>> They actually gave her money back. That's good right? Sure they took four months, but they did it. She should shut up and stop complaining.
So you think its ok for a company to sell a broken, potentially harmfull product? If customers are hurt by the product, you think it is ok for customers to have to waste their own time over the course of several months to seek the minor recourse of a refund? Then, if they do finally get back their money, you think they should shut up and not warn any other victims that this company is engaging in fraud?
Most of the problems have not been serious, no. Servers down happen. (I lived through the EverQuest Luclin release; nothing can be that bad.) The effect of lag are very interesting and different (mobs continue to move and can be attacked, killed, etc., but one cannot loot or move about items), making this more challenging than EverQuest (i.e. everything just lags up fairly equally).
However, the one thing that I would call serious are the seemingly automatic rollbacks on server crashes. Each time the server goes down, the game goes back a significant amount of time. This is true even if you have travelled extensively (i.e. to another zone) or even if you've logged out of the game! It can be very disconcerting to log out safely in your home base, only to log back in the next day and find yourself back in the middle of the enemy camp you fought in the night before, with the last 5 minutes of loot gone. I've never seen another game where, once you successfully camped out, there was any concern that your items would be lost. This is serious, and it scares me.
The queues to get onto the populated servers are a problem for Blizzard, and they will be a bigger problem for me if they aren't resolved fairly soon. Blizzard brough up 41 servers at opening, and brought up another 47 in the first week. But, I and my guild started playing the first day, so I'm on an "old" server with high population, and I have to wait in queue for 10 minutes to an hour to play. As soon as I'm paying a monthly fee, this won't be acceptable.
The queues are a problem for Blizzard now as it hampers growth and long-term adoption. I gave out the free disks and free trials that came with my purchased copy to friends that have never played an MMORPG, and I told the friends what server I was on. But, I hope they have not yet tried to play, because if they find a queue to play on my server, they may give up and quit before they begin.
>> Second, AOL never purchased TW. As I mention in a post above they merged by exchanging stock 55%/45% and formed a new company called AOLTW of which the ISP known as AOL was a division. They have since dropped AOL from the name.
No, AOL never "purchased" TimeWarner. But the merger was instigated by AOL, which was worth more than Time Warner at the time. Also note that, as you say, AOL shareholders controlled 55% of the merged company, while Time Warner shareholders controlled 45%. The company name was changed to AOL Time Warner to reflect who the big dog was in the merger.
Then, later, as AOL started dying and its proportion of the combined company dropped WAY below that of the ex-Time Warner part, they dropped AOL. That doesn't eliminate the fact that the merger was between a stronger AOL and a weaker Time Warner.
From a January 10, 2000 CNN article:
The deal, if approved, calls for Time Warner shareholders to receive 1.5 shares of the new company for every share of Time Warner stock they own. AOL shareholders will receive one share of the new company for every AOL share they hold.
The new company will be 55 percent owned by AOL and 45 percent owned by Time Warner. The combination will immediately boast a market capitalization of $350 billion and an annual revenue stream topping $30 billion.
More importantly, it provides AOL, which already boasts more than 20 million subscribers through its AOL and Compuserve Internet services, high-speed broadband access to Time Warner's more than 13 million cable subscribers, further reinforcing its position as the nation's top online provider.
>> But even in the short term, you come out ahead to the tune of $2800/y, and as a bonus, your doctor probably thinks of you as his best customer -- because you pay for his services upfront, and he doesn't have to spend $25 worth of his office workers' time filling out the forms that would ordinarily be associated with a $100 checkup! You win. Doc wins. Insurance company loses.
Even better, find a doctor that has decided to go off the "insurance wagon". I've read about them in the past year. There are family doctors that don't take insurance, at all. It's cash or check the day of the service or nothing. But, they've found that with the time they save not dealing with insurance paperwork, they don't need as many office staff, and can drop the per-visit charge from $100+ (with you paying your $15 copay) to $50.
Now, you can find catastrophic insurance to avoid bankruptcy if some idiot hits you in his Hummer. But that plus $50 for the occasional doctor visit can cost you much less than your old plan.
And moreover, the best way to do this is when the people in power support it and it isn't in their best interest based on the last election.
For example, had Kerry won the electoral college after losing the popular vote so thoroughly, but then still fought to replace the electoral college with a popular vote (or to adjust the electoral college system in a way that would have given Bush the election), it would be harder to criticize his motives.
Likewise, if Bush, who won the election without having to make or defend any claims of voter fraud, were to order an audit and push for legislation to open/clean the electronic voting process* (even though the process clearly works for him as is), it would help show that he wasn't doing it for any ultierior motives. And, it would help heal the divisions in the country, as it would be something that I (and other) Kerry supporters would support.
*(The legislation after the last election doesn't count as well, since there was enough public outcry that appeasing the populace was the overriding motive. Also, it helped put into place all the untraceable systems we have now.)
>> The fun part is that any default install of Windows (at least up to and including XP) will send out the current users LM hash if he tries to connect to a SMB share.
So, can you post a link explaining how to disable this as part of a non-default install? I'm not sure I've ever seen this before.
Dude, note that this is for FIRMWARE, not drivers. Big difference.
Hardware used to do things using discrete transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. These days most of that (and more) can be done better in high-density logic devices. But the "top of the line" high density logic, ASICs, still have too great a startup cost for many companies. Plus, they cannot be field upgraded.
The next best logic, FPGAs, are not hard-coded with the firmware. Instead, they load it from a memory source on the hardware - or they load it from the operating system on boot or plug-in. The advantage of the latter is that you don't have to pay for the EEPROM or flash to store the firmware on board, and updating the firmware is as simple as downloading a new binary to your computer. (Overwriting EEPROM or flash firmware on hardware can be dangerous, as a failure could prevent the hardware from being recognized to try again.)
So, firmware (i.e. code for the hardware) ships with the software driver, but is separate from it. Your next question will be: Why don't they open-source their firmware, too?
And the answer here is simple. They have to pay someone to design that firmware, lay out the PCB, spec in parts and materials, and then provide hardware to build those units. If their firmware is available to all, then someone else can take that code, copy their PCB, and produce the exact same board except with no overhead of R&D. Heck, they could even provide (under the table) vendor and device information so that it looked exactly like the primary company's product, would work with their driver, etc.
Why would any company want to do that? One of the early competitors of my company, 15 years or so ago when we used TTL parts, copied the entire product exactly. Reverse engineered the PCB. Then ran advertisements showing the two boards side-by-side, explaining how they were identical except that theirs cost less because they have no research overhead.
So, of course, my company leveraged its research "overhead" to produce a better, faster product that also happened to not be so easily copied. This resulted in our first ASIC. There is no way that we or most other existing hardware companies would return to the days where anyone can copy their products.
My mistake, I meant "increased gas prices". Sorry.
And yes, you are correct that many different things went into the increases in gas prices. One of them (not listed by you) was the administration's continued purchasing of strategic reserve fuel while prices are at record highs.
Of the other issues, the "instability in the arabic region" one can also be attributed to the administration, to an extent, given that much of the "instability" is due to actions in Iraq.
Of all the rest - nobody in the US can or should be directly blamed for them happening - but plenty of blame can be levied for them affecting us in the way they do. Personally, I want to see our country move away from dependence on Saudi Arabia entirely. That can't be done by drilling in Alaska. It can't be done by increasing production at US refineries. It can only be done by moving to alternative fuels - hydrogen in my opinion.
Sure, the first hydrogen produced will probably be done so using fossil fuels. But hydrogen is far more of a commodity fuel that gas will ever be. Anyone with access to the ocean has all the raw material they will ever need. They just need a power source to extract the fuel. Thus, over time, hydrogen can be produced by lots of different fuels - solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and yes, even fossil. Saudia Arabia will still have plenty of market for their fuels in the US and the rest of the world, but they won't have such a controlling interest in the day-to-day fate of our country.
I blame any administration that doesn't move us toward that independence, as this issue makes our country more vulnerable to the outside world than almost any other. In general, I think Democrats have a better mind toward energy efficiency and independence, and thus I think the nation will be better served in this regard by Kerry as president. With regard to Bush, his plan to help push the country to hydrogen fuel (announced by him a year or two ago) sounded great - I just don't think he'll follow through with it that well.
I posted three replies to the first response (Mr. I am the Bullgod), but they were all directed at you. They are in support of Kerry, not Bush, but I thought you should hear what I consider a few sane arguments in support of Kerry, in addition to whatever sane arguments in support of Bush that are also posted.
>> Tax Policy: I guess I'm a supply-sider at heart, but I don't believe that the way to spur the economy is to tax the bejesus out of those individuals and companies who actually employ people and spend money. I got tax relief, and I'm not one of the "rich" that supposedly got all the money.
The last line of this comment is incorrent. The rich didn't supposedly get all the money. The rich got most of the money. The rest of us got some, too.
My wife and I got a check for $600 or something. Great! We got a tax break for being married. Great! We've spent all of that amount on increased gas taxes and cost of living increases (without accompanying pay raises, though we were luck to both keep our jobs - my wife survived though 5 rounds of layoffs). Suck!
In the meantime, most of that money went to the richest folks. Now trickle-down economics as a theory states that (please clarify if this is incorrect), by giving more money to the wealthy, the wealthy will create more jobs and give it to the middle class and the poor. (I think that's an accurate description of the theory, so I don't think any clarification is necessary.)
The problem is, it just doesn't work as effectively as Republicans for the last 20 years would like you to believe. Yes, some of the money given to the very wealthy is used to create jobs. But a lot of it just makes the wealthy even more wealthy. Look at the surveys of (real) income growth for the top percentages of the country, and the (real) income drop for the bottom percentages of the country. The rich are getting much richer much faster - how could they be if all that money is trickling down to the other classes?
All that being said, I don't make *that* much money (upper middle middle class, whatever that means). I could still give more than I do to the country if I had to. I make more than enough to subsist and have plenty left over for luxury. The wealthy don't need extra money to survive - the only benefit ever cited in a down economy for trickle-down is the effect on job creation. So why not just give tax cuts for job creation instead of giving it to all the rich people who just plan to pocket it?
While Kerry says he would roll back the tax cuts on the top few percentages, he also has proposed changes to help the small business owners in those same percentages. This means that those people - the ones that actually create the jobs that supposedly justify trickle-down economics - aren't having all their tax cuts rolled back.
(The only other justification for tax cuts for the rich is that the rich deserve more of their money, since they "earned" it. This is a completely different discussion that I am not going to get into tonight as it's already very late and I have to go to work in 6 hours.)
To the grandparent poster, Mr. Twiggy, I just spent two hours writing out long replies to the parent poster to show some reasons why I voted for Kerry, not just against Bush. I know you say you aren't exactly "pro-Kerry", but some of us do belive that there are differences between the candidates, and we are passionate enough to believe that every vote is important - yours included.
Vote the way you feel is best - but remember how you voted and, if decisions made by the administration you vote for turn out to harm you - remember that you put them in office. Personally, I think that a Kerry administration (given the Republican house) will help the country, while another Bush administration will further harm it.
(Again, just expressing some alternate views for the parent who hasn't made up his mind yet. I don't expect Mr. Bullgod to change his mind, and I've already voted.)
>> Security: I haven't forgotten the uncertainty immediately following 9/11 (as I think so many have) and the feeling I got when Bush addressed the country. I think that he provided strong leadership and guided the country through a very trying time.
After the attacks, the country did unite behind Bush. We (as a country) made some good decisions in Afghanistan.
We made some horrible decisions at home, though. The Patriot Act was signed by so many congressman unread because the were told it would make America stronger. But taking away liberties doesn't make a free country stronger, it makes it weaker.
Perhaps the best story about security (and a personal one for me) involves my ex-boss at my company. He hired me straight from college. He was a very personable, friendly guy. He was Lebanese - an Orthodox Christian (as is half his country) - a naturalized American citizen (and proud of it) - and a staunch Republican. He voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought (as he told us) "Republicans are good for business"
Several months after the 9/11 attacks, his church - an Orthodox Christian church - tried to hold its annual Mediterranean festival. (Remember, the people who attacked us on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, working out of Afghanistan, not from the Mediterranean.) His church received bomb threats and members got death threats. They cancelled the festival out of fear. Remember too, that during these months the FBI was rounding up men of Lebanese decent (among others) for questioning. It wasn't a time to trust his fellow Americans, or his government.
Later, he summed up his feelings with (paraphrase, as close as I can remember) "I voted for Bush in 2000 for fiscal conservative reasons, but now that I see how crazy social conservatives can be, fiscal doesn't matter so much to me."
Anyway - this year he moved with his family back to Lebanon. He's still an American citizen, but I think that he sees Lebanon as a safer place to raise his family. This upsets me, because I belive America is a great country, and I'm ashamed that we (as a country) acted in such a horrible was as to let him down.
He said he's voting for Kerry this year to get the "nut cases" out of office or something like that. (To the parent poster, I guess that qualifies as a vote "against Bush and not for Kerry", but that is sort of necessary when talking about the feeling of security Bush provided after 9/11. To some people - like you - he guided us well. To the other half of the country - like my ex boss - he did a pretty damn rotten job.)
To express some counter views. (I'm not directly addressing you Mr. Bullgod, just expressing views to the parent poster.)
>> Social Security: The way it looks now, I stand to get zero, zilch, nada out of Social Security when I retire. I like Bush's proposal to allow a portion of my FICA contribution to go into a personal savings account.
I also expect to get little out of social security, because, as I expect we both agree, right now it's heading toward insolvency. I also know that Social Security, in and of itself, is not and never was sufficient to Live in retirement. It's enough to get by - yes - but not to Live. (Note the capital L.)
That was never the point of Social Security. If you want to retire and enjoy retirement, you have to save on your own. I don't like that 15% of the salary goes into a 401k, but I do so because I know I have to if I want to Live after I retire.
However, if the stock market crashes (and it does crash and will crash again), I could lose everything in my 401k. I might not be able to Live - but I would not die hungry, because Social Security would let me get by (assuming Social Security is still solvent, of course - see the first paragraph and the last one).
So, are you prevented from taking some of your current income and investing it in a personal account? No. So by saying that you want to invest funds privately, you are basically just saying that you want to put less into Social Security, to put more than you currently do in the stock market.
But, as I said, social security only exists to let you get by - it's certainly not a luxury. So if you - and millions of others - put part of that money into your private savings, and it's all lost in the stock market, where's the money for you to just 'get by'? The portion left in Social Security just wouldn't be enough. When that happens, you know very well that the government will figure out a way to keep elderly from starving in the streets. That way is Social Security, as it was created. Why break the solution just to bring it back again, after so many people are hurt?
Now - how to keep Social Security solvent? Well, by balancing the budget and paying down the debt, the insolvency date for Social Security can be pushed out, by putting money back into Social Security that should have never been taken out of it in the first place. Balancing the budget was done in the late 1990s, for a few years, and it can be done again. Ultimately, if Social Security can survive through the deaths of the Baby Boomer generation, it seems to me that the problem of money going in being less than the money going out would be solved.
I think that Kerry and a Democratic administration will do a better job to balance the budget, and get money back into the Social Security fund to tide it through until the generation about to retire has passed on. Perhaps it works best when different parties control the congress and the white house - and Republican control of the House isn't budging.
Aye, give me a dual head video card that I (still fairly new to Linux) could use with ease, and I'd buy it just because it's open source hardware. (And I'm a hardware designer.)
>> If you live in an area where the housing market is truly dominated by the customers, be sure to thank $DIETY every day. And never, ever leave that area.
Of course, you can't leave that area, because you can't sell your house.:)
Actually, all you need is social security number and date of birth. That's all they needed to open two cell phone accounts in my wife's name and rack up a few thousand dollars in charges, and cost us time and patience to get them cleared.*
Sadly, thanks to the failed "your social security number won't be used anywhere except to pay taxes" promise, most of us would find our social stamped across old school records, with our date of birth listed right below. Heck, going through some old boxes of tax records I found that BankOne used to print the account holder's social at the top of every statement. Sheesh.
* And it still affects us. Even though the charges are gone, we recently decided to switch cell phone carriers to one of those that had had a fraudulent account. It took my wife an extra half hour with their fraud department before they would unflag her name and let her open a legitimate account with them.
If you read the Google translation, it appears to say that, as he approached the toll booth, he was finally able to pry the smartcard out of the car. At this point, the car's speed started dropping, and he was able to bring the car to a halt before he drove into the booth.
That might or might not make it any less rotten, but that helps provide a more viable explanation. The English parent article just dropped that part completely - probably because they don't have a native translator and couldn't figure out what the Babelfish translation meant.
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record (or, in this case, machines that monitor your location electronically) change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera (computer checkpoint) and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
------------
One last thing:
>> Many of us has willingly added another intentifying device in the form of an electronic toll payer such as EZ-Pass.
Suppose there was a freeway exit in your town. The only thing at that exit was a pr0n shop. Would you use the EZ-Pass to pay the toll at that exit? Do you think everyone in the country would? Or would you prefer to pay cash for that spot?
Do NOT move somewhere with an HOA. You'll end up regretting it. Our house looks fine - really, but our neighbors mow their lawn twice a week (yes, they do) and keep all sorts of tacky stuff that makes their house look "good" to the HOA and our house look "bad". And I do take care of the lawn.
Ideally, live somewhere where the neighbors have to follow an HOA but you don't. Like in the original ranch house of a farm that was cut up into a subdivision - the property the original house is on might not have the deed restriction.
If that's not possible, go for no HOA. It will be better, I promise.
(Earlier this year we took out a flower bed to return it to part of the lawn.) The HOA sent us warnings and then fines for letting "weed" (i.e. grass) grow in a "bed" (that no longer exists). Hassle, hassle.
You seem like a very rational person. I don't, however, see why you plan to vote for Bush for one reason that doesn't (in my mind) make sense, while all your other concerns imply that you would lean toward liberal views?
With regard to the US forces in Iraq, Bush's statements are that things are going well, and we must keep doing what we have been doing. However, that assumes things are going well! It doesn't seem that we've done a good job to build up Iraq after we liberated them. Instead we've let parts of the country become terrorist breeding grounds. Even those Iraqis that would be dead under Saddam's regime don't like us much. I don't see this as the fault of anyone but the highest-level decision makers, who just failed to think through what it meant to govern an occupied country.
Kerry plans to do the following according to his web site: ---- We must change course in Iraq. Having gone to war, we cannot afford to fail at peace. The United States must take immediate measures to prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state that inevitably would become a haven for terrorists and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.
John Kerry and John Edwards will make the creation of a stable and secure environment in Iraq our immediate priority in order to lay the foundations for sustainable democracy. That is the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home. John Kerry and John Edwards believe the following principles should guide American policy in Iraq right now and that if these steps are not taken, options in the future will become more limited. This needs to be an urgent agenda to:
* Internationalize, because others must share the burden;
* Train Iraqis, because they must be responsible for their own security;
* Move forward with reconstruction because that's an important way to stop the spread of terror; and
* Help Iraqis achieve a viable government, because it is up to them to run their own country. ----
Nothing there says that we will pull out of Iraq immediately. That would be a pretty horrible thing to do - it would make Iraq the "failed state" that Kerry and Bush want to avoid. But, the conservate in me agrees very strongly with the ideas that Iraqis must "be responsible for their own security" and must "run their own country". I do not want US troops in Iraq in 10 years. I want Iraq to be a free, peaceful state. I don't see that happening under Bush, but I think with Kerry we have a chance.
I know the work that you did at the beginning (I assume you were there for the initial liberation from your post) went very well, but do you think that things are still going well?
Slashdot Mirror
>> They actually gave her money back. That's good right? Sure they took four months, but they did it. She should shut up and stop complaining.
So you think its ok for a company to sell a broken, potentially harmfull product? If customers are hurt by the product, you think it is ok for customers to have to waste their own time over the course of several months to seek the minor recourse of a refund? Then, if they do finally get back their money, you think they should shut up and not warn any other victims that this company is engaging in fraud?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid
>> Nothing really serious
Most of the problems have not been serious, no. Servers down happen. (I lived through the EverQuest Luclin release; nothing can be that bad.) The effect of lag are very interesting and different (mobs continue to move and can be attacked, killed, etc., but one cannot loot or move about items), making this more challenging than EverQuest (i.e. everything just lags up fairly equally).
However, the one thing that I would call serious are the seemingly automatic rollbacks on server crashes. Each time the server goes down, the game goes back a significant amount of time. This is true even if you have travelled extensively (i.e. to another zone) or even if you've logged out of the game! It can be very disconcerting to log out safely in your home base, only to log back in the next day and find yourself back in the middle of the enemy camp you fought in the night before, with the last 5 minutes of loot gone. I've never seen another game where, once you successfully camped out, there was any concern that your items would be lost. This is serious, and it scares me.
The queues to get onto the populated servers are a problem for Blizzard, and they will be a bigger problem for me if they aren't resolved fairly soon. Blizzard brough up 41 servers at opening, and brought up another 47 in the first week. But, I and my guild started playing the first day, so I'm on an "old" server with high population, and I have to wait in queue for 10 minutes to an hour to play. As soon as I'm paying a monthly fee, this won't be acceptable.
The queues are a problem for Blizzard now as it hampers growth and long-term adoption. I gave out the free disks and free trials that came with my purchased copy to friends that have never played an MMORPG, and I told the friends what server I was on. But, I hope they have not yet tried to play, because if they find a queue to play on my server, they may give up and quit before they begin.
>> Second, AOL never purchased TW. As I mention in a post above they merged by exchanging stock 55%/45% and formed a new company called AOLTW of which the ISP known as AOL was a division. They have since dropped AOL from the name.
No, AOL never "purchased" TimeWarner. But the merger was instigated by AOL, which was worth more than Time Warner at the time. Also note that, as you say, AOL shareholders controlled 55% of the merged company, while Time Warner shareholders controlled 45%. The company name was changed to AOL Time Warner to reflect who the big dog was in the merger.
Then, later, as AOL started dying and its proportion of the combined company dropped WAY below that of the ex-Time Warner part, they dropped AOL. That doesn't eliminate the fact that the merger was between a stronger AOL and a weaker Time Warner.
From a January 10, 2000 CNN article:
The deal, if approved, calls for Time Warner shareholders to receive 1.5 shares of the new company for every share of Time Warner stock they own. AOL shareholders will receive one share of the new company for every AOL share they hold.
The new company will be 55 percent owned by AOL and 45 percent owned by Time Warner. The combination will immediately boast a market capitalization of $350 billion and an annual revenue stream topping $30 billion.
More importantly, it provides AOL, which already boasts more than 20 million subscribers through its AOL and Compuserve Internet services, high-speed broadband access to Time Warner's more than 13 million cable subscribers, further reinforcing its position as the nation's top online provider.
>> But even in the short term, you come out ahead to the tune of $2800/y, and as a bonus, your doctor probably thinks of you as his best customer -- because you pay for his services upfront, and he doesn't have to spend $25 worth of his office workers' time filling out the forms that would ordinarily be associated with a $100 checkup! You win. Doc wins. Insurance company loses.
Even better, find a doctor that has decided to go off the "insurance wagon". I've read about them in the past year. There are family doctors that don't take insurance, at all. It's cash or check the day of the service or nothing. But, they've found that with the time they save not dealing with insurance paperwork, they don't need as many office staff, and can drop the per-visit charge from $100+ (with you paying your $15 copay) to $50.
Now, you can find catastrophic insurance to avoid bankruptcy if some idiot hits you in his Hummer. But that plus $50 for the occasional doctor visit can cost you much less than your old plan.
And moreover, the best way to do this is when the people in power support it and it isn't in their best interest based on the last election .
For example, had Kerry won the electoral college after losing the popular vote so thoroughly, but then still fought to replace the electoral college with a popular vote (or to adjust the electoral college system in a way that would have given Bush the election), it would be harder to criticize his motives.
Likewise, if Bush, who won the election without having to make or defend any claims of voter fraud, were to order an audit and push for legislation to open/clean the electronic voting process* (even though the process clearly works for him as is), it would help show that he wasn't doing it for any ultierior motives. And, it would help heal the divisions in the country, as it would be something that I (and other) Kerry supporters would support.
*(The legislation after the last election doesn't count as well, since there was enough public outcry that appeasing the populace was the overriding motive. Also, it helped put into place all the untraceable systems we have now.)
>> The fun part is that any default install of Windows (at least up to and including XP) will send out the current users LM hash if he tries to connect to a SMB share.
So, can you post a link explaining how to disable this as part of a non-default install? I'm not sure I've ever seen this before.
The parent poster used these words:
>> So why do companies have a problem with free driver distribution?
Free, as in speech (or beer). I read it as speech. And, he was talking about drivers, not firmware, as he should have been.
Dude, note that this is for FIRMWARE, not drivers. Big difference.
Hardware used to do things using discrete transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. These days most of that (and more) can be done better in high-density logic devices. But the "top of the line" high density logic, ASICs, still have too great a startup cost for many companies. Plus, they cannot be field upgraded.
The next best logic, FPGAs, are not hard-coded with the firmware. Instead, they load it from a memory source on the hardware - or they load it from the operating system on boot or plug-in. The advantage of the latter is that you don't have to pay for the EEPROM or flash to store the firmware on board, and updating the firmware is as simple as downloading a new binary to your computer. (Overwriting EEPROM or flash firmware on hardware can be dangerous, as a failure could prevent the hardware from being recognized to try again.)
So, firmware (i.e. code for the hardware) ships with the software driver, but is separate from it. Your next question will be: Why don't they open-source their firmware, too?
And the answer here is simple. They have to pay someone to design that firmware, lay out the PCB, spec in parts and materials, and then provide hardware to build those units. If their firmware is available to all, then someone else can take that code, copy their PCB, and produce the exact same board except with no overhead of R&D. Heck, they could even provide (under the table) vendor and device information so that it looked exactly like the primary company's product, would work with their driver, etc.
Why would any company want to do that? One of the early competitors of my company, 15 years or so ago when we used TTL parts, copied the entire product exactly. Reverse engineered the PCB. Then ran advertisements showing the two boards side-by-side, explaining how they were identical except that theirs cost less because they have no research overhead.
So, of course, my company leveraged its research "overhead" to produce a better, faster product that also happened to not be so easily copied. This resulted in our first ASIC. There is no way that we or most other existing hardware companies would return to the days where anyone can copy their products.
My mistake, I meant "increased gas prices". Sorry.
And yes, you are correct that many different things went into the increases in gas prices. One of them (not listed by you) was the administration's continued purchasing of strategic reserve fuel while prices are at record highs.
Of the other issues, the "instability in the arabic region" one can also be attributed to the administration, to an extent, given that much of the "instability" is due to actions in Iraq.
Of all the rest - nobody in the US can or should be directly blamed for them happening - but plenty of blame can be levied for them affecting us in the way they do. Personally, I want to see our country move away from dependence on Saudi Arabia entirely. That can't be done by drilling in Alaska. It can't be done by increasing production at US refineries. It can only be done by moving to alternative fuels - hydrogen in my opinion.
Sure, the first hydrogen produced will probably be done so using fossil fuels. But hydrogen is far more of a commodity fuel that gas will ever be. Anyone with access to the ocean has all the raw material they will ever need. They just need a power source to extract the fuel. Thus, over time, hydrogen can be produced by lots of different fuels - solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and yes, even fossil. Saudia Arabia will still have plenty of market for their fuels in the US and the rest of the world, but they won't have such a controlling interest in the day-to-day fate of our country.
I blame any administration that doesn't move us toward that independence, as this issue makes our country more vulnerable to the outside world than almost any other. In general, I think Democrats have a better mind toward energy efficiency and independence, and thus I think the nation will be better served in this regard by Kerry as president. With regard to Bush, his plan to help push the country to hydrogen fuel (announced by him a year or two ago) sounded great - I just don't think he'll follow through with it that well.
I posted three replies to the first response (Mr. I am the Bullgod), but they were all directed at you. They are in support of Kerry, not Bush, but I thought you should hear what I consider a few sane arguments in support of Kerry, in addition to whatever sane arguments in support of Bush that are also posted.
>> Tax Policy: I guess I'm a supply-sider at heart, but I don't believe that the way to spur the economy is to tax the bejesus out of those individuals and companies who actually employ people and spend money. I got tax relief, and I'm not one of the "rich" that supposedly got all the money.
The last line of this comment is incorrent. The rich didn't supposedly get all the money. The rich got most of the money. The rest of us got some, too.
My wife and I got a check for $600 or something. Great! We got a tax break for being married. Great! We've spent all of that amount on increased gas taxes and cost of living increases (without accompanying pay raises, though we were luck to both keep our jobs - my wife survived though 5 rounds of layoffs). Suck!
In the meantime, most of that money went to the richest folks. Now trickle-down economics as a theory states that (please clarify if this is incorrect), by giving more money to the wealthy, the wealthy will create more jobs and give it to the middle class and the poor. (I think that's an accurate description of the theory, so I don't think any clarification is necessary.)
The problem is, it just doesn't work as effectively as Republicans for the last 20 years would like you to believe. Yes, some of the money given to the very wealthy is used to create jobs. But a lot of it just makes the wealthy even more wealthy. Look at the surveys of (real) income growth for the top percentages of the country, and the (real) income drop for the bottom percentages of the country. The rich are getting much richer much faster - how could they be if all that money is trickling down to the other classes?
All that being said, I don't make *that* much money (upper middle middle class, whatever that means). I could still give more than I do to the country if I had to. I make more than enough to subsist and have plenty left over for luxury. The wealthy don't need extra money to survive - the only benefit ever cited in a down economy for trickle-down is the effect on job creation. So why not just give tax cuts for job creation instead of giving it to all the rich people who just plan to pocket it?
While Kerry says he would roll back the tax cuts on the top few percentages, he also has proposed changes to help the small business owners in those same percentages. This means that those people - the ones that actually create the jobs that supposedly justify trickle-down economics - aren't having all their tax cuts rolled back.
(The only other justification for tax cuts for the rich is that the rich deserve more of their money, since they "earned" it. This is a completely different discussion that I am not going to get into tonight as it's already very late and I have to go to work in 6 hours.)
To the grandparent poster, Mr. Twiggy, I just spent two hours writing out long replies to the parent poster to show some reasons why I voted for Kerry, not just against Bush. I know you say you aren't exactly "pro-Kerry", but some of us do belive that there are differences between the candidates, and we are passionate enough to believe that every vote is important - yours included.
Vote the way you feel is best - but remember how you voted and, if decisions made by the administration you vote for turn out to harm you - remember that you put them in office. Personally, I think that a Kerry administration (given the Republican house) will help the country, while another Bush administration will further harm it.
(Again, just expressing some alternate views for the parent who hasn't made up his mind yet. I don't expect Mr. Bullgod to change his mind, and I've already voted.)
>> Security: I haven't forgotten the uncertainty immediately following 9/11 (as I think so many have) and the feeling I got when Bush addressed the country. I think that he provided strong leadership and guided the country through a very trying time.
After the attacks, the country did unite behind Bush. We (as a country) made some good decisions in Afghanistan.
We made some horrible decisions at home, though. The Patriot Act was signed by so many congressman unread because the were told it would make America stronger. But taking away liberties doesn't make a free country stronger, it makes it weaker.
Perhaps the best story about security (and a personal one for me) involves my ex-boss at my company. He hired me straight from college. He was a very personable, friendly guy. He was Lebanese - an Orthodox Christian (as is half his country) - a naturalized American citizen (and proud of it) - and a staunch Republican. He voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought (as he told us) "Republicans are good for business"
Several months after the 9/11 attacks, his church - an Orthodox Christian church - tried to hold its annual Mediterranean festival. (Remember, the people who attacked us on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, working out of Afghanistan, not from the Mediterranean.) His church received bomb threats and members got death threats. They cancelled the festival out of fear. Remember too, that during these months the FBI was rounding up men of Lebanese decent (among others) for questioning. It wasn't a time to trust his fellow Americans, or his government.
Later, he summed up his feelings with (paraphrase, as close as I can remember) "I voted for Bush in 2000 for fiscal conservative reasons, but now that I see how crazy social conservatives can be, fiscal doesn't matter so much to me."
Anyway - this year he moved with his family back to Lebanon. He's still an American citizen, but I think that he sees Lebanon as a safer place to raise his family. This upsets me, because I belive America is a great country, and I'm ashamed that we (as a country) acted in such a horrible was as to let him down.
He said he's voting for Kerry this year to get the "nut cases" out of office or something like that. (To the parent poster, I guess that qualifies as a vote "against Bush and not for Kerry", but that is sort of necessary when talking about the feeling of security Bush provided after 9/11. To some people - like you - he guided us well. To the other half of the country - like my ex boss - he did a pretty damn rotten job.)
To express some counter views. (I'm not directly addressing you Mr. Bullgod, just expressing views to the parent poster.)
>> Social Security: The way it looks now, I stand to get zero, zilch, nada out of Social Security when I retire. I like Bush's proposal to allow a portion of my FICA contribution to go into a personal savings account.
I also expect to get little out of social security, because, as I expect we both agree, right now it's heading toward insolvency. I also know that Social Security, in and of itself, is not and never was sufficient to Live in retirement. It's enough to get by - yes - but not to Live. (Note the capital L.)
That was never the point of Social Security. If you want to retire and enjoy retirement, you have to save on your own. I don't like that 15% of the salary goes into a 401k, but I do so because I know I have to if I want to Live after I retire.
However, if the stock market crashes (and it does crash and will crash again), I could lose everything in my 401k. I might not be able to Live - but I would not die hungry, because Social Security would let me get by (assuming Social Security is still solvent, of course - see the first paragraph and the last one).
So, are you prevented from taking some of your current income and investing it in a personal account? No. So by saying that you want to invest funds privately, you are basically just saying that you want to put less into Social Security, to put more than you currently do in the stock market.
But, as I said, social security only exists to let you get by - it's certainly not a luxury. So if you - and millions of others - put part of that money into your private savings, and it's all lost in the stock market, where's the money for you to just 'get by'? The portion left in Social Security just wouldn't be enough. When that happens, you know very well that the government will figure out a way to keep elderly from starving in the streets. That way is Social Security, as it was created. Why break the solution just to bring it back again, after so many people are hurt?
Now - how to keep Social Security solvent? Well, by balancing the budget and paying down the debt, the insolvency date for Social Security can be pushed out, by putting money back into Social Security that should have never been taken out of it in the first place. Balancing the budget was done in the late 1990s, for a few years, and it can be done again. Ultimately, if Social Security can survive through the deaths of the Baby Boomer generation, it seems to me that the problem of money going in being less than the money going out would be solved.
I think that Kerry and a Democratic administration will do a better job to balance the budget, and get money back into the Social Security fund to tide it through until the generation about to retire has passed on. Perhaps it works best when different parties control the congress and the white house - and Republican control of the House isn't budging.
Aye, give me a dual head video card that I (still fairly new to Linux) could use with ease, and I'd buy it just because it's open source hardware. (And I'm a hardware designer.)
I could live without 3D
Adblock 'images.indiads.com' and the overlay image is gone. Sounds like a website worthy of riddance.
Maybe he bought the censored version, and that's how he thinks the song goes!
>> If your boat springs a leak, you fix it, you don't just install a bigger bilge pump.
Funny, because that's just what I was thinking New Orleans is going to do...
Slap some +1 informative on the parent post.
>> If you live in an area where the housing market is truly dominated by the customers, be sure to thank $DIETY every day. And never, ever leave that area.
:)
Of course, you can't leave that area, because you can't sell your house.
Actually, all you need is social security number and date of birth. That's all they needed to open two cell phone accounts in my wife's name and rack up a few thousand dollars in charges, and cost us time and patience to get them cleared.*
Sadly, thanks to the failed "your social security number won't be used anywhere except to pay taxes" promise, most of us would find our social stamped across old school records, with our date of birth listed right below. Heck, going through some old boxes of tax records I found that BankOne used to print the account holder's social at the top of every statement. Sheesh.
* And it still affects us. Even though the charges are gone, we recently decided to switch cell phone carriers to one of those that had had a fraudulent account. It took my wife an extra half hour with their fraud department before they would unflag her name and let her open a legitimate account with them.
If you read the Google translation, it appears to say that, as he approached the toll booth, he was finally able to pry the smartcard out of the car. At this point, the car's speed started dropping, and he was able to bring the car to a halt before he drove into the booth.
That might or might not make it any less rotten, but that helps provide a more viable explanation. The English parent article just dropped that part completely - probably because they don't have a native translator and couldn't figure out what the Babelfish translation meant.
/again...
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record (or, in this case, machines that monitor your location electronically) change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera (computer checkpoint) and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
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One last thing:
>> Many of us has willingly added another intentifying device in the form of an electronic toll payer such as EZ-Pass.
Suppose there was a freeway exit in your town. The only thing at that exit was a pr0n shop. Would you use the EZ-Pass to pay the toll at that exit? Do you think everyone in the country would? Or would you prefer to pay cash for that spot?
I use Firefox. But those options aren't on by default - I didn't even know they existed. Fixed now.
Do NOT move somewhere with an HOA. You'll end up regretting it. Our house looks fine - really, but our neighbors mow their lawn twice a week (yes, they do) and keep all sorts of tacky stuff that makes their house look "good" to the HOA and our house look "bad". And I do take care of the lawn.
Ideally, live somewhere where the neighbors have to follow an HOA but you don't. Like in the original ranch house of a farm that was cut up into a subdivision - the property the original house is on might not have the deed restriction.
If that's not possible, go for no HOA. It will be better, I promise.
(Earlier this year we took out a flower bed to return it to part of the lawn.) The HOA sent us warnings and then fines for letting "weed" (i.e. grass) grow in a "bed" (that no longer exists). Hassle, hassle.
You seem like a very rational person. I don't, however, see why you plan to vote for Bush for one reason that doesn't (in my mind) make sense, while all your other concerns imply that you would lean toward liberal views?
With regard to the US forces in Iraq, Bush's statements are that things are going well, and we must keep doing what we have been doing. However, that assumes things are going well! It doesn't seem that we've done a good job to build up Iraq after we liberated them. Instead we've let parts of the country become terrorist breeding grounds. Even those Iraqis that would be dead under Saddam's regime don't like us much. I don't see this as the fault of anyone but the highest-level decision makers, who just failed to think through what it meant to govern an occupied country.
Kerry plans to do the following according to his web site:
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We must change course in Iraq. Having gone to war, we cannot afford to fail at peace. The United States must take immediate measures to prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state that inevitably would become a haven for terrorists and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.
John Kerry and John Edwards will make the creation of a stable and secure environment in Iraq our immediate priority in order to lay the foundations for sustainable democracy. That is the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home. John Kerry and John Edwards believe the following principles should guide American policy in Iraq right now and that if these steps are not taken, options in the future will become more limited. This needs to be an urgent agenda to:
* Internationalize, because others must share the burden;
* Train Iraqis, because they must be responsible for their own security;
* Move forward with reconstruction because that's an important way to stop the spread of terror; and
* Help Iraqis achieve a viable government, because it is up to them to run their own country.
----
Nothing there says that we will pull out of Iraq immediately. That would be a pretty horrible thing to do - it would make Iraq the "failed state" that Kerry and Bush want to avoid. But, the conservate in me agrees very strongly with the ideas that Iraqis must "be responsible for their own security" and must "run their own country". I do not want US troops in Iraq in 10 years. I want Iraq to be a free, peaceful state. I don't see that happening under Bush, but I think with Kerry we have a chance.
I know the work that you did at the beginning (I assume you were there for the initial liberation from your post) went very well, but do you think that things are still going well?