles or so. The water is after all the source of your hydrogen, the wire is the source of the energy. This also greatly increases the safety of the vehicle, because there is no need for a very high pressure hydrogen tank, and the associated hazards of refilling and transportation of hydrogen.
d) As for efficiency, there is always heat. Since the system uses heat to crack the water, it's not going to be too far off in efficiency from a regular car. It actually may be less efficient, since there are two heat losses - you have to burn the hydrogen after all, and that too releases heat. This may not matter as much since the fuel source is more easily renewable.
e) it's an interesting system when you examine it. You are using a wire to generate heat, to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then BURNING that hydrogen (presumably with the oxygen you make, to improve efficiency) and that actually gets you... water. I suppose technically it may not need water refils because of this. But then if you look at that, you've come full circle. The only addition has been the wire being turned into physical motion. It's too bad they need to go through the water-to hydrogen-to water conversion but it provides a buffer that allows for fast accelleration etc. Considering the zero emissions and loss of reliance on fossil fuels, it sounds like a very good move, environmentally.
For a real contract, doesn't it require both parties to agree? In the case of a shrink wrap license, the manufaccturer has no knowledge of you at all, and certainly has no proof that you agreed to the terms of the license.
As something of an example, you may have edited the installer to not display the EULA and just go ahead with the install, or edited it to also proceed with the install if you clicked DO NOT AGREE. In which case you are not bound by the eula? If you wanted to make a comparison, you could compare this with for example, one party's lawyers drafting a contract and giving it to the other party to sign. (more interesting if you assume they don't even know who they've given the contract to!) The recipient then takes the contract, makes some changes to it, and signs it. Taken further, after they've signed it, they don't even have to give it back to the original party. Not much of a contract, is it? Pointless even, you might say?
The other question I have is don't contracts normally have to be signed by both parties, since pretty much all contracts are agreements by both parties to give the other party something? If it's only signed by one party, then only the signer would have obligation under force of the contract to give something? (there would be nothing to say that the other party was even involved in the contract, and that it wasn't just a piece of paper made up by the signing party) I have yet to see a EULA signed by the software vendor, giving me anything I didn't already have when I bought their product. I suppose you could consider the acceptance of my money as their signature?
Wouldn't a click to agree thingie constitute merely a verbal agreement? Most legally binding things can't be done via a simple verbal contract, they require a signature. I don't know how good of a defense that would make, but that is a good start.
The other big argument here is can you know the terms before "agreeing" to them? Many of these are 'shrink wrap' licenses, and are supposedly agreed to by opening the box. Of course the terms are inside the box, so there's no way to know what you're "agreeing" to before doing so.
Though some shrink wrap licenses direct you to return the product immediately for a refund if you do not agree. And I have read on several occasions of companies with such a clause, which then refused to allow the product to be returned on those grounds. So they can't even play by their own rules..
But the evil of evils is the 800 line EULA that is displayed in a scroll box that is, at most, four lines tall and 30 characters wide. I counted on one of them, it took me over 110 clicks of Page Down to view the whole thing, three lines at a time. That would be another interesting one to see brought to court. Another similar EULA I have encountered had slightly shorter text, a 4 line window, and DID NOT respond to page step clicking in the scroll bar, or Page Down. It also did not enable the 'agree' button until you had gone to the bottom. So I spent 30 seconds holding the Down button on the scroll bar down, to get to the bottom.
The stupidity and arrogance of businessmen never ceases to amaze me.
I don't have a wifi cardbus card to play with but maybe someone else does. Mac OS allows network sharing, where you can for example, run an ethernet cable to your mac, and "share" that network on your wireless nic, to other nearby wireless users. The opposite is also possible, to pull in a wireless signal and share it on your ethernet port. (useful for when you have a 2nd computer that is not wifi capable, and no way to run a cable, but you have another mac with wifi and ethernet to act as a bridge)
Would it be possible to plug in a wifi cardbus card into say, a powerbook that already had wifi, and bridge between the built-in and the add-on wifi? I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work, besides maybe interferance.
Not as cheap as doing it with one nic, but maybe more efficient?
Isn't this how it always is? When someone comes up with an innovative, convenient, and more proffitable way to do business, any "big fish" in that particular pond cry foul and demand that they are somehow entitled to a "cut" of the proffit. (and unfortunately, all too often they GET it - taxing blank CDs for the RIAA comes immediately to mind) Often their only justification for getting the cut is simply because now they can't make as much money as they used to be able to. Like the world somehow owes them a certain amount of proffit each year, and if anything happens to take some of that away, they must be compensated.
That attitude is so presumptuous as to be beyond even laughing at. It's just sad. They're like 3 year olds demanding that someone OWES them candy. Just because they don't have enough already.
Apple has what, a half dozen active recalls on batteries? I know of two for the 15" albooks and one for the 12" albook that were recently put into effect. You don't see much in the way of other failure recalls though - it seems that if it doesn't light the computer on fire it's not going to get recalled. (comp makers don't seem to care about it just plain not working, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone and bait a lawsuit?) Maybe that's why we see battery recalls and not much of anything else. (though the ibooks have seen a very troublesome logic board recall for loss of video)
IPTV is more commonly know arond these parts as Iowa Public Television, the state run science, educational, and childrens channel. That would have to be one of the last places I would want to see M$. (it's bad enough M$ has managed to get advertisements on what used to be an advertisement-free channel)
On one hand we have companies like this trying to extend our view time of their media by sending us a hardcopy to watch later.
Then we have twits trying to make self-destructing DVDs that only work for a couple days before turning into coasters.
They need to collectively make up their mind.
It seems to be a case of them not wanting to charge for the media, but wanting to charge for each viewing of the media. Yet another in the endless examples of why the concept of "licensing" sucks.
Though i suppose in 20 years every video the consumer can get will be pay-per-view. What a mess.
The military's job is to protect the lives of the citizens whose country they serve. Everything else (including wildlife) is secondary. If they're prepared to sink a boat full of people, does anyone really expect them to do it while being careful not to kill a few fish?
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It seems reasonable for law enforcement to expect "cooperation" with investigations, I can get with that.
But it seems at this point they want everyone to cater to them, to make their jobs as easy as possible. "At the press of a button" - who do they think they are, George Jetson? Who's going to make MY job easier? And why do I have to pay to make THEIR job easier?
I seem to recall something in Britain a few hundred years ago, the Quartering Act I believe it was called. It said something to the effect that if asked, any citizen had to provide free room and board to soldiers of the British Army. Why? To keep the peace of course. What's different today? People being forced to spend time and money to make the police's jobs easier. It's just not a good enogh reason. The police have an important job, but it's not one that should have any special elevation above the rest and receive all this assistance and soforth.
The law really can't care less about what you "expect" the program to do. As has been covered ad-nausium already, they print it out for you in black and white and you have to acknowledge that you've read it. (click agree) If you zombie out and just hammer the PgDn button until Agree becomes available and click it, heck, you may have just signed away your next year's pay to them. You said you have an "explicite understanding" with a virus scanner.... what makes it that way? It's just as explicite as the games are. The only difference is one is doing something you like, and one is doing something you like and also something you don't like. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it should not apply to you. You agreed to it. Unless it violates a law or your civil rights, you agreed to it and have no right to whine.
When I buy a car, I sign an agreement to get a car, AND to pay for it. Later do you think I can just say "thanks for the car but I've decided I'm not paying for it."? You agreed to be charged monthly in exchange for the car. You can't just decide later which terms of the agreement should apply and which should not. If you don't like getting a bill every month, don't sign the contract. Same thing, your choice.
This is not MicroSoft fighting for your rights. This is MicroSoft working to get legislation passed that clearly establishes the rules and defines the loopholes through which they will legally violate your privacy. That's how it always works. Sort of like how the Do Not Call list made certain calls illegal, and at the same time made it legal for politicians to campaign you over the phone all day long. Sort of a variant on "bait and switch".
Lets see how big the battery is. I think a 5 amp draw is about as much as they'd dare pull on a 120v house line. That's 600 watts. Now for 5 minutes, (1/20th hr) that's 50 watt hours. That's about the capacity of a typical computer laptop battery.
This is of course assuming 100% efficiency, and you KNOW it's gonna get hotter than a grease fire while it's charging, so efficiency is probably more in the 70% and below range. So it'd require more like 7 amps off the 120 to push 50wh into the battery.
Sounds doable, but doesn't sound safe
My grandmother was paranoid about her SSN and its privacy. She did not give it out to anyone. Most people's drivers license numbers are their ssn too, but hers was a different number by her request.
She spent about an hour at Sears one day, trying to apply for a Sears charge card. They requested her ssn, but she would not give it. After about an hour of them calling around to figure out what to do about it, she did get the charge card and did not have to give her ssn, but the drones at the counter had to scramble for an entire hour to figure out how to get her the card without her ssn.
So while this may be possible, it is not always easy.
Also remember, for things like business transactions, in most cases they can require you to do anything short of violate your civil rights. Your option of course is to just not do business with them. AFAIK, not having to give out your ssn is not a civil right, so they could make this a requirement for them to do business with you?
Also, it's possible that what you are getting (cc, or whatever) is using your ssn as a unique identifier. So if you use a popular ssn, or really anything short of your ssn, you are risking duplication in their database. It won't be so funny when you start receiving credit card bills from 10 other people that are all using Nixon's ssn for their IDs. It looks reasonably safe to make up a number starting with 000, since that region code was not used. For simplicity sake you might just change the first three to 000. Again this could potentially produce database duplication, but the odds would be greatly reduced.
It's also possible that some automated processing may choke on a number that starts with 000, simply because according to the rules it's not supposed to exist. (that could actually be somewhat humorous, I bet you could crash numerous data processing systems with an array-out-of-bounds error when it tries to hash sort your SSN)
Turning up the contrast and brightness on a sprite does not strike me as revolutionary. Is there something special about how they're doing it?
Curious, how did you know how these units were used and when they were disposed of? I didn't think that would be information they'd share with anyone.
I have done some digging into the less accessible files in the OS, and was quite surprised to find US government things buried deep within the OS. The first thing I found were two images of key cards, and the code to support their use. The other fun thing I ran into were large emblems of the army, navy, air force, marines, FBI, noaa, coast guard, DoD, public health service, and several other US government departments. Clearly OS X has some built-in support for use in US government roles. (no images from non-US governments were found) This is in client as well as server. I'd love to know how to enable those features. Anyone happen to run across this info anywhere?
/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/ SCLoginPlugin.bundle/Contents/Resources/)
(for those interested, in 10.3, do Go, Go to Folder...
sexual reproduction, while old, is not the root of life. All early life was asexual. Sex was just an evolutionary breakthrough that allowed more rapid evolution. So calling this gene the "start of life" is not really all that accurate.
Actually not true. The president (and maybe others?) has the authority to label a person or a group as "enemy combatants". At that point it does not matter WHO you are. You can be a tourist from Europe, a 4th generation Texan, or the Czar of Russia, it really does not matter. Once you are an Enemy Combatant, you are nobody. They can kill you, lock you up and throw away the key, and basically you have no rights. No right to habeus corpus (sp?), no right of attourney, no right of trial by jury, and certainly no right to a speedy trial. Your life and fredom is their whim at that point.
Because of this, no one has guaranteed fredom or guaranteed rights in the US anymore. With those two words all your rights get taken away and you just basically don't exist anymore. There is no appeal, no review, no limits. If it happens to you, there is simply nothing anyone can do to help you. To say someone has rights, EXCEPT if someone decides they don't, means you never had any rights to begin with. Anything so easily taken away does not truly exist.
It's not open for comments just yet. They're accepting your feedback starting November 2. Warm up your keyboard and give 'em a piece of your mind!
Sounds like you know a lot more about physics than me. I just know the questions to ask, I'll let someone else work out the answers. ;)
Speaking of that... one question I had was how does the energy density of gasoline compare to the (potential) energy from water? Now I realize gas already has the energy, and water is the low energy state, but lets just assume on one hand you have an unlimited source of gas, and on the other hand you have an unlimited source of water and electricity. What is the energy you can obtain from say, one galon of gas? Then, how much water woud you need to produce enough hydrogen/oxygen (or at least hydrogen) to equal the energy in that one galon of gas? I honestly have no idea what to expect. It would be interesting if a galon of water was capable of being used as a catalyst of sorts to produce more energy than a galon of gas.
Though this being a closed system, and assuming we don't have water evaporation or leakage, the water is therefore essentially unlimited, being used as a catalyst.
The next step then would be to work out how much hydrogen a given amount of "wire" could produce. Then you could establish a fair comparison between miles/galon and miles/pound, or basically get a comparison to say that to equal the energy of 1 galon of gas would require xx pounds of wire.
Lets just address these in order.
a) yes Al takes a lot of energy to make. we would call this a "high energy density" material. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. It means we can put more energy in a smaller (or lighter) package. Gasoline is not incredbily energy-dense. One way or another you have to put energy into the process of creating fuel. The only difference with petrolium is the energy has already been put in, and it just needs to be processed for us to use easily. Since you have to put energy into it, a source like nuclear power actually makes a great deal of sense. It's highly renewable, low pollution, and provides a very large amount of energy.
b) um, the trucks can be wire-powered too, y'know. It'd be kinda silly for them NOT to be wire powered.
c) Water will add to the weight, yes. I don't know all the physics, but in general I know you can get a LOT of hydrogen out of a little water. A system like this may require occasional refilling. On a guess I'd say you might need to tank up on water every 100 miles or so. The water is after all the source of your hydrogen, the wire is the source of the energy. This also greatly increases the safety of the vehicle, because there is no need for a very high pressure hydrogen tank, and the associated hazards of refilling and transportation of hydrogen.
d) As for efficiency, there is always heat. Since the system uses heat to crack the water, it's not going to be too far off in efficiency from a regular car. It actually may be less efficient, since there are two heat losses - you have to burn the hydrogen after all, and that too releases heat. This may not matter as much since the fuel source is more easily renewable.
e) it's an interesting system when you examine it. You are using a wire to generate heat, to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then BURNING that hydrogen (presumably with the oxygen you make, to improve efficiency) and that actually gets you... water. I suppose technically it may not need water refils because of this. But then if you look at that, you've come full circle. The only addition has been the wire being turned into physical motion. It's too bad they need to go through the water-to hydrogen-to water conversion but it provides a buffer that allows for fast accelleration etc. Considering the zero emissions and loss of reliance on fossil fuels, it sounds like a very good move, environmentally.
For a real contract, doesn't it require both parties to agree? In the case of a shrink wrap license, the manufaccturer has no knowledge of you at all, and certainly has no proof that you agreed to the terms of the license.
As something of an example, you may have edited the installer to not display the EULA and just go ahead with the install, or edited it to also proceed with the install if you clicked DO NOT AGREE. In which case you are not bound by the eula? If you wanted to make a comparison, you could compare this with for example, one party's lawyers drafting a contract and giving it to the other party to sign. (more interesting if you assume they don't even know who they've given the contract to!) The recipient then takes the contract, makes some changes to it, and signs it. Taken further, after they've signed it, they don't even have to give it back to the original party. Not much of a contract, is it? Pointless even, you might say?
The other question I have is don't contracts normally have to be signed by both parties, since pretty much all contracts are agreements by both parties to give the other party something? If it's only signed by one party, then only the signer would have obligation under force of the contract to give something? (there would be nothing to say that the other party was even involved in the contract, and that it wasn't just a piece of paper made up by the signing party) I have yet to see a EULA signed by the software vendor, giving me anything I didn't already have when I bought their product. I suppose you could consider the acceptance of my money as their signature?
Wouldn't a click to agree thingie constitute merely a verbal agreement? Most legally binding things can't be done via a simple verbal contract, they require a signature. I don't know how good of a defense that would make, but that is a good start.
The other big argument here is can you know the terms before "agreeing" to them? Many of these are 'shrink wrap' licenses, and are supposedly agreed to by opening the box. Of course the terms are inside the box, so there's no way to know what you're "agreeing" to before doing so.
Though some shrink wrap licenses direct you to return the product immediately for a refund if you do not agree. And I have read on several occasions of companies with such a clause, which then refused to allow the product to be returned on those grounds. So they can't even play by their own rules..
But the evil of evils is the 800 line EULA that is displayed in a scroll box that is, at most, four lines tall and 30 characters wide. I counted on one of them, it took me over 110 clicks of Page Down to view the whole thing, three lines at a time. That would be another interesting one to see brought to court. Another similar EULA I have encountered had slightly shorter text, a 4 line window, and DID NOT respond to page step clicking in the scroll bar, or Page Down. It also did not enable the 'agree' button until you had gone to the bottom. So I spent 30 seconds holding the Down button on the scroll bar down, to get to the bottom.
The stupidity and arrogance of businessmen never ceases to amaze me.
also in 10.3 anyway, Duplicate is not an available button when airpot is selected. available for everything else though...
I don't have a wifi cardbus card to play with but maybe someone else does. Mac OS allows network sharing, where you can for example, run an ethernet cable to your mac, and "share" that network on your wireless nic, to other nearby wireless users. The opposite is also possible, to pull in a wireless signal and share it on your ethernet port. (useful for when you have a 2nd computer that is not wifi capable, and no way to run a cable, but you have another mac with wifi and ethernet to act as a bridge)
Would it be possible to plug in a wifi cardbus card into say, a powerbook that already had wifi, and bridge between the built-in and the add-on wifi? I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work, besides maybe interferance.
Not as cheap as doing it with one nic, but maybe more efficient?
Isn't this how it always is? When someone comes up with an innovative, convenient, and more proffitable way to do business, any "big fish" in that particular pond cry foul and demand that they are somehow entitled to a "cut" of the proffit. (and unfortunately, all too often they GET it - taxing blank CDs for the RIAA comes immediately to mind) Often their only justification for getting the cut is simply because now they can't make as much money as they used to be able to. Like the world somehow owes them a certain amount of proffit each year, and if anything happens to take some of that away, they must be compensated.
That attitude is so presumptuous as to be beyond even laughing at. It's just sad. They're like 3 year olds demanding that someone OWES them candy. Just because they don't have enough already.
but death would be too good for... oh, or do you mean like in the testicles?
This really sounds like they are trying to rely on security through obscurity. And we know how effective that is.
Someone needs to wake them up from their cozy safe little dream.
Funny though, I recall someone saying the white house and pentagon don't appear on teraserver, blocked out or something.
Apple has what, a half dozen active recalls on batteries? I know of two for the 15" albooks and one for the 12" albook that were recently put into effect. You don't see much in the way of other failure recalls though - it seems that if it doesn't light the computer on fire it's not going to get recalled. (comp makers don't seem to care about it just plain not working, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone and bait a lawsuit?) Maybe that's why we see battery recalls and not much of anything else. (though the ibooks have seen a very troublesome logic board recall for loss of video)
IPTV is more commonly know arond these parts as Iowa Public Television, the state run science, educational, and childrens channel. That would have to be one of the last places I would want to see M$. (it's bad enough M$ has managed to get advertisements on what used to be an advertisement-free channel)
On one hand we have companies like this trying to extend our view time of their media by sending us a hardcopy to watch later.
Then we have twits trying to make self-destructing DVDs that only work for a couple days before turning into coasters.
They need to collectively make up their mind.
It seems to be a case of them not wanting to charge for the media, but wanting to charge for each viewing of the media. Yet another in the endless examples of why the concept of "licensing" sucks.
Though i suppose in 20 years every video the consumer can get will be pay-per-view. What a mess.
The military's job is to protect the lives of the citizens whose country they serve. Everything else (including wildlife) is secondary. If they're prepared to sink a boat full of people, does anyone really expect them to do it while being careful not to kill a few fish?
is it just me or is ebay becoming this big black hole and just sucking in everything near it?