A long time ago a similar service existed, "www.movierater.com", you would rate a mess of movies and it would give you the picks out on video and in theaters that you would likely like. I miss that one, it had pretty good accuracy.
The only thing I don't like about this one is that it is Yahoo doing it. They have too much presence and too much potential for data mining that the old single site I used to use didn't have.
I replaced my LCD with a used Nokia 445Xi Plus 21" CRT that I picked up used for $150 CDN. It's by far my most beloved piece of hardware on my system.
I went basically the same route. I picked up 4 21" Iiyama CRTs refurbished, 3 were excellent, and 1 was a little bit fuzzy for my liking so I gave that one away. I got the 4 of them for less than what 1 new one would cost. Having a pair of 21" displays for my desktop makes life so much easier,and I still have a spare for when one of these dies.
You can rely on the internal sensors if you like and most newer boards come with such devices. I have a bit less trust in such things and prefer to take the reading directly from the line with a volt meter.
I've worked on many PCs, and I check at the plug with my multimeter. Some of the internal sensors I've looked at have been so far off that if those values were real the system wouldn't be running but fine at the multimeter. There should be some way to calibrate these, but I never see anything on the board to do it with. Any easy way?
Well, that sure does end my consideration of buying a Pentium-D, Intel motherboard or any Intel product period. I had been giving a Pentium-D system serious consideration for cost/performance ratio reasons, but this changes that. Think I'll buy some AMD shares instead.
I have a feeling Intel is going to find out that this is an ever bigger hit with consumers that the Processor-ID-Serial Number tag in the Pentium-III.
From Jim Bergers piece: DVDs are a good example of where government intervention was rejected.
Really? They didn't ram through the DMCA for their own interest by shopping it in international treaties? It wasn't software companies screaming the loudest for this stuff, it was the entertainment companies.
On the other hand, in medicine I've seen some pretty obvious trials. For instance, the recent "Combining morphine + ibuprofen is more effective than the same level of morphine and no ibuprofen in relieving pain" and by the same author (I guess he figured it was a gold mine) "Combining two opioids is more effective than one opioid at the same dose as the first opioid alone". Who would have thought! But worse, it was a meta-analysis. Which means some other reasearches already did the same study and he just pirated their data.
Most of the pain research isn't very good to begin with, but this type of stuff only sucks up the limited grant money that could be used for meaningful work.
I would love to see pain research that focused on what could be done to prevent acute pain from becomming chronic. Every once in awhile in the surgical setting you see a good study, like one that found you could reduce allodynia, hyperalgesia, and RSD/CRPS by 90%+ by pretreating patients with an NMDA antagonist, long acting opioid, COX2 inhibitor, and after surgery maintaining the LA-opioid, a decent breakthrough medicine, and some tylenol for 2 weeks. A 90% reduction in those complications and better outcomes is big news. I wish someone would apply the same basic principle to when patients first present with pain. Maybe we could stop 90% of them after modifying doctors standand practices from going on to develop chronic pain, but no one is doing the research, so we will never know.
Instead we get treated to the 127th confirmatory study that NSAIDS are effective on mild to moderate arthritis pain.
Compact fluorescent is no longer 10x the cost of a old bulb, though they are more expensive by several times. They last 10x as long though.
My own experience with them does not support your or the makers claims of extended longevity. Every single one of them I have ever installed has failed 9X sooner or greater than it was supposed to. In fact, many of them failed before the regular bulbs on the same switch did. I wanted this to work, I had hoped for energy savings to pay for the bulb, but what I got was a light with 10X higher cost and 75% of the life of the existing technology. I felt extremely ripped off.
I sincerely hope these have improved, but I'm not willing to make another investment with them.
Re:At least they're taking extra precautions...
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Tinfoil Hat House
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No, unfotunately I am not joking. Many of the stores that sell garden lights openly tell you they share their customer list with law enforcement, a few of them have signs on the door. The police used to tail people who would go to the garden center and pull them over...etc That behavior got it institutionalized here, so they got the hardware stores involved and started offering cash to employees who would phone in on larger orders of certain supplies. Buying a mess of mylar at the hardware store is enough. Buying a single space age blanket probably isn't going to raise an eyebrow though.
I'm not sure how much better the mylar is for that purpose, I've been told that it reflects different spectrums of light more effectively than just flat white paint, and slightly more effectively (total lumens) than the plastic sheeting. The plastic sheeting is lot cheaper.
Of course just because they come to your door doesn't mean you have to let them in, but the mere fact that they are at the door because you made a purchase from the hardware store is very disturbing.
Re:At least they're taking extra precautions...
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Tinfoil Hat House
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· Score: 3, Informative
The only problem with buying lots of mylar and mylar space blankets it the visit your get from the DEA after the hardware store reports you.
They started offering cash rewards to store owners here to report that kind of activity, it doesn't matter that most people buying it aren't running a grow op.
They've certainly been a lot more aggressive in the past few years, particularly following legal rather than technological avenues, since illegal uses of P2P became widespread. What we need is a change of legal framework to something where basic rights -- for example, the right to back-up your data or move it to different media formats for your own use after legitimately paying for it -- are paramount, but thereafter there are reasonable penalties for those who abuse the system -- for example, copying and then giving the copy away to others.
I look at things a little more long term, and some of those making format decisions also did. Now when you had a record, you could back it to tape or reel to reel tape and that was good enough, the record would last a long long time if you took care of it, but would shatter if you dropped it. This was a pretty good period for us. I used to makes tapes of all of my records and use the tape as much as I could to preserve my records.
With the introduction of the CD without restrictions on it, things improved even more for us -, you could make a perfect (or nearly perfect given some limits of invertors) backup of that media(CD backup for the car, original in the house), you would also be able to adapt that media to future formats should those formats change. It was just a matter of time till we got DVD, and burnable DVD for instance, and something will replace that as well. If you copied that CD you could convert the format to do many things and adapt to future formats. It's just data.
The people that designed DVD's had the history of the CD in front of them. Part of that included getting to resell all of the content again and make bank on it, people wanted digital media. But they also realized the format would change again, so this time they sought to preserve their rights yet again (as they had tried to do with macrovision) so that you couldn't backup your media and prepare for format changes in the future, you couldn't even backup to the existing format. They wanted to preserve "You will have to buy it again" forever.
It wasn't anyones piracy but their own that they had in mind. This is a player who has always acted in bad faith, even in the VHS days.
I don't disagee that their tone and justifications have changed now, but I'm not willing to grant a free pass on their motives for the decisions that were made then, and I don't think the rest of should either. The time line and the MPAA's public story & the development history of the DVD do not jive. The computer is still the biggest threat to "You have to buy it again & again* for them. Yes, it includes additional and largely unrealized other threats, but the biggest revenue hit they could take would be us not having to buy all of our media again when the format shift happens yet again.
We should realize this side of the MPAA's history, and that they have always been a player acting in bad faith. We ought to be fighting them tooth and nail to keep them out of our computers and other devices.
It's just data, and we ought to be able to move the data around that we own how we see fit. It's fundimental to ownership. In terms of making copies for others, we already have existing laws that protect their interest, no one is sticking up for our interest.
Why are we letting them have a free pass for the examples where they have clearly violated the laws of this land? Do we have a frickin' shortage of lawyers folks? I know we can't enforce criminal penalties, only the government can do that, but we sure as hell can bring civil case after civil case.
People like you don't like DRM, or region-locked DVDs, and all that crap.
And if it weren't for people like you being so blatantly selfish, the rest of us wouldn't now have to put up with it.
Region coding had nothing to do with >cough copyright infringement. Where you get off on this tanget I don't know. The truth is, they would have done region coding anyway. They concieved of region coding as a way to put up a technological barrier to being able to see movies earlier in your own market than they were released, if they happened to be released already in another market segment. It was nothing to do with not paying for the movie. They simply thought that they could maximize profits by staggering theater and DVD releases in different markets.
The other truth is, DRM would have come anyway. Macrovision was setup before VHS copyright infringement was ever a big deal, and it (just like every method before it) was quickly circumvented and tools were available *before* its introduction to do so. (Your pre-198X VCR didn't have the feature and wouldn't recognize it.;-)
Ethics indeed. Companies have long sought ways to make you pay for things again & again. I don't see the movie industry as that much different from G.E. making lightbulbs that were designed to last less than half the length advertised. You would have to go buy it again. Or appliance makers designing a product to fail after a certain period (common house fans are a good case in point).
In the same way, DVDs are made on a material with a shorter than advertised life, they wont replace the media if it goes bad, and they have made it illegal for you to make a backup of your media that you paid for. They are advertised as "OWN IT ON DVD", but you don't own it. Maybe your version of ethics is different from mine, but I consider (and so do many state attorney generals) the tactics of G.E. to be unethical and illegal. It's no stretch to say that the movie industry is just as unethical and had performed the exact same kind of fraud as G.E., but they went 10 steps further with their fraud an unethical behavior. They tried to circumvent your rights to the material even while the media is working.
If these same extended tactics were applied to lightbulbs, no one in the right mind would buy them if they were advertised as such. This would be a lightbulb that doesn't turn on when you tell it to, it only comes on when G.E. allows it to, it doesn't turn off when you tell it to so you can't save the bulbs life - it only turns off when G.E. tells it to, it wont work when you try to do things that G.E. doesn't like you having light for, or if you travel with it it wont work in certain locations, and even though it fails in less than half of the time advertised they wont replace it. You have to buy another one. It would also code your socket so you couldn't use a different light bulb, and if you modified your light socket to work with other bulbs or to make the lightbulb behave like all light bulbs should knowingly behave (despite it still having a reduced life), they would sue you and have you thrown in jail.
People who copy movies may be copyright infringers, but the MPAA are pirates.
I find billboards even more annoying. We built a public highway with taxpayer money (sound familiar???) and these parasites come in & stick up 120x40' billboards all over it. Worse, they put them in an environment where viewing them can distract you from the highly dangerous activity of driving that you are engaged in.
Since all public companies will be required to have this in place next year, what are good email achiving systems that are currently available? Do we have any GPL/BSD solutions that are reasonably automatic? (IE: Throw one machine at the front and it intercepts everything headed for your 5 different mail servers..etc)
That argument holds no water in the software industry. Sure, a bunch of college students and kids will have software they never would've purchased. They are insignificant on the grand scale of things.
I disagree, they are not insignificant at all. The mere fact they have your software, and have used your software means that when a problem comes up that your software can possibly solve it will be the first thing on the table that they suggest. The process may take a few years for the 16 year old with a CAD program, or the college student with a database program, or the art student with photoshop - but in the end, them being familiar with your software will probably lead to it being used in the business setting later. Most of those copies will be paid for.
Also not insignificant is the number of copies that are downloaded just so people can learn to use your software. It's hard to get a job that requires you to be familiar with 18+ software packages that each retail for $599+ when you don't have that kind of cash laying around. The company doesn't want to train you, they want you to already know that.
Outside of games, I have a feeling that most of the piracy going on is of this type. Yes, there are businesses that run entirely on pirated software, but would you risk that when only one employee with a grudge can bring down a load of massive fines on you?
(it's such a pain to have to find all the extensions I want after you install mozilla/firefox..i wish they would just dump the extension idea and build everything into the browser--it could be done without more "bloat".
I agree that having to go & hunt down extensions is a pain. Instead of installing extensions, I download them now and stick them into a folder on the network drive here. I still have to do the whole "open file" routine, but it's far better than having to hunt on the extensionroom site for everything I want back. Of course, the ones that wont work with the new version I have to go get (or wait for them to be updated), and I don't like when extensions wont update properly, or crash (like WeatherFox did) Firefox to where I have to go into safe mode to take a guess at what broke what and remove things. There is a certain point where spaghetti string starts to apply.
There are some extensions I feel should be built into the browser, but the problem becomes - what I think is important is not what everyone else does, and with a product as customizeable as Firefox is with more than 300+ extensions available for it, how would anyone pick and choose and have everyone be happy with it?
For every error the mainstream media makes, the "alternative" media makes one, or likely many more.
As bad as NYT & Newsweek are, they have absolutely nothing on the error rate and sensationalized crap-flood rate of my local NBC affiliate KDSK. Though last weeks ABC-News-Today-USA Today-tie in story on pain care was right up there with them. Fluff coverage with lack of insight & serious misdirection is even worse, IMO.
I think the NY Times is right, the only draw that they have is their opinion pieces, and while they usually are dead wrong on most subjects, this has set the "talking points" so we can all listen to inane debates everywhere else on Sunday morning that have no insight on the real issues. I 100% applaud their decision to bury this behind registration, fees, blood test, and even retinal scans. This decision will help shift the debates to something else, and from where I sit, it can only get better.
I'm not always the best about documenting what I do, but every job I've ever left where it actually mattered (where I had some responsibility), I've gone above and beyond making sure they were able to do the job without me. I'm sure problems were still blamed on me, but hopefully nobody had the nerve to suggest that I deliberately caused the problems.
When you fully come to appreciate just how irrational people are when it comes to things that they do not understand fully -- it's quite probable you were being bad mouthed for "f'ing that up" 20 minutes after you left the building.
I've had users say "You must have done something to it! It worked fine before YOU touched it!" even more amusing on systems that were off site...because they can't accept that computers are not fully reliable, software has bugs, and that just maybe they did something they weren't supposed to do (though we did try to make that very difficult). As if I ever had the time to come by and work out how to sabotage their word document, or cause their spread sheet to crash and them to have to do it again.
The same people can grasp that if their car has a defect, the boogie man probably didn't break into it the night before and sabotage their cruise control so it doesn't stay on. You will, however, never convince them the same thing about the beige box next on their desk. Unfortunately, some of these folks end up in management...
"While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves.
I don't see how this could be... The new Battlestar Galactica is terrible, absolutely terrible. Now if they were showing reruns of the old series, maybe, but I want my 40 minutes back from even watching the torrent of the new one.
I think about what exciting things this could do for pain control. For instance, if it could be made to generate enough power for neuro-stim devices, you might be able to have 24 hour pain control without having to have risky and costly surgeries every couple years. Even an implantable device for better intestinal and bowel regulation would be possible with that amount of current, real problems for people with crohns disease.
I even remember reading something about a version of gastic bypass surgery that used elecric stim to trick people into thinking they were full. Perhaps it could be used as part of a weight loss tool for the severely obese. Though not through the reduction of glucose as some people are suggesting.
Also the idea of actively controlled implantable infusion pumps without having to deal with the batteries sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Right now the choices are mostly passive pumps, or pumps with batteries with if have to have adjustable control. These are widely used in pain control, and though you would still have to refill them with drugs, it would be one less hassle.
Also thinking about some of the brain operations they are doing for parkinsons patients where they implant stimulators in their brains, those could be made self powering as well.
I don't think they could do a pacemaker this way as I believe it would still need a battery, but I'm sure there are plenty of other applications if they can get the amps a little bit higher.
You are only asked the last 4 digits of your social security number if you are applying to buy something under their extended payment plans. In which case they use another company to extend the credit out and it is needed for the approval process (just like any other loan application) to verify your credit rating and help them make a decision on whether or not to extend credit.
You will never be asked your SS number, or any part of your SS number if you are not applying to purchase on credit from them.
It may not be as grim. If we each write our reps and tell them, do you really want to be known as the guy who broke TV and made it impossible for all of the rabid sports fans to use their digital recording setups and big screen plasma HDTVs? Me, my xerox machine, stack of sports jerseys, and one hour of free time during every >insert local sports teams names home game doesn't think so.
In my home town we have MLB, NHL, NFL, and a NASCAR circuit. The fans wont take kindly to that being passed if they know who to blame. Even the threat of calling into every sports radio show to name those responsible holds weight.
Hockey fans in particular wont tolerate not being able to see the Stanley Cup Playoffs in high quality. Not with the "all-sports-packages" going for $60-80 a pop in most places.
The politicians need to know it is a hot button issue if someone is willing to hold their feet to the fire, and doing so isn't particularily expensive. We have a natural set of allies in this, and it's never too early to start making phone calls and flyers even if the votes are not in.
Sporting events if one of the specifically mentioned items that the broadcast flag is targeting, so we can even use their own words against them, just put it in bold...
Unless I'm missing something, I can't see how slowing down gradually will increase anything beside the frustration of the driver behind you because you're not getting to a stop light quicker
I used to work as a courier, while fuel is a pretty big expense, it isn't the only expense on a car. You pay for quick starts & stops in tires, brakes, transmission wear, some % of fuel economy, and human stress. If you are driving in a smooth and even manner, a few drivers will pass around you, but most will go ahead and stay behind you, and as the lights turn you will glide right on past them with much less effort. You can literally watch them stomp and chirp the rubber on their tires both ways. Traffic lights are the great equalizer.
The real trick is figuring out the timing of the lights & roads where you travel. If you can make it from 1st to 48th with only 2-3 stops, you are going to get exceptional mileage compared to the usual 28 stops. This isn't just a smooth trip though, sometimes you have to gun it in places to beat the lights and literally crawl at others. After a bit of practice in some areas I could do the trips faster & I could do it while saving brake wear and increasing mileage. City driving is where those tactics pay off the most. Fuel economy doesn't change as much though, my truck averaged around 21-22 mpg for the entire loop (all include highly aggressive highway driving where you can make time, and having to sit through 2 rush hours a day) and only 24-26 mpg adopting those tactics. Smooth driving on long trips saves a few mpg more on the average of the trip, but this wasn't the daily routine. Just like most of you I ran the AC max in the summer, and kept a comfortable temp in the winter.
The savings in brakes & tires from adopting those tactics alone were enough to make them worthwhile, and it's less stressful to do it that way. At the end of the week I came home happier, with more money in my pocket, more runs, less repair expenses - that is the bottom line. In total for what I did it worked out around $1960 a year in direct expenses to modify driving tactics minus some expenses that are very hard to calculate, fuel was also cheaper then. Of course, you would have to divide that by 4-5 or so to represent what a typical driver would save.
In terms of productivity I was able to pull off another run or two a day, and that added up to another 40-80 a week. $80-130 a week difference was enough to get my attention, a 10% pay increase by modifying habits. It was clear enough even before looking at year to year schedule C numbers.
Something else I noticed after awhile was that my working environment became cooler as well. All of that brake heat & extra engine heat has to go somewhere... In typical city driving the brakes get used a lot and become less efficient after they get hot, so you have to use them harder to stop. This is a viscious cycle. On commercial vehicles brake wear is atrocious for this reason, frequent stops, city driving, and frequent heavy vehicle loads. While not quite cutting the brake wear in half, it cut it down considerably.
Commercial service is truly the ultimate way to see how a vehicle will hold up. I still question if hybrids would take that kind of environment for very long, and what additional expenses would crop up. Just thinking about the heat all of those batteries would have to endure, hopefully you would be able to add water to them to maintain them. I can't imagine a sealed battery would take that for very long as the heat expansion would always allow for some leakage, which is why they always failed in commercial service & regular maintainence batteries would last much longer (if you took care of them) at least in non-hybrids.
Mississippi is a MUCH worse place than Florida. People in *Alabama* regularly thank God that they don't live in Mississippi.
Alabama has redneck NASA in Huntsville. You go there and see the space shuttle sitting in an overgrown field of weeds, resting on blocks with the tires off, one window smashed out, and painted in two different colors of primer.
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A long time ago a similar service existed, "www.movierater.com", you would rate a mess of movies and it would give you the picks out on video and in theaters that you would likely like. I miss that one, it had pretty good accuracy.
The only thing I don't like about this one is that it is Yahoo doing it. They have too much presence and too much potential for data mining that the old single site I used to use didn't have.
I replaced my LCD with a used Nokia 445Xi Plus 21" CRT that I picked up used for $150 CDN. It's by far my most beloved piece of hardware on my system.
I went basically the same route. I picked up 4 21" Iiyama CRTs refurbished, 3 were excellent, and 1 was a little bit fuzzy for my liking so I gave that one away. I got the 4 of them for less than what 1 new one would cost. Having a pair of 21" displays for my desktop makes life so much easier,and I still have a spare for when one of these dies.
You can rely on the internal sensors if you like and most newer boards come with such devices. I have a bit less trust in such things and prefer to take the reading directly from the line with a volt meter.
I've worked on many PCs, and I check at the plug with my multimeter. Some of the internal sensors I've looked at have been so far off that if those values were real the system wouldn't be running but fine at the multimeter. There should be some way to calibrate these, but I never see anything on the board to do it with. Any easy way?
AMD++
Well, that sure does end my consideration of buying a Pentium-D, Intel motherboard or any Intel product period. I had been giving a Pentium-D system serious consideration for cost/performance ratio reasons, but this changes that. Think I'll buy some AMD shares instead.
I have a feeling Intel is going to find out that this is an ever bigger hit with consumers that the Processor-ID-Serial Number tag in the Pentium-III.
From Jim Bergers piece: DVDs are a good example of where government intervention was rejected.
Really? They didn't ram through the DMCA for their own interest by shopping it in international treaties? It wasn't software companies screaming the loudest for this stuff, it was the entertainment companies.
Ahh, well, we will just omit that..
On the other hand, in medicine I've seen some pretty obvious trials. For instance, the recent "Combining morphine + ibuprofen is more effective than the same level of morphine and no ibuprofen in relieving pain" and by the same author (I guess he figured it was a gold mine) "Combining two opioids is more effective than one opioid at the same dose as the first opioid alone". Who would have thought! But worse, it was a meta-analysis. Which means some other reasearches already did the same study and he just pirated their data.
Most of the pain research isn't very good to begin with, but this type of stuff only sucks up the limited grant money that could be used for meaningful work.
I would love to see pain research that focused on what could be done to prevent acute pain from becomming chronic. Every once in awhile in the surgical setting you see a good study, like one that found you could reduce allodynia, hyperalgesia, and RSD/CRPS by 90%+ by pretreating patients with an NMDA antagonist, long acting opioid, COX2 inhibitor, and after surgery maintaining the LA-opioid, a decent breakthrough medicine, and some tylenol for 2 weeks. A 90% reduction in those complications and better outcomes is big news. I wish someone would apply the same basic principle to when patients first present with pain. Maybe we could stop 90% of them after modifying doctors standand practices from going on to develop chronic pain, but no one is doing the research, so we will never know.
Instead we get treated to the 127th confirmatory study that NSAIDS are effective on mild to moderate arthritis pain.
Compact fluorescent is no longer 10x the cost of a old bulb, though they are more expensive by several times. They last 10x as long though.
My own experience with them does not support your or the makers claims of extended longevity. Every single one of them I have ever installed has failed 9X sooner or greater than it was supposed to. In fact, many of them failed before the regular bulbs on the same switch did. I wanted this to work, I had hoped for energy savings to pay for the bulb, but what I got was a light with 10X higher cost and 75% of the life of the existing technology. I felt extremely ripped off.
I sincerely hope these have improved, but I'm not willing to make another investment with them.
No, unfotunately I am not joking. Many of the stores that sell garden lights openly tell you they share their customer list with law enforcement, a few of them have signs on the door. The police used to tail people who would go to the garden center and pull them over...etc That behavior got it institutionalized here, so they got the hardware stores involved and started offering cash to employees who would phone in on larger orders of certain supplies. Buying a mess of mylar at the hardware store is enough. Buying a single space age blanket probably isn't going to raise an eyebrow though.
I'm not sure how much better the mylar is for that purpose, I've been told that it reflects different spectrums of light more effectively than just flat white paint, and slightly more effectively (total lumens) than the plastic sheeting. The plastic sheeting is lot cheaper.
Of course just because they come to your door doesn't mean you have to let them in, but the mere fact that they are at the door because you made a purchase from the hardware store is very disturbing.
The only problem with buying lots of mylar and mylar space blankets it the visit your get from the DEA after the hardware store reports you.
They started offering cash rewards to store owners here to report that kind of activity, it doesn't matter that most people buying it aren't running a grow op.
They've certainly been a lot more aggressive in the past few years, particularly following legal rather than technological avenues, since illegal uses of P2P became widespread. What we need is a change of legal framework to something where basic rights -- for example, the right to back-up your data or move it to different media formats for your own use after legitimately paying for it -- are paramount, but thereafter there are reasonable penalties for those who abuse the system -- for example, copying and then giving the copy away to others.
I look at things a little more long term, and some of those making format decisions also did. Now when you had a record, you could back it to tape or reel to reel tape and that was good enough, the record would last a long long time if you took care of it, but would shatter if you dropped it. This was a pretty good period for us. I used to makes tapes of all of my records and use the tape as much as I could to preserve my records.
With the introduction of the CD without restrictions on it, things improved even more for us -, you could make a perfect (or nearly perfect given some limits of invertors) backup of that media(CD backup for the car, original in the house), you would also be able to adapt that media to future formats should those formats change. It was just a matter of time till we got DVD, and burnable DVD for instance, and something will replace that as well. If you copied that CD you could convert the format to do many things and adapt to future formats. It's just data.
The people that designed DVD's had the history of the CD in front of them. Part of that included getting to resell all of the content again and make bank on it, people wanted digital media. But they also realized the format would change again, so this time they sought to preserve their rights yet again (as they had tried to do with macrovision) so that you couldn't backup your media and prepare for format changes in the future, you couldn't even backup to the existing format. They wanted to preserve "You will have to buy it again" forever.
It wasn't anyones piracy but their own that they had in mind. This is a player who has always acted in bad faith, even in the VHS days.
I don't disagee that their tone and justifications have changed now, but I'm not willing to grant a free pass on their motives for the decisions that were made then, and I don't think the rest of should either. The time line and the MPAA's public story & the development history of the DVD do not jive. The computer is still the biggest threat to "You have to buy it again & again* for them. Yes, it includes additional and largely unrealized other threats, but the biggest revenue hit they could take would be us not having to buy all of our media again when the format shift happens yet again.
We should realize this side of the MPAA's history, and that they have always been a player acting in bad faith. We ought to be fighting them tooth and nail to keep them out of our computers and other devices.
It's just data, and we ought to be able to move the data around that we own how we see fit. It's fundimental to ownership. In terms of making copies for others, we already have existing laws that protect their interest, no one is sticking up for our interest.
Why are we letting them have a free pass for the examples where they have clearly violated the laws of this land? Do we have a frickin' shortage of lawyers folks? I know we can't enforce criminal penalties, only the government can do that, but we sure as hell can bring civil case after civil case.
People like you don't like DRM, or region-locked DVDs, and all that crap.
;-)
And if it weren't for people like you being so blatantly selfish, the rest of us wouldn't now have to put up with it.
Region coding had nothing to do with >cough copyright infringement. Where you get off on this tanget I don't know. The truth is, they would have done region coding anyway. They concieved of region coding as a way to put up a technological barrier to being able to see movies earlier in your own market than they were released, if they happened to be released already in another market segment. It was nothing to do with not paying for the movie. They simply thought that they could maximize profits by staggering theater and DVD releases in different markets.
The other truth is, DRM would have come anyway. Macrovision was setup before VHS copyright infringement was ever a big deal, and it (just like every method before it) was quickly circumvented and tools were available *before* its introduction to do so. (Your pre-198X VCR didn't have the feature and wouldn't recognize it.
Ethics indeed. Companies have long sought ways to make you pay for things again & again. I don't see the movie industry as that much different from G.E. making lightbulbs that were designed to last less than half the length advertised. You would have to go buy it again. Or appliance makers designing a product to fail after a certain period (common house fans are a good case in point).
In the same way, DVDs are made on a material with a shorter than advertised life, they wont replace the media if it goes bad, and they have made it illegal for you to make a backup of your media that you paid for. They are advertised as "OWN IT ON DVD", but you don't own it. Maybe your version of ethics is different from mine, but I consider (and so do many state attorney generals) the tactics of G.E. to be unethical and illegal. It's no stretch to say that the movie industry is just as unethical and had performed the exact same kind of fraud as G.E., but they went 10 steps further with their fraud an unethical behavior. They tried to circumvent your rights to the material even while the media is working.
If these same extended tactics were applied to lightbulbs, no one in the right mind would buy them if they were advertised as such. This would be a lightbulb that doesn't turn on when you tell it to, it only comes on when G.E. allows it to, it doesn't turn off when you tell it to so you can't save the bulbs life - it only turns off when G.E. tells it to, it wont work when you try to do things that G.E. doesn't like you having light for, or if you travel with it it wont work in certain locations, and even though it fails in less than half of the time advertised they wont replace it. You have to buy another one. It would also code your socket so you couldn't use a different light bulb, and if you modified your light socket to work with other bulbs or to make the lightbulb behave like all light bulbs should knowingly behave (despite it still having a reduced life), they would sue you and have you thrown in jail.
People who copy movies may be copyright infringers, but the MPAA are pirates.
I find billboards even more annoying. We built a public highway with taxpayer money (sound familiar???) and these parasites come in & stick up 120x40' billboards all over it. Worse, they put them in an environment where viewing them can distract you from the highly dangerous activity of driving that you are engaged in.
Since all public companies will be required to have this in place next year, what are good email achiving systems that are currently available? Do we have any GPL/BSD solutions that are reasonably automatic? (IE: Throw one machine at the front and it intercepts everything headed for your 5 different mail servers..etc)
That argument holds no water in the software industry. Sure, a bunch of college students and kids will have software they never would've purchased. They are insignificant on the grand scale of things.
I disagree, they are not insignificant at all. The mere fact they have your software, and have used your software means that when a problem comes up that your software can possibly solve it will be the first thing on the table that they suggest. The process may take a few years for the 16 year old with a CAD program, or the college student with a database program, or the art student with photoshop - but in the end, them being familiar with your software will probably lead to it being used in the business setting later. Most of those copies will be paid for.
Also not insignificant is the number of copies that are downloaded just so people can learn to use your software. It's hard to get a job that requires you to be familiar with 18+ software packages that each retail for $599+ when you don't have that kind of cash laying around. The company doesn't want to train you, they want you to already know that.
Outside of games, I have a feeling that most of the piracy going on is of this type. Yes, there are businesses that run entirely on pirated software, but would you risk that when only one employee with a grudge can bring down a load of massive fines on you?
(it's such a pain to have to find all the extensions I want after you install mozilla/firefox..i wish they would just dump the extension idea and build everything into the browser--it could be done without more "bloat".
I agree that having to go & hunt down extensions is a pain. Instead of installing extensions, I download them now and stick them into a folder on the network drive here. I still have to do the whole "open file" routine, but it's far better than having to hunt on the extensionroom site for everything I want back. Of course, the ones that wont work with the new version I have to go get (or wait for them to be updated), and I don't like when extensions wont update properly, or crash (like WeatherFox did) Firefox to where I have to go into safe mode to take a guess at what broke what and remove things. There is a certain point where spaghetti string starts to apply.
There are some extensions I feel should be built into the browser, but the problem becomes - what I think is important is not what everyone else does, and with a product as customizeable as Firefox is with more than 300+ extensions available for it, how would anyone pick and choose and have everyone be happy with it?
For every error the mainstream media makes, the "alternative" media makes one, or likely many more.
As bad as NYT & Newsweek are, they have absolutely nothing on the error rate and sensationalized crap-flood rate of my local NBC affiliate KDSK. Though last weeks ABC-News-Today-USA Today-tie in story on pain care was right up there with them. Fluff coverage with lack of insight & serious misdirection is even worse, IMO.
I think the NY Times is right, the only draw that they have is their opinion pieces, and while they usually are dead wrong on most subjects, this has set the "talking points" so we can all listen to inane debates everywhere else on Sunday morning that have no insight on the real issues. I 100% applaud their decision to bury this behind registration, fees, blood test, and even retinal scans. This decision will help shift the debates to something else, and from where I sit, it can only get better.
I'm not always the best about documenting what I do, but every job I've ever left where it actually mattered (where I had some responsibility), I've gone above and beyond making sure they were able to do the job without me. I'm sure problems were still blamed on me, but hopefully nobody had the nerve to suggest that I deliberately caused the problems.
...because they can't accept that computers are not fully reliable, software has bugs, and that just maybe they did something they weren't supposed to do (though we did try to make that very difficult). As if I ever had the time to come by and work out how to sabotage their word document, or cause their spread sheet to crash and them to have to do it again.
When you fully come to appreciate just how irrational people are when it comes to things that they do not understand fully -- it's quite probable you were being bad mouthed for "f'ing that up" 20 minutes after you left the building.
I've had users say "You must have done something to it! It worked fine before YOU touched it!" even more amusing on systems that were off site
The same people can grasp that if their car has a defect, the boogie man probably didn't break into it the night before and sabotage their cruise control so it doesn't stay on. You will, however, never convince them the same thing about the beige box next on their desk. Unfortunately, some of these folks end up in management...
I like these folks a lot already. :) I love getting threatening letters in my email too.
"While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves.
I don't see how this could be... The new Battlestar Galactica is terrible, absolutely terrible. Now if they were showing reruns of the old series, maybe, but I want my 40 minutes back from even watching the torrent of the new one.
I think about what exciting things this could do for pain control. For instance, if it could be made to generate enough power for neuro-stim devices, you might be able to have 24 hour pain control without having to have risky and costly surgeries every couple years. Even an implantable device for better intestinal and bowel regulation would be possible with that amount of current, real problems for people with crohns disease.
I even remember reading something about a version of gastic bypass surgery that used elecric stim to trick people into thinking they were full. Perhaps it could be used as part of a weight loss tool for the severely obese. Though not through the reduction of glucose as some people are suggesting.
Also the idea of actively controlled implantable infusion pumps without having to deal with the batteries sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Right now the choices are mostly passive pumps, or pumps with batteries with if have to have adjustable control. These are widely used in pain control, and though you would still have to refill them with drugs, it would be one less hassle.
Also thinking about some of the brain operations they are doing for parkinsons patients where they implant stimulators in their brains, those could be made self powering as well.
I don't think they could do a pacemaker this way as I believe it would still need a battery, but I'm sure there are plenty of other applications if they can get the amps a little bit higher.
You are only asked the last 4 digits of your social security number if you are applying to buy something under their extended payment plans. In which case they use another company to extend the credit out and it is needed for the approval process (just like any other loan application) to verify your credit rating and help them make a decision on whether or not to extend credit.
You will never be asked your SS number, or any part of your SS number if you are not applying to purchase on credit from them.
It may not be as grim. If we each write our reps and tell them, do you really want to be known as the guy who broke TV and made it impossible for all of the rabid sports fans to use their digital recording setups and big screen plasma HDTVs? Me, my xerox machine, stack of sports jerseys, and one hour of free time during every >insert local sports teams names home game doesn't think so.
In my home town we have MLB, NHL, NFL, and a NASCAR circuit. The fans wont take kindly to that being passed if they know who to blame. Even the threat of calling into every sports radio show to name those responsible holds weight.
Hockey fans in particular wont tolerate not being able to see the Stanley Cup Playoffs in high quality. Not with the "all-sports-packages" going for $60-80 a pop in most places.
The politicians need to know it is a hot button issue if someone is willing to hold their feet to the fire, and doing so isn't particularily expensive. We have a natural set of allies in this, and it's never too early to start making phone calls and flyers even if the votes are not in.
Sporting events if one of the specifically mentioned items that the broadcast flag is targeting, so we can even use their own words against them, just put it in bold...
The webserver for Cuba runs IIS as well last I checked. I figured if anyone would be using Linux it would the commies down there...
Unless I'm missing something, I can't see how slowing down gradually will increase anything beside the frustration of the driver behind you because you're not getting to a stop light quicker
I used to work as a courier, while fuel is a pretty big expense, it isn't the only expense on a car. You pay for quick starts & stops in tires, brakes, transmission wear, some % of fuel economy, and human stress. If you are driving in a smooth and even manner, a few drivers will pass around you, but most will go ahead and stay behind you, and as the lights turn you will glide right on past them with much less effort. You can literally watch them stomp and chirp the rubber on their tires both ways. Traffic lights are the great equalizer.
The real trick is figuring out the timing of the lights & roads where you travel. If you can make it from 1st to 48th with only 2-3 stops, you are going to get exceptional mileage compared to the usual 28 stops. This isn't just a smooth trip though, sometimes you have to gun it in places to beat the lights and literally crawl at others. After a bit of practice in some areas I could do the trips faster & I could do it while saving brake wear and increasing mileage. City driving is where those tactics pay off the most. Fuel economy doesn't change as much though, my truck averaged around 21-22 mpg for the entire loop (all include highly aggressive highway driving where you can make time, and having to sit through 2 rush hours a day) and only 24-26 mpg adopting those tactics. Smooth driving on long trips saves a few mpg more on the average of the trip, but this wasn't the daily routine. Just like most of you I ran the AC max in the summer, and kept a comfortable temp in the winter.
The savings in brakes & tires from adopting those tactics alone were enough to make them worthwhile, and it's less stressful to do it that way. At the end of the week I came home happier, with more money in my pocket, more runs, less repair expenses - that is the bottom line. In total for what I did it worked out around $1960 a year in direct expenses to modify driving tactics minus some expenses that are very hard to calculate, fuel was also cheaper then. Of course, you would have to divide that by 4-5 or so to represent what a typical driver would save.
In terms of productivity I was able to pull off another run or two a day, and that added up to another 40-80 a week. $80-130 a week difference was enough to get my attention, a 10% pay increase by modifying habits. It was clear enough even before looking at year to year schedule C numbers.
Something else I noticed after awhile was that my working environment became cooler as well. All of that brake heat & extra engine heat has to go somewhere... In typical city driving the brakes get used a lot and become less efficient after they get hot, so you have to use them harder to stop. This is a viscious cycle. On commercial vehicles brake wear is atrocious for this reason, frequent stops, city driving, and frequent heavy vehicle loads. While not quite cutting the brake wear in half, it cut it down considerably.
Commercial service is truly the ultimate way to see how a vehicle will hold up. I still question if hybrids would take that kind of environment for very long, and what additional expenses would crop up. Just thinking about the heat all of those batteries would have to endure, hopefully you would be able to add water to them to maintain them. I can't imagine a sealed battery would take that for very long as the heat expansion would always allow for some leakage, which is why they always failed in commercial service & regular maintainence batteries would last much longer (if you took care of them) at least in non-hybrids.
Mississippi is a MUCH worse place than Florida. People in *Alabama* regularly thank God that they don't live in Mississippi.
Alabama has redneck NASA in Huntsville. You go there and see the space shuttle sitting in an overgrown field of weeds, resting on blocks with the tires off, one window smashed out, and painted in two different colors of primer.