When the network goes down? It would seem to me that placing our two most important communications networks on the same system would wreak havoc if anything went down.
Imagine you're in an isolated midwestern town, if you're not already there. Now imagine that you have these services, and the town router decides to take a smoke break (ie, it crashes). Excepting for people with cell phones (if even they keep those on their own network too), you'll be cut off from any emergency services you need.
This is a bad, yet easily imaginable scenario. No, I think we should keep our phone and internet systems separate, or at least provide an independent backup system.
I assume your criticism is in response to the recent chicken-McNugget scandal. The way the mass media dumbed down the lawsuit, to "a man suing because he says eating at McDonald's every day caused his obesity," (or something to that point) was entirely misleading.
If you look at the lawsuit a little more in detail, you'll see that this was not what prompted McDonalds to change their nugget recipe. It was that their ingredients for making the chicken nuggets were exposed in court, and it was found that there were a substantial number of ingredients which deviated from anything that you would expect to find in food - special chemicals for flavor and preservation, parts of the chicken you wouldn't eat, etc.
So next time you see a McDonald's chicken nugget, remember that it's now far less hazardous to your health, and that's because of a trial lawyer and a class action lawsuit.
At my school, one of our channel 26 displayed a Windows error message for the entire year. Sometimes we would hit the bong, leave the channel on, and complain about how nobody ever just clicked OK.
A professor whom I TA for actually is involved in a venture business to do just this, and he bounced the idea off of us (his TA staff) about a year ago.
But it wasn't location based advertising, per se. It was location based coupons, eg, you walk into a Foot Locker, and get a message that will give you 10% off any Reebok for the next 20 minutes. Another use was instead of having to wait in line at the DMV (or taking a number and waiting to be called), go in, register your phone, and recieve a text message when you near the beginning of the queue.
There are some positive sides to this technology, although I do hope that there is some option to turn it off.
That no matter how hard they try to copy-protect media, there will be many geeks trying to break the protection, and at least one of them will succeed?
You are missing one key motivating factor behind downloading: It is the only way to nearly instantly (on hi-speed) obtain a song or a movie.
Sure, you could drive to a store, but that involves getting off your ass, which is something manking has been trying to do less and less of since the Industrial Revolution. And store collections are severely limited compared to online collections.
The point is, there is a demand for instant on-demand entertainment, there's obviously the technology, but the only people who can allow it legally are dragging their feet.
I'm a student and work at the help desk at my school, and let me recommend two things: 1) Do not buy a laptop 2) If you ignore 1, get a Mac laptop
My main reason against laptops is that you'll rarely ever actually make use of the portability, unless you *really* like to work in libraries, or if your campus has a really good wireless network and has year-round warm weather. At my school, most of my friends with laptops leave it in their room 99.9% of the time.
As for recommending Macs, I'm not a Mac person, but my experience working at our help desk has shown that PC laptops are all garbage. They break far more easily than they should, hardware almost as much as software (so many hard drive crashes I've seen).
A laptop might also be a better idea if you don't live within driving distance of your school.
Add this to conventional desktop vs. laptop wisdom, and you'll (hopefully) come out with the right choice.
Argh. Half the news posts on/. these days are about lawsuits. Since when did filing suit against someone become a viable means of effecting action?
Since we decided that standing back to back, walking 10 paces in opposite directions, and drawing revolvers was no longer a civilized method of conflict resolution.
In general there should be a reasonable expectation that the coffee is close to boiling since that is how coffee is generally made.
Actually, the court involved in this case determined otherwise. I believe the court determined that the expected temperature for hot coffee is either 120 or 140 degrees F, whereas McDonald's was serving coffee between 180 and 200. This was (partly) the grounds for the ruling - nobody should have to expect that the coffee being *served* to them is near boiling, as in normal home-brewing, it never reaches near that degree.
What happens when they get a false positive? And it (1) is something very valuable and/or (2) needs to be delivered in pristine condition on time.
Will they just attach a note saying "Sorry, we thought you had drugs..."?
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When the network goes down? It would seem to me that placing our two most important communications networks on the same system would wreak havoc if anything went down.
Imagine you're in an isolated midwestern town, if you're not already there. Now imagine that you have these services, and the town router decides to take a smoke break (ie, it crashes). Excepting for people with cell phones (if even they keep those on their own network too), you'll be cut off from any emergency services you need.
This is a bad, yet easily imaginable scenario. No, I think we should keep our phone and internet systems separate, or at least provide an independent backup system.
I assume your criticism is in response to the recent chicken-McNugget scandal. The way the mass media dumbed down the lawsuit, to "a man suing because he says eating at McDonald's every day caused his obesity," (or something to that point) was entirely misleading.
If you look at the lawsuit a little more in detail, you'll see that this was not what prompted McDonalds to change their nugget recipe. It was that their ingredients for making the chicken nuggets were exposed in court, and it was found that there were a substantial number of ingredients which deviated from anything that you would expect to find in food - special chemicals for flavor and preservation, parts of the chicken you wouldn't eat, etc.
So next time you see a McDonald's chicken nugget, remember that it's now far less hazardous to your health, and that's because of a trial lawyer and a class action lawsuit.
At my school, one of our channel 26 displayed a Windows error message for the entire year. Sometimes we would hit the bong, leave the channel on, and complain about how nobody ever just clicked OK.
A professor whom I TA for actually is involved in a venture business to do just this, and he bounced the idea off of us (his TA staff) about a year ago.
But it wasn't location based advertising, per se. It was location based coupons, eg, you walk into a Foot Locker, and get a message that will give you 10% off any Reebok for the next 20 minutes. Another use was instead of having to wait in line at the DMV (or taking a number and waiting to be called), go in, register your phone, and recieve a text message when you near the beginning of the queue.
There are some positive sides to this technology, although I do hope that there is some option to turn it off.
That no matter how hard they try to copy-protect media, there will be many geeks trying to break the protection, and at least one of them will succeed?
You are missing one key motivating factor behind downloading: It is the only way to nearly instantly (on hi-speed) obtain a song or a movie.
Sure, you could drive to a store, but that involves getting off your ass, which is something manking has been trying to do less and less of since the Industrial Revolution. And store collections are severely limited compared to online collections.
The point is, there is a demand for instant on-demand entertainment, there's obviously the technology, but the only people who can allow it legally are dragging their feet.
Betamax back! Those evil VHS men in white coats stole my Betamax!
Oh wait, I wasn't even a month old when this case was decided...
I'm a student and work at the help desk at my school, and let me recommend two things:
1) Do not buy a laptop
2) If you ignore 1, get a Mac laptop
My main reason against laptops is that you'll rarely ever actually make use of the portability, unless you *really* like to work in libraries, or if your campus has a really good wireless network and has year-round warm weather. At my school, most of my friends with laptops leave it in their room 99.9% of the time.
As for recommending Macs, I'm not a Mac person, but my experience working at our help desk has shown that PC laptops are all garbage. They break far more easily than they should, hardware almost as much as software (so many hard drive crashes I've seen).
A laptop might also be a better idea if you don't live within driving distance of your school.
Add this to conventional desktop vs. laptop wisdom, and you'll (hopefully) come out with the right choice.
Argh. Half the news posts on /. these days are about lawsuits. Since when did filing suit against someone become a viable means of effecting action?
Since we decided that standing back to back, walking 10 paces in opposite directions, and drawing revolvers was no longer a civilized method of conflict resolution.
In general there should be a reasonable expectation that the coffee is close to boiling since that is how coffee is generally made. Actually, the court involved in this case determined otherwise. I believe the court determined that the expected temperature for hot coffee is either 120 or 140 degrees F, whereas McDonald's was serving coffee between 180 and 200. This was (partly) the grounds for the ruling - nobody should have to expect that the coffee being *served* to them is near boiling, as in normal home-brewing, it never reaches near that degree.
What happens when they get a false positive? And it (1) is something very valuable and/or (2) needs to be delivered in pristine condition on time. Will they just attach a note saying "Sorry, we thought you had drugs..."?
The site's already been /.ed