Unless you want to do stuff like put gas in your two cars along with occasional maintenance, use some electricity now and then, have a telephone or Internet connection, occasionally flush a toilet or take a shower, go out to dinner/movie every now and again, do some unexpected home repairs, etc.
IMO, a $3500 mortgage on a $5000 income is ridiculously irresponsible.
And when mortgage brokers are allowed to negotiate loans which they know will be defaulted, and then turn around and use those loans for triple-A securities, there's a serious problem.
And this is where the prisons need to be doing a booming business. It's fraud, plain and simple.
Now you can say that the lending institution shouldn't have given it to them, but they should have also known that they couldn't afford it.
Why should they care whether the buyer could afford it or not? They knew that loan was going to get bundled and sold to a brokerage or other entity well before the monthly payments were due to change, and the original lender would be paid in full when those loans changed hands. There was practically no risk at all to the loan issuer.
I find it infuriating that banks are even allowed to call loans when the repayments are being made, but apparently it's necessary.
I don't get it myself - if you have a debtor that is consistently making payments with no indication that he's going to default, why blow up the only chance you'll get to recover all the money owed on the property? Foreclosure is an option at any time, so the bank always has the ability to take possession and resell the property if the debtor bails, so why the hell would you want to grab the property and try to sell it when the prices are *still* going down? Yeah, you might get $250K for a house that will bottom out at $210K, but wouldn't it still be better to get the $400K that was owed on it? Even if the property gets refinanced, it seems that the bank would be money ahead if they just let sleeping dogs lie.
Actually, the entity that made the loan most certainly did get the full payment from the brokerage firm they sold the mortgage to.
To me, this is where the real fraud happened. The entity originating the loan could not have cared less whether the loan could have been paid back or not - they only cared whether the first few months were going to be paid because they were only on the hook for the loan until they sold it to the broker, at which point it totally ceased to be their problem. It was pretty much impossible for them to lose money on the deal, so it was imperative simply to get the loans in place regardless of the long-term ability to pay. The brokers and other people up the food chain bought into the myth that says "property values never decrease", and are paying for that unreasonable belief now.
They have to. If they didn't, they couldn't win a single case.
And they should be more concerned about justice and the proper use of the court system rather than just winning cases. The thing is, rather than pursuing the cases, they should be telling their clients (the RIAA members) that their cases are deficient and there's not enough real evidence to continue. That's what an ethical lawyer acting as an officer of the court would do. Instead, they prefer to cash those big checks and twist the system around in an attempt to actively hinder their chosen target's ability to receive justice in the courts. Worst of all, in some cases they are richly rewarded for having abused said system so skillfully.
In some localities, attorneys in private practice serve as public defenders for a certain number of cases per year as a required public service, so it's probably not as rare as you'd think that there are PDs that actually know what they're doing.
they've been taking works that should have become public domain and extending the duration of their monopoly rights over them
And unlike the folks that claim that copyright infringment = theft, this *really is* theft (i.e., something taken from people that they are unable to use as a result) on a massive scale.
An 8 oz. can of Coke (I am sure their bulldogs will be all over this) has some 45g of sugars or something like 180 calories.
I think you meant a 12 oz can (355 ml), which would be 140 calories and 39g of sugar. Obviously this would be a bit less for the 330 ml cans that are common outside the US.
This is quite true, which speaks even more strongly for an encrypted RTP stream for VoIP communications. Problem is, if it terminates to a POTS connection anywhere, or you're going through a provider that's subject to CALEA, you're still pretty much hosed. You need to be have an end-to-end encrypted connection with trusted devices/software on each end to be assured of privacy.
The thing is, I'd imagine any agency that can get a warrant to use the backdoor in Skype can also get a warrant to examine your net connection for voice traffic. VoIP implemented over SIP/RTP is quite easy to listen in on if you have access to the entire bit stream since practically nobody encrypts the RTP stream.
Odd about the dimming the light that way; IIRC the LEDs I've used can be extremely dim with low enough voltages without having to flicker it on/off.
This is often true, but LEDs don't get brighter in a linear fashion when the input voltage (or current) is increased. Pulsing makes the perceived brightness much more controllable.
I have an LED lightbar on top of my vehicle (volunteer firefighter), and the lights are brighter
Yeah, I'll definitely agree they're brighter. I think they're brighter to the point that the light bar manufacturers should incorporate a photocell that will allow the controller to reduce the LED duty cycle when it's dark outside because they're dazzling to the point of ruining dark-adapted vision, particularly the blue ones.
And yeah, my parents wrote books for a living, what they wrote wasn't even art (they didn't write novels), no kind of social engineering was needed to find that out, only asking, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
Not even asking was necessary for that, since a simple Google search turns all that up. By the way Michel, happy belated birthday, and I hope you're enjoying Ireland and didn't get too much of a culture shock from leaving France. I also hope you're doing well with the French tutoring. Despite the lack of a college education, you seem to have a decent handle on the basics of DSP, although it sounds like you still have quite a lot of math to learn before making it a career - this book might be quite helpful to you in that regard. It's quite a good book, and I speak from personal experience with it. As regards your royalty checks, who'd have guessed that names would be so interesting to so many people?
You seem to be a smart guy, which makes it all the more a shame that you've been such a tool during this whole discussion. Maybe you'll grow out of it, but don't ever forget that the Internet is forever, and what you do or say will likely follow you for a long, long time. And still nothing changes the fact that here in the U.S., copyright exists only by virtue of the Copyright Clause, not as a natural right.
How dare you compare doing engineering for a car manufacturer with creating works of art sold as such?
I dare quite easily, thank you. Creativity is creativity, whether it's writing source code, engineering a better speedometer, writing a book, or writing music. Incidentally, I've done all of those except for the speedometer, although I don't publish any of my music and my one book was only on the market for a short time and has been out of print since 1990, thus I don't see any further income from it. However, I'd be just fine with a PDF of it being distributed if anyone were still interested and the publisher didn't have an issue with it. I think I have a pretty good experiential and moral base to hold the views that I have. What have *you* brought to society lately?
And yeah it was safe to assume that you never created shit worthy of a copyright and I fail to see where you prove it wrong.
It's not my job to prove anything to anyone, and you're operating under the mistaken assumption that I really care whether or not you believe or agree with me. I'm frankly just getting a kick out of how easy it is to manipulate you into showing that it often really is about greed instead of any lofty artistic ideals. Enjoy those royalty checks, sport.
Unfortunately, "limited" is now being taken in comparison to the heat death of the universe, instead of in comparison with the length of time a person could reasonably be expected to live as it used to be.
If you had ever created anything and heard some fucker claimed that society inherently owns what you've created you'd feel like putting your foot up their arse
I actually do make a reasonably comfortable living creating "intellectual property" and have for the last 20 years (and odds are good that you interact with the results of my work every time you get into your car), but I don't feel I have a perpetual right to what I create and I certainly don't have an entitlement mentality that says it's my God-given right to continue receiving checks from stuff Mommy and Daddy did years ago for the rest of my life. You really shouldn't go around saying stuff like "you never created shit worthy of a copyright" when you don't know the first thing about the person you're talking about, you know.
Fortunately, I get my check, and all you get is an erection of my middle fingers.
Oh, that stung. Sounds like I got someone's panties in a bunch.
If what they produce is still worth something (as in, people would pay for it) after 100 years, why artificially remove its added value by declaring it's free?
Because society is the true owner of those works, and copyright is a manufactured temporary right given to creators in order to induce them to create more. They have no inherent natural right to those works they create, unlike the chair manufacturer, who paid for the raw materials and thus has a legal claim to ownership of the chairs he makes.
my parents were book writers (nothing else), the proverbial starving artists, and best believe I want to get royalties off their work as long as there's someone who wants to buy their books.
And what's your justification for believing you're entitled to royalties? Simply because they were your parents? Sorry, copyright doesn't work like that.
In the United States, you don't have a pre-existing right to anything as regards IP except that as explicitly *granted*. I'd suggest you actually read the text of the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
A natural right can't be granted ("secured") for a "limited time" by a government and then taken away, as the Copyright Clause so clearly states is to happen. Natural rights exist outside any government action, and are inherent by virtue of being human. Given the text, the authors of the Constitution obviously felt that copyright was not such a right. Copyright is a very rare example of a right that is actually *given* by the Constitution, as opposed to enumerating an always-existing right that is noted as being inalienable, such as those in the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution clearly spells out that *society* owns everything you create, and that you're given a limited time to profit from it in order to encourage you to create more, but in the end it doesn't belong to you. You *don't* have some God-given moral right to that which you create, at least not in the United States.
Sorry, but Consumer Reports has a larger sample size tested over a longer period than you do I bet.
Prove it then. The last CR assessment I saw of anything having to do with Apple regarded technical support, and that was based on a survey. When CR buys a thousand MacBooks and tests them, maybe then we can draw some better inferences. The quality of technical support has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the product they're supporting.
My personal experiences have tended to jive more with the other two posters. My wife's iMac G3 had its hard disk die after about 2.5 years of use (a *far* shorter lifespan than any other hard disk I own). Her iBook G3 has been back to the shop four times and had its motherboard replaced twice under warranty, and that's not counting the number of power adapters she went through owing to Apple's ridiculous design that completely abandoned the idea of strain relief on the cabling. Her current MacBook experienced near-continuous PMU issues (sudden power-off) from the time she bought it to the time that Apple quietly released a PMU firmware upgrade, after they denied the entire time there was a problem.
You can post all the anecdotes you want, but find me a real, professional study with a good sample size like those published by Consumer Reports to back up your opinion if you want me to take it seriously.
No offense, but I really couldn't care less what your opinion about Apple's reliability is. I know what my personal experience tells me, and it's because of that (and the fact that Apple wants almost $300 to replace the proprietary 300-watt power supply in a G4-450 DP tower) that I am quite unlikely to buy an Apple computer for myself in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
One can also simplify by seeing that $20000 over 5 years is $4000/year. This means that it's $1000 every three months, or $333.33/month.
Breaking the problem down into more manageable chunks is often a great help.
and $550 for groceries and bullshit every month.
Unless you want to do stuff like put gas in your two cars along with occasional maintenance, use some electricity now and then, have a telephone or Internet connection, occasionally flush a toilet or take a shower, go out to dinner/movie every now and again, do some unexpected home repairs, etc.
IMO, a $3500 mortgage on a $5000 income is ridiculously irresponsible.
And when mortgage brokers are allowed to negotiate loans which they know will be defaulted, and then turn around and use those loans for triple-A securities, there's a serious problem.
And this is where the prisons need to be doing a booming business. It's fraud, plain and simple.
Now you can say that the lending institution shouldn't have given it to them, but they should have also known that they couldn't afford it.
Why should they care whether the buyer could afford it or not? They knew that loan was going to get bundled and sold to a brokerage or other entity well before the monthly payments were due to change, and the original lender would be paid in full when those loans changed hands. There was practically no risk at all to the loan issuer.
I find it infuriating that banks are even allowed to call loans when the repayments are being made, but apparently it's necessary.
I don't get it myself - if you have a debtor that is consistently making payments with no indication that he's going to default, why blow up the only chance you'll get to recover all the money owed on the property? Foreclosure is an option at any time, so the bank always has the ability to take possession and resell the property if the debtor bails, so why the hell would you want to grab the property and try to sell it when the prices are *still* going down? Yeah, you might get $250K for a house that will bottom out at $210K, but wouldn't it still be better to get the $400K that was owed on it? Even if the property gets refinanced, it seems that the bank would be money ahead if they just let sleeping dogs lie.
Actually, the entity that made the loan most certainly did get the full payment from the brokerage firm they sold the mortgage to.
To me, this is where the real fraud happened. The entity originating the loan could not have cared less whether the loan could have been paid back or not - they only cared whether the first few months were going to be paid because they were only on the hook for the loan until they sold it to the broker, at which point it totally ceased to be their problem. It was pretty much impossible for them to lose money on the deal, so it was imperative simply to get the loans in place regardless of the long-term ability to pay. The brokers and other people up the food chain bought into the myth that says "property values never decrease", and are paying for that unreasonable belief now.
They have to. If they didn't, they couldn't win a single case.
And they should be more concerned about justice and the proper use of the court system rather than just winning cases. The thing is, rather than pursuing the cases, they should be telling their clients (the RIAA members) that their cases are deficient and there's not enough real evidence to continue. That's what an ethical lawyer acting as an officer of the court would do. Instead, they prefer to cash those big checks and twist the system around in an attempt to actively hinder their chosen target's ability to receive justice in the courts. Worst of all, in some cases they are richly rewarded for having abused said system so skillfully.
In some localities, attorneys in private practice serve as public defenders for a certain number of cases per year as a required public service, so it's probably not as rare as you'd think that there are PDs that actually know what they're doing.
they've been taking works that should have become public domain and extending the duration of their monopoly rights over them
And unlike the folks that claim that copyright infringment = theft, this *really is* theft (i.e., something taken from people that they are unable to use as a result) on a massive scale.
An 8 oz. can of Coke (I am sure their bulldogs will be all over this) has some 45g of sugars or something like 180 calories.
I think you meant a 12 oz can (355 ml), which would be 140 calories and 39g of sugar. Obviously this would be a bit less for the 330 ml cans that are common outside the US.
we could all drink vegetable oil and eat sugar without any worries
Mmmm....Cool Whip....
This is quite true, which speaks even more strongly for an encrypted RTP stream for VoIP communications. Problem is, if it terminates to a POTS connection anywhere, or you're going through a provider that's subject to CALEA, you're still pretty much hosed. You need to be have an end-to-end encrypted connection with trusted devices/software on each end to be assured of privacy.
The thing is, I'd imagine any agency that can get a warrant to use the backdoor in Skype can also get a warrant to examine your net connection for voice traffic. VoIP implemented over SIP/RTP is quite easy to listen in on if you have access to the entire bit stream since practically nobody encrypts the RTP stream.
Odd about the dimming the light that way; IIRC the LEDs I've used can be extremely dim with low enough voltages without having to flicker it on/off.
This is often true, but LEDs don't get brighter in a linear fashion when the input voltage (or current) is increased. Pulsing makes the perceived brightness much more controllable.
I don't see why one would like to dim a car tail light.
It would allow you to use the same set of LEDs for both taillights and brake lights. Taillights would be dimmed, brake lights would be full power.
I have an LED lightbar on top of my vehicle (volunteer firefighter), and the lights are brighter
Yeah, I'll definitely agree they're brighter. I think they're brighter to the point that the light bar manufacturers should incorporate a photocell that will allow the controller to reduce the LED duty cycle when it's dark outside because they're dazzling to the point of ruining dark-adapted vision, particularly the blue ones.
I feel a little bad for all the people who have built a "career" around supporting this hell-spawned beast.
At a thousand bucks a day, I feel more envy than anything.
And yeah, my parents wrote books for a living, what they wrote wasn't even art (they didn't write novels), no kind of social engineering was needed to find that out, only asking, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
Not even asking was necessary for that, since a simple Google search turns all that up. By the way Michel, happy belated birthday, and I hope you're enjoying Ireland and didn't get too much of a culture shock from leaving France. I also hope you're doing well with the French tutoring. Despite the lack of a college education, you seem to have a decent handle on the basics of DSP, although it sounds like you still have quite a lot of math to learn before making it a career - this book might be quite helpful to you in that regard. It's quite a good book, and I speak from personal experience with it. As regards your royalty checks, who'd have guessed that names would be so interesting to so many people?
You seem to be a smart guy, which makes it all the more a shame that you've been such a tool during this whole discussion. Maybe you'll grow out of it, but don't ever forget that the Internet is forever, and what you do or say will likely follow you for a long, long time. And still nothing changes the fact that here in the U.S., copyright exists only by virtue of the Copyright Clause, not as a natural right.
How dare you compare doing engineering for a car manufacturer with creating works of art sold as such?
I dare quite easily, thank you. Creativity is creativity, whether it's writing source code, engineering a better speedometer, writing a book, or writing music. Incidentally, I've done all of those except for the speedometer, although I don't publish any of my music and my one book was only on the market for a short time and has been out of print since 1990, thus I don't see any further income from it. However, I'd be just fine with a PDF of it being distributed if anyone were still interested and the publisher didn't have an issue with it. I think I have a pretty good experiential and moral base to hold the views that I have. What have *you* brought to society lately?
And yeah it was safe to assume that you never created shit worthy of a copyright and I fail to see where you prove it wrong.
It's not my job to prove anything to anyone, and you're operating under the mistaken assumption that I really care whether or not you believe or agree with me. I'm frankly just getting a kick out of how easy it is to manipulate you into showing that it often really is about greed instead of any lofty artistic ideals. Enjoy those royalty checks, sport.
Unfortunately, "limited" is now being taken in comparison to the heat death of the universe, instead of in comparison with the length of time a person could reasonably be expected to live as it used to be.
If you had ever created anything and heard some fucker claimed that society inherently owns what you've created you'd feel like putting your foot up their arse
I actually do make a reasonably comfortable living creating "intellectual property" and have for the last 20 years (and odds are good that you interact with the results of my work every time you get into your car), but I don't feel I have a perpetual right to what I create and I certainly don't have an entitlement mentality that says it's my God-given right to continue receiving checks from stuff Mommy and Daddy did years ago for the rest of my life. You really shouldn't go around saying stuff like "you never created shit worthy of a copyright" when you don't know the first thing about the person you're talking about, you know.
Fortunately, I get my check, and all you get is an erection of my middle fingers.
Oh, that stung. Sounds like I got someone's panties in a bunch.
If what they produce is still worth something (as in, people would pay for it) after 100 years, why artificially remove its added value by declaring it's free?
Because society is the true owner of those works, and copyright is a manufactured temporary right given to creators in order to induce them to create more. They have no inherent natural right to those works they create, unlike the chair manufacturer, who paid for the raw materials and thus has a legal claim to ownership of the chairs he makes.
my parents were book writers (nothing else), the proverbial starving artists, and best believe I want to get royalties off their work as long as there's someone who wants to buy their books.
And what's your justification for believing you're entitled to royalties? Simply because they were your parents? Sorry, copyright doesn't work like that.
In the United States, you don't have a pre-existing right to anything as regards IP except that as explicitly *granted*. I'd suggest you actually read the text of the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
A natural right can't be granted ("secured") for a "limited time" by a government and then taken away, as the Copyright Clause so clearly states is to happen. Natural rights exist outside any government action, and are inherent by virtue of being human. Given the text, the authors of the Constitution obviously felt that copyright was not such a right. Copyright is a very rare example of a right that is actually *given* by the Constitution, as opposed to enumerating an always-existing right that is noted as being inalienable, such as those in the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution clearly spells out that *society* owns everything you create, and that you're given a limited time to profit from it in order to encourage you to create more, but in the end it doesn't belong to you. You *don't* have some God-given moral right to that which you create, at least not in the United States.
Because an anthropomorphic bomb is so much more informative.
:-)
It is as long as you can keep Doolittle talking to it.
Sorry, but Consumer Reports has a larger sample size tested over a longer period than you do I bet.
Prove it then. The last CR assessment I saw of anything having to do with Apple regarded technical support, and that was based on a survey. When CR buys a thousand MacBooks and tests them, maybe then we can draw some better inferences. The quality of technical support has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the product they're supporting.
My personal experiences have tended to jive more with the other two posters. My wife's iMac G3 had its hard disk die after about 2.5 years of use (a *far* shorter lifespan than any other hard disk I own). Her iBook G3 has been back to the shop four times and had its motherboard replaced twice under warranty, and that's not counting the number of power adapters she went through owing to Apple's ridiculous design that completely abandoned the idea of strain relief on the cabling. Her current MacBook experienced near-continuous PMU issues (sudden power-off) from the time she bought it to the time that Apple quietly released a PMU firmware upgrade, after they denied the entire time there was a problem.
You can post all the anecdotes you want, but find me a real, professional study with a good sample size like those published by Consumer Reports to back up your opinion if you want me to take it seriously.
No offense, but I really couldn't care less what your opinion about Apple's reliability is. I know what my personal experience tells me, and it's because of that (and the fact that Apple wants almost $300 to replace the proprietary 300-watt power supply in a G4-450 DP tower) that I am quite unlikely to buy an Apple computer for myself in the foreseeable future.