I think that their brand name is now strong enough to survive a movie that doesn't live up to the rest of Pixar's films. With that said, barring serious evil taking over the management and infecting their processes, I doubt that Pixar will allow the release of a film that doesn't live up. Contrast that to Disney, which has slowly used all of its positive branding that was built up during the mid 90's, to the point where they felt they needed to jettison their ENTIRE 2D feature animation division, and replace it with a crew oriented toward 3D.
The biggest threat to Pixar, I think, is if all these other studios, racing in to cash in on the money delivered by 3D films like Finding Nemo, and Shrek 2 (just as studios in the mid 90's all started up 2D animation divisions to make the next Lion King). With all of those companies out for the money, you're going to get more Final Fantasy type movies, with nice looking graphics, and lousy story/acting. This might take some of the shine off of 3d films, and possibly damage Pixar's ability to get wide distribution in the short term following a glut of bad 3d films.
No need to go to those extremes. Just band together with like-minded lawsuit recipients, and go on a hunger strike! The novelty of it would probably get you enough media coverage to make the *IAA folks rather nervous - like roaches, they really don't like it when people start shining spotlights on them. They want the media to report people folding, not people fighting back and questioning the flimsy sheaf of "rights" that the media conglomerates have built empires around.
Well, given that these 3,000 lawsuits tie up a whole hell of paper, and a certain amount of lawclerk time that could be used to process one of the hundreds of thousands of other cases that are backlogged in the US court system, it's certainly non-trival.
Over the course of a year, they may be paying hundreds of dollars more for gasoline, but they generally have already payed thousands more for the upfront cost of buying an SUV over an economy car.
I think for the majority of the car buying public in the US, this is NOT true. Why? Most buyers here in the US finance their car purchases - otherwise, it's kind of hard to justify spending upwards of $30,000 on a van or SUV, with the leather interior, CD changer, automatic doors, sunroof, etc. As a result, they're really looking at their monthly cost of owning the car - not the total cost, since it's distributed over several years (ie, 5 yrs.) If you consider a $575 a month car payment, then things like a higher insurance premium and higher gas per month start to become problems if you were already pushing the limit of your monthly income.
I think that's the reality of car buying here in the US. Most of the costs are spread out over the time of ownership, so unless there's a general perception that you're going to suffer by buying an SUV (ie, higher gas prices), you're probably going to listen to the salesman, with his rebates and incentives, and almost guaranteed long-term financing. Yes, they'll be paying thousands more in the long term (especially since the higher cost will translate into more interest paid on the auto loan), but most people are living beyond their means anyways...
When I was at a summer camp back in Junior High, I temporarily "liberated" a large magnifying lens meant for magnifying television sets. The damn thing required two of us to maneuver it into position, and in the intense summer sunlight we toasted salsa until it turned black, carved letters out of concrete on the sidewalk, and liquidated several nickels (they may look solid, but don't touch them - the inside can be quite runny and extremely hot.)
I now have two fresnel lenses, not quite that large, which I eventually will be using to set up a solar-powered forge. Also, I now have welding glasses and gloves, two things that would have come in handy when we were roasting coinage.
So when are they going to start taking their statistics from my ReplayTV or all the Tivos out there.
As other posters have noted, Tivo already has a deal with Nilsen, and I think that ReplayTV will soon join them. ReplayTV has been running a "pause promotion" sweepstakes, where you write down a code that appears when you pause programming, and enter it in (along with your address, thereby establishing exactly where your unit is) for a chance at a prize. Pretty slick - they not only figure out where your unit is, then can measure who's actually paying attention after a pause action, and perhaps put in advertising during the pause (sort of how multiplex movie theatres run those stupid slide show ads before the commercials and previews start.)
This claim sounds highly suspect. If such a loophole exists, I find it incredibly hard to believe that it has not long since been abused enough to warrant a fix.
What the original poster was talking about is essentially identity theft (yes, taking someone's credit card and making charges, pretending that you are them, is ID theft.) As you can see in the US, identity theft, despite now being one of the top financial crimes in the country, with thousands of innocent citizens affected, is not a serious priority for law enforcement. We've basically band-aided the system at the behest of the credit card companies and credit bureaus - instead of fixing the problem (ie, the ease with which fraud can be committed, and the fact that usually nobody ever gets prosecuted because the amounts are too small for the feds to deal with - less than $5000, and the smaller police departments don't have the resources, or don't get cooperation from the credit card issuers/banks), they've just made it slightly easier to report fraud.
Visa and Mastercard represent to the card-holders that they don't have to pay. What they don't say is that merchants bear all the costs. THAT's the loophole - and if you're a merchant, your options are limited. Stop taking card not present transactions (ie, commit suicide if you're doing business online), or accept the fact that your lossage rates will continue to rise, no matter WHAT you do to discourage fraud.
I live in Anchorage, Alaska and I bike commute summer/winter/fall. 18 miles a day, 5 days a week
18 miles a day? Hell, I rode 15 miles... EACH WAY during a bus strike when I worked in Burbank, CA (I was living on the Westside at the time.) If you do the math, that's 30 miles a day. Now mind you, I didn't have to deal with snowdrifts, eternal night half the year, or polar bears, but damn, some of those drivers in West Hollywood were pretty mean customers...
The problem is I assumed an even distribution of machines. As a result, the maximum number of ethernet ports in any given room was usually 3 - I did two separate drops to each room, with 2 cat5e cables in each drop (areas like the living room, family room, etc. got one drop of 3 cables, and thus had a limit of 2 ethernet jacks.) Thus, for most rooms, one drop had 2 ethernet jacks, the other drop had one ethernet jack and two phone jacks.
However, some rooms have more than one computer. Some rooms have significantly more than one computer (ie, my room does double duty as a studio/office/workshop, and I have 4 computers, plus one extra workstation, and a laptop - that's where I needed to chain a hub, off of the drop that only had one ethernet jack.) Some rooms have devices which are not computers (ie, ReplayTV units), but use up ethernet ports anyways! I also have servers that will eventually live in the garage, but also want to put in a cheap workstation there. Then there's the MAME project I want to build...
Well, you should keep low-voltage wire runs away from regular 110/220AC, and any DC lines (ie, intercom, doorbell, alarm) to prevent interference and to avoid problems with induced currents. If you have to run near 110/220, don't run it in parallel if you can help it, and if you cross, cross at right angles. Wires must be supported if not run in conduit. Special rules for cat5/cat6 are don't knot, twist, or kink the cable, make sure you leave a little extra to allow for movement before you secure the cable (especially in earthquake country).
There are probably actual codes that govern this stuff, but my wiring was inspected by the local housing inspector as part of the general inspection (ie, they treated my work as if it had been done by a subcontractor for purposes of checking the work done by the general contractor.) It passed, so I didn't give it any more thought.
I've heard stories about people hiring out a company during a remodeling (circumventing their contractor) to do the work and their contractor coming in and ripping it all out before sheetrocking?
That sounds kind of weird, if you're the one that hired the contractor. In my case, I said up front that I would be handling telephone and network wiring. I wish I had done the electrical work too - they did a shitty job - just enough to pass inspection, but we've got fixtures that were installed improperly, switches that aren't hooked up to anything, lights that can't be controlled by switches...
I think I managed to get it all for about $1400. The most expensive items was the cable (about $500-600 at the time), and the tester/probe kits. I didn't want to use crappy tools, so I spent about $200 on a set of el-cheapo blinking-light cat-5 contiunity testers, and a more generic telecom tester/inductive probe (since I was running telephone also.) I also spent maybe another hundred on crimpers, punchdown tools, etc. Everything else, from the keystone jacks to faceplates were either bargain-basement Belkin or off of eBay.
So, for the cost of one computer (at the time, probably a Pentium III 6000), I put in a network that is capable of supplying every room in the house (including one bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry room, and the garage, in addition to all your standard living areas) with phone and cat-5 ethernet. The $1400 did not include my labor, nor any additional equipment (ie, hubs, switches, etc.) For the switches, I have two 10/100 units (also off of eBay). I got them cheap, and they work nicely - however, I'd get consumer ethernet equipment in the future - the stuff I have right now is noisy as hell (fans) and they eat up a lot of power.
There is a problem with having this many ports though. If you have that many computers, you're going to need a lot of UPS units, and they all draw a LOT of power...
It wasn't hard - the framing was up (this was a remodeling job), they had put in the plywood, but no stucco or drywall yet. I had prior experience doing runs with CAT-5, and purchased half a dozen spools, a pair of termination and test kits, and a mess of jacks/faceplates. A drill is mandatory, and of course, you have to come back after they put in the drywall and paint to finish terminating each drop. I think the biggest benefit was that I did the telephone lines at the same time, so instead of having everything strung together (the way the electrician would have done it, to save wire), I ran the phone lines like I did the ethernet - everything from the port to a patch panel. Theoretically, I can put in a PBX without any wiring changes (I do have a Vonage box for a second line wired in next to my switch and patch panel.)
As someone who wired every major room with at least 2 cat5 ports upon remodeling, there's one thing I'd do differently: Run 2" plastic conduit so that I can run other types of signal wires/coax/fire optic in the future.
As it is, some rooms have ALREADY maxed out all the ports (I've got a 16 port hub chained off of one of my ports, other areas I've got to run long patch cables to get to the other side of the room, etc.) I do have a central box, but it could have been located in a better spot (it's currently located at the demarc point, I should have set up a secondary distribution box on the second floor and ran everything from there.) I used two 24-port patch panels, which ended up being just enough for the layout that I used.
Another problem that cropped up was running wires for a sound system, intercom, internal phones, etc. I ran 3 cat-5 wires to every room (some rooms had more) using 2 of them for each port (theoretically I can use splitters to expand to 4 ports), and using one of the 8-conductor wires for phone service (theoretically 4 lines.) Even so, there's now a lot more stuff I'd like to run, but without punching through the drywall, I'm a bit constrained as to what I can do. Not putting in fiber was a big mistake:P I'll eventually put up wireless, but that's a whole new bit of infrastructure to build, debug and secure.
I just finished riding back from an afternoon tea in Santa Monica, CA, and was amazed at how bike friendly that the city had gotten. It was fairly bike friendly before, with bike lanes everywhere, but it looks like they've recently started introducing these oversized corner curbs that cut off a portion of the rightmost lane at the intersection, leaving just enough room for a bike, but not a car. The nice thing about this is that it promotes using the rightmost lane for parking, while leaving enough room for bikes, AND not allowing cars to pass on the right - a big plus if you're on a bicycle in traffic and the guy behind you isn't signalling, but intends to turn in your lane anyways.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that they've started reserving whole lanes for buses only in Downtown Santa Monica. If only Los Angeles was this progressive - although it's a damn sight more pedestrian/bicycle friendly than some of the outlying housing developments where everything is car-only, and there aren't any sidewalks.
I work in MR imaging. We recently bought a set of 160gb drives to upgrade our workstations (they shipped with 80gb drives.) Within a week we had filled all of the new drives about 60% full with new in-process data from our MR scanners (we do research, and pull data from multiple scanners on campus.)
Aside from driving the local network admin nuts ("We need to buy ANOTHER multi-terabyte raid to do local backups?!?"), the data we pull needs to be backed up. We used to burn CDs, and only recently have we started burning DVDs. It make a big difference when you can burn one single data set to one disc, instead of splitting it into pieces, or having to zip them. My only worry is that DVDs may not be able to last - we lost a bunch of data that were stored on 1gb Jaz cartridges when the carts went bad, and unfortunately, they hadn't made backup copies.
Although we do research in my group, the SOP for the MR/CT scanners for clinical patients is to burn CDs for archiving patient data. Keep that in mind if the MPAA/RIAA manages to put through ANOTHER tax on recordable media. If your insurance costs go up, you'll know who to blame.
Having worked with marketers, I often wonder how they sleep at night. Do they deliberately disregard the common good? Have they managed to convince themselves that they are necessary, and even a good? Or are they playing a zero-sum game - "Well, if I don't screw everybody else over, someone else will do it anyways, so I might as well reap the rewards."
In olden days, these kinds of people would have been dealt with by:
1. Tarring and feathering. 2. Being tied to a rail and getting run out of town. 3. Being thrown in a boat without paddles and left to drift downstream.
It's only in today's society, where these vermin have so many targets of opportunity (and the veil of apparent anonymity) that they can thrive, and not be thrown out. Even worse, it's only in today's society that these vermin can band together, hire lawyers and lobbyists, and start dictating to the rest of us, what we can do and what we can't do. The Do Not Call list was a good counter-blow, but they're still out there, degrading useful services like Google and e-mail for the rest of us...
In each of those categories, there are copyrighted works that will never see the light of day because of wrangling over who owns what rights. There is code, and documentation produced on a daily basis that is kept out of the public eye, with copyright being the excuse to restrict access.
Although I consider "shovelware" manufacturers of low-cost knockoffs to be morally questionable, they do fill a role in a capitalistic market economy, by supplying a good at a low price (though it might be of lower quality.) For example, vendors might sell pulp paperbacks (or digital CDs) of the great novels of the 20th century - books that otherwise might not be published because someone who owns the rights doesn't think that selling at that price will net them enough money.
This is a fundamental economic point - copyright is an artificial monopoly. Because it is a monopoly, it restricts competition, adding "friction" to the economic process, in the same way taxes and tarrifs do. In places like China and India, where intellectual property enforcement is lax, industries have been built around duplicating CDs/DVDs, and producing copies of drugs. They still hire people, buy raw materials, and supply goods (usually at lower prices), which contributes to the economy. Not only that, they build industries which now can compete in "legitimate" markets, such as drug R&D, and engineering of new digital video standards.
I think that copyright is important - as an artist and a writer, my work would be worth less without it. However, copyright must be viewed in the context of a broader social contract - there must be a defined lifetime to the monopoly, and at some point, the monopoly MUST END. Whether do you that by enforcing compulsory licensing, fees, etc., is an exercise left to the reader. However I agree that writing a blank check for a monopoly, without exacting funds to preserve a work until the copyright period expires (thus denying the work to the public) is definitely not the intent of having copyright law.
What a load of garbage: you want to tax people for merely having copyrighted works?
Not having. Owning. An important distinction.
Not only would be virtually impossible to implement, but would create a huge disincentive to create copyright works (I'd stop writing informal papers, people would stop creating open source software - all for fear that the tax department levy bills on them).
See paragraph two of why I said that asset taxes are inherently evil. Even though open source is free - you'd still have to convince some assessor that you shouldn't be taxed. This adds friction to the economic process, and is inherently less efficient (that's why it's evil.) On the other hand, I'm assuming the system would be set up such that if you are not making any money on the property, you don't get taxed. (see parent to my post.)
if you make money out of the works you have to pay tax anyway
Theoretically true. Not necessarily true. The bigger the business, the more money they stand to save by NOT paying their taxes (ie, tax shelters.)
The original poster who proposed the idea (see parent of my post) essentally was re-proposing the idea that someone who leverages their copyright for economic benefit should be required to pay for that privilege. As it stands now, you're pretty much granted a free monopoly for longer than any of us will probably be alive. The original intent was for the people to grant that monopoly in exchange for making that item available to the public, monopoly-free after a certain number of years, in order to benefit the public (ie, it's a two way street.) Because of abuses of the copyright system, if they don't intend to ever give up control, then there needs to be some mechanism to either force their hand, or recoup some public benefit.
An asset tax is a lousy way of doing trying to recoup some of that public benefit, but it is one alternative if they refuse to roll back the copyright duration. Again, read paragraph two, where I state that asset taxes are so inherently evil, that it's probably not the way to go.
The more you make off your copyright and the more protection need, the more you should pay.
I was thinking the exact same thing, only it should not only be tied to the asset valuation, but to time as well. For example, for the first 5 years of a copyright, you don't get taxed - after that, you get assessed an "Intellectual Property Tax".
The problem with the idea is that asset taxes are inherently evil - so evil that I'm not sure that I'd want to create a new bureaucracy to handle the assessment, levying, and paperwork. It's bad enough we have property taxes (and for very unlucky folks), business asset taxes (ie, I buy a computer, pay a sales tax, and for the next 5 years, I have to pay 3% of the remaining value on the computer to the local county). Can you imagine some auditor going into the library of congress, and sending off letters to authors, playwrights, etc., arguing that their work is worth $X, even though it's been out of print for years, and that they owe back taxes?
On the other hand, if we can't get a limitation to copyright duration, then we should be taxing the hell out of it, so at least SOME public good comes out of it.
When copyright and IP laws are torn all to hell, blame the MPAA and the RIAA for trying to push the envelope and just not being smart enough to leave things alone (just as traditional junk mailers and call centers can blame spammers and telemarketers for the woes that have befallen them as a result of super-sensitizing people to ad-interruptions.)
Wow, outsourcing legal work to the goernment, and you don't even need to pay them! Man, is that a racket or what? Up until now, you actually had to be elected to treat taxpayers as your own piggy-bank, thanks to the RIAA and the MPAA, copyright holders (with influence) can now get paid by the american people for... suing the american people!
I can back that. I have several replayTV units, and I routinely go through 300 GB every couple of weeks, archiving shows (eventually they'll be edited to trim commercials, and burned onto DVD.) A few months of that, and you've easily collected a terabyte's of shows, especially if you're recording them at high resolution (about 2gb per hour of video.)
The thing is, drive space is so cheap, that it's cheaper (timewise) for me just to buy more drives. Oh well, that's what college-age siblings are for - cheap editing labor come summer vacation.
Not only were both rigid-body airships and blimps everywhere, helium was declared a strategic war material. A National Helium Reserve was established in 1925, and we've been sitting on stockpiles of the stuff ever since. Finally, it will get used for its intended purpose (hopefully...)
You may or may not like blacklists, but you gotta admit, they take their work seriously (from their list of return classifications when querying their blacklist DNS lookup):
Shoot On Sight (Response: 127.0.0.10)
This IP address is listed for one of several reasons. The provider, individual, or company did one of the following:
* Cart00ney threats made towards the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, and spam fighters. * Attempted and unsuccessful legal attacks against the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, and spam fighters. * Promotes, supports, or incites attacks against the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, spam fighters, and others on the Internet.
Most of the laws we have are there for a good reason, and they should all be enforced.
Yes, we should go about enforcing every law, no matter how trivial, stupid, or potentially abusable it is. Otherwise, how would people realize how trivial, stupid, and abusable that particular law is? As it stands right now, the real cost of all the stupid brain-dead laws on the books is hidden, because they're selectively enforced. They lie there, on the books, like landmines, until they're needed to selectively target a specific group (ie, gangs), or until some hapless joe trips over some rarely enforced regulation, and loses life, limb, or property over it.
The other part of it is that passing laws that aren't enforced (or that are just plain stupid) does nothing to promote respect for laws in general. If you pass a law, you'd better be serious about enforcing it, along with all the enforcement and social costs of doing so. Otherwise, don't even waste taxpayer time and money by proposing ANOTHER LAW just to give some bozo politician a chance to spout out sound bites.
If we don't enforce all of our laws, why even bother writing them if all we really care about are rapists, murderers, and corrupt board members?
Because politicians need to justify the salaries they draw that they keep raising, and because they need to "be against" something, in order to distinguish themselves from their challengers. Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposal for a part-time legislature is sounding better all the time - give them too much idle time, and they just end up proposing stupid laws (like the Calif. State Senator who is proposing a law to make GMail illegal... and which would also incidentally make services like virus scanners, spam filters, etc. illegal as well.)
How does the US prescription system work? Are doctors prescribing branded drugs over cheaper, generic drugs in order to receive funding from drug companies?
Actually, it's more the case that doctors, faced with a bewildering choice of new drugs to keep up with every single year, end up prescribing the drug that they're most familiar with. This ends up usually being the drug that they're given the most free samples of.
As far as HMOs are concerned, they have a list of drugs and their generic equivalents, and if you use the brand name, you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so.
The only people getting funding from drug companies are researchers, and clinical test sites. For regular folks (ie, doctors, interns, etc.) they get a lot of swag and free drug samples (as well as seminars, etc.), but they're not supposed to get cash.
Frankly, high drug costs (at the counter, not high development costs) leading to offshoring is a red herring. The trend toward offshoring has to do more with escaping regulatory hurdles which prevent certain types of research (stem cells, anyone?), the lousy payoff in domestic drug research, and the rise of very competitive research and testing labs overseas.
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I think that their brand name is now strong enough to survive a movie that doesn't live up to the rest of Pixar's films. With that said, barring serious evil taking over the management and infecting their processes, I doubt that Pixar will allow the release of a film that doesn't live up. Contrast that to Disney, which has slowly used all of its positive branding that was built up during the mid 90's, to the point where they felt they needed to jettison their ENTIRE 2D feature animation division, and replace it with a crew oriented toward 3D.
The biggest threat to Pixar, I think, is if all these other studios, racing in to cash in on the money delivered by 3D films like Finding Nemo, and Shrek 2 (just as studios in the mid 90's all started up 2D animation divisions to make the next Lion King). With all of those companies out for the money, you're going to get more Final Fantasy type movies, with nice looking graphics, and lousy story/acting. This might take some of the shine off of 3d films, and possibly damage Pixar's ability to get wide distribution in the short term following a glut of bad 3d films.
No need to go to those extremes. Just band together with like-minded lawsuit recipients, and go on a hunger strike! The novelty of it would probably get you enough media coverage to make the *IAA folks rather nervous - like roaches, they really don't like it when people start shining spotlights on them. They want the media to report people folding, not people fighting back and questioning the flimsy sheaf of "rights" that the media conglomerates have built empires around.
Well, given that these 3,000 lawsuits tie up a whole hell of paper, and a certain amount of lawclerk time that could be used to process one of the hundreds of thousands of other cases that are backlogged in the US court system, it's certainly non-trival.
Over the course of a year, they may be paying hundreds of dollars more for gasoline, but they generally have already payed thousands more for the upfront cost of buying an SUV over an economy car.
I think for the majority of the car buying public in the US, this is NOT true. Why? Most buyers here in the US finance their car purchases - otherwise, it's kind of hard to justify spending upwards of $30,000 on a van or SUV, with the leather interior, CD changer, automatic doors, sunroof, etc. As a result, they're really looking at their monthly cost of owning the car - not the total cost, since it's distributed over several years (ie, 5 yrs.) If you consider a $575 a month car payment, then things like a higher insurance premium and higher gas per month start to become problems if you were already pushing the limit of your monthly income.
I think that's the reality of car buying here in the US. Most of the costs are spread out over the time of ownership, so unless there's a general perception that you're going to suffer by buying an SUV (ie, higher gas prices), you're probably going to listen to the salesman, with his rebates and incentives, and almost guaranteed long-term financing. Yes, they'll be paying thousands more in the long term (especially since the higher cost will translate into more interest paid on the auto loan), but most people are living beyond their means anyways...
When I was at a summer camp back in Junior High, I temporarily "liberated" a large magnifying lens meant for magnifying television sets. The damn thing required two of us to maneuver it into position, and in the intense summer sunlight we toasted salsa until it turned black, carved letters out of concrete on the sidewalk, and liquidated several nickels (they may look solid, but don't touch them - the inside can be quite runny and extremely hot.)
I now have two fresnel lenses, not quite that large, which I eventually will be using to set up a solar-powered forge. Also, I now have welding glasses and gloves, two things that would have come in handy when we were roasting coinage.
So when are they going to start taking their statistics from my ReplayTV or all the Tivos out there.
As other posters have noted, Tivo already has a deal with Nilsen, and I think that ReplayTV will soon join them. ReplayTV has been running a "pause promotion" sweepstakes, where you write down a code that appears when you pause programming, and enter it in (along with your address, thereby establishing exactly where your unit is) for a chance at a prize. Pretty slick - they not only figure out where your unit is, then can measure who's actually paying attention after a pause action, and perhaps put in advertising during the pause (sort of how multiplex movie theatres run those stupid slide show ads before the commercials and previews start.)
This claim sounds highly suspect. If such a loophole exists, I find it incredibly hard to believe that it has not long since been abused enough to warrant a fix.
What the original poster was talking about is essentially identity theft (yes, taking someone's credit card and making charges, pretending that you are them, is ID theft.) As you can see in the US, identity theft, despite now being one of the top financial crimes in the country, with thousands of innocent citizens affected, is not a serious priority for law enforcement. We've basically band-aided the system at the behest of the credit card companies and credit bureaus - instead of fixing the problem (ie, the ease with which fraud can be committed, and the fact that usually nobody ever gets prosecuted because the amounts are too small for the feds to deal with - less than $5000, and the smaller police departments don't have the resources, or don't get cooperation from the credit card issuers/banks), they've just made it slightly easier to report fraud.
Visa and Mastercard represent to the card-holders that they don't have to pay. What they don't say is that merchants bear all the costs. THAT's the loophole - and if you're a merchant, your options are limited. Stop taking card not present transactions (ie, commit suicide if you're doing business online), or accept the fact that your lossage rates will continue to rise, no matter WHAT you do to discourage fraud.
I live in Anchorage, Alaska and I bike commute summer/winter/fall. 18 miles a day, 5 days a week
18 miles a day? Hell, I rode 15 miles... EACH WAY during a bus strike when I worked in Burbank, CA (I was living on the Westside at the time.) If you do the math, that's 30 miles a day. Now mind you, I didn't have to deal with snowdrifts, eternal night half the year, or polar bears, but damn, some of those drivers in West Hollywood were pretty mean customers...
The problem is I assumed an even distribution of machines. As a result, the maximum number of ethernet ports in any given room was usually 3 - I did two separate drops to each room, with 2 cat5e cables in each drop (areas like the living room, family room, etc. got one drop of 3 cables, and thus had a limit of 2 ethernet jacks.) Thus, for most rooms, one drop had 2 ethernet jacks, the other drop had one ethernet jack and two phone jacks.
However, some rooms have more than one computer. Some rooms have significantly more than one computer (ie, my room does double duty as a studio/office/workshop, and I have 4 computers, plus one extra workstation, and a laptop - that's where I needed to chain a hub, off of the drop that only had one ethernet jack.) Some rooms have devices which are not computers (ie, ReplayTV units), but use up ethernet ports anyways! I also have servers that will eventually live in the garage, but also want to put in a cheap workstation there. Then there's the MAME project I want to build...
Well, you should keep low-voltage wire runs away from regular 110/220AC, and any DC lines (ie, intercom, doorbell, alarm) to prevent interference and to avoid problems with induced currents. If you have to run near 110/220, don't run it in parallel if you can help it, and if you cross, cross at right angles. Wires must be supported if not run in conduit. Special rules for cat5/cat6 are don't knot, twist, or kink the cable, make sure you leave a little extra to allow for movement before you secure the cable (especially in earthquake country).
There are probably actual codes that govern this stuff, but my wiring was inspected by the local housing inspector as part of the general inspection (ie, they treated my work as if it had been done by a subcontractor for purposes of checking the work done by the general contractor.) It passed, so I didn't give it any more thought.
I've heard stories about people hiring out a company during a remodeling (circumventing their contractor) to do the work and their contractor coming in and ripping it all out before sheetrocking?
That sounds kind of weird, if you're the one that hired the contractor. In my case, I said up front that I would be handling telephone and network wiring. I wish I had done the electrical work too - they did a shitty job - just enough to pass inspection, but we've got fixtures that were installed improperly, switches that aren't hooked up to anything, lights that can't be controlled by switches...
I think I managed to get it all for about $1400. The most expensive items was the cable (about $500-600 at the time), and the tester/probe kits. I didn't want to use crappy tools, so I spent about $200 on a set of el-cheapo blinking-light cat-5 contiunity testers, and a more generic telecom tester/inductive probe (since I was running telephone also.) I also spent maybe another hundred on crimpers, punchdown tools, etc. Everything else, from the keystone jacks to faceplates were either bargain-basement Belkin or off of eBay.
So, for the cost of one computer (at the time, probably a Pentium III 6000), I put in a network that is capable of supplying every room in the house (including one bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry room, and the garage, in addition to all your standard living areas) with phone and cat-5 ethernet. The $1400 did not include my labor, nor any additional equipment (ie, hubs, switches, etc.) For the switches, I have two 10/100 units (also off of eBay). I got them cheap, and they work nicely - however, I'd get consumer ethernet equipment in the future - the stuff I have right now is noisy as hell (fans) and they eat up a lot of power.
There is a problem with having this many ports though. If you have that many computers, you're going to need a lot of UPS units, and they all draw a LOT of power...
It wasn't hard - the framing was up (this was a remodeling job), they had put in the plywood, but no stucco or drywall yet. I had prior experience doing runs with CAT-5, and purchased half a dozen spools, a pair of termination and test kits, and a mess of jacks/faceplates. A drill is mandatory, and of course, you have to come back after they put in the drywall and paint to finish terminating each drop. I think the biggest benefit was that I did the telephone lines at the same time, so instead of having everything strung together (the way the electrician would have done it, to save wire), I ran the phone lines like I did the ethernet - everything from the port to a patch panel. Theoretically, I can put in a PBX without any wiring changes (I do have a Vonage box for a second line wired in next to my switch and patch panel.)
As someone who wired every major room with at least 2 cat5 ports upon remodeling, there's one thing I'd do differently: Run 2" plastic conduit so that I can run other types of signal wires/coax/fire optic in the future.
:P I'll eventually put up wireless, but that's a whole new bit of infrastructure to build, debug and secure.
As it is, some rooms have ALREADY maxed out all the ports (I've got a 16 port hub chained off of one of my ports, other areas I've got to run long patch cables to get to the other side of the room, etc.) I do have a central box, but it could have been located in a better spot (it's currently located at the demarc point, I should have set up a secondary distribution box on the second floor and ran everything from there.) I used two 24-port patch panels, which ended up being just enough for the layout that I used.
Another problem that cropped up was running wires for a sound system, intercom, internal phones, etc. I ran 3 cat-5 wires to every room (some rooms had more) using 2 of them for each port (theoretically I can use splitters to expand to 4 ports), and using one of the 8-conductor wires for phone service (theoretically 4 lines.) Even so, there's now a lot more stuff I'd like to run, but without punching through the drywall, I'm a bit constrained as to what I can do. Not putting in fiber was a big mistake
I just finished riding back from an afternoon tea in Santa Monica, CA, and was amazed at how bike friendly that the city had gotten. It was fairly bike friendly before, with bike lanes everywhere, but it looks like they've recently started introducing these oversized corner curbs that cut off a portion of the rightmost lane at the intersection, leaving just enough room for a bike, but not a car. The nice thing about this is that it promotes using the rightmost lane for parking, while leaving enough room for bikes, AND not allowing cars to pass on the right - a big plus if you're on a bicycle in traffic and the guy behind you isn't signalling, but intends to turn in your lane anyways.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that they've started reserving whole lanes for buses only in Downtown Santa Monica. If only Los Angeles was this progressive - although it's a damn sight more pedestrian/bicycle friendly than some of the outlying housing developments where everything is car-only, and there aren't any sidewalks.
I work in MR imaging. We recently bought a set of 160gb drives to upgrade our workstations (they shipped with 80gb drives.) Within a week we had filled all of the new drives about 60% full with new in-process data from our MR scanners (we do research, and pull data from multiple scanners on campus.)
Aside from driving the local network admin nuts ("We need to buy ANOTHER multi-terabyte raid to do local backups?!?"), the data we pull needs to be backed up. We used to burn CDs, and only recently have we started burning DVDs. It make a big difference when you can burn one single data set to one disc, instead of splitting it into pieces, or having to zip them. My only worry is that DVDs may not be able to last - we lost a bunch of data that were stored on 1gb Jaz cartridges when the carts went bad, and unfortunately, they hadn't made backup copies.
Although we do research in my group, the SOP for the MR/CT scanners for clinical patients is to burn CDs for archiving patient data. Keep that in mind if the MPAA/RIAA manages to put through ANOTHER tax on recordable media. If your insurance costs go up, you'll know who to blame.
Having worked with marketers, I often wonder how they sleep at night. Do they deliberately disregard the common good? Have they managed to convince themselves that they are necessary, and even a good? Or are they playing a zero-sum game - "Well, if I don't screw everybody else over, someone else will do it anyways, so I might as well reap the rewards."
In olden days, these kinds of people would have been dealt with by:
1. Tarring and feathering.
2. Being tied to a rail and getting run out of town.
3. Being thrown in a boat without paddles and left to drift downstream.
It's only in today's society, where these vermin have so many targets of opportunity (and the veil of apparent anonymity) that they can thrive, and not be thrown out. Even worse, it's only in today's society that these vermin can band together, hire lawyers and lobbyists, and start dictating to the rest of us, what we can do and what we can't do. The Do Not Call list was a good counter-blow, but they're still out there, degrading useful services like Google and e-mail for the rest of us...
I'd like to know what works being out of the public domain are hindering the progress of society.
Textbooks. Artwork. Plays. Music. Movies. Games. Computer programs.
In each of those categories, there are copyrighted works that will never see the light of day because of wrangling over who owns what rights. There is code, and documentation produced on a daily basis that is kept out of the public eye, with copyright being the excuse to restrict access.
Although I consider "shovelware" manufacturers of low-cost knockoffs to be morally questionable, they do fill a role in a capitalistic market economy, by supplying a good at a low price (though it might be of lower quality.) For example, vendors might sell pulp paperbacks (or digital CDs) of the great novels of the 20th century - books that otherwise might not be published because someone who owns the rights doesn't think that selling at that price will net them enough money.
This is a fundamental economic point - copyright is an artificial monopoly. Because it is a monopoly, it restricts competition, adding "friction" to the economic process, in the same way taxes and tarrifs do. In places like China and India, where intellectual property enforcement is lax, industries have been built around duplicating CDs/DVDs, and producing copies of drugs. They still hire people, buy raw materials, and supply goods (usually at lower prices), which contributes to the economy. Not only that, they build industries which now can compete in "legitimate" markets, such as drug R&D, and engineering of new digital video standards.
I think that copyright is important - as an artist and a writer, my work would be worth less without it. However, copyright must be viewed in the context of a broader social contract - there must be a defined lifetime to the monopoly, and at some point, the monopoly MUST END. Whether do you that by enforcing compulsory licensing, fees, etc., is an exercise left to the reader. However I agree that writing a blank check for a monopoly, without exacting funds to preserve a work until the copyright period expires (thus denying the work to the public) is definitely not the intent of having copyright law.
What a load of garbage: you want to tax people for merely having copyrighted works?
Not having. Owning. An important distinction.
Not only would be virtually impossible to implement, but would create a huge disincentive to create copyright works (I'd stop writing informal papers, people would stop creating open source software - all for fear that the tax department levy bills on them).
See paragraph two of why I said that asset taxes are inherently evil. Even though open source is free - you'd still have to convince some assessor that you shouldn't be taxed. This adds friction to the economic process, and is inherently less efficient (that's why it's evil.) On the other hand, I'm assuming the system would be set up such that if you are not making any money on the property, you don't get taxed. (see parent to my post.)
if you make money out of the works you have to pay tax anyway
Theoretically true. Not necessarily true. The bigger the business, the more money they stand to save by NOT paying their taxes (ie, tax shelters.)
The original poster who proposed the idea (see parent of my post) essentally was re-proposing the idea that someone who leverages their copyright for economic benefit should be required to pay for that privilege. As it stands now, you're pretty much granted a free monopoly for longer than any of us will probably be alive. The original intent was for the people to grant that monopoly in exchange for making that item available to the public, monopoly-free after a certain number of years, in order to benefit the public (ie, it's a two way street.) Because of abuses of the copyright system, if they don't intend to ever give up control, then there needs to be some mechanism to either force their hand, or recoup some public benefit.
An asset tax is a lousy way of doing trying to recoup some of that public benefit, but it is one alternative if they refuse to roll back the copyright duration. Again, read paragraph two, where I state that asset taxes are so inherently evil, that it's probably not the way to go.
The more you make off your copyright and the more protection need, the more you should pay.
I was thinking the exact same thing, only it should not only be tied to the asset valuation, but to time as well. For example, for the first 5 years of a copyright, you don't get taxed - after that, you get assessed an "Intellectual Property Tax".
The problem with the idea is that asset taxes are inherently evil - so evil that I'm not sure that I'd want to create a new bureaucracy to handle the assessment, levying, and paperwork. It's bad enough we have property taxes (and for very unlucky folks), business asset taxes (ie, I buy a computer, pay a sales tax, and for the next 5 years, I have to pay 3% of the remaining value on the computer to the local county). Can you imagine some auditor going into the library of congress, and sending off letters to authors, playwrights, etc., arguing that their work is worth $X, even though it's been out of print for years, and that they owe back taxes?
On the other hand, if we can't get a limitation to copyright duration, then we should be taxing the hell out of it, so at least SOME public good comes out of it.
When copyright and IP laws are torn all to hell, blame the MPAA and the RIAA for trying to push the envelope and just not being smart enough to leave things alone (just as traditional junk mailers and call centers can blame spammers and telemarketers for the woes that have befallen them as a result of super-sensitizing people to ad-interruptions.)
Wow, outsourcing legal work to the goernment, and you don't even need to pay them! Man, is that a racket or what? Up until now, you actually had to be elected to treat taxpayers as your own piggy-bank, thanks to the RIAA and the MPAA, copyright holders (with influence) can now get paid by the american people for... suing the american people!
I can back that. I have several replayTV units, and I routinely go through 300 GB every couple of weeks, archiving shows (eventually they'll be edited to trim commercials, and burned onto DVD.) A few months of that, and you've easily collected a terabyte's of shows, especially if you're recording them at high resolution (about 2gb per hour of video.)
The thing is, drive space is so cheap, that it's cheaper (timewise) for me just to buy more drives. Oh well, that's what college-age siblings are for - cheap editing labor come summer vacation.
Not only were both rigid-body airships and blimps everywhere, helium was declared a strategic war material. A National Helium Reserve was established in 1925, and we've been sitting on stockpiles of the stuff ever since. Finally, it will get used for its intended purpose (hopefully...)
Most of the laws we have are there for a good reason, and they should all be enforced.
Yes, we should go about enforcing every law, no matter how trivial, stupid, or potentially abusable it is. Otherwise, how would people realize how trivial, stupid, and abusable that particular law is? As it stands right now, the real cost of all the stupid brain-dead laws on the books is hidden, because they're selectively enforced. They lie there, on the books, like landmines, until they're needed to selectively target a specific group (ie, gangs), or until some hapless joe trips over some rarely enforced regulation, and loses life, limb, or property over it.
The other part of it is that passing laws that aren't enforced (or that are just plain stupid) does nothing to promote respect for laws in general. If you pass a law, you'd better be serious about enforcing it, along with all the enforcement and social costs of doing so. Otherwise, don't even waste taxpayer time and money by proposing ANOTHER LAW just to give some bozo politician a chance to spout out sound bites.
If we don't enforce all of our laws, why even bother writing them if all we really care about are rapists, murderers, and corrupt board members?
Because politicians need to justify the salaries they draw that they keep raising, and because they need to "be against" something, in order to distinguish themselves from their challengers. Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposal for a part-time legislature is sounding better all the time - give them too much idle time, and they just end up proposing stupid laws (like the Calif. State Senator who is proposing a law to make GMail illegal... and which would also incidentally make services like virus scanners, spam filters, etc. illegal as well.)
How does the US prescription system work? Are doctors prescribing branded drugs over cheaper, generic drugs in order to receive funding from drug companies?
Actually, it's more the case that doctors, faced with a bewildering choice of new drugs to keep up with every single year, end up prescribing the drug that they're most familiar with. This ends up usually being the drug that they're given the most free samples of.
As far as HMOs are concerned, they have a list of drugs and their generic equivalents, and if you use the brand name, you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so.
The only people getting funding from drug companies are researchers, and clinical test sites. For regular folks (ie, doctors, interns, etc.) they get a lot of swag and free drug samples (as well as seminars, etc.), but they're not supposed to get cash.
Frankly, high drug costs (at the counter, not high development costs) leading to offshoring is a red herring. The trend toward offshoring has to do more with escaping regulatory hurdles which prevent certain types of research (stem cells, anyone?), the lousy payoff in domestic drug research, and the rise of very competitive research and testing labs overseas.