I would take a stand on principle, but there's no place to stand.
You're complaining about $2 a year per domain? Even for 200 domains that's only $400 more a year. If you really can't cover these costs, I have to wonder why you've got some many domains in the first place. Your implication that people have endless dollars available to buy principle... a nice idea, but not part of reality for most of us.
You're really just thinking short term. How much is it going to cost you if godaddy suspends one of your domains because they want to? How much is it going to cost when you have to bid against godaddy? How much is it going to cost when they apply any of their other unethical practices?
If you can't afford $400 a year to not deal with scumbags, get out of whatever business you're in. Scambags always screw you over in the end.
Bridges OTOH are lowest-bidder type contracting (I'm assuming).
Not in Minnesota at least.
After the bridge collapse there were several bids to replace the 35W bridge by different contractors. The DOT eventually picked one of the more expensive, and slightly slower proposals because they preferred the construction techniques. The low price bidder even threatened to sue because they thought it was all based on price. So no, price isn't always the only factor in bridge construction.
I know one bridge that has been hit 12 times in the last 3 years by trucks that were too tall. In the last 10 years before that, I was told only 2 people hit the bridge.
Wanna take a guess how many of these new truckers are just listening to their GPS units blindly?
I don't know, but blaming GPS for truckers hitting low bridges is a bit of a stretch without any supporting evidence.
Maybe there's more trucking? Could there be a closed bridge somewhere that's changed traffic patterns? Perhaps a new weight restriction on another bridge? Or maybe there's more inexperienced truckers? Poor signage? Innacurate bridge guides?
There's a million different explanations that are about as equally valid as blaming GPS navigation. So why are you so convinced this is a GPS navigation problem?
Try setting up a printer...even that supported by Linux. You get into issues like CUPS as if you are supposed to know what the OS is gonna use to get the printer setup.
I've never run into such a problem setting up a printer on Ubuntu. It's actually easier than in Windows.
A few months ago my father bought a new wizz-bang do-everything printer, and wanted me to install it on his Linux machine (I put Linux and Windows on one of his machines after windows blew up spectacularly on it). I wasn't sure what would happen, if the printer would work, or how much of the afternoon I'd waste doing this.
I literally plugged the printer into the USB port and Ubuntu detected the printer and it all worked a few minutes after that. Printing, scanning, fax. No driver installs, no software installs, no driver downloads, just working. That's pretty amazing.
Now, it could have gone the other way, with no drivers available, etc. But this is starting to become rare, and painless installs a lot more common.
Why does everyone seem to think I was saying this would be the electric costs/month?
This isn't the cost to produce electricity, nor the cost it will sell at. It's JUST the cost to produce the plant divided over 25 years. Maintenance, transmission, and any overhead aren't included.
The cost of the actual electricity is a totally different number. The point here is that the construction costs alone are VERY high.
This is insane. 1,600,000,000/50,000 is $32,000 per home. Even over 25 years that's $1280/home/year (and this doesn't include maintenance costs). If this is going to be a real solution costs have to come down enormously.
For one, because Viacom limit distribution by country. For two, because there is no way to find related content -- if you're watching an interview on The Daily Show, you're probably interested in watching that same person being interviewed on The Late Show
These are advantages to YOU, not to Viacom. I don't know why Viacom limits distribution by country, but they've identified that as something that's important to their business. Also, Viacom doesn't WANT you to start watching The Late Show, as they don't own that content and are a direct competitor. Why would they want to link to content they don't own?
from what I gather Commodore were the masters of bungling.
They were. But what likely wound up killing off Commodore was Irving Gould (the owner). From what I've read in "On The Edge" Irving was a short-term thinker who only cared about living a jet-set lifestyle. He left the management (but not the budgeting) to the president, Jack Tramiel.
Tramiel was a fierce competitor who cut his teeth in the typewriter and calculator business (both lost to the Japanese). He made his mistakes as well, but the guy was as ruthless as Bill Gates but was never given full reign of the company. Irving eventually fired him after Jack made a play to gain a greater control over Commodore. (Though some dispute this as the reason). Jack had an enormous instinct to cut prices to shut out competition. Had he not been fired and actually got greater control of Commodore, we might have had the cheap computers that exist today 20 years ago.
The genius of Bill Gates is he realized the OS could be used as a leveraging point. Before him, nobody really concentrated much on the operating system. It was really just a money loser you put in to sell the hardware. Bill realized you could leverage the OS to make money on the software (and develop a monopoly based on people writing for your OS).
I think this is unlikely to happen. Viacom already has a video sharing site where you can watch ANY episode of The Daily Show. The question Viacom will ask is, "What value does YouTube add that we don't already have, or could easily develop?" Frankly I don't see that youtube does add any value, but maybe I'm wrong.
No, I think Viacom is NOT the company to try to pursue negotiation rights with, at least for now. That doesn't mean there aren't other media companies they couldn't do the same thing with, that haven't developed the video sharing technology.
how many peices of evidence for earlier crimes we can now find a print where we couldn't before?
How many pieces of evidence are now ruined, because there wasn't a careful procedure followed in the chain of evidence where nobody touched it? A bullet casing or bomb fragment being criss-crossed with fingerprints isn't exactly going to make this technique any easier.
yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.
Ridiculous. Computers gained the traction they did in society because they greatly increased productivity, and we'd already developed the technology (the silicon chip) to make them cheaply. Bill Gates just was able to capitalize on those two circumstances.
If Gates hadn't have done it, someone else would have. Jobs and Apple? IBM? Hell, maybe even Commodore.
The path taken would have been different for sure, but the entry of computers into society at the level they exist was invevidible. Maybe cross-platform applications would have become far more prevalent than they are now without Gates and Company trying to stifle any such products, and the OS would become largely irrelevant. Really, the OS IS irrelevant to the end-user. The only thing that provides any value are the applications.
"There's a lot more effort and time going into creating our images."
As many "I play a lawyer on slashdot" readers know, copyright has little or nothing to do with the amount of work that goes into producing it, and everything to do with being a creative work.
There was an important decision sometime in the early 90s if phonebooks were protected under copyright. IIRC it was a case where an independent publisher wanted to create a conglomerate phonebook for multiple different phone companies in the area. He got permission from all of the companies except one. The publisher went on and published the entries anyway, without permission. The phone company sued, with a similar argument about the amount of work that went into it. They lost, and the court rejected the notion that arranging the names in alphabetic order was a creative work.
My dumb former Governor, Jesse Ventura tried to claim his name was protected by either copyright or trademark, mainly because it's a stage name. Obviously he lost that one.
That is no doubt true for you, but for many of us it is not
I'm sure there are some people like yourself that do collaborative editing. My point is that that's really a niche market, and is generally served by niche products. The vast majority of people don't need such a solution, so solutions to those problems should be aimed at that market, not the masses. It sounds like you're forced into using the formats developed for the general case, but are under served by them.
I find when I'm trying to take videos, or photos, I end up missing out on the actual fun.
I think this is the main reason I don't really believe that much in recordings. Some people have this strange belief they can preserve the past, and some are willing to ignore the present to do so.
I'd rather just pay very good attention to the present and remember it, rather than trying to preserve it with recordings. A few snapshots every now and again is one thing, but trying to preserve an entire event through video seems crazy to me.
They had a major data loss once because some douchebag forgot to change the backup tapes when he was supposed to.
Obviously designed by people who aren't smart enough to know they're dumb.
(I do find it odd though that such a well designed system can have a single point of failure like that). I do think it underscores the point though that you should have a plan in place if your backup system ever fails.
Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process?
Yes, that would have been smart, but Microsoft is a company with thousands of people who don't always agree.
It really reinforces an idea I've had for a while not that there's currently a large culture war going on at Microsoft. The battle is between the old thinking "lock em in and control it!" vs "we need to adapt to standards or become extinct".
Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Your statement, taken as a whole is correct. I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often. I can't think of one time I've been sent a document that someone wanted me to edit during the whole 18 years I've had internet access. 99.99% of the time I get documents someone wants me to review, but not edit in any way. In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.
If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).
The bigger deal for a single document format is really just archival purposes. I want to be able to save a document today, and open the same document in 10 years with totally different software, on a completely different OS and computer. You're not really even guaranteed of doing that TODAY with.doc.
Very idealistic of you but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer who will then bitch and moan to their government representation that they are being gouged.
It worked for catalytic converters, (and as a result unleaded gas). It's worked for low-sulphur diesel. It's worked for air bags. All of those examples likely cause higher prices for consumers that are passed on from manufacturers. I recall auto makers making these exact same arguments against airbags, and nowadays people are afraid of any used car without them. I don't recall any politicians being thrown out of office for making these requirements.
I'm sure there were some naysayers, there always are. The trick is you just have to sell it to the public. Not everyone is a dumbass that only cares about saving a few pennies on electronics.
Right now it's a pain in the ass to get rid of electronics. A lot of garbage collectors won't take them. Cities sometimes do, but you have to bring them to a special collection place, often many miles away and open odd hours. Put something in the legislation that anyone that sells electronics has to also take them for recycling. In Minnesota (and likely other states) we already do this for motor oil.
I've had two pieces of equipment fail for this exact reason. A motherboard, and a DVD player. I actually managed to fix the DVD player since other people have had the same thing happen and provided all the details of the right capacitor to buy. The motherboard I tossed.
Tin whiskers I've never seen.. but then when the capacitor thing first came out I didn't have any equipment fail do to bad caps either.
It sounds really stupid to me to have a DVI port, and not a VGA port. Why? Because there's a lot more VGA compatible hardware out their than their is DVI compatible hardware.
The small advantage of slightly better graphics output doesn't really outweigh the disadvantage of having to either have an adapter (that people will likely forget or lose), or use a display that supports DVI.
It sounds like they are using whatever ciphers in ECB mode.
No. This type of attack relies on leaking information through a variable bitrate sound compression algorithm. The problem is there's more information in certain phonemes (individual speech parts) than in others, so they compress at different rates. That means you can look at the amount of information going across the wire as a function of time and guess at some of the phonemes. If there's enough of them, you can guess at some of the words. The chosen encryption method is (mostly) beside the point.
To fix this problem, you'd either not use a variable bitrate codec, or choose a type of encryption that puts junk data into the data stream as a function of the bitrate from the codec (likely before you encrypt it). Both methods would create a constant bit rate encrypted datastream, and thus hide this leak.
I guess I'm not really sure the real problem is one of "classification". Frankly that's really a frightening thought to me that some simply applying some semantics and spin in the right way can deny anyone rights. Classification isn't reality, and I hope nobody thinks it is.
The real question I'd hope the courts are answering is "Do the people we've got locked up in Gitmo have a right to a trial by an independent judge?" The answer the supreme court came back with was yes. Call them whatever you like, it doesn't really matter. The ruling is that the President or the Congress can't deny people the right to a trial indefinitely. Justice is about separating the guilty from the innocent through a fair process. The President, or Congress just declaring them guilty isn't justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you getting a price of $2 per year for a domain?
$2 a year is the DIFFERENCE between the $10 godaddy price, and other registrars which charge $12 a year (I know Joker.com is $12/year).
I would take a stand on principle, but there's no place to stand.
You're complaining about $2 a year per domain? Even for 200 domains that's only $400 more a year. If you really can't cover these costs, I have to wonder why you've got some many domains in the first place.
Your implication that people have endless dollars available to buy principle... a nice idea, but not part of reality for most of us.
You're really just thinking short term. How much is it going to cost you if godaddy suspends one of your domains because they want to? How much is it going to cost when you have to bid against godaddy? How much is it going to cost when they apply any of their other unethical practices?
If you can't afford $400 a year to not deal with scumbags, get out of whatever business you're in. Scambags always screw you over in the end.
Bridges OTOH are lowest-bidder type contracting (I'm assuming).
Not in Minnesota at least.
After the bridge collapse there were several bids to replace the 35W bridge by different contractors. The DOT eventually picked one of the more expensive, and slightly slower proposals because they preferred the construction techniques. The low price bidder even threatened to sue because they thought it was all based on price. So no, price isn't always the only factor in bridge construction.
I know one bridge that has been hit 12 times in the last 3 years by trucks that were too tall. In the last 10 years before that, I was told only 2 people hit the bridge.
Wanna take a guess how many of these new truckers are just listening to their GPS units blindly?
I don't know, but blaming GPS for truckers hitting low bridges is a bit of a stretch without any supporting evidence.
Maybe there's more trucking? Could there be a closed bridge somewhere that's changed traffic patterns? Perhaps a new weight restriction on another bridge? Or maybe there's more inexperienced truckers? Poor signage? Innacurate bridge guides?
There's a million different explanations that are about as equally valid as blaming GPS navigation. So why are you so convinced this is a GPS navigation problem?
Try setting up a printer...even that supported by Linux. You get into issues like CUPS as if you are supposed to know what the OS is gonna use to get the printer setup.
I've never run into such a problem setting up a printer on Ubuntu. It's actually easier than in Windows.
A few months ago my father bought a new wizz-bang do-everything printer, and wanted me to install it on his Linux machine (I put Linux and Windows on one of his machines after windows blew up spectacularly on it). I wasn't sure what would happen, if the printer would work, or how much of the afternoon I'd waste doing this.
I literally plugged the printer into the USB port and Ubuntu detected the printer and it all worked a few minutes after that. Printing, scanning, fax. No driver installs, no software installs, no driver downloads, just working. That's pretty amazing.
Now, it could have gone the other way, with no drivers available, etc. But this is starting to become rare, and painless installs a lot more common.
that's close to what my electric bill is now
Why does everyone seem to think I was saying this would be the electric costs/month?
This isn't the cost to produce electricity, nor the cost it will sell at. It's JUST the cost to produce the plant divided over 25 years. Maintenance, transmission, and any overhead aren't included.
The cost of the actual electricity is a totally different number. The point here is that the construction costs alone are VERY high.
This is insane. 1,600,000,000/50,000 is $32,000 per home. Even over 25 years that's $1280/home/year (and this doesn't include maintenance costs). If this is going to be a real solution costs have to come down enormously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Address_resolution_mechanism
For one, because Viacom limit distribution by country. For two, because there is no way to find related content -- if you're watching an interview on The Daily Show, you're probably interested in watching that same person being interviewed on The Late Show
These are advantages to YOU, not to Viacom. I don't know why Viacom limits distribution by country, but they've identified that as something that's important to their business. Also, Viacom doesn't WANT you to start watching The Late Show, as they don't own that content and are a direct competitor. Why would they want to link to content they don't own?
from what I gather Commodore were the masters of bungling.
They were. But what likely wound up killing off Commodore was Irving Gould (the owner). From what I've read in "On The Edge" Irving was a short-term thinker who only cared about living a jet-set lifestyle. He left the management (but not the budgeting) to the president, Jack Tramiel.
Tramiel was a fierce competitor who cut his teeth in the typewriter and calculator business (both lost to the Japanese). He made his mistakes as well, but the guy was as ruthless as Bill Gates but was never given full reign of the company. Irving eventually fired him after Jack made a play to gain a greater control over Commodore. (Though some dispute this as the reason). Jack had an enormous instinct to cut prices to shut out competition. Had he not been fired and actually got greater control of Commodore, we might have had the cheap computers that exist today 20 years ago.
The genius of Bill Gates is he realized the OS could be used as a leveraging point. Before him, nobody really concentrated much on the operating system. It was really just a money loser you put in to sell the hardware. Bill realized you could leverage the OS to make money on the software (and develop a monopoly based on people writing for your OS).
I think this is unlikely to happen. Viacom already has a video sharing site where you can watch ANY episode of The Daily Show. The question Viacom will ask is, "What value does YouTube add that we don't already have, or could easily develop?" Frankly I don't see that youtube does add any value, but maybe I'm wrong.
No, I think Viacom is NOT the company to try to pursue negotiation rights with, at least for now. That doesn't mean there aren't other media companies they couldn't do the same thing with, that haven't developed the video sharing technology.
how many peices of evidence for earlier crimes we can now find a print where we couldn't before?
How many pieces of evidence are now ruined, because there wasn't a careful procedure followed in the chain of evidence where nobody touched it? A bullet casing or bomb fragment being criss-crossed with fingerprints isn't exactly going to make this technique any easier.
yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.
Ridiculous. Computers gained the traction they did in society because they greatly increased productivity, and we'd already developed the technology (the silicon chip) to make them cheaply. Bill Gates just was able to capitalize on those two circumstances.
If Gates hadn't have done it, someone else would have. Jobs and Apple? IBM? Hell, maybe even Commodore.
The path taken would have been different for sure, but the entry of computers into society at the level they exist was invevidible. Maybe cross-platform applications would have become far more prevalent than they are now without Gates and Company trying to stifle any such products, and the OS would become largely irrelevant. Really, the OS IS irrelevant to the end-user. The only thing that provides any value are the applications.
"There's a lot more effort and time going into creating our images."
As many "I play a lawyer on slashdot" readers know, copyright has little or nothing to do with the amount of work that goes into producing it, and everything to do with being a creative work.
There was an important decision sometime in the early 90s if phonebooks were protected under copyright. IIRC it was a case where an independent publisher wanted to create a conglomerate phonebook for multiple different phone companies in the area. He got permission from all of the companies except one. The publisher went on and published the entries anyway, without permission. The phone company sued, with a similar argument about the amount of work that went into it. They lost, and the court rejected the notion that arranging the names in alphabetic order was a creative work.
My dumb former Governor, Jesse Ventura tried to claim his name was protected by either copyright or trademark, mainly because it's a stage name. Obviously he lost that one.
That is no doubt true for you, but for many of us it is not
I'm sure there are some people like yourself that do collaborative editing. My point is that that's really a niche market, and is generally served by niche products. The vast majority of people don't need such a solution, so solutions to those problems should be aimed at that market, not the masses. It sounds like you're forced into using the formats developed for the general case, but are under served by them.
I find when I'm trying to take videos, or photos, I end up missing out on the actual fun.
I think this is the main reason I don't really believe that much in recordings. Some people have this strange belief they can preserve the past, and some are willing to ignore the present to do so.
I'd rather just pay very good attention to the present and remember it, rather than trying to preserve it with recordings. A few snapshots every now and again is one thing, but trying to preserve an entire event through video seems crazy to me.
They had a major data loss once because some douchebag forgot to change the backup tapes when he was supposed to.
Obviously designed by people who aren't smart enough to know they're dumb.
(I do find it odd though that such a well designed system can have a single point of failure like that). I do think it underscores the point though that you should have a plan in place if your backup system ever fails.
Wouldn't you think they'd want all their products supporting that standard before embarking on such an ambitious process?
Yes, that would have been smart, but Microsoft is a company with thousands of people who don't always agree.
It really reinforces an idea I've had for a while not that there's currently a large culture war going on at Microsoft. The battle is between the old thinking "lock em in and control it!" vs "we need to adapt to standards or become extinct".
Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Your statement, taken as a whole is correct. I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often. I can't think of one time I've been sent a document that someone wanted me to edit during the whole 18 years I've had internet access. 99.99% of the time I get documents someone wants me to review, but not edit in any way. In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.
If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).
The bigger deal for a single document format is really just archival purposes. I want to be able to save a document today, and open the same document in 10 years with totally different software, on a completely different OS and computer. You're not really even guaranteed of doing that TODAY with .doc.
Very idealistic of you but manufacturers will NEVER bear the cost, it will be passed on to the consumer who will then bitch and moan to their government representation that they are being gouged.
It worked for catalytic converters, (and as a result unleaded gas). It's worked for low-sulphur diesel. It's worked for air bags. All of those examples likely cause higher prices for consumers that are passed on from manufacturers. I recall auto makers making these exact same arguments against airbags, and nowadays people are afraid of any used car without them. I don't recall any politicians being thrown out of office for making these requirements.
I'm sure there were some naysayers, there always are. The trick is you just have to sell it to the public. Not everyone is a dumbass that only cares about saving a few pennies on electronics.
Right now it's a pain in the ass to get rid of electronics. A lot of garbage collectors won't take them. Cities sometimes do, but you have to bring them to a special collection place, often many miles away and open odd hours. Put something in the legislation that anyone that sells electronics has to also take them for recycling. In Minnesota (and likely other states) we already do this for motor oil.
I've had two pieces of equipment fail for this exact reason. A motherboard, and a DVD player. I actually managed to fix the DVD player since other people have had the same thing happen and provided all the details of the right capacitor to buy. The motherboard I tossed.
Tin whiskers I've never seen.. but then when the capacitor thing first came out I didn't have any equipment fail do to bad caps either.
With what exactly should it short cut?
Two nearby solder points whose whiskers touch? One or more whiskers breaking off and landing between two solder points?
Having metal floating around your sensitive electronics isn't generally a good idea.
That's insanely stupid.
It sounds really stupid to me to have a DVI port, and not a VGA port. Why? Because there's a lot more VGA compatible hardware out their than their is DVI compatible hardware.
The small advantage of slightly better graphics output doesn't really outweigh the disadvantage of having to either have an adapter (that people will likely forget or lose), or use a display that supports DVI.
It sounds like they are using whatever ciphers in ECB mode.
No. This type of attack relies on leaking information through a variable bitrate sound compression algorithm. The problem is there's more information in certain phonemes (individual speech parts) than in others, so they compress at different rates. That means you can look at the amount of information going across the wire as a function of time and guess at some of the phonemes. If there's enough of them, you can guess at some of the words. The chosen encryption method is (mostly) beside the point.
To fix this problem, you'd either not use a variable bitrate codec, or choose a type of encryption that puts junk data into the data stream as a function of the bitrate from the codec (likely before you encrypt it). Both methods would create a constant bit rate encrypted datastream, and thus hide this leak.
I guess I'm not really sure the real problem is one of "classification". Frankly that's really a frightening thought to me that some simply applying some semantics and spin in the right way can deny anyone rights. Classification isn't reality, and I hope nobody thinks it is.
The real question I'd hope the courts are answering is "Do the people we've got locked up in Gitmo have a right to a trial by an independent judge?" The answer the supreme court came back with was yes. Call them whatever you like, it doesn't really matter. The ruling is that the President or the Congress can't deny people the right to a trial indefinitely. Justice is about separating the guilty from the innocent through a fair process. The President, or Congress just declaring them guilty isn't justice.