Verizon sold their (2g/3g, dunno about the 4g stuff) frequencies in half the state (the northern/northeastern half) to US Cellular. Those were B-side (or A-side, i forget which, it's the one originally handed out to incumbent wireline LECs) allocations in the 800 MHz blocks back in the 80s. Bell Atlantic had them, but didn't keep them -- there, or in the western panhandle of Maryland either (and in MD they are wireline ILEC for the entire state, no exceptions). So it's not that they were outbid; they unloaded them deliberately. They wanted the cash to serve a more lucrative market. They kept all the Pennsyltucky ones though; I guess Bell of PA was a better funded division than C&P back then.
That half of the state is pretty much served only by US Cellular and AT&T, with a smattering of nTelos/Sprint near major highways. And that's before you get to the radio quiet zone near the VA border. Ain't nobody got time to keep hundreds of cell towers from interfering in any way whatsoever with the radio telescopes in Green Bank, or the ECHELON spy station in Sugar Grove. (So actually, you sort of *can* blame bad wireless service in a few counties directly on the NSA here.)
And to some degree it was dangerously vague. It is not a straw man to be concerned about laws barring anonymity. Plenty of high-level computer policy people have wanted to ban anonymous posting for reasons having nothing to do with spam, or with the cost of transmitting the messages in question. If the reason anonymity were restricted were because of spurious claims anonymous posting helps terrorists, or because politicians didn't like being criticized anonymously, I doubt many here would be defending the law.
Virginia has recently tended to be the kind of place that such technocratic prescriptions, which combine right-wing goals with decidedly non-libertarian means (see also UCITA), take root in the legislature, and I'm glad the court rooted them out.
Another thing to note is that Virginia is not a "blue pencil" state. Contracts in VA cannot be modified by the courts unless there is a clear severability provision which describes what the basic bargaining units of the contract are. Part of the reason for this is that it is for the people who have made the contract, not the court, to decide how the value in the contract balances out when line items are changed. Thus the rule is "when in doubt, throw it out". Whether or not this is the right approach, many states around the country do it this way (and many also don't). This is a law, not a contract, but it is consistent with the "no blue pencil" doctrine for the court to just throw the whole law back to the legislature to fix it rather than trying to rewrite it.
By the way, I'm not a lawyer, I only play one on Slashdot.
the DSLAM doesn't have huge buffers, AND tends to prioritize traffic with the right TOS bits set. Most recent ADSL dslams do both of these, and believe it or not there is a lot many telcos could do to make voip worse if they wanted to, than the pretty decent default behavior built into most recent dslams.
It used to be thought that dropping packets was the worst thing you could do, and that robust networking equipment would buffer out the wazoo. The reality of multimedia and realtime services has now set in, and most modern equipment doesn't buffer nearly as much. The interesting upshot of this is that the modern ADSL that pretty much any telco will provision is *better* for VoIP than most SDSLs with no added edge router on each end to provide better QoS. (Paradyne MVL, once the favorite SDSL of little regional CLECs everywhere, is particularly bad in this regard; it's nearly unusable for VoIP in the absence of deliberate QoS on both ends.) In addition, the fast downstream on ADSL helps mitigate the effect of bursty TCP traffic, although it may not be enough for torrents.
By the way, if you are configuring Linux for QoS, the same issue applies. There is a tradeoff between latency and the likelihood of dropping packets. The linux defaults are biased toward very high speed interfaces (and very large buffers), and the kernel has the counterintuitive practice of copying the interface's queue length to each leaf qdisc. The defaults create excessive latency with many QoS setups. You should set the txqueuelen using ifconfig to something much lower than the default of 1000 (but usually at least 10), BEFORE you create the htb/cbq/hfsc qdisc and classes for QoS.
North Carolina: Basically a clone of Virginia with nicer cities *and* shittier weather. Hope you like the ice storms, cuz they're the exception and not the rule three months out of the year.
South Carolina: Behind the genteel southern facade lies the other south. Serial killers in other states trace their ancestry to South Carolina, and the history of violence crosses racial and other demographic lines. Rural SC is an ideal setting for a believable horror film.
Georgia: The legacy of decades of fundamentalism and intolerance. Sodomy laws didn't stop people from having sex, but they did result in one of America's highest rates of AIDS and other STDs. Sex doesn't kill, but the down-low does. "Motor voter" in other states is supposed to help people register and vote; in Georgia, it means you need a car to vote, since until very recently there were no DMV's within 20 miles of Atlanta, and it took threats of prosecution from the federal government to fix that. If you don't have a motor, you're not a voter. Labor laws don't get worse than Georgia, except in Florida.
Florida: A decrepit, corrupt third world country cleverly disguised as an American state. The rest of the country only tolerates them because we like orange juice and Disney World. The rest of the south actually gave up slavery and plantations; Florida just substituted illegal immigrants for the slaves, has continued to keep them under lock and key, and pays them slave wages. Every couple decades there's a national TV documentary on conditions for agricultural workers in Florida, which issue is then promptly forgotten about until the next documentary. The salmonella in your tomatoes came from either Florida or Mexico, and there really isn't much of a difference there. Gave us Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, who should both be deported to Burma or Zimbabwe, where their brand of politics would feel more at home. Rioting mobs of right-wing preppies invaded the Miami voting office to stop the recount in 2000, giving us Dubya as president.
Just to elaborate on this wonderful theme. I'm starting south from Mass. and leaving Maine and New Hampshire out of this, although at least NH probably sucks too.
Massachusetts: You did read the article, right?
<strike>Rhode</strike> Rude Island: A crummy little shithole with some of the worst labor laws to be found anywhere outside the South. Population is split between a boring old city with the most pretentious of the already pretentious Ivy League universities, a bunch of pricey beach towns for the super rich, and run-down industrial towns that make Ohio look up and coming.
Connecticut: Moar like Corrupticut amirite!? Road use restricted, state liability limited, better hope the bridge doesn't fall into the river again. Probably secretly cheering what happened in Minnesota last year since they held the record for bridge disasters until that. Somehow even the wealthiest people in the country, in Fairfield County, can't help the state pay for the cost overruns caused by mafia-run contractors, so the whole place is still falling apart. Gave us Senator Joe Lieberman (formerly D-CT; the D stands for Douchebag), which should be enough to nuke the place clear off the map.
New York: NYC people think they're the only place on earth worth being in, which of course means they're the one place that's definitely not worth staying. The only jobs that are worthwhile involve either moving money around or gluing eyeballs to TV sets. Make sure to take the oath to support nuking Tehran on your way in to claim your AIPAC membership card, which will soon be necessary to vote. Living upstate is also an option, if you want to be one of 1,000 people competing for the remaining 10 jobs.
New Jersey: The butt of every joke in the country, but the joke's on you when you realize it's actually one of the better places to live in the East Coast, as long as you live nowhere near the Turnpike or the oil refineries, which basically excludes 2/3 of the state.
Pennsylvania: Sucks for more reasons than I can count. The state only pretends to have a real state university system or an impartial plan for economic development, having virtually privatized both decades ago. In lieu of making tuition affordable, they set up a student loan lender which became so profitable it was spun off to become one of the biggest holders of student debt in the country.
Delaware: Rogue state. Invented the much-imitated practice of abusing the lack of any federal corporate law to make sure there really isn't any to speak of at any level. Fills their state coffers with bribes to not regulate corporations, plus more than a few of your toll dollars.
Maryland: As a state, probably the nicest places on the East Coast, and one of the few that manages to maintain a halfway competent government. Trouble is, where will you live, in the massively overpriced DC suburbs? Howard/Montgomery County sprawl? The redneck panhandle (with no jobs to speak of), or the boutique eastern shore? (Well, it's not all boutique, but if you live in the part that's not, get used to waking up to the smell of chicken shit.) Nah, here's a better idea, you can always shorten your life expectancy in Baltimore, murder capital of the country.
DC: Taxation without representation!!1! Which means, don't expect the government to actually do anything for you. The only "state" in the country apparently forbidden by the federal government from actually doing anything productive.
Virginia: Really sucks. Don't let the apparent leftward shift in politics fool you, the southern aristocracy runs everything with an iron hand. The legislature meets only two months a year, which is a constitutional guarantee that nothing will move out of the 19th century. Hug trees all you want, there are plenty of them, but don't even think about labor rights here. Even the environmentalists
The whole eastern seaboard, at least from Massachusetts to Florida, is a cesspool of snobby lawyers and greedy big money people. But the southeast is worse than anywhere; it is especially laughable that so many states proclaim the "right to work" (without a union, possibly for peanuts or for a tyrannical boss) but you don't actually have a legal right to work in your occupation if you've signed a broad non-compete that forbids it. These are often "at will" states as well, where your employer can fire you and hire someone else to do what you do, but you can't necessarily work for another company doing what you know how to do.
I've lived in VA and in PA most of my life, and I'm just about finished with the eastern US forever. My next home will be either in Europe or west of the Mississippi. By the way, the states that will not enforce non-competes include CA, OR, CO, MT, ND, SD, OK, LA, and probably a couple others. Nearly all of them are in the western US.
As for the most ridiculous non-compete ever, how about a membership agreement for an outdoors club that forbids former members not only from operating a competing club, but even using a google group to organize similar activities? The original version was even worse, if you want to read some lawyerspeak that will make your head spin, and prompted this article in a local newspaper.
Now if they'll only get the shotpak stock-spam fuckers. I am waiting with bated breath or some other such cliché for the SEC to suspend trading of that damned stock like they did with connect-a-jet.
Why don't the Mandriva people write a complaint to the US government accusing Microsoft of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? Historically, before the current administration and when the executive branch even sometimes believed in rule of law, the US DoJ has not been kind to US companies and their officers who have succeeded in foreign countries by corrupt means.
Want to see Steve Ballmer, or more likely some scapegoat underling, in federal prison? Now's your chance. Get some resources together to investigate how this happened, pin it on them, and land their ass in jail.
I've actually had a reasonably good experience with recent WD disks, particularly the WD1200JB and its relatives. (I'm not sure how the even newer disks do, and unfortunately it's hard to know that until their warranty period is up... that's the pain with hard drives). After their disastrous 4-8GB disks in the late '90s (install it upside-down and it's guaranteed to die!) they released rebranded IBM disks for a while, and after they started designing their own disks they've been ok. My WD800JB replaced a Seagate Barracuda ATA II, a true piece of alpha-quality shit from an otherwise excellent brand. I bought the WD because at the time it still had a 3 year warranty while new Seagates didn't; now Seagate offers 5 yrs. Every company has had their bad batches and periods; some (Maxtor in particular) have had too many for me to trust, but those companies tend to die or get swallowed up sooner or later.
Please excuse me while I go make backups in case I've cursed myself with this post.
That's exactly the point. Apple, if they wanted to, could wait until the ink dries on your AT&T contract before they let you get your grubby little hands on an iPhone. But they don't; they want to sell the device as an upscale impulse buy. Walk into a store, walk out with a shiny little box, and worry about having to pick a plan and sign a contract later, even though that's the only way you can use the phone.
They can't have it both ways. Either the phone is yours to hack (under the DMCA exception for interoperability), or you don't have it at all until you've signed a contract, like most other subsidized phones on the market.
The propaganda this guy writes is so good, it's a wonder he doesn't get paid by Apple for it. The irony is, if he worked for Apple, he'd get fired for writing this blog. It isn't in Steveglish, for one thing, and it isn't vetted by Apple's crack PR team. Apple -- praise them as the second coming, but only if you don't work for them.
btw, hint to advertisers: buy pay per CLICK, not per VIEW. Thanks so much:-)
Re: your first point. Yes, they do, in the US. They can't in the UK, as it is supposedly illegal to change the cover OR binding, which means all you could do is put a plastic slip around the front. In the US I've seen plastic covers, real hardcovers either with no image (solid color) or a scanned image of the book on them, generally with the book's binding removed and redone so the hard cover can't be easily removed.
It's not necessary to have such a condition to be able to take action against distributors of scanned/electronic copies. The copyright statement is enough for that ("No part of this work...electronic retrieval system...")
But the US condition has no legal meaning other than that the book you are receiving could have been diverted and might be considered stolen property. The bookstores are supposed to send back the cover as proof they destroyed the book, but in fact the books end up getting sold as seconds without the cover. Now, the ethics of a publisher actively wanting their work destroyed, when they are supposed to be spreading knowledge, are problematic. But the English warning is much more dangerous legally.
Right. That's the problem. Now people who elect these school boards need to make informed decisions and not allow people of questionable character in public office. But the people who lose have little to do with anyone who made any of the decisions. Since it sounds like the computers walked off, the real answer might be to get the police dept on the case to see if there's any way they can figure out who took them. The statute of limitations might have expired by now, but a few criminal charges wouldn't hurt if they do find the responsible party.
This kind of shit happens all the time in school and public utility boards with poor accountability. IBM might even have a share of the blame if they sold excess equipment on a public procurement contract with no sense that it was going to be useful to the district. Based upon that there's an argument for getting IBM involved in the solution to this other than just paying them back.
Which school board? The one 15 years ago that approved the equipment and then let it get stolen, or the one now that's stuck with the bill?
It sucks that elected representatives do this so often, but what's the answer for it? The people doing it know they won't be there to answer for it! Kind of like our current administration at the federal level pissing away money on Iraq while the situation there gets worse every day, and leaving it to the next administration to make the hard decisions and clean up the mess.
Still true in other countries, one of a handful of places the US copyright law is actually better than its counterparts elsewhere. If you buy a book in England, it may have this piece of shit on the copyright page:
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The "except in the US" is added because first sale in the US prohibits such a condition from being enforced in any way. It is routine here for university libraries to buy trade paperbacks, especially for replacement books, and have them rebound, sometimes even scanning the cover and reprinting it onto a new hardback cover. More power to them, I say. Where this is not legal it results in a premium on books for libraries (since libraries generally will not lend out paperbacks; they do fall apart).
You'd think so. You'd be wrong. Ever seen an "invalid sibling link"? I did, oh, in 1996, with the original HFS. Also this past year on a Tiger server. I suspect there was something wrong with the RAID controller, but a filesystem that relies on b-trees really should be able to at least try to repair them. HFS+ has good company, though. XFS from SGI (on Linux) has tons of stupid bugs, omissions, and corner cases; NTFS certainly has its share of "fun"; and I haven't used reiserfs enough to really know how stable it is. I do like JFS, though, even though it's not the fastest in the world.
The headline in question ("an OMG moment when phone bill arrives") is on the front page of today's Washington Post, although below the fold. Has OMG (or an equally common email acronym such as WTF, LOL, HTH) made the front page of a major American paper before?
Also, one nice side effect of parents irate at phone companies who have just hit their texting kids with an OMG bill is that the big cell carriers are now offering cheaper unlimited text message plans, which is good for those of us in IT that rely on cell phones as a pager and receive probably hundreds of pages per month.
how exactly does it help "freedom to acquire useful knowledge" to stop people from being able to acquire and use against her in court useful knowledge of what a scumbag she is?
And we mined it in the US of A for a couple centuries now without MTR. Why is it so vital to do MTR now?
From an energy perspective, someone has already brought up wind. Once you chop off the top of a mountain, there isn't anywhere to stick a windmill anymore when the coal is all gone.
What the "new breed" of mining companies that practice MTR (Massey et al) are doing isn't necessary to provide us with energy. It's pure short term greed. They want to strip all the mountains they can before enough people wake up and put a stop to it.
I like it how you're only using "overrated" so you'll never have to answer to meta-mod. You're modding me down because it's the truth, and you don't want it seen. It's too bad only mac fanatics read deep into the comments of the Apple articles here. Grow some damn balls and give me a real rating. I've got enough karma to burn anyway. And if any editors are reading this, please investigate the abuse of the moderation system here.
Also, I'm not accusing all Mac fans of this kind of bias. Of the major blogs (ignoring all the rumor sites), only RoughlyDrafted really shows journalism skills worthy of Fox News. I might disagree with John Gruber, for instance, but I actually like reading Daring Fireball from time to time and I find his observations insightful to the extent that I care to keep track of that particular sector of the industry.
Excessive verbosity masking rampant Mac fanboyism? Check. Fairly good, readable explanations of just those factors favoring Apple's position? Check. Pompous platitudes and non-sequiturs about factors not favoring Apple's position? "Apple wants things to be simpler and more efficient, not to offer DRM-free indie tracks next to DRM songs. Duh." Oh yeah. Check. Not-so-subtle baiting ("free-software hippies") at Linux and free software advocates throughout? Check. Absolute bewilderment at the part of the reader as to why the author would provide so much free PR for Apple? Especially since he likes to insult free software authors for "not getting paid" a couple times each story? Check. A belief that the author is actually some kind of analyst despite writing fluff that would feel at home in Apple's officially released press releases and technical notes? Check. Ooh, a mysterious anonymous submission to/.? Yup. Check.
"Like reading RoughlyDrafted?" Well I guess I like having my teeth pulled too. It's pretty excruciating to get through each time but I do learn something, I suppose.
That would be the least of the ASA's concerns... if I recall, the "I'm a Mac" ads play fast and loose with the truth in the first place. The ad that claims Macs "crash less" than Windows and demonstrates it by Hodgman "crashing" and "rebooting" periodically... says who, with what tests, hardware and drivers?
This American quite admires the ASA, or at least the idea of it... it would be nice to have the "commercial speech is free speech" decision overturned on this side of the pond...
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Verizon sold their (2g/3g, dunno about the 4g stuff) frequencies in half the state (the northern/northeastern half) to US Cellular. Those were B-side (or A-side, i forget which, it's the one originally handed out to incumbent wireline LECs) allocations in the 800 MHz blocks back in the 80s. Bell Atlantic had them, but didn't keep them -- there, or in the western panhandle of Maryland either (and in MD they are wireline ILEC for the entire state, no exceptions). So it's not that they were outbid; they unloaded them deliberately. They wanted the cash to serve a more lucrative market. They kept all the Pennsyltucky ones though; I guess Bell of PA was a better funded division than C&P back then.
That half of the state is pretty much served only by US Cellular and AT&T, with a smattering of nTelos/Sprint near major highways. And that's before you get to the radio quiet zone near the VA border. Ain't nobody got time to keep hundreds of cell towers from interfering in any way whatsoever with the radio telescopes in Green Bank, or the ECHELON spy station in Sugar Grove. (So actually, you sort of *can* blame bad wireless service in a few counties directly on the NSA here.)
And to some degree it was dangerously vague. It is not a straw man to be concerned about laws barring anonymity. Plenty of high-level computer policy people have wanted to ban anonymous posting for reasons having nothing to do with spam, or with the cost of transmitting the messages in question. If the reason anonymity were restricted were because of spurious claims anonymous posting helps terrorists, or because politicians didn't like being criticized anonymously, I doubt many here would be defending the law.
Virginia has recently tended to be the kind of place that such technocratic prescriptions, which combine right-wing goals with decidedly non-libertarian means (see also UCITA), take root in the legislature, and I'm glad the court rooted them out.
Another thing to note is that Virginia is not a "blue pencil" state. Contracts in VA cannot be modified by the courts unless there is a clear severability provision which describes what the basic bargaining units of the contract are. Part of the reason for this is that it is for the people who have made the contract, not the court, to decide how the value in the contract balances out when line items are changed. Thus the rule is "when in doubt, throw it out". Whether or not this is the right approach, many states around the country do it this way (and many also don't). This is a law, not a contract, but it is consistent with the "no blue pencil" doctrine for the court to just throw the whole law back to the legislature to fix it rather than trying to rewrite it.
By the way, I'm not a lawyer, I only play one on Slashdot.
the DSLAM doesn't have huge buffers, AND tends to prioritize traffic with the right TOS bits set. Most recent ADSL dslams do both of these, and believe it or not there is a lot many telcos could do to make voip worse if they wanted to, than the pretty decent default behavior built into most recent dslams.
It used to be thought that dropping packets was the worst thing you could do, and that robust networking equipment would buffer out the wazoo. The reality of multimedia and realtime services has now set in, and most modern equipment doesn't buffer nearly as much. The interesting upshot of this is that the modern ADSL that pretty much any telco will provision is *better* for VoIP than most SDSLs with no added edge router on each end to provide better QoS. (Paradyne MVL, once the favorite SDSL of little regional CLECs everywhere, is particularly bad in this regard; it's nearly unusable for VoIP in the absence of deliberate QoS on both ends.) In addition, the fast downstream on ADSL helps mitigate the effect of bursty TCP traffic, although it may not be enough for torrents.
By the way, if you are configuring Linux for QoS, the same issue applies. There is a tradeoff between latency and the likelihood of dropping packets. The linux defaults are biased toward very high speed interfaces (and very large buffers), and the kernel has the counterintuitive practice of copying the interface's queue length to each leaf qdisc. The defaults create excessive latency with many QoS setups. You should set the txqueuelen using ifconfig to something much lower than the default of 1000 (but usually at least 10), BEFORE you create the htb/cbq/hfsc qdisc and classes for QoS.
North Carolina: Basically a clone of Virginia with nicer cities *and* shittier weather. Hope you like the ice storms, cuz they're the exception and not the rule three months out of the year.
South Carolina: Behind the genteel southern facade lies the other south. Serial killers in other states trace their ancestry to South Carolina, and the history of violence crosses racial and other demographic lines. Rural SC is an ideal setting for a believable horror film.
Georgia: The legacy of decades of fundamentalism and intolerance. Sodomy laws didn't stop people from having sex, but they did result in one of America's highest rates of AIDS and other STDs. Sex doesn't kill, but the down-low does. "Motor voter" in other states is supposed to help people register and vote; in Georgia, it means you need a car to vote, since until very recently there were no DMV's within 20 miles of Atlanta, and it took threats of prosecution from the federal government to fix that. If you don't have a motor, you're not a voter. Labor laws don't get worse than Georgia, except in Florida.
Florida: A decrepit, corrupt third world country cleverly disguised as an American state. The rest of the country only tolerates them because we like orange juice and Disney World. The rest of the south actually gave up slavery and plantations; Florida just substituted illegal immigrants for the slaves, has continued to keep them under lock and key, and pays them slave wages. Every couple decades there's a national TV documentary on conditions for agricultural workers in Florida, which issue is then promptly forgotten about until the next documentary. The salmonella in your tomatoes came from either Florida or Mexico, and there really isn't much of a difference there. Gave us Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, who should both be deported to Burma or Zimbabwe, where their brand of politics would feel more at home. Rioting mobs of right-wing preppies invaded the Miami voting office to stop the recount in 2000, giving us Dubya as president.
Just to elaborate on this wonderful theme. I'm starting south from Mass. and leaving Maine and New Hampshire out of this, although at least NH probably sucks too.
Massachusetts: You did read the article, right?
<strike>Rhode</strike> Rude Island: A crummy little shithole with some of the worst labor laws to be found anywhere outside the South. Population is split between a boring old city with the most pretentious of the already pretentious Ivy League universities, a bunch of pricey beach towns for the super rich, and run-down industrial towns that make Ohio look up and coming.
Connecticut: Moar like Corrupticut amirite!? Road use restricted, state liability limited, better hope the bridge doesn't fall into the river again. Probably secretly cheering what happened in Minnesota last year since they held the record for bridge disasters until that. Somehow even the wealthiest people in the country, in Fairfield County, can't help the state pay for the cost overruns caused by mafia-run contractors, so the whole place is still falling apart. Gave us Senator Joe Lieberman (formerly D-CT; the D stands for Douchebag), which should be enough to nuke the place clear off the map.
New York: NYC people think they're the only place on earth worth being in, which of course means they're the one place that's definitely not worth staying. The only jobs that are worthwhile involve either moving money around or gluing eyeballs to TV sets. Make sure to take the oath to support nuking Tehran on your way in to claim your AIPAC membership card, which will soon be necessary to vote. Living upstate is also an option, if you want to be one of 1,000 people competing for the remaining 10 jobs.
New Jersey: The butt of every joke in the country, but the joke's on you when you realize it's actually one of the better places to live in the East Coast, as long as you live nowhere near the Turnpike or the oil refineries, which basically excludes 2/3 of the state.
Pennsylvania: Sucks for more reasons than I can count. The state only pretends to have a real state university system or an impartial plan for economic development, having virtually privatized both decades ago. In lieu of making tuition affordable, they set up a student loan lender which became so profitable it was spun off to become one of the biggest holders of student debt in the country.
Delaware: Rogue state. Invented the much-imitated practice of abusing the lack of any federal corporate law to make sure there really isn't any to speak of at any level. Fills their state coffers with bribes to not regulate corporations, plus more than a few of your toll dollars.
Maryland: As a state, probably the nicest places on the East Coast, and one of the few that manages to maintain a halfway competent government. Trouble is, where will you live, in the massively overpriced DC suburbs? Howard/Montgomery County sprawl? The redneck panhandle (with no jobs to speak of), or the boutique eastern shore? (Well, it's not all boutique, but if you live in the part that's not, get used to waking up to the smell of chicken shit.) Nah, here's a better idea, you can always shorten your life expectancy in Baltimore, murder capital of the country.
DC: Taxation without representation!!1! Which means, don't expect the government to actually do anything for you. The only "state" in the country apparently forbidden by the federal government from actually doing anything productive.
Virginia: Really sucks. Don't let the apparent leftward shift in politics fool you, the southern aristocracy runs everything with an iron hand. The legislature meets only two months a year, which is a constitutional guarantee that nothing will move out of the 19th century. Hug trees all you want, there are plenty of them, but don't even think about labor rights here. Even the environmentalists
The whole eastern seaboard, at least from Massachusetts to Florida, is a cesspool of snobby lawyers and greedy big money people. But the southeast is worse than anywhere; it is especially laughable that so many states proclaim the "right to work" (without a union, possibly for peanuts or for a tyrannical boss) but you don't actually have a legal right to work in your occupation if you've signed a broad non-compete that forbids it. These are often "at will" states as well, where your employer can fire you and hire someone else to do what you do, but you can't necessarily work for another company doing what you know how to do.
I've lived in VA and in PA most of my life, and I'm just about finished with the eastern US forever. My next home will be either in Europe or west of the Mississippi. By the way, the states that will not enforce non-competes include CA, OR, CO, MT, ND, SD, OK, LA, and probably a couple others. Nearly all of them are in the western US.
As for the most ridiculous non-compete ever, how about a membership agreement for an outdoors club that forbids former members not only from operating a competing club, but even using a google group to organize similar activities? The original version was even worse, if you want to read some lawyerspeak that will make your head spin, and prompted this article in a local newspaper.
Now if they'll only get the shotpak stock-spam fuckers. I am waiting with bated breath or some other such cliché for the SEC to suspend trading of that damned stock like they did with connect-a-jet.
Why don't the Mandriva people write a complaint to the US government accusing Microsoft of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? Historically, before the current administration and when the executive branch even sometimes believed in rule of law, the US DoJ has not been kind to US companies and their officers who have succeeded in foreign countries by corrupt means.
Want to see Steve Ballmer, or more likely some scapegoat underling, in federal prison? Now's your chance. Get some resources together to investigate how this happened, pin it on them, and land their ass in jail.
I've actually had a reasonably good experience with recent WD disks, particularly the WD1200JB and its relatives. (I'm not sure how the even newer disks do, and unfortunately it's hard to know that until their warranty period is up... that's the pain with hard drives). After their disastrous 4-8GB disks in the late '90s (install it upside-down and it's guaranteed to die!) they released rebranded IBM disks for a while, and after they started designing their own disks they've been ok. My WD800JB replaced a Seagate Barracuda ATA II, a true piece of alpha-quality shit from an otherwise excellent brand. I bought the WD because at the time it still had a 3 year warranty while new Seagates didn't; now Seagate offers 5 yrs. Every company has had their bad batches and periods; some (Maxtor in particular) have had too many for me to trust, but those companies tend to die or get swallowed up sooner or later.
Please excuse me while I go make backups in case I've cursed myself with this post.
That's exactly the point. Apple, if they wanted to, could wait until the ink dries on your AT&T contract before they let you get your grubby little hands on an iPhone. But they don't; they want to sell the device as an upscale impulse buy. Walk into a store, walk out with a shiny little box, and worry about having to pick a plan and sign a contract later, even though that's the only way you can use the phone.
They can't have it both ways. Either the phone is yours to hack (under the DMCA exception for interoperability), or you don't have it at all until you've signed a contract, like most other subsidized phones on the market.
The propaganda this guy writes is so good, it's a wonder he doesn't get paid by Apple for it. The irony is, if he worked for Apple, he'd get fired for writing this blog. It isn't in Steveglish, for one thing, and it isn't vetted by Apple's crack PR team. Apple -- praise them as the second coming, but only if you don't work for them.
:-)
btw, hint to advertisers: buy pay per CLICK, not per VIEW. Thanks so much
Re: your first point. Yes, they do, in the US. They can't in the UK, as it is supposedly illegal to change the cover OR binding, which means all you could do is put a plastic slip around the front. In the US I've seen plastic covers, real hardcovers either with no image (solid color) or a scanned image of the book on them, generally with the book's binding removed and redone so the hard cover can't be easily removed.
It's not necessary to have such a condition to be able to take action against distributors of scanned/electronic copies. The copyright statement is enough for that ("No part of this work...electronic retrieval system...")
But the US condition has no legal meaning other than that the book you are receiving could have been diverted and might be considered stolen property. The bookstores are supposed to send back the cover as proof they destroyed the book, but in fact the books end up getting sold as seconds without the cover. Now, the ethics of a publisher actively wanting their work destroyed, when they are supposed to be spreading knowledge, are problematic. But the English warning is much more dangerous legally.
Right. That's the problem. Now people who elect these school boards need to make informed decisions and not allow people of questionable character in public office. But the people who lose have little to do with anyone who made any of the decisions. Since it sounds like the computers walked off, the real answer might be to get the police dept on the case to see if there's any way they can figure out who took them. The statute of limitations might have expired by now, but a few criminal charges wouldn't hurt if they do find the responsible party. This kind of shit happens all the time in school and public utility boards with poor accountability. IBM might even have a share of the blame if they sold excess equipment on a public procurement contract with no sense that it was going to be useful to the district. Based upon that there's an argument for getting IBM involved in the solution to this other than just paying them back.
Which school board? The one 15 years ago that approved the equipment and then let it get stolen, or the one now that's stuck with the bill?
It sucks that elected representatives do this so often, but what's the answer for it? The people doing it know they won't be there to answer for it! Kind of like our current administration at the federal level pissing away money on Iraq while the situation there gets worse every day, and leaving it to the next administration to make the hard decisions and clean up the mess.
The "except in the US" is added because first sale in the US prohibits such a condition from being enforced in any way. It is routine here for university libraries to buy trade paperbacks, especially for replacement books, and have them rebound, sometimes even scanning the cover and reprinting it onto a new hardback cover. More power to them, I say. Where this is not legal it results in a premium on books for libraries (since libraries generally will not lend out paperbacks; they do fall apart).
You'd think so. You'd be wrong. Ever seen an "invalid sibling link"? I did, oh, in 1996, with the original HFS. Also this past year on a Tiger server. I suspect there was something wrong with the RAID controller, but a filesystem that relies on b-trees really should be able to at least try to repair them. HFS+ has good company, though. XFS from SGI (on Linux) has tons of stupid bugs, omissions, and corner cases; NTFS certainly has its share of "fun"; and I haven't used reiserfs enough to really know how stable it is. I do like JFS, though, even though it's not the fastest in the world.
The headline in question ("an OMG moment when phone bill arrives") is on the front page of today's Washington Post, although below the fold. Has OMG (or an equally common email acronym such as WTF, LOL, HTH) made the front page of a major American paper before?
Also, one nice side effect of parents irate at phone companies who have just hit their texting kids with an OMG bill is that the big cell carriers are now offering cheaper unlimited text message plans, which is good for those of us in IT that rely on cell phones as a pager and receive probably hundreds of pages per month.
how exactly does it help "freedom to acquire useful knowledge" to stop people from being able to acquire and use against her in court useful knowledge of what a scumbag she is?
And we mined it in the US of A for a couple centuries now without MTR. Why is it so vital to do MTR now?
From an energy perspective, someone has already brought up wind. Once you chop off the top of a mountain, there isn't anywhere to stick a windmill anymore when the coal is all gone.
What the "new breed" of mining companies that practice MTR (Massey et al) are doing isn't necessary to provide us with energy. It's pure short term greed. They want to strip all the mountains they can before enough people wake up and put a stop to it.
I like it how you're only using "overrated" so you'll never have to answer to meta-mod. You're modding me down because it's the truth, and you don't want it seen. It's too bad only mac fanatics read deep into the comments of the Apple articles here. Grow some damn balls and give me a real rating. I've got enough karma to burn anyway. And if any editors are reading this, please investigate the abuse of the moderation system here.
Also, I'm not accusing all Mac fans of this kind of bias. Of the major blogs (ignoring all the rumor sites), only RoughlyDrafted really shows journalism skills worthy of Fox News. I might disagree with John Gruber, for instance, but I actually like reading Daring Fireball from time to time and I find his observations insightful to the extent that I care to keep track of that particular sector of the industry.
Excessive verbosity masking rampant Mac fanboyism? Check. /.? Yup. Check.
Fairly good, readable explanations of just those factors favoring Apple's position? Check.
Pompous platitudes and non-sequiturs about factors not favoring Apple's position? "Apple wants things to be simpler and more efficient, not to offer DRM-free indie tracks next to DRM songs. Duh." Oh yeah. Check.
Not-so-subtle baiting ("free-software hippies") at Linux and free software advocates throughout? Check.
Absolute bewilderment at the part of the reader as to why the author would provide so much free PR for Apple? Especially since he likes to insult free software authors for "not getting paid" a couple times each story? Check.
A belief that the author is actually some kind of analyst despite writing fluff that would feel at home in Apple's officially released press releases and technical notes? Check.
Ooh, a mysterious anonymous submission to
"Like reading RoughlyDrafted?" Well I guess I like having my teeth pulled too. It's pretty excruciating to get through each time but I do learn something, I suppose.
That would be the least of the ASA's concerns... if I recall, the "I'm a Mac" ads play fast and loose with the truth in the first place. The ad that claims Macs "crash less" than Windows and demonstrates it by Hodgman "crashing" and "rebooting" periodically... says who, with what tests, hardware and drivers?
This American quite admires the ASA, or at least the idea of it... it would be nice to have the "commercial speech is free speech" decision overturned on this side of the pond...
Fun? If you think jail is fun, and you would like to share this man's fate, I suggest you do so.
On the other hand, Clarence Thomas seems to think that you have to walk home with a black eye before you can sue over it.