I'd pay the $1.50 just to have them leave it off. My phone would not be useful to me if I had to leave it at the security desk when I visit customers who ban the phones because they have that lousy camera on them. (I think all our major customers ban them.) Unfortunately, it is getting harder to get phones without the cameras.
I don't have a camera phone, but the one I have looks peculiar enough that at one customer's site, I had to wait while security inspected my phone for a few minutes to make sure no camera was hidden there.
1. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service
I control the means of producing or selling my services. 2. A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity
I have exclusive control over my activities. 3. Something that is exclusively possessed or controlled
I have exclusive possession and control of myself, (except for the DOJ part of me, of course.)
I am a monopoly of myself. That doesn't make me bad, though other things might. So if EA has a monopoly on the NFL games market, that doesn't make it inherently a harmful thing. The beneficiary of this monopoly (whether or not they got a good deal is another matter) is the NFL. When I watch my local team play, the only beer available is Budweiser, but if Coors offered them more money next year, I'm sure that they would be the only beer available.
EA paid for these exclusive rights, and in a few years, they will either have to ante up and pay again, or someone else will do it instead. It would be a harmful monopoly if somehow EA had made it so that nobody else could bring any football games to the market, but that isn't the case, any more than the exclusion of Coors from my football stadium keeps it from being available at my convenience store.
In fact, out of curiosity I searched for myself once and turned up all sorts of erroneous information," he said. "One seemingly reputable and authoritative page even had my name wrong!"
It seems Carly Simon had a song about Mr. Jennings . . .
Yes, they are hiring, but it is not really additional jobs. For example, someone above mentioned the Sprint deal. Well, the IT people who are at Sprint and are lucky will become IBM employees. Those who are not lucky will be out of a job. To IBM, these are new hires. However, these are not additional jobs, but one company cutting payroll and hiring someone else to hire some of the people who got laid off.
Dell sent a technician to our place to replace a faulty DLT drive. He removed the drive, plugged in the other one, and froze up the server. He was the next thing to freeze up, as he just stood there and said, "I'm not going to touch anything, because I will just get blamed for whatever happens anyway!"
I took care of the server and ever since, we have told Dell, "Please don't send a technician, we will take care of it ourself!"
To use a tired cliche, a security policy is as "strong as its weakest link." If people have access to web mail, CD burners, or other simple means of transferring data, then the policy is absurd. However, if strong security measures have been taken elsewhere, then this is perfectly reasonable, too.
So, if I were sued by the RIAA, could I give them $3000 worth of "merchandise" as payment instead of giving that stuff to Goodwill? For starters, I think my old underwear is worth $1 a pair.
This might be more valid if every email provider was doing this, the way that credit card companies did this in the eighties. I am not familiar with the quality of choices of credit cards that were available then, but there is plenty of choice today in the types of free and paid email accounts. If people don't want the privacy infringements they fear from Google, but they want free mail, they can go to Yahoo, Excite or Hotmail.
Even if we were to agree that minimum wage laws were good, the analogy doesn't fit very well. Some people may only be able to get a minimum wage job, and thus have no other choice. When it comes to email, there is choice. You can choose Gmail and all its possible privacy infringements, or you can choose Yahoo, Hotmail, Excite, or other freemail services if you want web mail. There are very accessible options available for those who don't like what Gmail is doing.
What is the "governnment entity" that is greedy? Last I checked, we're running a massive deficit. I'm a greedy taxpayer who is all for shrinking the size of govt and keeping as much of my own money as possible. If the govt spends less on the licensing merry-go-round, that's a win for the taxpayer.
On another note, Microsoft's ads claim that their software saves money, partly by lowering personnel costs (jobs.) What's sauce for the goose . . .
They are successfull because they are the best search tool out there, but there is more to being "Google" than just being a good search tool. If it was just a good search tool, there wouldn't be an artilce about thim on/. every day. They are not only good at search, but they have an approach to the Internet that has struck a chord with many on the one hand. On the flip side, they are so influential that minor changes to their algorithms can send some small businesses into a tail spin.
They have a few big issues. I have talked to both a union person and my SBC account rep about it as well.
Some of the union gripes are that SBC is outsourcing jobs instead of giving the jobs in new areas to union employees, so the union wants some job guarantees. Another union gripe is that they currently pay 4-7% in copays (no premiums) for health insurance, and SBC wants to raise it to 7-11%.
SBC is also using this as a stick to beat the feds with, because they claim that they have to support the CLEC's by leasing them their lines at less than it costs to maintain them, so if the feds give them some pricing relief, they will reciprocate with the unions.
As a customer of both CLEC's and SBC, I hope SBC loses on the feds front. The service I get from the CLEC is vastly superior to SBC's service, even when the CLEC leases the line from SBC. Presumably, it is because with SBC, we're small fish, big pond, whereas with the CLEC, we're big fish, small pond, though I think SBC's problems are systemic.
The difference is that people don't have to choose MSIE to be their browser. I can surf the web with Firefox, but I cannot choose whether I interact with Verisign. That's a monopoly I cannot get around.
As others have also already mentioned, it messes up far more than just web traffic. It has wreaked havoc with many anti-spam solutions. Of course, in Verisign's case (remember their annoying pop-ups), they and the spammers may be more birds of a feather than they care to admit.
It is a big deal, though, when one buys a hybrid as the result of a caluculated decision. The price differences between the hybrid and conventional car are large enough that one has to be careful if saving money is the goal. This difference in mileage is enough to probably tip the scales from what was already likely to be a more expensive choice, even in the long run.
These equivocations are a bit extreme. I lean libertarian, and there are plenty of things about Ashcroft, Patriot Act, War in Iraq, etc. that bother me, but there are significant things that make everything mentioned quite a bit different.
Kent State - yes it was a travesty, but there were large consequences, and people were rightly outraged. There were no repercussions on those who spoke out against Kent State, unlike China.
Imprison without evidence - probably the most valid one on the list, but to equivocate the anti-terror activities with what happens in totalitarian regimes where people are killed for having the wrong religion is quite a strech. I have vocally and consistently opposed the war in Iraq, but I do not see any need to worry about being imprisoned. Someone in China would not even have that luxury.
American armed guards at airports - I've been at our airports with armed guards, and I've been to the airport in Belgrade, Yugoslavia which also had armed guards. One noticeable difference is I never saw an American soldier take the camera from a young girl and rip out the film, but I did see a Yugoslavian soldier do that. The security measures at our airports are maybe wrong-headed, but they do not compare.
American media censorship of Reagan movie, war in Iraq and Michal Moore's movie - Our media chose to self-censor in these areas. CBS's giving of the Reagan docudrama to Showtime was a calculated political move, not the act of an oppressive government. The names of the dead from Iraq were read by Ted Koppell on Nightline, and he faced no governent repercussions. Michael Moore's movie will still get played, just not by Miramax, because Disney did not need another PR hit. A spineless media that values access more than real journalism is not the same as Pravda.
We have our problems, but the difference between the US and China is one of more than a few feet, or we wouldn't be having this discussion without fear that our Internet access would be revoked.
The Search and Rescue operations are expensive, and having locator devices would make the searching go much faster and cheaper. How about informing everyone that if they want to go into the woods, that is their own business, but if they need Search and Rescue, they will have to pay for it?
The way to lower your cost is by agreeing to take some sort of locator device with you so the "Search" part would not take nearly as long.
There could even be Search and Rescue insurance policies, like those some people get when they rent a car. The price of the policy could be lowered if you agreed to take the locator device with you.
Not that this happens all the time, but I would have liked more tuners on my DVR when we had a hostage situation at work, just to see what each station's take on the situation was.
Of course, "worth watching" is in the eye of the beholder. I HATE local news - they shouldn't need more than ten minutes.
You can realize half that dream with Microsoft Software Update Services. We've been running it for nearly a year, and it keeps every Windows machine on our network patched. All I do is approve patches, and they are automatically pushed out to every computer on the network. TCO for 130 users was a little over $500 for another copy of Windows 2000 Server, plus a day for setup, plus about ten minutes a month checking and approving patches.
I know it isn't perfect, and I shouldn't even have to pay for a server to keep our MS stuff up-to-date, but it has saved us tons of time and hasn't given us any problems yet. Maybe we are an exception.
If you go to their website, http://www.bondedsender.com, and look at their rules, you will see that they do have somewhat reasonable rules that must be followed. There are many more rules than just this, but here is the part under the section called "Consent."
Consent
V. Participating Senders must ensure that consent with appropriate disclosure or a prior business relationship exists prior to sending Commercial or Promotional Email Messages.
Acceptable forms of consent include:
Double Opt-In: (sometimes referred to as 'Confirmed Opt-In'): The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a confirmation email and the Recipient confirms his/her request by replying or visiting a provided URL.
Opt-In with Verification: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions.
Opt-In: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list.
Pre-Selected Option with Verification: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
Pre-Selected Option: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
I heard a news segment on NPR a few months ago about hybrids, and they said that Ford was far enough behind in hybrid technology that they were licensing some hybrid technology from Toyota. I don't know if that covers this, though. Honda has already had hybrids here as long as has Toyota.
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention it, but a possible theory might be that they are intentionally manufacturing a crisis. Microsoft has the potential to be dinged by tons of patent infringement lawsuits based on patents as frivolous as this one. They probably have more exposure here than anyone else.
My theory is that it is possible that there might be a lot more of these Microsoft patents in the works. Then, rather than having to fight off all the lawsuits for their patent infringements (some legit, others not) at great expense, and in irrational courtrooms with unsympathetic juries (hello EU), they could create such an overload in the patent and legal system that the only option would be to take a step back and look at how ridiculous the whole patent issue has become.
I don't have any facts to back it up, it's just a theory.
It was a short review, but one problem I had with their comparison of PowerPoint/Impress was that Impress had a hard time working with a PowerPoint file that had a lot of imbedded Excel and Word information. Frankly, PowerPoint isn't nearly as good at handling those things as it ought to be either. Most of the testing was done to see how well an office could migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice, so the concern is a legitemate one, but I think that one will see that Impress will handle Writer and Calc files as well or better than PowerPoint will handle Word and Excel files.
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I don't have a camera phone, but the one I have looks peculiar enough that at one customer's site, I had to wait while security inspected my phone for a few minutes to make sure no camera was hidden there.
I control the means of producing or selling my services.
2. A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity
I have exclusive control over my activities.
3. Something that is exclusively possessed or controlled
I have exclusive possession and control of myself, (except for the DOJ part of me, of course.)
I am a monopoly of myself. That doesn't make me bad, though other things might. So if EA has a monopoly on the NFL games market, that doesn't make it inherently a harmful thing. The beneficiary of this monopoly (whether or not they got a good deal is another matter) is the NFL. When I watch my local team play, the only beer available is Budweiser, but if Coors offered them more money next year, I'm sure that they would be the only beer available.
EA paid for these exclusive rights, and in a few years, they will either have to ante up and pay again, or someone else will do it instead. It would be a harmful monopoly if somehow EA had made it so that nobody else could bring any football games to the market, but that isn't the case, any more than the exclusion of Coors from my football stadium keeps it from being available at my convenience store.
It seems Carly Simon had a song about Mr. Jennings . . .
I'm just impressed that a /.'er actually does laundry!
Yes, they are hiring, but it is not really additional jobs. For example, someone above mentioned the Sprint deal. Well, the IT people who are at Sprint and are lucky will become IBM employees. Those who are not lucky will be out of a job. To IBM, these are new hires. However, these are not additional jobs, but one company cutting payroll and hiring someone else to hire some of the people who got laid off.
I took care of the server and ever since, we have told Dell, "Please don't send a technician, we will take care of it ourself!"
To use a tired cliche, a security policy is as "strong as its weakest link." If people have access to web mail, CD burners, or other simple means of transferring data, then the policy is absurd. However, if strong security measures have been taken elsewhere, then this is perfectly reasonable, too.
So, if I were sued by the RIAA, could I give them $3000 worth of "merchandise" as payment instead of giving that stuff to Goodwill? For starters, I think my old underwear is worth $1 a pair.
This might be more valid if every email provider was doing this, the way that credit card companies did this in the eighties. I am not familiar with the quality of choices of credit cards that were available then, but there is plenty of choice today in the types of free and paid email accounts. If people don't want the privacy infringements they fear from Google, but they want free mail, they can go to Yahoo, Excite or Hotmail.
Even if we were to agree that minimum wage laws were good, the analogy doesn't fit very well. Some people may only be able to get a minimum wage job, and thus have no other choice. When it comes to email, there is choice. You can choose Gmail and all its possible privacy infringements, or you can choose Yahoo, Hotmail, Excite, or other freemail services if you want web mail. There are very accessible options available for those who don't like what Gmail is doing.
What is the "governnment entity" that is greedy? Last I checked, we're running a massive deficit. I'm a greedy taxpayer who is all for shrinking the size of govt and keeping as much of my own money as possible. If the govt spends less on the licensing merry-go-round, that's a win for the taxpayer. On another note, Microsoft's ads claim that their software saves money, partly by lowering personnel costs (jobs.) What's sauce for the goose . . .
They are successfull because they are the best search tool out there, but there is more to being "Google" than just being a good search tool. If it was just a good search tool, there wouldn't be an artilce about thim on /. every day. They are not only good at search, but they have an approach to the Internet that has struck a chord with many on the one hand. On the flip side, they are so influential that minor changes to their algorithms can send some small businesses into a tail spin.
Some of the union gripes are that SBC is outsourcing jobs instead of giving the jobs in new areas to union employees, so the union wants some job guarantees. Another union gripe is that they currently pay 4-7% in copays (no premiums) for health insurance, and SBC wants to raise it to 7-11%.
SBC is also using this as a stick to beat the feds with, because they claim that they have to support the CLEC's by leasing them their lines at less than it costs to maintain them, so if the feds give them some pricing relief, they will reciprocate with the unions.
As a customer of both CLEC's and SBC, I hope SBC loses on the feds front. The service I get from the CLEC is vastly superior to SBC's service, even when the CLEC leases the line from SBC. Presumably, it is because with SBC, we're small fish, big pond, whereas with the CLEC, we're big fish, small pond, though I think SBC's problems are systemic.
You're lucky. I can't even get them to keep my service up with them not on strike. This is going to be great!
As others have also already mentioned, it messes up far more than just web traffic. It has wreaked havoc with many anti-spam solutions. Of course, in Verisign's case (remember their annoying pop-ups), they and the spammers may be more birds of a feather than they care to admit.
It is a big deal, though, when one buys a hybrid as the result of a caluculated decision. The price differences between the hybrid and conventional car are large enough that one has to be careful if saving money is the goal. This difference in mileage is enough to probably tip the scales from what was already likely to be a more expensive choice, even in the long run.
Kent State - yes it was a travesty, but there were large consequences, and people were rightly outraged. There were no repercussions on those who spoke out against Kent State, unlike China.
Imprison without evidence - probably the most valid one on the list, but to equivocate the anti-terror activities with what happens in totalitarian regimes where people are killed for having the wrong religion is quite a strech. I have vocally and consistently opposed the war in Iraq, but I do not see any need to worry about being imprisoned. Someone in China would not even have that luxury.
American armed guards at airports - I've been at our airports with armed guards, and I've been to the airport in Belgrade, Yugoslavia which also had armed guards. One noticeable difference is I never saw an American soldier take the camera from a young girl and rip out the film, but I did see a Yugoslavian soldier do that. The security measures at our airports are maybe wrong-headed, but they do not compare.
American media censorship of Reagan movie, war in Iraq and Michal Moore's movie - Our media chose to self-censor in these areas. CBS's giving of the Reagan docudrama to Showtime was a calculated political move, not the act of an oppressive government. The names of the dead from Iraq were read by Ted Koppell on Nightline, and he faced no governent repercussions. Michael Moore's movie will still get played, just not by Miramax, because Disney did not need another PR hit. A spineless media that values access more than real journalism is not the same as Pravda.
We have our problems, but the difference between the US and China is one of more than a few feet, or we wouldn't be having this discussion without fear that our Internet access would be revoked.
The way to lower your cost is by agreeing to take some sort of locator device with you so the "Search" part would not take nearly as long.
There could even be Search and Rescue insurance policies, like those some people get when they rent a car. The price of the policy could be lowered if you agreed to take the locator device with you.
Of course, "worth watching" is in the eye of the beholder. I HATE local news - they shouldn't need more than ten minutes.
Is the battery replaceable, or is it like the old iPOD battery?
I know it isn't perfect, and I shouldn't even have to pay for a server to keep our MS stuff up-to-date, but it has saved us tons of time and hasn't given us any problems yet. Maybe we are an exception.
Consent
V. Participating Senders must ensure that consent with appropriate disclosure or a prior business relationship exists prior to sending Commercial or Promotional Email Messages.
Acceptable forms of consent include:
Double Opt-In: (sometimes referred to as 'Confirmed Opt-In'): The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a confirmation email and the Recipient confirms his/her request by replying or visiting a provided URL.
Opt-In with Verification: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions.
Opt-In: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. Pre-Selected Option with Verification: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
Pre-Selected Option: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
I heard a news segment on NPR a few months ago about hybrids, and they said that Ford was far enough behind in hybrid technology that they were licensing some hybrid technology from Toyota. I don't know if that covers this, though. Honda has already had hybrids here as long as has Toyota.
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention it, but a possible theory might be that they are intentionally manufacturing a crisis. Microsoft has the potential to be dinged by tons of patent infringement lawsuits based on patents as frivolous as this one. They probably have more exposure here than anyone else. My theory is that it is possible that there might be a lot more of these Microsoft patents in the works. Then, rather than having to fight off all the lawsuits for their patent infringements (some legit, others not) at great expense, and in irrational courtrooms with unsympathetic juries (hello EU), they could create such an overload in the patent and legal system that the only option would be to take a step back and look at how ridiculous the whole patent issue has become. I don't have any facts to back it up, it's just a theory.
It was a short review, but one problem I had with their comparison of PowerPoint/Impress was that Impress had a hard time working with a PowerPoint file that had a lot of imbedded Excel and Word information. Frankly, PowerPoint isn't nearly as good at handling those things as it ought to be either. Most of the testing was done to see how well an office could migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice, so the concern is a legitemate one, but I think that one will see that Impress will handle Writer and Calc files as well or better than PowerPoint will handle Word and Excel files.