While for the RIAA has clear the legal bases of their claims
I think what you mean is that the RIAA has a clear legal basis for their actions. And, the answer to that is: not always. They've been caught more than once suing over material for which they do not have the rights. Whether that's due to Incompetence or sleaziness, I couldn't say. The point being that the RIAA is hardly an improvement over this English Heritage outfit.
considering Uverse can only show HD on One TV at a time, I would say that on top of the high price for the same package I have with Comcast, there is quite a bit of cognitive dissonance going on with the Comcast haters.
Um... where did you hear that? U-Verse will do four simultaneous HD streams. I understand that you're one of those rare happy Comcast customers, but there's no need to dissemble when speaking about the competition. Comcast's TV ads already do plenty of that.
I guess the ACLU was unsuccessful in setting up a branch office.
The same thing is going to happen in the US, ACLU or not. The bills are already written. They are just waiting for another 9/11 to they can ram them through.
It already happened. How do you think that a massive bill like the Patriot Act got passed within days of 9/11? Like you said, it was just waiting in the wings. And I agree, we're in for more of the same. What irritates the FUCK out of me is the admiring stance taken by so many of our government officials towards the UK's surveillance state. It's crazy. What is with you people! Maybe we need to start requiring psych profiles for anyone holding public office, elected or otherwise. If you're paranoid, megamaniacal, delusional, or just a garden-variety sociopath... out you go! Hell, bus drivers get them. Why shouldn't judges, lawmakers and the rest? Should not We the People know when someone for whom we're thinking of voting is batshit insane?
A double whoosh! Oh my god, WHAT DOES IT MEAN!? T_T
It means that someone completely missed the point, had it explained to them and then... missed it again. It was actually funnier than the original joke.
Next thing, they will want you to declare the illegal drugs you carry...
That is just about as logical as this. FTFA, "Making a false statement to a customs officer carries a fine of up to $11,000 dollars while bringing in objectionable material, such as child pornography, can incur a fine of up to $275,000 and 10 years' jail.".
What kind of moran will declare ANY material with that kind of deal?
It is logical. That's why the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has questions such as "Do you have any illegal income to declare?" on tax return forms. It's for just that purpose: catching morans, I mean, morons. They do bag a few that way each year. In addition, if you are later nailed for having criminal income, they have you on tax evasion charges. That can be some serious shit: just remember how they took down Al Capone.
So because NAT happens to work for you, and your rather basic needs, we should delay the inevitable instead of fixing the fundamental underlying problem.
I agree with almost everything you said except for the last part.
I know most people might find this hard to believe, but the U.S. does export quite a bit to China. We even have some solid manufacturing left here, although we do need more. As the relative value of some other currencies goes up, it's going to get more cost-effective to do it here, so I think the problem is going to moderate itself over time.
As the cost of raw materials and transportation rise worldwide (and China isn't helping there) we'll (hopefully) begin to see some production capability shift back here, just because it is more economical. I don't think China's efforts to decimate the manufacturing capacity of every industrial country on the planet are going to hold up indefinitely.
Although it may hold up long enough. It depends upon what their ultimate plans are.
Well, the US should, as a response, stop shipments of garbage abroad.
Start processing electric junk at home to recycle rare earth and precious metals.
Better yet, stop making deals with the Devil in the first place. Maybe then we won't keep getting burned.
No Uverse here yet, but other friends have had the same experience. Canning cable gave them more channels, more boxes, better quality for less money.
What amazed me about my last (and, with any luck at all, final experience with Comcast) is how they could fuck up television. I mean, sure, we all know how they've handled their Internet services: performing MITM attacks on their own customers, DNS hijacking, nickel-and-dime billing practices and scads of other things. But back when I had them I had just bought my first big-screen high-definition television. So I paid extra for the HD box and the full panoply of hi-def channels, hooked it all up and was... nonplussed. Why in hell was I paying all this money? The regular channels were fine but the so-called "hi def" was decidedly fuzzy, blurry even. Had a tech come out and switch out the cable box, and got the same result... he tried to tell me that this was what hi-definition TV was all about. Yeah right. So why did the picture improve substantially when I bypassed their stupid box? Even then it was nothing like what I'd seen elsewhere from other providers.
So I eventually went to U-Verse... night and day so far as picture quality is concerned. Phone service works fine and is reasonably priced, and so far as the Internet connection goes, I'm getting more bandwidth than I'm rated at, no mucking about with downloads and a 2 mbit backchannel. So far AT&T is treating me very well (knock on wood.)
Now, every year a Comcast drone drops by my house trying to sell me on their new "improved" high-definition service. "Oh, you had the old silver box? Our new ones are ever so much better." Now maybe they are, I don't know. But I'm happy with what I have now, and so long as AT&T doesn't screw up, I'll have no reason to switch back.
As an aside, when a Comcast tech came out to connect my phone service (Comcast Digital Voice, I think it was called) he left a bunch of bare wires hanging from my basement ceiling. Bastard couldn't be bothered to use any wire nuts, much less a terminal strip of any kind. Bare fucking wires. I couldn't believe it I ended up installing my own punchdown block and doing it right.
When the U-Verse folks came out, they set me up to run a network connection to my upstairs STB over my phone wires (worked very well, I must say.) They had the tools to work with my existing punchdown block and it was all done very professionally.
In Metro Detroit I have Comcast, WOW, and ATT Uverse. Comcast is easily 50 dollars cheaper than Uverse and for the package level I am at, Comcast is cheaper than WOW, not to mention the better onDemand and Internet Media.
Where I am I've had the exact opposite experience. Comcast fucked with my service, jacked up my rates, gave me dismal picture quality, and in the end I couldn't wait to get U-Verse. Finally it came to my area, and I switched on the spot. Not looking back either. Competition is good, actually.
You don't need to use a commandline in Ubuntu. There is a GUI for pretty much everything.
Ubuntu is pretty good in that respect, but I think it still has a way to go. Of all the various Linux flavors I've used, I'm going to say that OpenSUSE and Mepis have some of the best GUI utilities for normal configuration purposes. I am using Ubuntu at the moment since a. I'm not afraid of configuration files and b. there seems to be more available software for it, but it could use some more GUI tools. I will say I liked OpenSUSE's NFS client, it was handy since I use NFS for most things on my network.
The major Linux distros still aren't as convenient, configuration-wise, as they could be although they've certainly come a loooong way in the past few years.
Anecdotal example: I heard about the feature that the iPod Touch 2nd generation performs an undo action in the Notes app when you shake it. So I tried it while sitting down, without having a cover on it. It slipped out of my hand, at an angle more horizontal than vertical, and fell 2 feet down to the thin carpet sitting over concrete. The glass cracked.
Ack. Man, that's gotta suck.
Over the time I had my G1, there were a number of apps that used the accelerometer to detect shaking for various purposes. I was fooling around with this shotgun app (shake to cock it) I thought it was cool until I managed to accidentally throw it across the room. "Oooooohhhhhhh sssshhhhiiiittttt!" Fortunately, it landed on the carpet and didn't break. But I haven't been quite so keen on phone shaking as a user-interface element ever since.
it's VERY easy to do. all your bag phones from the 80s don't have such expansive glass areas like the iphone 4 does.
I had a T-Mobile G1 for a while. In spite of the sliding keyboard mechanism, the damn thing was a tank: damn near impossible to kill (well, until I flashed the SPL and radio firmware in the wrong order... oops.) It had an "expansive screen area" as well. Fact is, some phones are just more durable than others. Are Apple's products more, or less, likely to suffer physical damage than competitive devices? I don't know, other than from the number of people I know that have been disappointed with the iPhones for that reason. Conversely, I've known a number of HTC owners, and none of them have managed to break their phone by dropping it. HTC's products have always seemed physically very solid, if not particularly sexy.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems a bit harsh to bar all libertarians from legitimate jobs.
Oh, come on, mods. Whatever your political persuasion that's hardly a troll. Sheesh.
I think you may have missed some of the sarcasm in my comment :)
No, I was actually agreeing with you.
You realize that with this statement you are saying that lawyers are not people. Well done!
I likes mine raw.
Just drag them behind your horse for a few miles.
While for the RIAA has clear the legal bases of their claims
I think what you mean is that the RIAA has a clear legal basis for their actions. And, the answer to that is: not always. They've been caught more than once suing over material for which they do not have the rights. Whether that's due to Incompetence or sleaziness, I couldn't say. The point being that the RIAA is hardly an improvement over this English Heritage outfit.
Geeks know this. To really make the public understand the issue, though, they need to make a movie out of it.
They did. It was called "Hackers", and John Q. Public never understood a word of it, being thoroughly distracted by a young Angelina Jolie.
Actually, it's a levy.
Yes, well those tend to break when it rains really hard. So just be careful downloading during a thunderstorm.
considering Uverse can only show HD on One TV at a time, I would say that on top of the high price for the same package I have with Comcast, there is quite a bit of cognitive dissonance going on with the Comcast haters.
Um ... where did you hear that? U-Verse will do four simultaneous HD streams. I understand that you're one of those rare happy Comcast customers, but there's no need to dissemble when speaking about the competition. Comcast's TV ads already do plenty of that.
Given that humans are the fundamental underlying problem, there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for getting rid of them.
Actually, there's plenty of support for that, we call them "missile silos".
Wouldn't stick. They can't reasonably claim that you might have known that key.
Yes, but being unreasonable gives them a damn big stick to club you with.
"Do what we tell you or we'll jail you for not giving up your session keys."
"But, nobody has access to those keys!"
"Better do what we tell you then."
Now I see why the Brits constantly write Orwellian-dystopia-type fiction
I think you'll find that most of that comes out of the U.S. Not that we want such a future, but we're still free enough to be able to write about it.
hich was in actuality an organisation - which comprised of a single person
Is that like hearing "Unit one - converge!" on a police radio?
It's so nice to see the lunatics on the far-right agreeing with the lunatics on the far-left. Really makes one hopeful about the future.
Don't be too sure. How did Lewis Black put it?
.... is when those little pricks work together.
The only thing dumber than a Democrat, or a Republican
The same thing is going to happen in the US, ACLU or not. The bills are already written. They are just waiting for another 9/11 to they can ram them through.
It already happened. How do you think that a massive bill like the Patriot Act got passed within days of 9/11? Like you said, it was just waiting in the wings. And I agree, we're in for more of the same. What irritates the FUCK out of me is the admiring stance taken by so many of our government officials towards the UK's surveillance state. It's crazy. What is with you people! Maybe we need to start requiring psych profiles for anyone holding public office, elected or otherwise. If you're paranoid, megamaniacal, delusional, or just a garden-variety sociopath ... out you go! Hell, bus drivers get them. Why shouldn't judges, lawmakers and the rest? Should not We the People know when someone for whom we're thinking of voting is batshit insane?
A double whoosh! Oh my god, WHAT DOES IT MEAN!? T_T
It means that someone completely missed the point, had it explained to them and then ... missed it again. It was actually funnier than the original joke.
Next thing, they will want you to declare the illegal drugs you carry...
That is just about as logical as this. FTFA, "Making a false statement to a customs officer carries a fine of up to $11,000 dollars while bringing in objectionable material, such as child pornography, can incur a fine of up to $275,000 and 10 years' jail.". What kind of moran will declare ANY material with that kind of deal?
It is logical. That's why the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has questions such as "Do you have any illegal income to declare?" on tax return forms. It's for just that purpose: catching morans, I mean, morons. They do bag a few that way each year. In addition, if you are later nailed for having criminal income, they have you on tax evasion charges. That can be some serious shit: just remember how they took down Al Capone.
So because NAT happens to work for you, and your rather basic needs, we should delay the inevitable instead of fixing the fundamental underlying problem.
Got it.
Yes, well, you just described civilization.
I agree with almost everything you said except for the last part.
I know most people might find this hard to believe, but the U.S. does export quite a bit to China. We even have some solid manufacturing left here, although we do need more. As the relative value of some other currencies goes up, it's going to get more cost-effective to do it here, so I think the problem is going to moderate itself over time.
As the cost of raw materials and transportation rise worldwide (and China isn't helping there) we'll (hopefully) begin to see some production capability shift back here, just because it is more economical. I don't think China's efforts to decimate the manufacturing capacity of every industrial country on the planet are going to hold up indefinitely.
Although it may hold up long enough. It depends upon what their ultimate plans are.
To make a nailgun, we need neodymium magnets!!
Actually, here in the Bible Belt we only use God's gift to the nailgun manufacturing industry: Prayseodymium!.
Well, the US should, as a response, stop shipments of garbage abroad. Start processing electric junk at home to recycle rare earth and precious metals.
Better yet, stop making deals with the Devil in the first place. Maybe then we won't keep getting burned.
No Uverse here yet, but other friends have had the same experience. Canning cable gave them more channels, more boxes, better quality for less money.
What amazed me about my last (and, with any luck at all, final experience with Comcast) is how they could fuck up television. I mean, sure, we all know how they've handled their Internet services: performing MITM attacks on their own customers, DNS hijacking, nickel-and-dime billing practices and scads of other things. But back when I had them I had just bought my first big-screen high-definition television. So I paid extra for the HD box and the full panoply of hi-def channels, hooked it all up and was ... nonplussed. Why in hell was I paying all this money? The regular channels were fine but the so-called "hi def" was decidedly fuzzy, blurry even. Had a tech come out and switch out the cable box, and got the same result ... he tried to tell me that this was what hi-definition TV was all about. Yeah right. So why did the picture improve substantially when I bypassed their stupid box? Even then it was nothing like what I'd seen elsewhere from other providers.
... night and day so far as picture quality is concerned. Phone service works fine and is reasonably priced, and so far as the Internet connection goes, I'm getting more bandwidth than I'm rated at, no mucking about with downloads and a 2 mbit backchannel. So far AT&T is treating me very well (knock on wood.)
So I eventually went to U-Verse
Now, every year a Comcast drone drops by my house trying to sell me on their new "improved" high-definition service. "Oh, you had the old silver box? Our new ones are ever so much better." Now maybe they are, I don't know. But I'm happy with what I have now, and so long as AT&T doesn't screw up, I'll have no reason to switch back.
As an aside, when a Comcast tech came out to connect my phone service (Comcast Digital Voice, I think it was called) he left a bunch of bare wires hanging from my basement ceiling. Bastard couldn't be bothered to use any wire nuts, much less a terminal strip of any kind. Bare fucking wires. I couldn't believe it I ended up installing my own punchdown block and doing it right.
When the U-Verse folks came out, they set me up to run a network connection to my upstairs STB over my phone wires (worked very well, I must say.) They had the tools to work with my existing punchdown block and it was all done very professionally.
In Metro Detroit I have Comcast, WOW, and ATT Uverse. Comcast is easily 50 dollars cheaper than Uverse and for the package level I am at, Comcast is cheaper than WOW, not to mention the better onDemand and Internet Media.
Where I am I've had the exact opposite experience. Comcast fucked with my service, jacked up my rates, gave me dismal picture quality, and in the end I couldn't wait to get U-Verse. Finally it came to my area, and I switched on the spot. Not looking back either. Competition is good, actually.
You don't need to use a commandline in Ubuntu. There is a GUI for pretty much everything.
Ubuntu is pretty good in that respect, but I think it still has a way to go. Of all the various Linux flavors I've used, I'm going to say that OpenSUSE and Mepis have some of the best GUI utilities for normal configuration purposes. I am using Ubuntu at the moment since a. I'm not afraid of configuration files and b. there seems to be more available software for it, but it could use some more GUI tools. I will say I liked OpenSUSE's NFS client, it was handy since I use NFS for most things on my network.
The major Linux distros still aren't as convenient, configuration-wise, as they could be although they've certainly come a loooong way in the past few years.
configurable (is that even a word?)
gah, meant "configurability", lol
Yes. That's a word.
Anecdotal example: I heard about the feature that the iPod Touch 2nd generation performs an undo action in the Notes app when you shake it. So I tried it while sitting down, without having a cover on it. It slipped out of my hand, at an angle more horizontal than vertical, and fell 2 feet down to the thin carpet sitting over concrete. The glass cracked.
Ack. Man, that's gotta suck.
Over the time I had my G1, there were a number of apps that used the accelerometer to detect shaking for various purposes. I was fooling around with this shotgun app (shake to cock it) I thought it was cool until I managed to accidentally throw it across the room. "Oooooohhhhhhh sssshhhhiiiittttt!" Fortunately, it landed on the carpet and didn't break. But I haven't been quite so keen on phone shaking as a user-interface element ever since.
it's VERY easy to do. all your bag phones from the 80s don't have such expansive glass areas like the iphone 4 does.
I had a T-Mobile G1 for a while. In spite of the sliding keyboard mechanism, the damn thing was a tank: damn near impossible to kill (well, until I flashed the SPL and radio firmware in the wrong order ... oops.) It had an "expansive screen area" as well. Fact is, some phones are just more durable than others. Are Apple's products more, or less, likely to suffer physical damage than competitive devices? I don't know, other than from the number of people I know that have been disappointed with the iPhones for that reason. Conversely, I've known a number of HTC owners, and none of them have managed to break their phone by dropping it. HTC's products have always seemed physically very solid, if not particularly sexy.