Don't forget, that conventional aircraft need to sacrifice some of their carrying capacity for life support and armor to protect the pilot. At a 3000lb payload without having to support a pilot and their required accessories (not to mention the bulk of their user interface), you can build a cheap, lightweight, almost disposable attack craft. It's pretty much guaranteed that you will have multiple UCAV units assigned to a given controller.
There was a recent Wall Street Journal article on how Air Force pilots were pissed to get unmanned pilot duty after distinguished stints at flying f14s, etc. They didn't like being locked into a little box, flying a plane by remote, and they really resented the fact that they'd be locked into this duty for a year or more, while they lost out on actual airtime to their colleagues (airtime being a critical factor for advancement and promotion, not to mention basic flying skills.)
The gist of it was, the Air Force wasn't apologizing for needing qualified pilots, even to fly by remote, and were trying to line up a few T34 trainers so the Global Hawk pilots could get some real airtime in between missions.
Upshot - could it be someday that geeks with less than perfect vision could get wings in our nation's Air Force?
Are you talking about Clinton or Bush? Clinton's policy of OOTW (Operations Other Than War) got our soldiers killed handing out food, and doing police duty - items that can arguably classified as NOT IN OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE.
Bush is using the military in a very focused manner (as opposed to committing the entire force structure) to root out terrorists in a now-friendly country (Afghanistan). Terrorists, may I remind you, who in one attack, killed 4000+ civilians in a major US city, some of whom were foreign nationals. Of course, I'm an American citizen, so maybe my viewpoint is a little biased...
Your country has a military, doesn't it? What does it do to justify it's existence?
In places where you are allowed to own firearms, you can train and practice in your own time. The federally funded Civilian Marksmanship Program is supposed to promote and maintain good shooting skills among civilians so that they make better soldiers in time of war.
Besides, if we're all drafted, we civilians wouldn't have much of a choice about it, would we?
Anyone remember the Last Starfighter? Beat the boss on the arcade game, and the next day, get a visit from your local galactic Starfighter recruiter...
I'm wondering how long it takes for them to add other MOS than Infantry. I'm old now - the glory of having little sleep, and hiking 40 mile treks with a 50 pound rucksack, LBE full of ammo, water and other assorted crap, plus a heavy ass M-16A1 (not to mention ammo can if you manage to draw that duty), just does not appeal to me like I did when I was 18. I wouldn't mind just working in the damn motorpool, or restocking the PX...
Not all customers. The ISS is one potential customer not in the gravity well. Telecommunications companies that need transponders are in the gravity well, but the transponders need to be in orbit. Companies wanting to mine high-value materials in space will need someone to supply them with reaction mass, solar furnaces for metals extraction, replacement parts, engines.
Remember, at current rates, every pound lofted into orbit is hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus every pound lofted into orbit has to include the cost and weight of the fuel needed to get it into orbit. Every pound of oxygen, water, structural members, and shielding you can avoid lifting off from the ground is a pound you can use to lift something else that cannot be supplied from space.
Why drop it down a gravity well at all? And why only mine metals? If you have a base on the moon or stations in orbit or the lagrange points, they're gonna need water and organic building blocks from somewhere. Honestly, I'd go for an ice rock first, slap a reactor on it, and use the water in the rock as reaction mass. Maybe tether some iron-bearing asteroids to it first so I could use maximum use of my trip out there (hell, why not just use a big-ass robot mining ship?) The only thing you'd need to do is slap a cover on it so that the sun doesn't destabilize your trajectory, ala comet tails.
Nah, that's what if statement blocks with conditions that never will be met are for. That way you preserve the bulk of your unused code when you compile your binary, so you can bloat your release and have it shipped on a couple of CDs. Not to mention it confuses the hell out of the Q&A guys.
I explain what each function is supposed to do, along with any assumptions I'm making and any desired side-effects that the coder should expect. If I'm using algorithms beyond a basic for loop, I'll stick pseudo code with example inputs and outputs in the comments as well.
Function and variable names that make sense go without saying - they may be a pain to type in, but in the end they don't hamper code efficency, so make them as self-explanatory as possible (with exceptions like using i and j for a 5 line for loop.) Remember, whitespace and good, CONSISTENT formatting is just as important as good commenting. Funky, inconsistent formatting pisses me off just as badly as cryptic commenting and 6-character all-capital variable and function names.
I comment under the assumption that the next time I look at this code, it will be years later and I'll have forgotten much of the programming language I originally wrote the code in (basically, I assume the next time I look at the code, I'll need to port it.) In instances like this, basic descriptions of what a function is supposed to do, along with pseudocode of the alogrithm with sample inputs and outputs are EXACTLY what I need - not to mention, they serve as a road map for when I'm writing and debugging the code the first time. Typically, I'll have just as much commenting as actual code for simple stuff, for anything beyond that I'll have double as much commenting as code (readable english is less efficient than clean code, so what do you expect?)
You should always look over and polish both your code and your comments before you shelve your code. If you're leading a team, it should be your code that sets the bar for good logic, commenting and formatting style. Even if you're not, good maintainable code is what they're paying you do write (I hope.) Of course, if they aren't paying you enough to write clean, commented code, then they get what they're paying for...
You can add idiots who scrawl political slogans and rally messages on buildings using colored chalk. Chalk is supposed to be easily washable... except when it's colored, and liberally smeared into brick or limestone. At that point, it does damage to remove it. I guess they use it because it's supposed to be more "environmentally friendly" than using leaflets. Morons.
Fine, don't give out your number. How does this help against telemarketers who use wardialing machines? Yes, they're illegal. So are junk faxes and the use of automatic dialers/recorded telemarketing pitches. I don't see any let up in any of those practices, despite the law. Face it, without active enforcement by the FCC/phone companies, you're pretty much at the mercy of unscrupulous spammers everywhere.
It's like the Spammer card in Illuminati - No power, making it impossible to destroy them - they're too diffuse.
Accidents. Derigibles were phased out because they were a bitch to land. You need mooring facilities, hangars big enough to hold them so moored craft can withstand a storm, and big crews to secure them. Several of the Navy's lighter-than-air fleet had accidents, mostly on landing (one was lost in a storm I think), and the Hindenburg didn't do much for the popularity of civilian derigibles.
The really funny thing is that the United States still manages a strategic Helium reserve! Yes, just as with oil, Helium is hoarded for possible military usage, even though we don't have a military derigible fleet anymore!
Are there any existing WWII era derigible hangars still around on the West coast? I know of some at Moffat air field, which is controlled by NASA, but to my knowledge, that's about it. Where the heck are we going to garage/maintain these monsters?
Actually, a better question is, who makes derigibles in volume anymore? I don't exactly see Boeing, McDonald Douglas, or Newport News fitting into the bidding process too well - to my knowledge none of their units do any work relating to lighter-than-air patrol craft. How will the public react to our getting military hardware from Graf Zepplin (yes, they still make zepplins.)
Lastly, who would control and staff these craft? The Air Force? The Navy (which controlled the derigible fleets prior to and during WWII), or the Coast Guard (who are undermanned and underfunded - WAY undermanned and WAY underfunded)?
I learned basic on a Commodore 64 in elementary school (3rd grade)... and then took those skills to the Apple II. These days I pull in a tidy sum coding in Perl, C, IDL, AppleScript, Lingo, etc. Once you learn the programming basics (for loop, conditional branching, variables) you're pretty much equipped to learn almost any programming language under the sun. I say almost, because LISP (which I have learned, and have written code in) requires a good grasp of recursive design, which is another skill set entirely...
On the issue of what's too hard, I had friends in public school (Los Angeles Unified School District to boot) taking and passing the AP Calc test with perfect scores in 8th grade. Most schools have excessively low expectations of their students, and it shows. I say,
You don't need the SDK to swap out the motors and components of the Abio, although you might want to modify the operating code a bit so that the upgraded Abio doesn't accidently crush someone with it's more powerful motors...
How long before someone equips an Abio with better feet, armor, camera, and a shotgun, and sells it as an all-terrain bomb-disarming robot?
Thanks for sharing the tips - due to the sheer volume of spam, I'm moving to filtering as a first line of defense. Most spammers who can be canned by reporting have been, and I've felt that it's time to start writing adaptive heuristic algorithms to identify and waste the rest. Sending monthly totals to my congresscritter is a great idea - thanks!
You overlook those of us with e-mail addresses old enough to pre-date spam. There was no reason to hide or mangle our addresses back then because there were no spam bots, and no spammers. Usenet was actually useful, and open relays were the norm, not the bane of proper netiquette. Hell, you gave your address out and expected people to contact you, not mass-mail ads. When you give your phone out to people, do you expect them to inundate you with telemarketing pitches? Of course not!
The point? Don't class those of us who get lots of spam because we choose to keep the addresses that we have had for the last 8 years with clueless newbies who don't know how to hide their addresses. We're aware we could use new addresses, but we've chosen to fight for the ones that we've got. All of my addresses are garbled, but goddamn fucking spammers in China, Argentina, and the US are still selling those "million-address" cds, with entries dating back for years, and some of them happen to contain my e-mails, culled from newsgroup postings, documentation, etc. As quickly as I whack-a-mole spammers, others pop us (most are now located in China, either for hosting, or originating - I'd solve 80% of my spam problem if I could just nuke China's connection to the outside world.
I fight hard to rid the 'net of these parasitic scum, and I resent the idea that it's MY fault that I'm getting spammed! Lay the blame where it lies - with the spammers!!!
Finally, regarding your comments regarding telemarketers, do you realize that there is a law against calling someone if they don't want to be called? Yet, under your logic, telemarketers should have the right to "market their product." And being irresponsible with one's address (or number.) You ignore random-dialing, which penalizes me for having a phone, and random-address discovery, where dictionaries of likely usernames are matched against domain names to generate addresses, without even having to run a spambot, or collect someone's data from a form.
Do you use your e-mail for business? Cause if you do, it's got to be a pain to notify all of your clients of your new address...
Monopolist? More like self-preservationist. Linux and Irix versions are still being produced, and by cutting Windows development, there will be more engineering time to work on making Shake a better tool for Mac users.
There was an interview on the TV with one of the music recording artists trying to overturn an exemption to a California law allowing for excessively long personal service contracts for people who sign in the music industry. For those who don't know, California limits the maximum length of a personal service contract to 7 years. Any longer than that is illegal. In 1987, the recording industry managed to get an exemption passed just for them, basically allowing for indentured servitude on the part of artists who sign with them.
The recording industry's excuse is that if a band or artist gets popular, they need to be allowed to get maximum return on their investment (ie, they need to exploit them to the maximum the law allows) in order to make up for all the people who they sign that don't make it. The artists (at least the successful ones), understandably, are pissed about this - the example cited in the interview was of a singer who had been signed when she was 12. According to the terms of her contract, she needs to produce 11 albums. At 1 album every 2 years (a statistic she cited as being an industry average) she would be bound to the contract until she was 34 (at the time of the interview, she was in her early 20s.)
After her label got wind of her interview, they managed to negotiate a settlement, but there are other artists in similar positions. Essentially, they sign a contract dictating terms for a certain number of albums, and if they make a hit, they have little or no room to negotiate with the label because of the contract.
Of course, one of the terms of contract is that what they produce is property of the label - hence many artists, even if they wanted to promote themselves with MP3s, have their work controlled by the minions of the RIAA, including future work as covered under the terms of the contract...
That's how evil the system is. Now, before anyone goes off buying the RIAA line, consider this: the old Hollywood studio system functioned in the same way - actors, writers, directors, etc. were all under contract, and distributors were often forced to accept a "B" picture along with an "A" picture. These days, I don't think anyone would say that the movie industry is lacking in profits, even though everyone shuffles from job to job without the kind of iron-clad contracts that still characterize the music industry.
You're missing the point. The point isn't whether it's Wilco's quality vs. Wilco's promotion method - obviously people buy because the like the music, not because they can download it and then buy it. The point is that the marketdroid dominated music monopoly decided that Wilco was NOT marketable, and allowed them to get out of their contract. That Wilco was able to make it to 13th on the charts in their first week of release, without having a huge-ass marketing budget behind them - that's the real point. Wilco is directly challenging the place of tradional music conglomerates, and showing that people will buy music because they like it, not because the marketers tell them that they should.
On that note, I'd argue that the MP3 provided valuable promotional exposure in lieu of the huge-ass marketing budget, and even better, Wilco did not have to sign their souls away in exchange for those marketing dollars.
The state police by the way only had jurisdiction in Sacramento (the state capitol of California), which is confusing to most people, as state police in other states have jurisdiction over the entire state (ie, state troopers.) Here, our state troopers are the CHP.
On a lesser note, if you're on a University of California campus, UCPD officers also have authority from the state
The same guys who want to foist copy protected CDs as a standard on their customers? The ones who tried to arrest a customer for trying to pick up a video card that he bought on sale online? The ones with the ultra-crappy customer service?
If you're still shopping at Best Buy, this fiasco with the wireless registers should be enough to make you go somewhere else.
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Don't forget, that conventional aircraft need to sacrifice some of their carrying capacity for life support and armor to protect the pilot. At a 3000lb payload without having to support a pilot and their required accessories (not to mention the bulk of their user interface), you can build a cheap, lightweight, almost disposable attack craft. It's pretty much guaranteed that you will have multiple UCAV units assigned to a given controller.
There was a recent Wall Street Journal article on how Air Force pilots were pissed to get unmanned pilot duty after distinguished stints at flying f14s, etc. They didn't like being locked into a little box, flying a plane by remote, and they really resented the fact that they'd be locked into this duty for a year or more, while they lost out on actual airtime to their colleagues (airtime being a critical factor for advancement and promotion, not to mention basic flying skills.)
The gist of it was, the Air Force wasn't apologizing for needing qualified pilots, even to fly by remote, and were trying to line up a few T34 trainers so the Global Hawk pilots could get some real airtime in between missions.
Upshot - could it be someday that geeks with less than perfect vision could get wings in our nation's Air Force?
Try these two links:
http://www.odcmp.com/toc.htm
http://www.civilianmarksmanship.com/
They also sell M1 rifles to qualified shooters as part of the program.
Also, don't forget to take a look at the NRA website for other training classes and information.
Are you talking about Clinton or Bush? Clinton's policy of OOTW (Operations Other Than War) got our soldiers killed handing out food, and doing police duty - items that can arguably classified as NOT IN OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE.
Bush is using the military in a very focused manner (as opposed to committing the entire force structure) to root out terrorists in a now-friendly country (Afghanistan). Terrorists, may I remind you, who in one attack, killed 4000+ civilians in a major US city, some of whom were foreign nationals. Of course, I'm an American citizen, so maybe my viewpoint is a little biased...
Your country has a military, doesn't it? What does it do to justify it's existence?
In places where you are allowed to own firearms, you can train and practice in your own time. The federally funded Civilian Marksmanship Program is supposed to promote and maintain good shooting skills among civilians so that they make better soldiers in time of war.
Besides, if we're all drafted, we civilians wouldn't have much of a choice about it, would we?
Anyone remember the Last Starfighter? Beat the boss on the arcade game, and the next day, get a visit from your local galactic Starfighter recruiter...
I'm wondering how long it takes for them to add other MOS than Infantry. I'm old now - the glory of having little sleep, and hiking 40 mile treks with a 50 pound rucksack, LBE full of ammo, water and other assorted crap, plus a heavy ass M-16A1 (not to mention ammo can if you manage to draw that duty), just does not appeal to me like I did when I was 18. I wouldn't mind just working in the damn motorpool, or restocking the PX...
Not all customers. The ISS is one potential customer not in the gravity well. Telecommunications companies that need transponders are in the gravity well, but the transponders need to be in orbit. Companies wanting to mine high-value materials in space will need someone to supply them with reaction mass, solar furnaces for metals extraction, replacement parts, engines.
Remember, at current rates, every pound lofted into orbit is hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus every pound lofted into orbit has to include the cost and weight of the fuel needed to get it into orbit. Every pound of oxygen, water, structural members, and shielding you can avoid lifting off from the ground is a pound you can use to lift something else that cannot be supplied from space.
Why drop it down a gravity well at all? And why only mine metals? If you have a base on the moon or stations in orbit or the lagrange points, they're gonna need water and organic building blocks from somewhere. Honestly, I'd go for an ice rock first, slap a reactor on it, and use the water in the rock as reaction mass. Maybe tether some iron-bearing asteroids to it first so I could use maximum use of my trip out there (hell, why not just use a big-ass robot mining ship?) The only thing you'd need to do is slap a cover on it so that the sun doesn't destabilize your trajectory, ala comet tails.
Nah, that's what if statement blocks with conditions that never will be met are for. That way you preserve the bulk of your unused code when you compile your binary, so you can bloat your release and have it shipped on a couple of CDs. Not to mention it confuses the hell out of the Q&A guys.
I explain what each function is supposed to do, along with any assumptions I'm making and any desired side-effects that the coder should expect. If I'm using algorithms beyond a basic for loop, I'll stick pseudo code with example inputs and outputs in the comments as well.
Function and variable names that make sense go without saying - they may be a pain to type in, but in the end they don't hamper code efficency, so make them as self-explanatory as possible (with exceptions like using i and j for a 5 line for loop.) Remember, whitespace and good, CONSISTENT formatting is just as important as good commenting. Funky, inconsistent formatting pisses me off just as badly as cryptic commenting and 6-character all-capital variable and function names.
I comment under the assumption that the next time I look at this code, it will be years later and I'll have forgotten much of the programming language I originally wrote the code in (basically, I assume the next time I look at the code, I'll need to port it.) In instances like this, basic descriptions of what a function is supposed to do, along with pseudocode of the alogrithm with sample inputs and outputs are EXACTLY what I need - not to mention, they serve as a road map for when I'm writing and debugging the code the first time. Typically, I'll have just as much commenting as actual code for simple stuff, for anything beyond that I'll have double as much commenting as code (readable english is less efficient than clean code, so what do you expect?)
You should always look over and polish both your code and your comments before you shelve your code. If you're leading a team, it should be your code that sets the bar for good logic, commenting and formatting style. Even if you're not, good maintainable code is what they're paying you do write (I hope.) Of course, if they aren't paying you enough to write clean, commented code, then they get what they're paying for...
You can add idiots who scrawl political slogans and rally messages on buildings using colored chalk. Chalk is supposed to be easily washable... except when it's colored, and liberally smeared into brick or limestone. At that point, it does damage to remove it. I guess they use it because it's supposed to be more "environmentally friendly" than using leaflets. Morons.
Fine, don't give out your number. How does this help against telemarketers who use wardialing machines? Yes, they're illegal. So are junk faxes and the use of automatic dialers/recorded telemarketing pitches. I don't see any let up in any of those practices, despite the law. Face it, without active enforcement by the FCC/phone companies, you're pretty much at the mercy of unscrupulous spammers everywhere.
It's like the Spammer card in Illuminati - No power, making it impossible to destroy them - they're too diffuse.
Accidents. Derigibles were phased out because they were a bitch to land. You need mooring facilities, hangars big enough to hold them so moored craft can withstand a storm, and big crews to secure them. Several of the Navy's lighter-than-air fleet had accidents, mostly on landing (one was lost in a storm I think), and the Hindenburg didn't do much for the popularity of civilian derigibles.
The really funny thing is that the United States still manages a strategic Helium reserve! Yes, just as with oil, Helium is hoarded for possible military usage, even though we don't have a military derigible fleet anymore!
Are there any existing WWII era derigible hangars still around on the West coast? I know of some at Moffat air field, which is controlled by NASA, but to my knowledge, that's about it. Where the heck are we going to garage/maintain these monsters?
Actually, a better question is, who makes derigibles in volume anymore? I don't exactly see Boeing, McDonald Douglas, or Newport News fitting into the bidding process too well - to my knowledge none of their units do any work relating to lighter-than-air patrol craft. How will the public react to our getting military hardware from Graf Zepplin (yes, they still make zepplins.)
Lastly, who would control and staff these craft? The Air Force? The Navy (which controlled the derigible fleets prior to and during WWII), or the Coast Guard (who are undermanned and underfunded - WAY undermanned and WAY underfunded)?
Army's not the only force branch looking for recruits and officers. Of course, if you want to be an officer, you ought to get a college degree...
Amen! Now, if only I could find enough time to study for my license exam...
I learned basic on a Commodore 64 in elementary school (3rd grade)... and then took those skills to the Apple II. These days I pull in a tidy sum coding in Perl, C, IDL, AppleScript, Lingo, etc. Once you learn the programming basics (for loop, conditional branching, variables) you're pretty much equipped to learn almost any programming language under the sun. I say almost, because LISP (which I have learned, and have written code in) requires a good grasp of recursive design, which is another skill set entirely...
On the issue of what's too hard, I had friends in public school (Los Angeles Unified School District to boot) taking and passing the AP Calc test with perfect scores in 8th grade. Most schools have excessively low expectations of their students, and it shows. I say,
You don't need the SDK to swap out the motors and components of the Abio, although you might want to modify the operating code a bit so that the upgraded Abio doesn't accidently crush someone with it's more powerful motors...
How long before someone equips an Abio with better feet, armor, camera, and a shotgun, and sells it as an all-terrain bomb-disarming robot?
Thanks for sharing the tips - due to the sheer volume of spam, I'm moving to filtering as a first line of defense. Most spammers who can be canned by reporting have been, and I've felt that it's time to start writing adaptive heuristic algorithms to identify and waste the rest. Sending monthly totals to my congresscritter is a great idea - thanks!
You overlook those of us with e-mail addresses old enough to pre-date spam. There was no reason to hide or mangle our addresses back then because there were no spam bots, and no spammers. Usenet was actually useful, and open relays were the norm, not the bane of proper netiquette. Hell, you gave your address out and expected people to contact you, not mass-mail ads. When you give your phone out to people, do you expect them to inundate you with telemarketing pitches? Of course not!
The point? Don't class those of us who get lots of spam because we choose to keep the addresses that we have had for the last 8 years with clueless newbies who don't know how to hide their addresses. We're aware we could use new addresses, but we've chosen to fight for the ones that we've got. All of my addresses are garbled, but goddamn fucking spammers in China, Argentina, and the US are still selling those "million-address" cds, with entries dating back for years, and some of them happen to contain my e-mails, culled from newsgroup postings, documentation, etc. As quickly as I whack-a-mole spammers, others pop us (most are now located in China, either for hosting, or originating - I'd solve 80% of my spam problem if I could just nuke China's connection to the outside world.
I fight hard to rid the 'net of these parasitic scum, and I resent the idea that it's MY fault that I'm getting spammed! Lay the blame where it lies - with the spammers!!!
Finally, regarding your comments regarding telemarketers, do you realize that there is a law against calling someone if they don't want to be called? Yet, under your logic, telemarketers should have the right to "market their product." And being irresponsible with one's address (or number.) You ignore random-dialing, which penalizes me for having a phone, and random-address discovery, where dictionaries of likely usernames are matched against domain names to generate addresses, without even having to run a spambot, or collect someone's data from a form.
Do you use your e-mail for business? Cause if you do, it's got to be a pain to notify all of your clients of your new address...
Monopolist? More like self-preservationist. Linux and Irix versions are still being produced, and by cutting Windows development, there will be more engineering time to work on making Shake a better tool for Mac users.
There was an interview on the TV with one of the music recording artists trying to overturn an exemption to a California law allowing for excessively long personal service contracts for people who sign in the music industry. For those who don't know, California limits the maximum length of a personal service contract to 7 years. Any longer than that is illegal. In 1987, the recording industry managed to get an exemption passed just for them, basically allowing for indentured servitude on the part of artists who sign with them.
The recording industry's excuse is that if a band or artist gets popular, they need to be allowed to get maximum return on their investment (ie, they need to exploit them to the maximum the law allows) in order to make up for all the people who they sign that don't make it. The artists (at least the successful ones), understandably, are pissed about this - the example cited in the interview was of a singer who had been signed when she was 12. According to the terms of her contract, she needs to produce 11 albums. At 1 album every 2 years (a statistic she cited as being an industry average) she would be bound to the contract until she was 34 (at the time of the interview, she was in her early 20s.)
After her label got wind of her interview, they managed to negotiate a settlement, but there are other artists in similar positions. Essentially, they sign a contract dictating terms for a certain number of albums, and if they make a hit, they have little or no room to negotiate with the label because of the contract.
Of course, one of the terms of contract is that what they produce is property of the label - hence many artists, even if they wanted to promote themselves with MP3s, have their work controlled by the minions of the RIAA, including future work as covered under the terms of the contract...
That's how evil the system is. Now, before anyone goes off buying the RIAA line, consider this: the old Hollywood studio system functioned in the same way - actors, writers, directors, etc. were all under contract, and distributors were often forced to accept a "B" picture along with an "A" picture. These days, I don't think anyone would say that the movie industry is lacking in profits, even though everyone shuffles from job to job without the kind of iron-clad contracts that still characterize the music industry.
You're missing the point. The point isn't whether it's Wilco's quality vs. Wilco's promotion method - obviously people buy because the like the music, not because they can download it and then buy it. The point is that the marketdroid dominated music monopoly decided that Wilco was NOT marketable, and allowed them to get out of their contract. That Wilco was able to make it to 13th on the charts in their first week of release, without having a huge-ass marketing budget behind them - that's the real point. Wilco is directly challenging the place of tradional music conglomerates, and showing that people will buy music because they like it, not because the marketers tell them that they should.
On that note, I'd argue that the MP3 provided valuable promotional exposure in lieu of the huge-ass marketing budget, and even better, Wilco did not have to sign their souls away in exchange for those marketing dollars.
The state police by the way only had jurisdiction in Sacramento (the state capitol of California), which is confusing to most people, as state police in other states have jurisdiction over the entire state (ie, state troopers.) Here, our state troopers are the CHP.
On a lesser note, if you're on a University of California campus, UCPD officers also have authority from the state
This is WORST Buy we're talking about, remember?
The same guys who want to foist copy protected CDs as a standard on their customers? The ones who tried to arrest a customer for trying to pick up a video card that he bought on sale online? The ones with the ultra-crappy customer service?
If you're still shopping at Best Buy, this fiasco with the wireless registers should be enough to make you go somewhere else.