Just hope you never get to the tipping point where there aren't enough legal users to subsidize the parasites, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
"If you tube adopts this, please find an alternative fast to make sure others get the message that this won't be tolerated."
Assuming, of course, such an alternative exists. Why not create one yourself? I'm sure you'd like to create a site hit by millions of people downloading bandwidth-intensive video all on your dime.
Could be what's needed is a site that has a bit-torrenting Flash-video player. That way you could host the links and the bandwidth gets paid for by all of the users.
Actually, if you consider the major corporations with widespread retail presences like Conoco and Exxon, Wal-Mart and Target, McDonalds & Wendys, Lowes and Home Depot, Big-O and Quicky Lube, Krogers and Safeway, and so on, I could probably take exception to the "You know, where most of us work." statement too. (grin)
" Is there no cafes with wifi in the US? How do they cope?"
Great. It's not enough that the parasites have caused ISPs to trottle legitimate BT traffic, and then trottle legitimate SSL traffic. Now I have to worry about my favorite WiFi-enabled resturants dropping free wireless because they're about to get hit with legal issues due to people torrenting on their networks.
"... until you realize that there are probably 50 VPs at the same company."
And how many generals and admirals did we have during WWII? Vice-admirals? Rear-admirals? Seriousy, if you're managing something small like, say, GE, who's the head guy in charge of sales? Marketing? HR? Procurement? IT? R&D? PR? Comptroller? US operations? Asian? Europe? Consumer products? Lighting? Appliances? Aircraft powerplants and aviation? Nuclear power generation division? Transportation? Electrical distribution equipment? Plastics? Consumer Finance? How many of those divisions have their own specific sales and marketing arms and/or departments?
Who runs NBC's TV network? (GE owns NBC.) Who's in charge of the network? Programming? Affiliates? Films? Sports?
NBC is also Universal Studios. Want to talk about films, distribution, or even theme parks for goodness sake?
You seem to be stuck on titles, but somehow I don't see anything odd in a company that has (literally) hundreds of divisions and employs over 300,000 people directly having 50 or so people (or more) in charge at the top.
"Really? I don't agree. And it wasn't "invented" either."
Middle management was in fact "invented" in order to gain some sembalance of control over organizations whose employees numbered in the tens of thousands, and who maintained plants and offices all over the planet. In fact it was derived directly from the command-and-control techniques developed to manage a little project known as WWII.
Today, the pervasive use of computers, email, the internet, and so on have enabled modern corporations to "flatten" the hierarcy somewhat, and eliminate quite a few of the paper-pushers. However, you still have people whose job it is to watch over product lines, regions, or however it is you've structured your company.
All that bomb making is messy, dangerous, and can be tracked. Personally, I'd get some books and the source to Linux and start looking for a couple of good hacks. Heck, I might even become a contributor so some of my "special" changes were integrated into the source tree.
That, coupled with a good router takedown, and some off-the-shelf Windows trojans ought to do the trick. Who needs bombs when you can wipe half the computers on the net?
"My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive... Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.'
If it came to that the labels would love it. You probably only have a few friends with whom you'd go to the time and trouble of sharing in this fashion. Heck, even if you had dozens of them that's better than the 10,000 or more "friends" you get when you torrent it.
"Let's not get started on SSL encrypted..."
You probably saw the article where ISPs were throttling SSL traffic because of encrypted torrents, didn't you? In that case all encryption does is screw things up for everyone else, at the expense of a few parasites.
"Instead of paying money to buy software, a company can instead choose to pay less money to modify an open source project to meet their needs and leverage the contributions other companies have made modifying the same project to their needs."
I have a one-man consulting company. I can buy Photoshop CS2 for $600 and have it here tomorrow. Who can I give $500 to in order to get GIMP up to the same level, and can he have the work done by tomorrow?
Software is a tool. Open source, closed source, you aquire it for what you can do with it. I don't buy Photoshop to pay for upgrades, I buy it because its one of the best damn graphics tools on the planet, because I can make it sing, and because I can get the best efforts of some of the best developers in the world for a mere $600. If an upgrade appears (CS3), and if it's worthwhile (looks like), then I may pay for it too, but I'm the one that makes the cost/benefit analysis.
It's the same war, a direct continuation and consequence of the first. We killed all of the guys who stood out in the open and fought, either because they had no choice or because they had more guts than brains. Now we're dealing with the smart ones, who know that standing out in the open is suicide, that they have to strike from the shadows, and who also know that doing so can be even more effective than open warfare.
Oddly enough, and perhaps appropriately, it's a page from the same playbook that we used back in 1775-6 against the British. Let the redcoats march around in the open road and fields. We'll pick 'em off from behind the trees.
Bush's own generals told him that. They said, "Okay, we take down the defenses, roll into Bagdad... and then what?"
What George forgot was that, for better or worse, Saddam (who we put into power, btw) kept the lid on the various factions. He also assumed that everyone and his kid brother would be so happy that they were out from under Saddam that they'd welcome us with open arms, and that no one else would have their own agenda. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
"All of that is debatable, but ultimately irrelevent to the question of whether countries will think twice about harboring terrorists, which we know they do."
Your statement is ambiguous. We know they do what? Think twice? Or harbor terrorists?
And the point is most definitely not irrelevent, since you maintain we've sent a positive signal, and I maintain that we look like a nation of easily led fools who blunder into situations with little to no forethought or planning.
Either way, I have to argue the cost/benefit ratio of spending $416 billion dollars on some nebulous "signal". Again, for a fraction of that amount we probably could have actually apprehended Bin Laden and "dealt with" his supporters. A "signal" of an entirely different sort, true, but one that probably would have been even more effective in the right circles.
Instead, we put on a "shock and awe" light show, with the world shocked that we'd be so stupid as to assume the enemy would tremble, drop their weapons, and hide from our might.
Yeah, we're looking real powerful when the citizens we're "protecting" hold rallies demanding that we leave, when an entire region believes that we acted purely out of greed over Iraq's oil and/or from a sense of "imperial" expansionism, and when we lose a dozen or so highly trained and equiped soldiers a day to car bombs with little to nothing to show for it.
Going the other way, the only thing that making people wait six months for an iPhone did was raise expectations to a nearly unsupportable level, and give competing phone makers six precious months to work on their software and interfaces.
And for a different take on preannouncing, go look up on what happened with some guy named Osborne....;)
"...and it doesn't mean that there really aren't things out there that need to be fought against."
Yes, but fought how? It's been shown time and again that fighting terrorism is best done through law enforcement. Did we do more damage to Al Qaeda by:
A) Finding and arresting its members and tracing and siezing its funds and resources?
B) Blowing up two countries?
For a tenth of the cost of the war we could have fielded and funded a small army of investigators to find those responsible and bring them to justice, or at least found them and sent in the special ops guys if an arrest was impossible. Instead, we spent billions on a "war" which primarily destroyed the infrastructures of two soverign nations, killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of their people, and created who knows how many martyrs and potential terrorist recruits.
Yes, we need to fight... but we need to use our brains and not our bullets.
"You're just hurting the possibility of true reform."
You mean, of course, by doing nothing. Which is in itself a choice.
And one which, by and large, leaves the controls in the hands of the fanatics and true believers on both sides. I, personally, would prefer to take a more active role in the matter, and not rely on the faint hope that in doing nothing someone else will notice that I've abdicated my responsibilities and invoke some sort of "reform" on my behalf.
Further, how do you know that any such reform will be in your favor? Look at the latest "reforms" in, say, bankruptcy law, which left millions unable to completely discharge their debts, and which was expected to benefit the credit industry to the tune of about $7 billion dollars.
And while with the Electorial College your vote may be a farce at the presidential level, it still has an effect at the state level, and even more so locally. Exercise more control over who gets into the system in the first place, and you might just stand a chance at impacting events on the national scene.
"If Putin pulled the plug on an anti-Putin web site inside Russia, the anti-Putin web site could simply be migrated offshore to a server in, say, the United States."...and then what? Putting it outside Russia means that blocking it's IP is probably easier to do, not harder. Then again, if I was doing it I'd let it run... and see who drops in.
As others have indicated, it plays HD just fine. Most of the processing is handed off to the video card, and the processor just keeps the cache fed.
There's nothing wrong with the hardware, the issue is entirely software (content), and content can and will be upgraded. Apple could well offer HD or near-HD content in the future and let you upgrade for the difference in price, much like they're doing with 128kbps to 256kbps music with EMI.
Slashdot Mirror
Just hope you never get to the tipping point where there aren't enough legal users to subsidize the parasites, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
"Cable is using the public right-of-way."
Which they paid to access. And I don't remember all of that cable and infrastructure existing before they spent money to put it there.
"If you tube adopts this, please find an alternative fast to make sure others get the message that this won't be tolerated."
Assuming, of course, such an alternative exists. Why not create one yourself? I'm sure you'd like to create a site hit by millions of people downloading bandwidth-intensive video all on your dime.
Could be what's needed is a site that has a bit-torrenting Flash-video player. That way you could host the links and the bandwidth gets paid for by all of the users.
"Why does anyone need 30 fucking seconds to advertise something?"
If it's a pharma advertising a new drug they need at least that long to list the side-effects...
TANSTAAFL
Actually, if you consider the major corporations with widespread retail presences like Conoco and Exxon, Wal-Mart and Target, McDonalds & Wendys, Lowes and Home Depot, Big-O and Quicky Lube, Krogers and Safeway, and so on, I could probably take exception to the "You know, where most of us work." statement too. (grin)
Have a nice day.
" Is there no cafes with wifi in the US? How do they cope?"
Great. It's not enough that the parasites have caused ISPs to trottle legitimate BT traffic, and then trottle legitimate SSL traffic. Now I have to worry about my favorite WiFi-enabled resturants dropping free wireless because they're about to get hit with legal issues due to people torrenting on their networks.
Just pay for the damn music.
"... until you realize that there are probably 50 VPs at the same company."
And how many generals and admirals did we have during WWII? Vice-admirals? Rear-admirals? Seriousy, if you're managing something small like, say, GE, who's the head guy in charge of sales? Marketing? HR? Procurement? IT? R&D? PR? Comptroller? US operations? Asian? Europe? Consumer products? Lighting? Appliances? Aircraft powerplants and aviation? Nuclear power generation division? Transportation? Electrical distribution equipment? Plastics? Consumer Finance? How many of those divisions have their own specific sales and marketing arms and/or departments?
Who runs NBC's TV network? (GE owns NBC.) Who's in charge of the network? Programming? Affiliates? Films? Sports?
NBC is also Universal Studios. Want to talk about films, distribution, or even theme parks for goodness sake?
You seem to be stuck on titles, but somehow I don't see anything odd in a company that has (literally) hundreds of divisions and employs over 300,000 people directly having 50 or so people (or more) in charge at the top.
And who is to blame for that? All of those people who swamped the web downloading Linux distributions? Or, perhaps, someone downloading somthing else?
"Really? I don't agree. And it wasn't "invented" either."
Middle management was in fact "invented" in order to gain some sembalance of control over organizations whose employees numbered in the tens of thousands, and who maintained plants and offices all over the planet. In fact it was derived directly from the command-and-control techniques developed to manage a little project known as WWII.
Today, the pervasive use of computers, email, the internet, and so on have enabled modern corporations to "flatten" the hierarcy somewhat, and eliminate quite a few of the paper-pushers. However, you still have people whose job it is to watch over product lines, regions, or however it is you've structured your company.
All that bomb making is messy, dangerous, and can be tracked. Personally, I'd get some books and the source to Linux and start looking for a couple of good hacks. Heck, I might even become a contributor so some of my "special" changes were integrated into the source tree.
That, coupled with a good router takedown, and some off-the-shelf Windows trojans ought to do the trick. Who needs bombs when you can wipe half the computers on the net?
Why do you need to encrypt your latest Linux download?
"My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive ... Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.'
If it came to that the labels would love it. You probably only have a few friends with whom you'd go to the time and trouble of sharing in this fashion. Heck, even if you had dozens of them that's better than the 10,000 or more "friends" you get when you torrent it.
"Let's not get started on SSL encrypted..."
You probably saw the article where ISPs were throttling SSL traffic because of encrypted torrents, didn't you? In that case all encryption does is screw things up for everyone else, at the expense of a few parasites.
"Instead of paying money to buy software, a company can instead choose to pay less money to modify an open source project to meet their needs and leverage the contributions other companies have made modifying the same project to their needs."
I have a one-man consulting company. I can buy Photoshop CS2 for $600 and have it here tomorrow. Who can I give $500 to in order to get GIMP up to the same level, and can he have the work done by tomorrow?
Software is a tool. Open source, closed source, you aquire it for what you can do with it. I don't buy Photoshop to pay for upgrades, I buy it because its one of the best damn graphics tools on the planet, because I can make it sing, and because I can get the best efforts of some of the best developers in the world for a mere $600. If an upgrade appears (CS3), and if it's worthwhile (looks like), then I may pay for it too, but I'm the one that makes the cost/benefit analysis.
Sounds to me like they're enabling twice as many jobs. You should be grateful.
It's the same war, a direct continuation and consequence of the first. We killed all of the guys who stood out in the open and fought, either because they had no choice or because they had more guts than brains. Now we're dealing with the smart ones, who know that standing out in the open is suicide, that they have to strike from the shadows, and who also know that doing so can be even more effective than open warfare.
Oddly enough, and perhaps appropriately, it's a page from the same playbook that we used back in 1775-6 against the British. Let the redcoats march around in the open road and fields. We'll pick 'em off from behind the trees.
Bush's own generals told him that. They said, "Okay, we take down the defenses, roll into Bagdad... and then what?"
What George forgot was that, for better or worse, Saddam (who we put into power, btw) kept the lid on the various factions. He also assumed that everyone and his kid brother would be so happy that they were out from under Saddam that they'd welcome us with open arms, and that no one else would have their own agenda. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
"All of that is debatable, but ultimately irrelevent to the question of whether countries will think twice about harboring terrorists, which we know they do."
Your statement is ambiguous. We know they do what? Think twice? Or harbor terrorists?
And the point is most definitely not irrelevent, since you maintain we've sent a positive signal, and I maintain that we look like a nation of easily led fools who blunder into situations with little to no forethought or planning.
Either way, I have to argue the cost/benefit ratio of spending $416 billion dollars on some nebulous "signal". Again, for a fraction of that amount we probably could have actually apprehended Bin Laden and "dealt with" his supporters. A "signal" of an entirely different sort, true, but one that probably would have been even more effective in the right circles.
Instead, we put on a "shock and awe" light show, with the world shocked that we'd be so stupid as to assume the enemy would tremble, drop their weapons, and hide from our might.
Yeah, we're looking real powerful when the citizens we're "protecting" hold rallies demanding that we leave, when an entire region believes that we acted purely out of greed over Iraq's oil and/or from a sense of "imperial" expansionism, and when we lose a dozen or so highly trained and equiped soldiers a day to car bombs with little to nothing to show for it.
Yep, we sent a signal all right...
Going the other way, the only thing that making people wait six months for an iPhone did was raise expectations to a nearly unsupportable level, and give competing phone makers six precious months to work on their software and interfaces.
;)
And for a different take on preannouncing, go look up on what happened with some guy named Osborne....
"...and it doesn't mean that there really aren't things out there that need to be fought against."
Yes, but fought how? It's been shown time and again that fighting terrorism is best done through law enforcement. Did we do more damage to Al Qaeda by:
A) Finding and arresting its members and tracing and siezing its funds and resources?
B) Blowing up two countries?
For a tenth of the cost of the war we could have fielded and funded a small army of investigators to find those responsible and bring them to justice, or at least found them and sent in the special ops guys if an arrest was impossible. Instead, we spent billions on a "war" which primarily destroyed the infrastructures of two soverign nations, killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of their people, and created who knows how many martyrs and potential terrorist recruits.
Yes, we need to fight... but we need to use our brains and not our bullets.
"You're just hurting the possibility of true reform."
You mean, of course, by doing nothing. Which is in itself a choice.
And one which, by and large, leaves the controls in the hands of the fanatics and true believers on both sides. I, personally, would prefer to take a more active role in the matter, and not rely on the faint hope that in doing nothing someone else will notice that I've abdicated my responsibilities and invoke some sort of "reform" on my behalf.
Further, how do you know that any such reform will be in your favor? Look at the latest "reforms" in, say, bankruptcy law, which left millions unable to completely discharge their debts, and which was expected to benefit the credit industry to the tune of about $7 billion dollars.
And while with the Electorial College your vote may be a farce at the presidential level, it still has an effect at the state level, and even more so locally. Exercise more control over who gets into the system in the first place, and you might just stand a chance at impacting events on the national scene.
Great analysis. Someone mod this guy up...
"If Putin pulled the plug on an anti-Putin web site inside Russia, the anti-Putin web site could simply be migrated offshore to a server in, say, the United States." ...and then what? Putting it outside Russia means that blocking it's IP is probably easier to do, not harder. Then again, if I was doing it I'd let it run... and see who drops in.
As others have indicated, it plays HD just fine. Most of the processing is handed off to the video card, and the processor just keeps the cache fed.
There's nothing wrong with the hardware, the issue is entirely software (content), and content can and will be upgraded. Apple could well offer HD or near-HD content in the future and let you upgrade for the difference in price, much like they're doing with 128kbps to 256kbps music with EMI.