It might be a closer concept to say that "a lawyer is good when he/she shares (and practices) your ideals"
There are plenty of people who have a lawyer "on their side" yet are still not exactly enamoured with them, especially those who have no choice but to pay for their own ridiculous attorney fees in order to avoid even more ridiculous costs of losing a case.
But, there ARE lawyers with a conscience. My own dealings with that particular profession have been - thankfully - rather limited, but I've met both sides. Both had fairly steep rates. One had actually send for me a notice to an insurance company, which - when they played fairly and I decided to try for a settlement without nailing them with a lawyer - he actually declined to accept payment for.
It's the same for lawyers, cops, and even IT "professionals." There are those that are out to do good in the world, and there are those that are out to do good for themselves. Unfortunately for the good lawyers, the bad ones are one of the most highly visible and widely reaching professions out there...
The problem is that a iDevice connector is not like a computer connector. If you hook up a laptop to an external monitor, then (barring screen resolution differences, and sometimes it has BETTER resolution), the behaviour should be the same between the device's screen and external screen. It's just a monitor, and the laptop doesn't care if you're running Powerpoint or Unreal Tournament, it'll display whatever is on your desktop.
On an iDevice, an app has to support the external screen. A lot don't, and it's been an issue for awhile. I remember getting an A/V cable for my iPod and being quite disappointed when very few apps supported it. A staff member where I work tried an external display cable for the iPad, and ran into similar issues with varying compatibility between apps, although it supposedly works better if you jailbreak the phone and install some 3rd-party addons...
Um, yes, but I'm fairly sure that if you decide to LEAVE the airport without flying and not being groped/scanned, you do have a right to do so. Except in that case the TSA has threatened to sue for about $10k...
It also seems to me that a properly implemented P2P protocol that favours near peers would be beneficial. Rather than having a few hundred or thousand students connecting to an update site and tying up the internet connection, a few of them can grab the update and then can will be distributed with the internal network with nearby peers. End result is that the students get the updates faster, and less actual internet bandwidth is used.
I've found this in many cases. However in many cases it also seems that the issue is more that there are long-term issues without a proper fix that are *still* around years later (or have even got worse, for example pulseaudio issues).
Seems to me that the same laws that protect Telestra from me slapping their branding on my own product also mean that they have to take responsibility for products released under their branding.
"but it was produced in China" is not a shortcut around copyright law.
Except that in this case it seems that Telestra is BRANDING the modems as their own, so it's not the case of a generic component inside another product. The item IS the product, and it IS branded.
If the deck in your example is branded as being a "Toyota" product, then I'd imagine they might in fact be liable. They could happily sell the car without the deck (entertainment center), but to continue using the deck they'd have to fix the violation...
Again, your rummage sale example is off-base because it's going after the seller, not the brander. If you were to sell one of these at a garage sale you're not going to assume liability for the GPL, because you're not sell it as a "jgreco" branded device...
Uh, this isn't the case of a lonely Telestra retailer in a store somewhere, this is a case of the company itself. If you want to compare it, a valid comparison might be if Toyota - as a company - were selling a car with a controller (maybe the "black box" recorder?) that was GPL-based and not releasing source.
Depends on volume, and how often they can actually sell a second laptop (and whether you're buying from the same vendor).
If I want a laptop that's awesome on battery and mobile, I might buy a cheap little Acer (I have one for work that's surprisingly good, especially when running 'nix), but if I wanted a powerful machine with lots of RAM and a good GPU, perhaps a Dell/HP/Toshiba/etc
So in the case of an add-on GPU, that's two sales for one vendor.
If modular laptop parts became more common, why shouldn't they also become cheaper? I really don't see a reason - other than cooling - why we couldn't have drop-in GPUs and various other peripherals. Heck, if they're "slot-in" (card goes in the side of the laptop and locks, similar to the battery or CD-ROM). Then you can have a cheaper GPU if you want, or a more expensive one. It might even save the producers on hardware costs... easier to produce a generic board and sell it with a given slot-in GPU than to have different lines being soldered in (and a LOT easier if there's a defect such as the issue with the NVidia's that were overheating and deballing back in the 8000/9000 series a few years back).
I thing the massive fakeness is one of the problems with the industry. There's a whole lotta fake, and part of the competition is not only downloads, but massive amounts of amateur (but often decent quality) material. Yeah, the angles and lighting aren't always as good, but you've got real people, real reactions, and no fake smiles, noises, or (even worse) voiceovers. I mean, a moan-track... gimme a break. At least in a lot of amat, *both* sides are there for the enjoyment and not it's not an obvious "I'm doing it because I need the money" (which is kinda depressing, and depressing isn't erotic). There *are* a few pros who seem to enjoy their stuff, but they're a minority.
And studios don't get it, they come out and label stuff as "amateur", but really all that means is that they don't have actors/actresses that have been in the industry for a long time. Amateur professional is an oxymoron, and you can't really make amateur in a pro setting. Personally, I'd be happy to see less studio stuff in downloads. Bring on the amateurs, perhaps it'll push a new progression in videography tools and equipment (a lot of that does have roots in the adult industry.
Maybe what the studios need to do is make it more interesting for the actors/actresses. How exactly they might do that I'm not 100% sure, but a little interest in the work would take away some of the fakeness.
New hollywood movies also tend to have a much greater purchasing audience. I doubt you're going to sell as many copies of the latest XXX as the latest Harry Potter movie.
Of course, Harry Potter also has a much greater effects budget. I don't know how much it costs to make a pr0n, but I doubt it's quite as much (although special effects might make it more interesting).
Hmmm. I had some friends comes from Aus to Canada and they commented on how good the customer-service was here. Since the last couple times I went to the US customer service was fairly similar to here (possibly better in US restaurants, they depend a lot more on tips), I'd guess that Australia tends to run into sucky service in a lot of places.
I've been to Aus once and it didn't seem that bad, though a bit hurried and less polite, but as with anywhere I'd imagine that YYMW depending on where in the country you are.
A lot of that depends on how one invests money. The difference between my wage here and what I made in the "big city" isn't actually that difference. It essentially comes out to one of two scenarios: a) Assuming I put down the same percentage of income, I could have a house paid off here a lot quicker than in Toronto if I bought something comparable in terms of size etc b) Within the same time-frame, I could have a place in Toronto that was a lot smaller than here, but comparable in price. Probably a condo-apartment on the edge of the city
When accounting for the cost of car insurance and many other things, I'm making less but taking home *more* than if I lived in the big city. Big mortgages also mean big interest too, so the only one getting rich in the long-run would've been the bank.
Now back in my hometown I did see situations where a lot of people from the more pricey cities were coming in and buying up real-estate. The end result is that local prices went up astronomically, so actually those who had bought a $200,000 house ended up with one worth over $500,000... but that only really help if you've moved to somewhere that hasn't gone up so much.
Agreed. iPads and iPhones aren't pricey because of patents, they're pricey because Apple knows that people will pay for them. If they could get $1000 or $1500 and still get a similar volume you can bet on them pricing their products accordingly...
Actually, I moved from Toronto to a rather small town too. One thing I've found about the big city is that you really get *screwed* if you're working on salary (which is pretty much the norm). So while you may be making less per-annum, you may actually be making more overall depending on how much extra-time you put in.
As for the costs. Food seems a bit more where I am (no local Chinese market), but not incredibly much. A car may cost the same or a bit more, gas is a little higher, but the cost of insurance is nearly *HALF* that of a bigger city. Houses are obviously cheaper, and parking is free, but that does come as a trade-off for crappy transit. Not that I consider the TTC to be overly great, but at least it took me under an hour to get to work downtown by transit (despite being almost in Scarborough, at the edge of Toronto).
Another big factor is the people. In many big cities the overall attitude seems to be "everyone for himself" followed by that others are fair game. In a smaller city, choices are less, but those who actively screw over the customers tend fare less well. Customer-friendly businesses also tend to get good word-of-mouth.
There are some things I miss about the bigger city, but there's a lot to be said for smaller places too.
Yes, but you can get a lot of that within a state or city too, especially a bigger city. You'll have an area that's predominantly white, black, Chinese, or whatever.
First, I'll state that I'm not an American, but rather I'm one of your northern Canadian neighbors. It's funny because I can definitely notice differences in upbringing and culture between Americans and Canadians, but I can also notice a lot of similarities, and I'll bet that the influence of American TV tends to increase those over time.
But hell, I can go to Vancouver (BC) or Toronto (Ontario), and see big cultural differences in a regional sense, and people nearly hate each other in those areas too. Try shopping in some areas of Richmond (Greater Vancouver Area, predominantly Chinese) and you'll be lucky to get any service if you're not Chinese or with a Chinese friend. Heck, a lot of provinces/cities have a hate-on for Toronto, and don't even get me *started* on Quebec.
But to compare that to Europe still seems a bit silly. At least for the most part I can go to a restaurant in North America and order a coffee/coke in English. Yeah, some people have funny accents that makes it a bit hard to understand, and there are areas that are culturally a bit non-english, but for the most-part there's still a lot of *sameness* too.
your average Texan is as close to someone from New York as a Finn is to a Greek
I'm going to assume you meant distance-wise. Europe, as the motherland of a certain segment of "white" (I can't think of a better word for it at the moment, sorry) civilization, was originally segmented into a rather large number of different cultures. Since mechanized travel didn't exist back then, and even animal-assisted travel could be sparse, a lot of those cultures tended to develop more-or-less independent of each other, and thus we have languages that - while they may bear some base relation - are radically different than each other.
Exempting natives, the US as a country is in many ways quite young compared to Europe. While there are some differences between states, the language is still roughly the same across such, and much of the culture and laws are shared. TV probably helps more for this than transportation, actually.
A comparison with a Texan VS a New-Yorker isn't really as fair as a Finn VS a Greek. There are huge language differences, and the common culture from which the current US was born is *MUCH* younger than that between Finland and Greece. Hence you have the Euro still being fairly recent (within my generation), while the US dollar - though varying in form - has been around quite a bit longer. The states - despite their distance - are still much more cohesive within their country than the countries of Europe are within their continent.
That isn't to say that all states are the same, far from it. You have radically different climate, subcultures (hell, you get different radically subcultures within a city), laws, and many other things, but there's still a lot of general cohesion that isn't quite there in Europe.
Private spaceflight is a dollar towards a goal that will make two dollars. Exempting a few instance of megacorp labs such as Xerox Parc, etc, dollars spent on pure research without a focus on a given monentary goal are somewhat more rare. Often such research produces knowledge which then leads to a greater understanding of our universe or planet, and is used by other companies to make some rather stunning technologies.
Any goals beyond a companies budget period aren't likely to go over so well, particularly lofty goals that may outlive the company itself, or the directors, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that you don't know if you're buying the real deal or a worthless fake, especially with eTickets which can be printed from home.
It might be a closer concept to say that "a lawyer is good when he/she shares (and practices) your ideals"
There are plenty of people who have a lawyer "on their side" yet are still not exactly enamoured with them, especially those who have no choice but to pay for their own ridiculous attorney fees in order to avoid even more ridiculous costs of losing a case.
But, there ARE lawyers with a conscience. My own dealings with that particular profession have been - thankfully - rather limited, but I've met both sides. Both had fairly steep rates. One had actually send for me a notice to an insurance company, which - when they played fairly and I decided to try for a settlement without nailing them with a lawyer - he actually declined to accept payment for.
It's the same for lawyers, cops, and even IT "professionals." There are those that are out to do good in the world, and there are those that are out to do good for themselves. Unfortunately for the good lawyers, the bad ones are one of the most highly visible and widely reaching professions out there...
So what type of device are you posting on, and where do you think it and/or the majority of its components are made?
The problem is that a iDevice connector is not like a computer connector. If you hook up a laptop to an external monitor, then (barring screen resolution differences, and sometimes it has BETTER resolution), the behaviour should be the same between the device's screen and external screen. It's just a monitor, and the laptop doesn't care if you're running Powerpoint or Unreal Tournament, it'll display whatever is on your desktop.
On an iDevice, an app has to support the external screen. A lot don't, and it's been an issue for awhile. I remember getting an A/V cable for my iPod and being quite disappointed when very few apps supported it. A staff member where I work tried an external display cable for the iPad, and ran into similar issues with varying compatibility between apps, although it supposedly works better if you jailbreak the phone and install some 3rd-party addons...
Um, yes, but I'm fairly sure that if you decide to LEAVE the airport without flying and not being groped/scanned, you do have a right to do so. Except in that case the TSA has threatened to sue for about $10k...
You do realize there can be varying degrees of evil, right?
It also seems to me that a properly implemented P2P protocol that favours near peers would be beneficial. Rather than having a few hundred or thousand students connecting to an update site and tying up the internet connection, a few of them can grab the update and then can will be distributed with the internal network with nearby peers. End result is that the students get the updates faster, and less actual internet bandwidth is used.
the only hits I get are ubuntu users in 2004.
I've found this in many cases. However in many cases it also seems that the issue is more that there are long-term issues without a proper fix that are *still* around years later (or have even got worse, for example pulseaudio issues).
Seems to me that the same laws that protect Telestra from me slapping their branding on my own product also mean that they have to take responsibility for products released under their branding.
"but it was produced in China" is not a shortcut around copyright law.
Except that in this case it seems that Telestra is BRANDING the modems as their own, so it's not the case of a generic component inside another product. The item IS the product, and it IS branded.
If the deck in your example is branded as being a "Toyota" product, then I'd imagine they might in fact be liable. They could happily sell the car without the deck (entertainment center), but to continue using the deck they'd have to fix the violation...
Again, your rummage sale example is off-base because it's going after the seller, not the brander. If you were to sell one of these at a garage sale you're not going to assume liability for the GPL, because you're not sell it as a "jgreco" branded device...
Uh, this isn't the case of a lonely Telestra retailer in a store somewhere, this is a case of the company itself. If you want to compare it, a valid comparison might be if Toyota - as a company - were selling a car with a controller (maybe the "black box" recorder?) that was GPL-based and not releasing source.
Depends on volume, and how often they can actually sell a second laptop (and whether you're buying from the same vendor).
If I want a laptop that's awesome on battery and mobile, I might buy a cheap little Acer (I have one for work that's surprisingly good, especially when running 'nix), but if I wanted a powerful machine with lots of RAM and a good GPU, perhaps a Dell/HP/Toshiba/etc
So in the case of an add-on GPU, that's two sales for one vendor.
It goes along with TLCTSC (Too Little Caffeine to Spell Correctly). Just a typo on my part...
If modular laptop parts became more common, why shouldn't they also become cheaper?
I really don't see a reason - other than cooling - why we couldn't have drop-in GPUs and various other peripherals. Heck, if they're "slot-in" (card goes in the side of the laptop and locks, similar to the battery or CD-ROM). Then you can have a cheaper GPU if you want, or a more expensive one. It might even save the producers on hardware costs... easier to produce a generic board and sell it with a given slot-in GPU than to have different lines being soldered in (and a LOT easier if there's a defect such as the issue with the NVidia's that were overheating and deballing back in the 8000/9000 series a few years back).
I thing the massive fakeness is one of the problems with the industry. There's a whole lotta fake, and part of the competition is not only downloads, but massive amounts of amateur (but often decent quality) material. Yeah, the angles and lighting aren't always as good, but you've got real people, real reactions, and no fake smiles, noises, or (even worse) voiceovers. I mean, a moan-track... gimme a break. At least in a lot of amat, *both* sides are there for the enjoyment and not it's not an obvious "I'm doing it because I need the money" (which is kinda depressing, and depressing isn't erotic). There *are* a few pros who seem to enjoy their stuff, but they're a minority.
And studios don't get it, they come out and label stuff as "amateur", but really all that means is that they don't have actors/actresses that have been in the industry for a long time. Amateur professional is an oxymoron, and you can't really make amateur in a pro setting. Personally, I'd be happy to see less studio stuff in downloads. Bring on the amateurs, perhaps it'll push a new progression in videography tools and equipment (a lot of that does have roots in the adult industry.
Maybe what the studios need to do is make it more interesting for the actors/actresses. How exactly they might do that I'm not 100% sure, but a little interest in the work would take away some of the fakeness.
New hollywood movies also tend to have a much greater purchasing audience. I doubt you're going to sell as many copies of the latest XXX as the latest Harry Potter movie.
Of course, Harry Potter also has a much greater effects budget. I don't know how much it costs to make a pr0n, but I doubt it's quite as much (although special effects might make it more interesting).
Hmmm. I had some friends comes from Aus to Canada and they commented on how good the customer-service was here. Since the last couple times I went to the US customer service was fairly similar to here (possibly better in US restaurants, they depend a lot more on tips), I'd guess that Australia tends to run into sucky service in a lot of places.
I've been to Aus once and it didn't seem that bad, though a bit hurried and less polite, but as with anywhere I'd imagine that YYMW depending on where in the country you are.
So, what happens when the offspring of this snake breed with a male? What DNA is lost in a female-only "clone" type reproduction?
A lot of that depends on how one invests money. The difference between my wage here and what I made in the "big city" isn't actually that difference. It essentially comes out to one of two scenarios:
a) Assuming I put down the same percentage of income, I could have a house paid off here a lot quicker than in Toronto if I bought something comparable in terms of size etc
b) Within the same time-frame, I could have a place in Toronto that was a lot smaller than here, but comparable in price. Probably a condo-apartment on the edge of the city
When accounting for the cost of car insurance and many other things, I'm making less but taking home *more* than if I lived in the big city. Big mortgages also mean big interest too, so the only one getting rich in the long-run would've been the bank.
Now back in my hometown I did see situations where a lot of people from the more pricey cities were coming in and buying up real-estate. The end result is that local prices went up astronomically, so actually those who had bought a $200,000 house ended up with one worth over $500,000... but that only really help if you've moved to somewhere that hasn't gone up so much.
RIM? Microsoft (MS Office) for a short while?
Agreed. iPads and iPhones aren't pricey because of patents, they're pricey because Apple knows that people will pay for them. If they could get $1000 or $1500 and still get a similar volume you can bet on them pricing their products accordingly...
Actually, I moved from Toronto to a rather small town too. One thing I've found about the big city is that you really get *screwed* if you're working on salary (which is pretty much the norm). So while you may be making less per-annum, you may actually be making more overall depending on how much extra-time you put in.
As for the costs. Food seems a bit more where I am (no local Chinese market), but not incredibly much. A car may cost the same or a bit more, gas is a little higher, but the cost of insurance is nearly *HALF* that of a bigger city. Houses are obviously cheaper, and parking is free, but that does come as a trade-off for crappy transit. Not that I consider the TTC to be overly great, but at least it took me under an hour to get to work downtown by transit (despite being almost in Scarborough, at the edge of Toronto).
Another big factor is the people. In many big cities the overall attitude seems to be "everyone for himself" followed by that others are fair game. In a smaller city, choices are less, but those who actively screw over the customers tend fare less well. Customer-friendly businesses also tend to get good word-of-mouth.
There are some things I miss about the bigger city, but there's a lot to be said for smaller places too.
Yes, but you can get a lot of that within a state or city too, especially a bigger city. You'll have an area that's predominantly white, black, Chinese, or whatever.
First, I'll state that I'm not an American, but rather I'm one of your northern Canadian neighbors. It's funny because I can definitely notice differences in upbringing and culture between Americans and Canadians, but I can also notice a lot of similarities, and I'll bet that the influence of American TV tends to increase those over time.
But hell, I can go to Vancouver (BC) or Toronto (Ontario), and see big cultural differences in a regional sense, and people nearly hate each other in those areas too. Try shopping in some areas of Richmond (Greater Vancouver Area, predominantly Chinese) and you'll be lucky to get any service if you're not Chinese or with a Chinese friend. Heck, a lot of provinces/cities have a hate-on for Toronto, and don't even get me *started* on Quebec.
But to compare that to Europe still seems a bit silly. At least for the most part I can go to a restaurant in North America and order a coffee/coke in English. Yeah, some people have funny accents that makes it a bit hard to understand, and there are areas that are culturally a bit non-english, but for the most-part there's still a lot of *sameness* too.
your average Texan is as close to someone from New York as a Finn is to a Greek
I'm going to assume you meant distance-wise. Europe, as the motherland of a certain segment of "white" (I can't think of a better word for it at the moment, sorry) civilization, was originally segmented into a rather large number of different cultures. Since mechanized travel didn't exist back then, and even animal-assisted travel could be sparse, a lot of those cultures tended to develop more-or-less independent of each other, and thus we have languages that - while they may bear some base relation - are radically different than each other.
Exempting natives, the US as a country is in many ways quite young compared to Europe. While there are some differences between states, the language is still roughly the same across such, and much of the culture and laws are shared. TV probably helps more for this than transportation, actually.
A comparison with a Texan VS a New-Yorker isn't really as fair as a Finn VS a Greek. There are huge language differences, and the common culture from which the current US was born is *MUCH* younger than that between Finland and Greece. Hence you have the Euro still being fairly recent (within my generation), while the US dollar - though varying in form - has been around quite a bit longer. The states - despite their distance - are still much more cohesive within their country than the countries of Europe are within their continent.
That isn't to say that all states are the same, far from it. You have radically different climate, subcultures (hell, you get different radically subcultures within a city), laws, and many other things, but there's still a lot of general cohesion that isn't quite there in Europe.
Private spaceflight is a dollar towards a goal that will make two dollars. Exempting a few instance of megacorp labs such as Xerox Parc, etc, dollars spent on pure research without a focus on a given monentary goal are somewhat more rare. Often such research produces knowledge which then leads to a greater understanding of our universe or planet, and is used by other companies to make some rather stunning technologies.
Any goals beyond a companies budget period aren't likely to go over so well, particularly lofty goals that may outlive the company itself, or the directors, etc.