I bought a $320 printer recently. The seller offered an extended warranty for $80. This warranty covered years 2 and 3; it kicks in only after the manufacturer's warranty expires.
So do the math. 320/80 = 4; the warranty costs me 25% of the replacement cost of the product. Or, I'm betting at 1:4 odds that the machine will become useless sometime between 2 and 3 years old.
Now this is a name-brand product, aimed at office workgroups with a duty cycle of a thousand or or so pages per month. My use will be perhaps a thousand pages a year. The printer sits in a hope office, in an area with few electrical storms, in a controlled environment.
I'm not willing to take a 1:4 bet. At a guess, 75% of the price of the warranty goes to the retailer, with perhaps 25% going to the warranty itself.
I'd take the bet at, say, $20.
I bought an R/C boat for my son at Toys-R-Us; it cost $50 and they offered a full replacement, no questions asked warranty for one year for $3. I bought it. 50/3 = 17; chances are pretty good that my son will trash the boat in one year. (Actually, he didn't; I did. But we got it replaced.)
So it's a question of which side of the bet you are willing to take.
It's the enforcement. We have really, really high fines here for all sorts of traffic violations, but enforcement is so lacking that it almost seems random. Your chances of getting caught are miniscule, so people learn to ignore the law. If they do get caught, the fines are staggering - but the one in ten thousand chance of getting caught is not a deterrent.
In addition to being an engineering dweeb, I'm also a fitness instructor. During certification, they drill the following questions into our heads:
1. What is the purpose of this exercise? (e.g., muscular strength or endurance, cardiorespiratory conditioning, flexibility, warm-up or activity preparation, skill development and/or stress reduction).
2. Are you doing that effectively? (e.g., proper range, speed or body position against gravity)
3. Does the exercise create any safety concerns? (e.g., potential stress areas, environmental concerns or movement control)
4. Can you maintain proper alignment and form for the duration of the exercise? (e.g., form, alignment or stabilization)
5. For whom is the exercise appropriate or inappropriate?
Rephrased for the problem at hand, it might make for an interesting set of answers.
And I really, really wish they'd change that. It's really confusing. Especially since a big chunk of D[igital] R[ights] M[anagement] seems to be preventing the dreaded video analog hole.
And thus we get the Sarah Palins of this world. People like her because is as ignorant and stupid and vacuous as they are.
It takes a long time to achieve expertise on any topic. Most people are lazy, ignorant, and stupid and don't want to put in the years of schooling and thought required to understand a topic. It's much easier to stand in the back of the room, and yell "Bullshit!" than it is to actually mount a reasonable argument.
The problem we seem to have now is that we have a lot of people in the back of the room. And never, ever forget that we have a lot of powerful and rich people, who, for the sake of getting richer and more powerful, don't want science to succeed, so they foster the growth of the crowd in the back of the room. And we have a whole slew of radio personalities who have found a gravy train encouraging those in the back of the room.
"If I can't understand it, it must be wrong" is not a scientific theory, but it seems to be the prevailing one.
First off, my use was legit, and we were testing various technologies of communication with remote devices, looking at alternatives such as long haul radio modems, wifi repeaters, and GSM modems. So I did not hack the cell towers or anything.
My point was more that, if one's goal was to do so, the technology is easily available and at or below the pricepoint for an unlocked phone. I think our cost for the board + modem was somewhere around $230.
So the fear that an open phone would be used to bring down the network is not legitimate; the technology is already there and it hasn't happened (at least not on any significant scale).
Oh come on... I can buy a GSM modem and stick it on an embedded board from embeddedarm.com. I now have a fully programmable open phone that, according to you, I can now use to wreak utter havoc on the cell phone industry. (I know, I programmed one. A direct bridge between the GSM network and our wifi network. Wneee! Hear those towers toppling!)
Not really. It's the same bullshit argument you hear about almost anything these days - can't trust the user, have to lock it down, we need DRM, those users are all thieves.
BULLSHIT! It only inconveniences the legit users, not those who really want to destroy civilization.
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
The problem is that we have so many laws, and even the most innocent thing can bring down the law. We had a case here with a roadside coffee stand on a farm. The law says you can operate a concession incidental to the farming use. Well, the way the economy tanked, the farm quit making any money. In the meantime, the coffee shop is still selling lattes, and pretty soon, it's the major money maker for these folks. OOOOPS! Here comes the law, they have a "nonconforming business use" and have to get laywers to keep from getting fined, shut down, have liens put on their property, all because their farm income went into the crapper.
Another case: A guy builds a model railroad, one of those that you can ride on, where the cars are about 12" high. He gives rides to neighbors and such. OOOPS! The state comes down on him for having an illegal amusement park. All because he wanted to share his hobby with his friends. And they actually made him dismantle the whole thing.
So, do you have any hobbies? Any side income? Do you do anything at all? Then you're probably breaking the law.
I think you miss the point. They're not rogues; it's a lucrative business that is the most profitable job out there.
They've been doing this for a while, and by now there has to be an infrastructure supporting this. The pirates have to have ports, ships, backers.
It's just come out into the open.
Understand Africa; a couple of US$ will buy a Kalashnikov. A $75,000 payday is a fortune that is more than most Somalis will see in a lifetime.
You can bet this will succeed, until something better (more profitable) comes along.
Remember that archelogists pay the going exchange in gold to their workers if they find any artifacts. Same thing; shipping companies will pay this as long as it's cheaper than the alternatives. As long as the Somalis charge 95% of the other routes, it will prosper.
Not only that, but the vast bulk of tuition is from out of the local area == free money to the local economy.
Students get money from gov't loans and grants, mom & pop, and almost none of it from the local area. Even most opn-campus student jobs are funded by outside grants. So at a guess each student brings in something like $30K a year into the local economy - that costs the city almost $0 to generate. 3.7 students (the size of the average family) bring in $117,000 - that's a pretty high income bracket.
So do some basic math, Mr. Mayor. Maybe the university doesn't pay taxes, but students are a huge cash cow for your town.
I coach people through weight loss and smoking cessation. At the beginning I make them sign a contract that says, in part, that they understand this is a life change that will cost them their current friends and social contacts.
Few relationships can survive a life change like that. That's why it's so difficult to quit.
When you smoke or overeat, you chose friends that do the same. And you do activities that revolve around overeating or smoking.
When you quit or lose weight, you find new friends and new activities and you find that your old friends no longer are your friends. Sometimes it's just a gradual thing, but sometimes those "friends" dump loads and loads of guilt on the person trying to change their life, and do everything possible to sabotage the effort.
This is relatively old tech. 3M has been making a window film that's bomb proof for years. The problem is that the the window frame and the surrounding structure has to be able to take the load when the film is anchored to the frame.
Heck, two layers of ordinary mylar film stuck to a window are "bomb proof" - as long as you anchor them to something.
As for the comments about structure - most commercial buildings today are steel frame with infill. That infill can be masonry or stud or prefab wall sheets. You can take out all of the infill and not hurt the structure. Heck, you can take out a lot of the structural pieces and the structure will still stand.
I think a large part of it is also how the music is recorded. The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.
Add to that the simple fact that most people today listen to music that's digitally encoded on tiny little earplugs.
Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall. They simply have no basis for hearing the range of sounds.
As with everything else, listening to music takes practice. If all you hear is 128Kbps mp3s then your ears will not hear any of the richness of a concert hall.
Not saying one is better than the other, but practice makes perfect and listening to modern music, which is fairly limited in both dynamic range and instrumentation to begin with, compressed into a tiny bit of the bandwidth available, on tinny earphones is a poor way to develop a critical ear.
Charge an "alternative minimum sales tax" of, say, 8.90%, that gets split between the feds and the local government where the business has its business license. Or change the laws such that sales tax is owed in the jurisdiction where the business is headquartered.
This issue of taxing the buyer and expecting the seller to deal with it is pretty absurd. It works for bricks and mortar, but barely - New York tried to collect taxes from New York residents shopping in new Jersey.
So fix the broken tax code instead of playing whack-a-mole with my wallet.
Like the other poster, I think you meant the F6F Hellcat. The F4F was slower than a Zero and couldn't come close to out-performing it.
I was thinking of "when they first met over the Pacific".... You're absolutely right, the Allies eventually outproduced the Zero both in quantity and quality, and the Japanese lost too many seasoned pilots.
Well, if you look at Japanese culture, the whole thing of permanence is frowned on... The Zero was the embodiment of Japanese thinking; fast, able, lethal, depending on pilot skill rather than heavy defenses. Worked well, too, until they started running out of seasoned pilots and the Allies fielded heavily armored aircraft that the Zero couldn't knock out of the sky.
The F4F was about the only plane that even came close to even with the Zero. The Buffalos, the Spitfires, were all toast. For the Buffalo, the kill ratio was something like 8:1 in favor of the Zero.
Hehe. You missed the part about "same could be said for all participants". My point was that as vicotrs, the Americans got to write about their achievements, while minimizing the achievements of others, and glossing over their mistakes.
History is seldom written from the perspective of the losing side; if it's written it's called a hostorical novel or fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a $320 printer recently. The seller offered an extended warranty for $80. This warranty covered years 2 and 3; it kicks in only after the manufacturer's warranty expires.
So do the math. 320/80 = 4; the warranty costs me 25% of the replacement cost of the product. Or, I'm betting at 1:4 odds that the machine will become useless sometime between 2 and 3 years old.
Now this is a name-brand product, aimed at office workgroups with a duty cycle of a thousand or or so pages per month. My use will be perhaps a thousand pages a year. The printer sits in a hope office, in an area with few electrical storms, in a controlled environment.
I'm not willing to take a 1:4 bet. At a guess, 75% of the price of the warranty goes to the retailer, with perhaps 25% going to the warranty itself.
I'd take the bet at, say, $20.
I bought an R/C boat for my son at Toys-R-Us; it cost $50 and they offered a full replacement, no questions asked warranty for one year for $3. I bought it. 50/3 = 17; chances are pretty good that my son will trash the boat in one year. (Actually, he didn't; I did. But we got it replaced.)
So it's a question of which side of the bet you are willing to take.
Oh Come On! You will never be elected by being soft on crime! We must INCREASE THE PENALTIES!
Take money out of education, social programs, health care, rehab, and PUNISH THE CRIMINALS!
It's the enforcement. We have really, really high fines here for all sorts of traffic violations, but enforcement is so lacking that it almost seems random. Your chances of getting caught are miniscule, so people learn to ignore the law. If they do get caught, the fines are staggering - but the one in ten thousand chance of getting caught is not a deterrent.
In addition to being an engineering dweeb, I'm also a fitness instructor. During certification, they drill the following questions into our heads:
1. What is the purpose of this exercise? (e.g., muscular strength or endurance, cardiorespiratory conditioning, flexibility, warm-up or activity preparation, skill development and/or stress reduction).
2. Are you doing that effectively? (e.g., proper range, speed or body position against gravity)
3. Does the exercise create any safety concerns? (e.g., potential stress areas, environmental concerns or movement control)
4. Can you maintain proper alignment and form for the duration of the exercise? (e.g., form, alignment or stabilization)
5. For whom is the exercise appropriate or inappropriate?
Rephrased for the problem at hand, it might make for an interesting set of answers.
I'd guess everyone at the border is videotaped. Where's the video?
And I really, really wish they'd change that. It's really confusing. Especially since a big chunk of D[igital] R[ights] M[anagement] seems to be preventing the dreaded video analog hole.
And thus we get the Sarah Palins of this world. People like her because is as ignorant and stupid and vacuous as they are.
It takes a long time to achieve expertise on any topic. Most people are lazy, ignorant, and stupid and don't want to put in the years of schooling and thought required to understand a topic. It's much easier to stand in the back of the room, and yell "Bullshit!" than it is to actually mount a reasonable argument.
The problem we seem to have now is that we have a lot of people in the back of the room. And never, ever forget that we have a lot of powerful and rich people, who, for the sake of getting richer and more powerful, don't want science to succeed, so they foster the growth of the crowd in the back of the room. And we have a whole slew of radio personalities who have found a gravy train encouraging those in the back of the room.
"If I can't understand it, it must be wrong" is not a scientific theory, but it seems to be the prevailing one.
Really? Which reader fits in a back pocket? And, can I sit on the bus or the train with it in my pocket?
How tough are the readers? The ones I've seen all look fairly fragile - like a simple elbow on the screen would render it useless.
When I can stick a reader in my back pocket, toss it on the table, leave it out on the deck overnight and have it get soaked in dew, I'll buy one.
Until then it's an expensive toy.
It stores more than a book, but it's expensive and fragile and big.
First off, my use was legit, and we were testing various technologies of communication with remote devices, looking at alternatives such as long haul radio modems, wifi repeaters, and GSM modems. So I did not hack the cell towers or anything.
My point was more that, if one's goal was to do so, the technology is easily available and at or below the pricepoint for an unlocked phone. I think our cost for the board + modem was somewhere around $230.
So the fear that an open phone would be used to bring down the network is not legitimate; the technology is already there and it hasn't happened (at least not on any significant scale).
Oh come on... I can buy a GSM modem and stick it on an embedded board from embeddedarm.com. I now have a fully programmable open phone that, according to you, I can now use to wreak utter havoc on the cell phone industry. (I know, I programmed one. A direct bridge between the GSM network and our wifi network. Wneee! Hear those towers toppling!)
Not really. It's the same bullshit argument you hear about almost anything these days - can't trust the user, have to lock it down, we need DRM, those users are all thieves.
BULLSHIT! It only inconveniences the legit users, not those who really want to destroy civilization.
The true moral of the story, is quit breaking the fucking law, and if you see someone else breaking the law (like distributing child porn) fucking tell someone. Do those two things and you'll be fine unless someone decides to railroad you. Then you could be screwed, but your record will be your best defense.
The problem is that we have so many laws, and even the most innocent thing can bring down the law. We had a case here with a roadside coffee stand on a farm. The law says you can operate a concession incidental to the farming use. Well, the way the economy tanked, the farm quit making any money. In the meantime, the coffee shop is still selling lattes, and pretty soon, it's the major money maker for these folks. OOOOPS! Here comes the law, they have a "nonconforming business use" and have to get laywers to keep from getting fined, shut down, have liens put on their property, all because their farm income went into the crapper.
Another case: A guy builds a model railroad, one of those that you can ride on, where the cars are about 12" high. He gives rides to neighbors and such. OOOPS! The state comes down on him for having an illegal amusement park. All because he wanted to share his hobby with his friends. And they actually made him dismantle the whole thing.
So, do you have any hobbies? Any side income? Do you do anything at all? Then you're probably breaking the law.
I think you miss the point. They're not rogues; it's a lucrative business that is the most profitable job out there.
They've been doing this for a while, and by now there has to be an infrastructure supporting this. The pirates have to have ports, ships, backers.
It's just come out into the open.
Understand Africa; a couple of US$ will buy a Kalashnikov. A $75,000 payday is a fortune that is more than most Somalis will see in a lifetime.
You can bet this will succeed, until something better (more profitable) comes along.
Remember that archelogists pay the going exchange in gold to their workers if they find any artifacts. Same thing; shipping companies will pay this as long as it's cheaper than the alternatives. As long as the Somalis charge 95% of the other routes, it will prosper.
You obviously haven't seen a group of teenage girls lately.....
Deal with MS, get screwed.
Nothing to see here, move on....
Not only that, but the vast bulk of tuition is from out of the local area == free money to the local economy.
Students get money from gov't loans and grants, mom & pop, and almost none of it from the local area. Even most opn-campus student jobs are funded by outside grants. So at a guess each student brings in something like $30K a year into the local economy - that costs the city almost $0 to generate. 3.7 students (the size of the average family) bring in $117,000 - that's a pretty high income bracket.
So do some basic math, Mr. Mayor. Maybe the university doesn't pay taxes, but students are a huge cash cow for your town.
I coach people through weight loss and smoking cessation. At the beginning I make them sign a contract that says, in part, that they understand this is a life change that will cost them their current friends and social contacts.
Few relationships can survive a life change like that. That's why it's so difficult to quit.
When you smoke or overeat, you chose friends that do the same. And you do activities that revolve around overeating or smoking.
When you quit or lose weight, you find new friends and new activities and you find that your old friends no longer are your friends. Sometimes it's just a gradual thing, but sometimes those "friends" dump loads and loads of guilt on the person trying to change their life, and do everything possible to sabotage the effort.
Yabbut.... that's their definition. I don't see where Google is a signatory to that agreement.
Free as in beer != free as in speech.
I notice the conspicuous absence of license terms on the website.
Just because they open source it doesn't mean they don't prohibit you from modifying, distributing, or otherwise using it as you wish.
The only thing I see on the website is that you can contribute to their code base; it says nothing about it being GPL or Apache or whatever licensed.
This is relatively old tech. 3M has been making a window film that's bomb proof for years. The problem is that the the window frame and the surrounding structure has to be able to take the load when the film is anchored to the frame.
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/WF/3MWindowFilms/Solutions/Government/?PC_7_RJH9U5230GE3E02LECFTDQGG44_nid=R14R9R3CBCbeT4DCJBL6BVgl
Heck, two layers of ordinary mylar film stuck to a window are "bomb proof" - as long as you anchor them to something.
As for the comments about structure - most commercial buildings today are steel frame with infill. That infill can be masonry or stud or prefab wall sheets. You can take out all of the infill and not hurt the structure. Heck, you can take out a lot of the structural pieces and the structure will still stand.
I think a large part of it is also how the music is recorded. The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.
Add to that the simple fact that most people today listen to music that's digitally encoded on tiny little earplugs.
Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall. They simply have no basis for hearing the range of sounds.
As with everything else, listening to music takes practice. If all you hear is 128Kbps mp3s then your ears will not hear any of the richness of a concert hall.
Not saying one is better than the other, but practice makes perfect and listening to modern music, which is fairly limited in both dynamic range and instrumentation to begin with, compressed into a tiny bit of the bandwidth available, on tinny earphones is a poor way to develop a critical ear.
Charge an "alternative minimum sales tax" of, say, 8.90%, that gets split between the feds and the local government where the business has its business license. Or change the laws such that sales tax is owed in the jurisdiction where the business is headquartered.
This issue of taxing the buyer and expecting the seller to deal with it is pretty absurd. It works for bricks and mortar, but barely - New York tried to collect taxes from New York residents shopping in new Jersey.
So fix the broken tax code instead of playing whack-a-mole with my wallet.
Like the other poster, I think you meant the F6F Hellcat. The F4F was slower than a Zero and couldn't come close to out-performing it.
I was thinking of "when they first met over the Pacific".... You're absolutely right, the Allies eventually outproduced the Zero both in quantity and quality, and the Japanese lost too many seasoned pilots.
Well, if you look at Japanese culture, the whole thing of permanence is frowned on... The Zero was the embodiment of Japanese thinking; fast, able, lethal, depending on pilot skill rather than heavy defenses. Worked well, too, until they started running out of seasoned pilots and the Allies fielded heavily armored aircraft that the Zero couldn't knock out of the sky.
The F4F was about the only plane that even came close to even with the Zero. The Buffalos, the Spitfires, were all toast. For the Buffalo, the kill ratio was something like 8:1 in favor of the Zero.
Hehe. You missed the part about "same could be said for all participants". My point was that as vicotrs, the Americans got to write about their achievements, while minimizing the achievements of others, and glossing over their mistakes.
History is seldom written from the perspective of the losing side; if it's written it's called a hostorical novel or fiction.