if AT&T catches you, you will be kicked off their network.
Bollocks. AT&T could give a rat's ass what you do with your phone, as long as they're getting their $90/month from you. Apple, on the other hand, loses a lot of money if people start getting their apps from somewhere else. If AT&T kicks you off their network, they lose a customer who they had managed to lock in for 2 years of overpriced service.
(Actually, AT&T might care if a whole bunch of people started tethering their iPhones without approval, or using their phones as dial-up modems to a free ISP without paying extra for the data plans. Beyond that, they have no reason to care.)
Very interesting experiment. I'd like to see someone post results over several speeds though -- you covered 100 km/h down to 90 km/h only. Note that at highway speeds, air resistance is probably by far the biggest friction your car is facing, and also that the energy you lose to air resistance goes up with the cube of your velocity -- so perhaps traveling at somewhat slower speeds will improve your overall system efficiency.
(You'd have to come up with new gasoline consumption figures if you tried this at different speeds; your figure of 1.3 ml/second was presumably for speeds ~100 km/h)
Am I missing something? Is there really such a demand for bottled water on the street that the convenience of being able to purchase it from a vending machine warrants a 10000000% markup?
In all seriousness, this will be a boon for privacy nuts, the very rich, money launderers, and anyone else too lazy to buy direct for cheaper. Keep in mind that tax evasion is something of a national pastime in Germany.
I had this idea for a website some time ago. I'm too lazy to implement it myself, so I'm offering it up here in the hopes someone will actually implement it. Heck, I might even help you for free:-)
The website would be called "Popular Usenet Binaries" or something similar. What would draw people in would be front-page links to direct, fast downloads over HTTP of the top 20-50 movies/etc. posted to Usenet over the past few days. The average warez-loving user who has been stripped of Usenet access by his ISP, and is afraid of uploading on bittorrent would love this site. How would this work?
On the front page, you would have an index of the various alt.binaries.* groups, ordered by post counts. Users could click on the different groups, and see a collapsed selection of the movies that had been posted. Most movies have obfuscated titles and filenames (e.g. "raxip-pu" for Pixar's "Up"), so you would let users enter their own un-obfuscated titles which would be displayed prominently alongside. Users would vote for which titles interested them. Your server would then automatically download these files, recombine the posts, resplit into 100MB or 250MB chunks, and upload to rapidshare, megaupload, and the few dozen other similar large file hosting services. For hosting sites that require captcha response, your server would simply pass the captchas on down to your users, and reward them with karma for answering the captchas. When the uploading was finished, a front-page link on your site would appear to the file, along with the unobfuscated title.
To stay legal, you'd of course honor DMCA safe-harbor takedown notices. Of course, the files would already have been uploaded to the dozen file-hosting sites, so your users could still fetch them with cached copies of your link pages. This idea is free for anyone to implement.
My home burglar alarm has a duress code. If someone should ever force me to disarm it at gunpoint... hello SWAT team.
Good luck with that. My office building has a top-of-the line alarm system that gets tripped every few months from someone forgetting to disarm it in the morning. If the police show up at all, it usually takes them 2-3 hours. They seem to expect that almost all alarm activations are accidental.
BAD BAD BAD I did a little digging into this supposedly-upstanding domain to be used for examples. Well guess what, mister -- I don't trust the "IANA Whois Service" one bit. Did you know that "IANA" is not even a part of the Better Business Bureau? And they don't have contact information on their page, so there's no one you can complain to?? They seem like a shady company to me, getting all this traffic from example code. They don't even have a privacy policy on their website!! Who knows what they could be doing with the IP Addresses they collect?!? Probably sending them to the RIAA, NSA, FBI, and various advertising agencies.
Do yourselves a favor -- stop using example.com in example code and network diagrams, RFC 2606 be damned. From now on, I propose that everyone use the domain "doubleclick.net" in example code, comments, diagrams, URLs, etc. You're welcome.
Hrmm.. I actually did that already. I followed some instructions online for a fun way to roll your own carbon-based biological intelligent computing system. Took a while for the machine to finally come online, and a few years for it to train itself, but even after it reached maturity the results were a little disappointing. See, after they become self-aware, they start making these ridiculous demands, wanting new clothes, cell phones, internet access, allowance money, etc. etc. And the damn machine seems disloyal, even outright hostile at times. I'm thinking about throwing in the towel and just starting to build a new one from scratch.. I hear they come in two different distros, M and F, and the F tend to be easier to handle, at least initially.
Wow. What an enormous difference. Paying a "service fee" instead of a "monthly rental fee". We uh.. sure have it great now, where we get to keep a crappy, locked-down-crippled phone after the 2 year contract is up, at which point you've paid well over $1,000 in service fees.
Heh, you might check your parents or grandma... they have probably paid thousands of dollars for that phone over the years.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I take it you don't even look at your cell phone bill? Hint: It would be hard not to pay "thousands of dollars... over the years" with just about any contract. $50/month + taxes + bogus fees adds up fast.
I love XKCD as much as the next bloke, but let's at least be fair in our hypotheticals. Would Calvin & Hobbes* exist if Bill Watterson had been born twenty or thirty years later? I'm doubtful.
* Watterson was vehemently opposed to commercializing the art that he saw his comics to be -- hence the lack of any official C&H merchandise, as opposed to Randall's business model.
Wait - without a warrant, which is the illegal request?
See e.g. Searches And Seizures FAQ (PDF). The police don't need a warrant if they have a reasonable fear that their safety, or that of the public, is in imminent danger. This case seems to be a cut and dried emergency case. Now, whether the Verizon operator had a legal duty (moral duty is obvious) to comply with the police's emergency request.. I imagine the operator, or Verizon itself, could be charged with Obstruction of Justice.
I suggest you publish your future books using a complicated, hacker-proof DRM system. One example would be using Microsoft's robust, cross-platform Silverlight content delivery system, possibly combined with military-grade RSA-56 encryption technology to thwart even the most determined hackers. This will ensure easy access to your textbooks, little or no complaints, effectively kill the secondhand market, and eliminate all pirated copies all in one blow. With this system, you should be able to easily charge hundreds of dollars per copy, and without pirates killing your sales I'm sure your future books will easily break 1M copies.
It can be a little intimidating to set up an effective DRM delivery system, as well as the key authentication servers properly, so if you're looking to do it yourself on the cheap I'd suggest you actually post another "Ask Slashdot" to look for experts in the field to help you for free. I'm sure you can tell by the helpful responses in this thread that many IT Experts, software developers, and fellow authors sympathize with your situation and would like to help you eliminate those brutish pirates. Best of luck!
Any content you purchase for Kindle from the Amazon Kindle store is eligible for return and refund if we receive your request within 7 days of the date of purchase. Once a refund is issued, the item will be removed from Your Media Library and will no longer be readable on your Kindle.
See my addendum. Sounds plausible, but doesn't work out so well in practice. If the board members were really convinced that MSFT had better future prospects than the market knew about, they'd be getting some of their own skin in the game by buying those shares for themselves. That isn't exactly happening.
Also, if a stock buyback raises the stock price, it has tax advantages compared to a dividend.
This used to be a good reason until 2003, with Bush's tax break for dividends. Qualified dividends are now taxed at 15%, which is typically much less than the marginal tax rate of your average investor. The only downside is that you have to pay the 15% during for the tax year when you received the dividend, instead of being able to postpone the income tax hit when you actually sell the shares at some point in the future, but I don't see this as a huge concern.
As an addendum, let me pose a hypothetical situation. Let's say you're on the board of directors of $BIGCORP. You have strong reason to believe that $BIGCORP's share are undervalued on the open market. Wouldn't you want to grab some of those undervalued shares for your own personal portfolio (when you're legally able to, that is, such as right after quarterly results postings so you're not guilty of insider trading) ?
Savvy traders should look at whether the board / executives of $BIGCORP to get a realistic look at how those executives truly feel about the shares. Take a look at the insider holdings for MSFT. See any large buybacks by the board members themselves? Didn't think so.
Assuming share repurchasing is really the intent here, and that's not a bad guess, let me offer a contrarian view to your rosy perspective to MSFT's move.
By borrowing dollars in the bond market to fund a share buyback, MSFT's board is effectively using borrowed money to place a wager that the market is currently undervaluing MSFT's stock. By choosing to throw their extra cash, along with borrowed dollars, at this share buyback scheme, MSFT is betting that they can predict the future better than the market.
What would be really great is if someone had done a study of the effect of share buybacks undertaken by S&P 500 companies, to test whether they work at all. Oh wait, S&P itself has. If you're a MSFT shareholder, ask yourself whether MSFT should be using their extra cash to pay dividends instead of embarking on harebrained schemes like this. Actually, I take that back -- you'd probably prefer they spend money buying back their own shares and paying bond interest rather than flushing it down the Zune toilet.
You can just go out and try to buy every outstanding stock in one shot anyway + you still have to convince the current stock holders to sell.
See Hostile Takeover. Despite the disadvantages, it happens now and then. You are right that it's not *quite* as simple as coming up with an amount of cash equivalent to the current market cap of the company -- (some of) the individual shareholders do need to be bought out, one way or another. But you don't need to buy 100% of the company to achieve your goals (majority stake, or significant voting power) -- witness the brouhaha when Porsche quietly bought up ~30% of VW.
(Yes, I know the comment by the GP about MSFT buying GM was just a joke).
Re:What do you get combining Apple + gaming compan
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was able to see a PDF of the complaint you filed, but is there any more information available on this case? It looks like you filed in Nov/Dec 2008, but I couldn't find any updates on the case anywhere.
Incidentally, I wouldn't go so far as to say I wholeheartedly agree with your lawsuit, but I admire you for having the backbone to take on EA in a court of law over their DRM garbage. Best of luck to you.
Get off your high horse, AC. OP talked about riding 10 miles in half an hour (20 miles an hour). I don't care if you're in great shape, you'll be sweaty and short of breath at the end of a ride like that, even if you're in great shape.
I'm in decent shape myself, and I start breaking a sweat after 3-5 miles if it's warm outside.
Go easy on them. Have you seen the OOXML standard?? That thing is freaking enormous. They'll be working on the basics for several years, after which they'll ship a half baked implementation and pray that future patches plug the holes.
I can't wait until this becomes available though -- just imagine, an open format to share documents in, easily implementable by different vendors. It should be great.
If they are regretting it, then they weren't successful. Do you think it's hard to kill oneself? It's not. These people you're talking about didn't really want to do it. These are the same people who were blabbing about it to everyone. And after they're all hopped up on meds, of course they're embarrassed about being pathetic.
Not quite true. Read Brent Runyon's "Burn Journals" for a counterexample. (Author pours gasoline all over himself and sets himself on fire -- not exactly a call for help, but he managed to survive and write about the experience.)
Slashdot Mirror
Bollocks. AT&T could give a rat's ass what you do with your phone, as long as they're getting their $90/month from you. Apple, on the other hand, loses a lot of money if people start getting their apps from somewhere else. If AT&T kicks you off their network, they lose a customer who they had managed to lock in for 2 years of overpriced service.
(Actually, AT&T might care if a whole bunch of people started tethering their iPhones without approval, or using their phones as dial-up modems to a free ISP without paying extra for the data plans. Beyond that, they have no reason to care.)
You jest, but it's actually common to see job postings phishing for all sorts of personal information up to and including SSNs and DOBs. Be careful with any job postings, particularly from companies you don't know/trust. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thecheckout/2007/02/looking_for_a_job_phishers_are.html
Very interesting experiment. I'd like to see someone post results over several speeds though -- you covered 100 km/h down to 90 km/h only. Note that at highway speeds, air resistance is probably by far the biggest friction your car is facing, and also that the energy you lose to air resistance goes up with the cube of your velocity -- so perhaps traveling at somewhat slower speeds will improve your overall system efficiency.
(You'd have to come up with new gasoline consumption figures if you tried this at different speeds; your figure of 1.3 ml/second was presumably for speeds ~100 km/h)
Am I missing something? Is there really such a demand for bottled water on the street that the convenience of being able to purchase it from a vending machine warrants a 10000000% markup?
In all seriousness, this will be a boon for privacy nuts, the very rich, money launderers, and anyone else too lazy to buy direct for cheaper. Keep in mind that tax evasion is something of a national pastime in Germany.
I had this idea for a website some time ago. I'm too lazy to implement it myself, so I'm offering it up here in the hopes someone will actually implement it. Heck, I might even help you for free :-)
The website would be called "Popular Usenet Binaries" or something similar. What would draw people in would be front-page links to direct, fast downloads over HTTP of the top 20-50 movies/etc. posted to Usenet over the past few days. The average warez-loving user who has been stripped of Usenet access by his ISP, and is afraid of uploading on bittorrent would love this site. How would this work?
On the front page, you would have an index of the various alt.binaries.* groups, ordered by post counts. Users could click on the different groups, and see a collapsed selection of the movies that had been posted. Most movies have obfuscated titles and filenames (e.g. "raxip-pu" for Pixar's "Up"), so you would let users enter their own un-obfuscated titles which would be displayed prominently alongside. Users would vote for which titles interested them. Your server would then automatically download these files, recombine the posts, resplit into 100MB or 250MB chunks, and upload to rapidshare, megaupload, and the few dozen other similar large file hosting services. For hosting sites that require captcha response, your server would simply pass the captchas on down to your users, and reward them with karma for answering the captchas. When the uploading was finished, a front-page link on your site would appear to the file, along with the unobfuscated title.
To stay legal, you'd of course honor DMCA safe-harbor takedown notices. Of course, the files would already have been uploaded to the dozen file-hosting sites, so your users could still fetch them with cached copies of your link pages. This idea is free for anyone to implement.
My home burglar alarm has a duress code. If someone should ever force me to disarm it at gunpoint ... hello SWAT team.
Good luck with that. My office building has a top-of-the line alarm system that gets tripped every few months from someone forgetting to disarm it in the morning. If the police show up at all, it usually takes them 2-3 hours. They seem to expect that almost all alarm activations are accidental.
BAD BAD BAD I did a little digging into this supposedly-upstanding domain to be used for examples. Well guess what, mister -- I don't trust the "IANA Whois Service" one bit. Did you know that "IANA" is not even a part of the Better Business Bureau? And they don't have contact information on their page, so there's no one you can complain to?? They seem like a shady company to me, getting all this traffic from example code. They don't even have a privacy policy on their website!! Who knows what they could be doing with the IP Addresses they collect?!? Probably sending them to the RIAA, NSA, FBI, and various advertising agencies.
Do yourselves a favor -- stop using example.com in example code and network diagrams, RFC 2606 be damned. From now on, I propose that everyone use the domain "doubleclick.net" in example code, comments, diagrams, URLs, etc. You're welcome.
Hrmm.. I actually did that already. I followed some instructions online for a fun way to roll your own carbon-based biological intelligent computing system. Took a while for the machine to finally come online, and a few years for it to train itself, but even after it reached maturity the results were a little disappointing. See, after they become self-aware, they start making these ridiculous demands, wanting new clothes, cell phones, internet access, allowance money, etc. etc. And the damn machine seems disloyal, even outright hostile at times. I'm thinking about throwing in the towel and just starting to build a new one from scratch.. I hear they come in two different distros, M and F, and the F tend to be easier to handle, at least initially.
Wow. What an enormous difference. Paying a "service fee" instead of a "monthly rental fee". We uh.. sure have it great now, where we get to keep a crappy, locked-down-crippled phone after the 2 year contract is up, at which point you've paid well over $1,000 in service fees.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I take it you don't even look at your cell phone bill? Hint: It would be hard not to pay "thousands of dollars ... over the years" with just about any contract. $50/month + taxes + bogus fees adds up fast.
I love XKCD as much as the next bloke, but let's at least be fair in our hypotheticals. Would Calvin & Hobbes* exist if Bill Watterson had been born twenty or thirty years later? I'm doubtful.
* Watterson was vehemently opposed to commercializing the art that he saw his comics to be -- hence the lack of any official C&H merchandise, as opposed to Randall's business model.
See e.g. Searches And Seizures FAQ (PDF). The police don't need a warrant if they have a reasonable fear that their safety, or that of the public, is in imminent danger. This case seems to be a cut and dried emergency case. Now, whether the Verizon operator had a legal duty (moral duty is obvious) to comply with the police's emergency request.. I imagine the operator, or Verizon itself, could be charged with Obstruction of Justice.
Ignorance is bliss.
Besides.. are you suggesting you'd prefer she wore more revealing clothes? *shudder*
Dear Peter,
I suggest you publish your future books using a complicated, hacker-proof DRM system. One example would be using Microsoft's robust, cross-platform Silverlight content delivery system, possibly combined with military-grade RSA-56 encryption technology to thwart even the most determined hackers. This will ensure easy access to your textbooks, little or no complaints, effectively kill the secondhand market, and eliminate all pirated copies all in one blow. With this system, you should be able to easily charge hundreds of dollars per copy, and without pirates killing your sales I'm sure your future books will easily break 1M copies.
It can be a little intimidating to set up an effective DRM delivery system, as well as the key authentication servers properly, so if you're looking to do it yourself on the cheap I'd suggest you actually post another "Ask Slashdot" to look for experts in the field to help you for free. I'm sure you can tell by the helpful responses in this thread that many IT Experts, software developers, and fellow authors sympathize with your situation and would like to help you eliminate those brutish pirates. Best of luck!
From the Kindle Content Return Policy:
See my addendum. Sounds plausible, but doesn't work out so well in practice. If the board members were really convinced that MSFT had better future prospects than the market knew about, they'd be getting some of their own skin in the game by buying those shares for themselves. That isn't exactly happening.
This used to be a good reason until 2003, with Bush's tax break for dividends. Qualified dividends are now taxed at 15%, which is typically much less than the marginal tax rate of your average investor. The only downside is that you have to pay the 15% during for the tax year when you received the dividend, instead of being able to postpone the income tax hit when you actually sell the shares at some point in the future, but I don't see this as a huge concern.
As an addendum, let me pose a hypothetical situation. Let's say you're on the board of directors of $BIGCORP. You have strong reason to believe that $BIGCORP's share are undervalued on the open market. Wouldn't you want to grab some of those undervalued shares for your own personal portfolio (when you're legally able to, that is, such as right after quarterly results postings so you're not guilty of insider trading) ?
Savvy traders should look at whether the board / executives of $BIGCORP to get a realistic look at how those executives truly feel about the shares. Take a look at the insider holdings for MSFT. See any large buybacks by the board members themselves? Didn't think so.
Assuming share repurchasing is really the intent here, and that's not a bad guess, let me offer a contrarian view to your rosy perspective to MSFT's move.
By borrowing dollars in the bond market to fund a share buyback, MSFT's board is effectively using borrowed money to place a wager that the market is currently undervaluing MSFT's stock. By choosing to throw their extra cash, along with borrowed dollars, at this share buyback scheme, MSFT is betting that they can predict the future better than the market.
What would be really great is if someone had done a study of the effect of share buybacks undertaken by S&P 500 companies, to test whether they work at all. Oh wait, S&P itself has. If you're a MSFT shareholder, ask yourself whether MSFT should be using their extra cash to pay dividends instead of embarking on harebrained schemes like this. Actually, I take that back -- you'd probably prefer they spend money buying back their own shares and paying bond interest rather than flushing it down the Zune toilet.
See Hostile Takeover. Despite the disadvantages, it happens now and then. You are right that it's not *quite* as simple as coming up with an amount of cash equivalent to the current market cap of the company -- (some of) the individual shareholders do need to be bought out, one way or another. But you don't need to buy 100% of the company to achieve your goals (majority stake, or significant voting power) -- witness the brouhaha when Porsche quietly bought up ~30% of VW.
(Yes, I know the comment by the GP about MSFT buying GM was just a joke).
I was able to see a PDF of the complaint you filed, but is there any more information available on this case? It looks like you filed in Nov/Dec 2008, but I couldn't find any updates on the case anywhere.
Incidentally, I wouldn't go so far as to say I wholeheartedly agree with your lawsuit, but I admire you for having the backbone to take on EA in a court of law over their DRM garbage. Best of luck to you.
Get off your high horse, AC. OP talked about riding 10 miles in half an hour (20 miles an hour). I don't care if you're in great shape, you'll be sweaty and short of breath at the end of a ride like that, even if you're in great shape.
I'm in decent shape myself, and I start breaking a sweat after 3-5 miles if it's warm outside.
Perhaps because the GP didn't want to show up to work in the morning drenched with sweat and exhausted?
Go easy on them. Have you seen the OOXML standard?? That thing is freaking enormous. They'll be working on the basics for several years, after which they'll ship a half baked implementation and pray that future patches plug the holes.
I can't wait until this becomes available though -- just imagine, an open format to share documents in, easily implementable by different vendors. It should be great.
Not quite true. Read Brent Runyon's "Burn Journals" for a counterexample. (Author pours gasoline all over himself and sets himself on fire -- not exactly a call for help, but he managed to survive and write about the experience.)