I understand that he was paid a certain amount during production of the series, but it's generally accepted that there would be residuals paid out after the fact when the contract says there will be. If one were to take a job that was getting paid X and produce Y, there is no expectation of receiving anything more than X. However, if one were to take a job that paid X up front to produce Y and receive Z percentage on profits, there is an expectation to receive Z if it is successful; instead one is regularly informed that profits are being made hand over fist, but because of creative math none of it will be paid out.
As a consumer, when one pays for performance art at the retail level, one generally is under the naive assumption that some of the proceeds will go towards the creativity of that art.
Do you actually buy music and movies with the full acknowledgment and acceptance that the people who wrote it and performed it will not receive anything from your purchase?
Any time Mikey Mouse is going to become Public Domain, Disney heavily lobbys to extend copyrighted works. It's sad that I'll probably live to see this happen again. I just wonder how long they're going to try to string it out.
This reminds me of when I worked for Hitachi Power Tools (HPT). Beyond the confusing owner ship of the company ( X% is owned by Hitachi Koki which is Y% owned by Hitachi Group, etc.) and the five year rotation of executives fresh from Japan (once they get a handle on the US market, they're sent elsewhere and are replaced by someone with no knowledge of the US market), they had a very interesting accounting practice:
Every month the head finance/accounting guy spent a few days locked in his office to produce reports of all sales, expenses, and inventory numbers for that month, last three months, last six months, and last 12 months for the parent company in Japan. In Japan they'd review these reports and would determine the quantity and price of each product we'd buy from them. This insured that HPT in North America would not be profitable, so if any income tax were to be paid, it would go to the Japanese government. On top of that, they wouldn't give any raises due to being in the red.
That post from JMS really bummed me out when I first read it since I bought all five seasons and all of the "made for TV movies" on DVD. Not a penny of my purchases went to anyone that poured their heart and soul into B5. Hollywood Accounting is one of the big reasons I don't have much sympathy for the studios crying that they're loosing trillions of dollars to piracy. If they can fudge the numbers so no one can get any residuals, they can fudge the numbers just as much to claim that rampant piracy is going to force them to close up shop and justify their lobbying for more ridiculous laws in their favor.
One of these days, this is going to bite me in the ass. If you're interested in her posts about being offended, they're either blackholed due to the flamewar or are unavailable presently due to the forum migration. If you're interested in the offending pictures, I'm not going to do the dirty work for you, but how about a refined Google search? I recommend at least results one and seven. Result One Post Four had the offending pictures, but they aren't hosted anymore. Result Seven does have a couple of the pictures, but they aren't on the first page.
Please keep in mind that the VW Vortex forums were recently forced to move to vBulliten from ZeroForum and not everything is available, like all of Result Seven, but can be had by either opening the Google Cache of it or replacing "zerothread?cmd=print&id=" with "showthread.php?". Do some searching with her name and "VW" and/or "R32" and you'll come across the offending pics
Came here to post that. Seriously, everyone has their price. I find it funny when someone wont acknowledge that they are a whore or at least have a price. Walk up to any person on the street, present them with a large sum of cash, make an offer to exchange the cash for something from them, and they'd seriously consider it and may even take the offer if they feel it's worth it to them.
casings, to expound on Maxo-Texas' post, take for example a young legal-adult lady with strong religious convictions to save her virginity for marriage. Offer her $5 million in tangible cash she could count on the spot to have sex with a dirty old man; she will seriously consider it. If she turns it down, offer her $500 million in cash and I'd wager she'd accept.
Story time: I frequent an enthusiast forum for a specific car brand. Obviously the majority of active members are heterosexual males. One of the people that frequented the board was a chick who's career was modeling; on her website it stated what types of modling she did, including "tasteful nudes", and had a portfolio of her work. There were some shots of her clothed but in prvocative poses next to her car of the same car brand and these ended up being posted by her or someone else on to the enthusiast forum. Obviously those threads went down the path of comments of how hot she was and other generalized intercourse statements. She bitched about about how those kinds of threads always ended up becoming a "meat fest". I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that the modeling she does is only for innocent artistic value, but I didn't expect the offending comments to be anything different given the demographic. Through the various posts of her picutures people did over time, at some point, someone identified her porn stage name and a simple search revealed a number of hardcore porn videos of her.
What I found hard to understand was her disgust over the typical "meat fest" that ensued over her in provocative pictures, yet she does porn. She can't be truly ignorant to the fact that millions of 13yo boys to wrinkly old men jerk it to those videos. I suppose I could accept it being her right to be offended at the reaction her pictures and videos create, but in my book it's moronic for her to be offended and she shouldn't expect anything less, especially from paying customers that fund her.
Third this. It's a great app and gives you a simple easy to understand view of the APs that are in range. If it's a bunch of APs turning on at once, you may be able to pick a channel that will work better.
If it's annoying enough, MetaGeek has their Wi-Spy line of Spectrun Analyzers that will give you a better detailed view of the spectrum and not just a map of the APs in your area.
If your WiFi card supports 802.11a (5GHz), an investment in a new AP may be the way to go. The 5GHz band isn't utilized as much as the 2.4GHz band and isn't susceptible to interference from microwave ovens. My apartment complex is riddled with APs and no one is using 5GHz. Though if a faulty street light ballast is the culprit, it may put it interference on 5GHz along with a number of other bands as well and your investment in new hardware not effective.
True they have been getting the retail copies, however I've seen a number of new DVD releases that are Rental copies; recent WB releases come to mind. Unfortunately these rental copies do not have any special features and are littered with previews.
Must be nice that you've been asked if you want to pick up someone else's responsibilities. I've always been told "this is what you'll be doing as well" or "since you've been cross-trained on their duties and they're now gone, you'll need to handle their stuff as well".
Any questions about a pay increase for compensation for doing 2+peoples jobs would either flag me for termination at a later date, not being a "team player", or "money hungry".
I never understood upper management's labeling of someone wanting to make more money when they're at <=$35k. Pardon me for wanting to be more than two paychecks away from bankruptcy and be able to save up for a car that can actually get me to and from work. Plus it's a bit hypocritical coming from an upper management a-hole who makes six figures and has a shiny Range Rover in their parking spot.
This is what I don't understand about companies. Their big overall focus are profits and wasting money hurts those profits. Rarely do they see any value in an employee's knowledge and experience with the company. They can't possibly give Employee_A a decent raise who knows their job well and how the company does business; however, if Employee_A leaves, then they end up hiring Employee_B for the same or more than Employee_A was asking and they still need to train/bring the noob up to speed. Worse, in some cases, they have to hire 2-5 people just to replace Employee_A.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!
My story:
I worked for an on-shore outsourcing company and was on a team exclusive to a particular client. My primary job was to handle UNIX and Oracle support and secondary was everything else a sys/net admin does. This was one of the rare instances that my IT job actually generated a traceable profit for my employer; each ticket was billed for a certain price that was common knowledge among my peers, though this knowledge didn't help morale with the peanuts we were making.
In a cost cutting move, they decided to move all of our jobs from the major metropolitan city to a hick, I mean, farm town three hours south. They really wanted me to stay since I had an in depth knowledge on my exclusive job roles and everyone elses' jobs, plus I had saved their ass on countless occasions with detailed knowledge of the client's policies and procedures and could always back it up with documentation. Their pitch to everyone was the cost of living was cheaper down there. That was a load of crap since my car, credit cards, and cell phone bills wouldn't go down, also my rent and utilities would go up since I had two roommates. Knowing full well that they'd cut my pay if I moved and I'd be miserable there, I countered with two options. Option one was keep my pay and bonus options and I would work remotely; this wasn't much of a risk on their part since performance was already measured by the tickets one processed. Option two, was a double in pay to compensate for the increase of living expenses, being three hours away from friends and family, and having to live in a shithole.
They didn't take either offer and instead hired four slackers that previously worked as tech-support for the local dial-up ISP. Their only real skill was playing EVE Online. They handled my exclusive support roles. All in all, they hired over double the work force to replace the team I was on and ended up spending more money on combined wages. IIRC, they ended up loosing money since the client couldn't trust them to get stuff done right and started to pull out.
This is kind of what first came to my mind. SuperMicro has or will be releasing a 45 drive 4U enclosure and I'd entertain the idea of getting one if I had a lot of expendable cash.
My current setup is just a basic mid-tower I reused with 3x1.5TB drives, the cheapest ($20) 64-bit AMD processor I could get at the time, and it boots FreeBSD off of a USB thumbdrive hanging out in the case. I use ZFS for the three HDDs and they're strictly for storing my crap; all software the OS uses is kept on the USB drive. The USB drive only added 10 seconds to boot times and there's a one second lag when saving config files; other than that, there is no difference to a regular drive. If I had the money to get more and bigger drives, I'd probably scale this setup. Though, I'd look into other OSes that are designed for more of a NAS setup. One thing is for sure, I'd still boot the OS off of a USB thumbdrive and I'd use ZFS to handle the filesystem and RAID. I use to talk smack about software RAIDs, but with these every increasing larger drives, the issues with some hardware RAIDs, and how ZFS is setup, I've been pretty convinced ZFS is the way to go.
What really impressed me beyond the lack of lag and CPU utilization was being able to reinstall the OS and not have to back anything up in order to mount the ZFS RAID. I had originally installed the OS on an old HDD and setup the ZFS RAIDz on the three drives. Later on I came across a good deal on a cheap USB thumbdrive that had more than enough capacity for the OS (32GB for $40 two years ago), software, CVS source copy, space for compiling, and extra room on top. I just yanked the OS HDD out, slapped in the USB drive, reinstalled the OS on the USB, and then told ZFS to mount. It mounted up perfectly with no complaints and no config file; impressive.
What gets me is the loosing of profits statement. Apple has a well documented history of bringing out redesigned or refreshed iPods and iPhones every year at around the same time respectively. I have little sympathy for those that buy an iPhone in April whine, moan, and stand in shock that Apple releases the next gen. iPhone a few months later. It's like someone who buys a new car in August and then is surprised when manufacturer releases an even better model soon after. It's a part of the buyer's due diligence to research a product before they purchase it.
Hypothetically, if today I had decided that I'm going to buy a new iPod, I'd wait to see what new products they came out with in a few months. Maybe something would strike my fancy; maybe it wouldn't be completely worth the wait.
I am truly interested in the point of my tax money being spent on this. This just seems like a waste of money. We have better things to do with tax money than point fingers at other countries' IP Laws in how they don't compare to the "USA's totally awesome laws".
The only reason I can think of is to get businesses to setup shop over here than elsewhere. No company can take this report as being objective. This is just childish talk like a boy putting down another boy just to impress a girl; sure BoyA may claim that BoyB failed Math class where BoyA got an A, but that doesn't change the fact that BoyA failed Science class.
Seriously. Let's fix our shit first before calling out someone else's crap just to look good. There are more important things to spend tax money on than this foolishness. Plus, I don't think we have the best IP laws anyways.
Disclaimer: IANAL nor do I know all of the pertaining US laws (some have already been quoted in other comments), however I work for a credit card processing gateway (known as a "Merchant Acquirer" in the industry) and am familiar with processing from that perspective.
The card holder has the right to dispute (chargeback) any transaction that they didn't authorize, receive the products, or services, to name a few, for up to six months (the chargeback period) and in extreme cases, nine months. Essentially the card holder goes to the card issuing bank and files a dispute. The bank issues a chargeback and the funds are soon after taken from the merchant's bank account along with fees and the amount the card holder was debited would be credited to their account. If the merchant doesn't have the funds in their account, the processor is liable and has to hand over the funds to the card holder. It's up to the merchant to provide documentation to support (prove) that the transaction was authorized by the card holder and they appropriately received the products or services they were billed for.
Obviously the processor doesn't want to maintain that risk, so they can get quite intrusive with knowing the merchant's ability to fund chargebacks, maintaining good documentation to support that the transaction was legitimate, and overall how they do business. This is generally done with the merchant agreement/contract stipulating that the merchant would provide any documentation to the processor the account is with and can include bank statements, signed receipts, signed invoices, signed contracts, invoices from suppliers, and even pictures of the facility in the case of brick and mortar businesses. If the processor isn't completely comfortable with how the merchant does business (ex: the merchant is using the transaction funds to buy the product from their supplier or they just don't keep a high enough balance in the account) or even a particular transaction, the processor can hold the funds for the one or all transactions for the chargeback period or possibly institute a rolling reserve where a percentage of the transaction funds are held by the processor for a specific time and then deposited into the merchant's account; this is done so processor can fund any chargebacks that may occur to reduce their overall financial risk.
In the case of a merchant fighting a chargeback, they would have to provide signed receipts, signed invoices, signed contracts, tracking numbers, and/or any other supporting documentation that is needed to prove the transaction was legitimate. This information is provided to the card issuing bank who needs to make an assessment. If the merchant wins, the original transaction amount is taken from the card holder and deposited back into the merchant's account minus any transaction fees. Even then, the merchant is screwed out of transaction fees three times (original transaction, chargeback transaction, and then winning the dispute) and the chargeback fee.
The card holder is in a good position to get their money back if the transaction is fraud or the merchant doesn't provide the product or service as advertised. A legitimate merchant is in a really crappy position no matter what.
Some light reading for those that want a little more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback -I know there are citations needed, but this article that I didn't write appears to be on the money from what I understand of the rules and regulations, which one can further review with Visa, MC, Discover, Amex, and PCI.
I'm not making as much as I use to, so money is tighter and I'm thankful to just have a damn job. We've budgeted to have a NetFlix subscription and go out to a movie once every three months. That budget is considered luxurious by some people I know.
Quoting piracy as a reason for dwindling sales is a cop-out IMHO. Anti-Piracy groups need to focus on the people selling pirated DVDs as legitimate ones; they're really taking traceable sales away. Is it possible to download a pirated copy of a movie for free? Yes. Will it always be in high quality, not require you to go find some new or obscure codec,and can be had in a matter of minutes? Hell no. My time is worth something and all that dicking around just isn't worth it for me and I may not even end up with what I was downloading not to mention the legal ramifications and possibilities of a fun lawsuit.
NetFlix is a good deal for me. I have the patience to wait for the disc in the mail and Watch Now (on demand) is great. It's a little annoying that they're cutting deals with the studios to hold off for 28 days, more so for the wife than me, but it means more content that can be streamed to the TV and not take up a slot in the mail queue.
MOVIE STUDIOS, I have some advice for you: 1. Stop making a lot of crappy movies just to see if they'll stick to the wall. 2. Make better movies and it doesn't always require $100+ million budget. 3. Understand that your low sales isn't a 100% result of piracy. 4. Understand that spending a lot of money on a movie doesn't mean it's going to net a lot of profit. 5. Appreciate that piracy in the US isn't as bad as it is in other countries. 6. Invest most of your anti-piracy efforts in the groups that are mass producing pirated DVDs for profit. They're taking significant profit away from you. 7. It's fine to educate people within reason that pirating is illegal. 8. Stop with all the DRM and DMCA. All it does is hurt your legitimately purchasing consumer and can potentially cost you money in the long run with refunds when shit doesn't work right or the authorizing servers go offline (e.g. Yahoo music). 9. Understand that fair use isn't costing you much money. I have the right to make a copy for my personal use and I'm going to do that so the original doesn't get damaged. If it did get damaged and I didn't have a copy of it, that doesn't mean I'm going to go and buy a new one. I'm not going to dick around with re-encoding it so it fits on a single-layer (dual-layer is too much and you might as well go legit for the cost) that I'm going to give to my friend, plus he can go out and pirate it himself or go down the street and rent it from RedBox for $1. 10. Understand that if people don't have a lot of disposable income, they aren't going to spend money on your product that they don't need to live. If you have a problem with that, either do something positive to get the economy rolling so people have disposable income to trade with you or change your business to something that involves basic needs like food, clothing, and/or shelter.
I do have a smartphone running Android with the Google Voice app and this is not the case. As MDMurphy stated, GV is a forwarder and this is how the app functions; outbound GV calls still call the local GV number and use minutes. I believe alop has a Gizmo5 account, which is a SIP service acquired by Google in November, and is the only SIP service supported to directly work with GV without a POTS call having to be initiated.
Even if one were to have a Gizmo5 account before they stopped accepting new accounts when Google acquired them, a SIP client app is still required; the GV app for Android will not connect via SIP and will still use airtime. The only way around this is to get a SIP account, Gizmo5 or not, and use a SIP client. GV can be optionally used depending on what services the SIP account provides and what you want to do. Additionally a service like SIP Sorcery might be needed depending on what you're doing: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ae8glDUXDsh9ZGR2eG43cjRfMzNkOTM4ZjNjeA&hl=en&pli=1
Google has stated that they plan on bringing SIP connectivity to the GV service in the future as part of their Gizmo5 purchase. Besides having a Gizmo5 account or jumping through the hoops of what's documented in the last link, I'm interested in how one can use GV via SIP or WiFi and no call over POTS or a mobile network using minutes.
This. Perhaps it isn't the next asbestos, but I know that certain radio waves * intensity * proximity distance * exposure time = highly unfavorable effects to the human body. Even if you had been living there for a couple of years with no ill effects and were selling it, the moment I saw that tower out the window, I'd be heading towards the door with my wife in tow mumbling about not wanting my balls to fall off. I wouldn't be surprised if most potential buyers would scoff at the site of that tower.
I don't know about Best Buy, however CompUSA use to do that years back. There's was really "any reason". I upgraded a couple of things under that and one upgrade was with a device in perfectly working condition. Buddy of mine worked the service counter and one day a guy brought in a mini-tower with a big hole in the side. While he was filling out the paperwork he asked what happened. The customer stated that he took a shotgun to it. When asked why he did that, he said he wanted to see if they'd actually replace it.
The legitimacy or how real world it applies aside, I'm disappointed with Motorola on this one. The Droid is an expensive device from a brand name manufacturer made in 2009. I expect a level of build quality, feature set, and accuracy. For a capacitance touch screen released in 2009, I would expect a level of accuracy that's at least comparable to the last generation of the iPhone, not accuracy that's poorer than a first gen iPhone.
Coming from resistive touchscreens on Windows Mobile and Palm devices and the device in general, I am overall pretty happy with my Droid. I do have inaccuracies from time to time, but it's ok. Using the onscreen keyboard has been pretty accurate; most of my errors I have attributed to my finger being in the wrong place. Sadly, this is another weapon for the annoying Apple fanboy; pissing contests are annoying and the constant Apple fanboy counter argument of being about to talk and do data at the same time is getting really old and doesn't apply to how I generally use the device.
At the company I work for, the users had unrestricted access to the internet. Then they started abusing that freedom by going to porn sites, soaking up all the bandwidth with streaming music and YouTube, and happily going to every malware website possible. We got fed up with blocking IP ranges at the firewall, having to tell a user not to stream media, and finding out how creative a user can get with getting malware.
I campaigned for and got a content filter. Not everyone gets a "no internets" policy. We start off with restricting the really malicious sites first, then allow full access to those that need it (e.g. underwriting), then make category blocks like porn, and then granular as each department head sees fit. So far everyone has gotten use to it. Sites do get miscategorized from time to time, but we can unblock them and recategorize them as needed. Really we should have had something like this when I first started since there is a possibility for unrestricted access to become a liability.
OP, if you want a website unblocked, put a request to the netadmin to have it unblocked. Otherwise appreciate that you do have some level of an internet connection that you're not paying for, get some means of a VPN that wont restrict internet access, or pay a hefty sum for an aircard.
This crap has been circling the web and it's not completely accurate. With the $30 and $45 data plans for smartphones, you get unlimited data for the phone itself. If you want to tether, it's an additional $30 for the $30 plan or $15 for the $45 plan and will allow you 5GB of tethered data and unlimited on the phone. In any case, if you want to tether and be within their TOS, you need to pay $60. It's still possible to tether without the extra cost and their software, it's just not within their TOS
The difference between the $30 and $45 data plan isn't documented well and leads to a lot of confusion. I fault VZW for not getting this strait. All the $45 gets you is access their WirelessSync service and supposedly allow you to do Exchange ActiveSync within the TOS. The $30 plan CAN DO Exchange ActiveSync, but it's supposedly not ok within their poorly documented TOS and every VZW employee will tell you that you need the $45 plan if you're going to do Exchange ActiveSync.
If you do use a lot of data on your phone, VZW can cancel your data account according to their TOS. I've used >5GB/month without a peep from VZW and any additional charge on my bill. It has been said in HoFo, if the data usage is extreme by VZW opionion, they could consider that your must be doing something that's violating the TOS. If VZW was smart, they wouldn't do much canceling since they're launching a bunch of Android phones and saying streaming YouTube and music is ok, which obviously will soak up a lot of bandwidth.
I suggest that Pickens and the article author do some fact checking before publishing assumptions and hearsay.
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Thank you for sharing. This cuts down on my research time to do the same. :)
I understand that he was paid a certain amount during production of the series, but it's generally accepted that there would be residuals paid out after the fact when the contract says there will be. If one were to take a job that was getting paid X and produce Y, there is no expectation of receiving anything more than X. However, if one were to take a job that paid X up front to produce Y and receive Z percentage on profits, there is an expectation to receive Z if it is successful; instead one is regularly informed that profits are being made hand over fist, but because of creative math none of it will be paid out.
As a consumer, when one pays for performance art at the retail level, one generally is under the naive assumption that some of the proceeds will go towards the creativity of that art.
Do you actually buy music and movies with the full acknowledgment and acceptance that the people who wrote it and performed it will not receive anything from your purchase?
Any time Mikey Mouse is going to become Public Domain, Disney heavily lobbys to extend copyrighted works. It's sad that I'll probably live to see this happen again. I just wonder how long they're going to try to string it out.
This reminds me of when I worked for Hitachi Power Tools (HPT). Beyond the confusing owner ship of the company ( X% is owned by Hitachi Koki which is Y% owned by Hitachi Group, etc.) and the five year rotation of executives fresh from Japan (once they get a handle on the US market, they're sent elsewhere and are replaced by someone with no knowledge of the US market), they had a very interesting accounting practice:
Every month the head finance/accounting guy spent a few days locked in his office to produce reports of all sales, expenses, and inventory numbers for that month, last three months, last six months, and last 12 months for the parent company in Japan. In Japan they'd review these reports and would determine the quantity and price of each product we'd buy from them. This insured that HPT in North America would not be profitable, so if any income tax were to be paid, it would go to the Japanese government. On top of that, they wouldn't give any raises due to being in the red.
That post from JMS really bummed me out when I first read it since I bought all five seasons and all of the "made for TV movies" on DVD. Not a penny of my purchases went to anyone that poured their heart and soul into B5. Hollywood Accounting is one of the big reasons I don't have much sympathy for the studios crying that they're loosing trillions of dollars to piracy. If they can fudge the numbers so no one can get any residuals, they can fudge the numbers just as much to claim that rampant piracy is going to force them to close up shop and justify their lobbying for more ridiculous laws in their favor.
One of these days, this is going to bite me in the ass. If you're interested in her posts about being offended, they're either blackholed due to the flamewar or are unavailable presently due to the forum migration. If you're interested in the offending pictures, I'm not going to do the dirty work for you, but how about a refined Google search? I recommend at least results one and seven. Result One Post Four had the offending pictures, but they aren't hosted anymore. Result Seven does have a couple of the pictures, but they aren't on the first page.
Please keep in mind that the VW Vortex forums were recently forced to move to vBulliten from ZeroForum and not everything is available, like all of Result Seven, but can be had by either opening the Google Cache of it or replacing "zerothread?cmd=print&id=" with "showthread.php?". Do some searching with her name and "VW" and/or "R32" and you'll come across the offending pics
Came here to post that. Seriously, everyone has their price. I find it funny when someone wont acknowledge that they are a whore or at least have a price. Walk up to any person on the street, present them with a large sum of cash, make an offer to exchange the cash for something from them, and they'd seriously consider it and may even take the offer if they feel it's worth it to them.
casings, to expound on Maxo-Texas' post, take for example a young legal-adult lady with strong religious convictions to save her virginity for marriage. Offer her $5 million in tangible cash she could count on the spot to have sex with a dirty old man; she will seriously consider it. If she turns it down, offer her $500 million in cash and I'd wager she'd accept.
Story time:
I frequent an enthusiast forum for a specific car brand. Obviously the majority of active members are heterosexual males. One of the people that frequented the board was a chick who's career was modeling; on her website it stated what types of modling she did, including "tasteful nudes", and had a portfolio of her work. There were some shots of her clothed but in prvocative poses next to her car of the same car brand and these ended up being posted by her or someone else on to the enthusiast forum. Obviously those threads went down the path of comments of how hot she was and other generalized intercourse statements. She bitched about about how those kinds of threads always ended up becoming a "meat fest". I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that the modeling she does is only for innocent artistic value, but I didn't expect the offending comments to be anything different given the demographic. Through the various posts of her picutures people did over time, at some point, someone identified her porn stage name and a simple search revealed a number of hardcore porn videos of her.
What I found hard to understand was her disgust over the typical "meat fest" that ensued over her in provocative pictures, yet she does porn. She can't be truly ignorant to the fact that millions of 13yo boys to wrinkly old men jerk it to those videos. I suppose I could accept it being her right to be offended at the reaction her pictures and videos create, but in my book it's moronic for her to be offended and she shouldn't expect anything less, especially from paying customers that fund her.
Third this. It's a great app and gives you a simple easy to understand view of the APs that are in range. If it's a bunch of APs turning on at once, you may be able to pick a channel that will work better.
If it's annoying enough, MetaGeek has their Wi-Spy line of Spectrun Analyzers that will give you a better detailed view of the spectrum and not just a map of the APs in your area.
If your WiFi card supports 802.11a (5GHz), an investment in a new AP may be the way to go. The 5GHz band isn't utilized as much as the 2.4GHz band and isn't susceptible to interference from microwave ovens. My apartment complex is riddled with APs and no one is using 5GHz. Though if a faulty street light ballast is the culprit, it may put it interference on 5GHz along with a number of other bands as well and your investment in new hardware not effective.
True they have been getting the retail copies, however I've seen a number of new DVD releases that are Rental copies; recent WB releases come to mind. Unfortunately these rental copies do not have any special features and are littered with previews.
Must be nice that you've been asked if you want to pick up someone else's responsibilities. I've always been told "this is what you'll be doing as well" or "since you've been cross-trained on their duties and they're now gone, you'll need to handle their stuff as well".
Any questions about a pay increase for compensation for doing 2+peoples jobs would either flag me for termination at a later date, not being a "team player", or "money hungry".
I never understood upper management's labeling of someone wanting to make more money when they're at <=$35k. Pardon me for wanting to be more than two paychecks away from bankruptcy and be able to save up for a car that can actually get me to and from work. Plus it's a bit hypocritical coming from an upper management a-hole who makes six figures and has a shiny Range Rover in their parking spot.
This is what I don't understand about companies. Their big overall focus are profits and wasting money hurts those profits. Rarely do they see any value in an employee's knowledge and experience with the company. They can't possibly give Employee_A a decent raise who knows their job well and how the company does business; however, if Employee_A leaves, then they end up hiring Employee_B for the same or more than Employee_A was asking and they still need to train/bring the noob up to speed. Worse, in some cases, they have to hire 2-5 people just to replace Employee_A.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!
My story: I worked for an on-shore outsourcing company and was on a team exclusive to a particular client. My primary job was to handle UNIX and Oracle support and secondary was everything else a sys/net admin does. This was one of the rare instances that my IT job actually generated a traceable profit for my employer; each ticket was billed for a certain price that was common knowledge among my peers, though this knowledge didn't help morale with the peanuts we were making.
In a cost cutting move, they decided to move all of our jobs from the major metropolitan city to a hick, I mean, farm town three hours south. They really wanted me to stay since I had an in depth knowledge on my exclusive job roles and everyone elses' jobs, plus I had saved their ass on countless occasions with detailed knowledge of the client's policies and procedures and could always back it up with documentation. Their pitch to everyone was the cost of living was cheaper down there. That was a load of crap since my car, credit cards, and cell phone bills wouldn't go down, also my rent and utilities would go up since I had two roommates. Knowing full well that they'd cut my pay if I moved and I'd be miserable there, I countered with two options. Option one was keep my pay and bonus options and I would work remotely; this wasn't much of a risk on their part since performance was already measured by the tickets one processed. Option two, was a double in pay to compensate for the increase of living expenses, being three hours away from friends and family, and having to live in a shithole.
They didn't take either offer and instead hired four slackers that previously worked as tech-support for the local dial-up ISP. Their only real skill was playing EVE Online. They handled my exclusive support roles. All in all, they hired over double the work force to replace the team I was on and ended up spending more money on combined wages. IIRC, they ended up loosing money since the client couldn't trust them to get stuff done right and started to pull out.
This is kind of what first came to my mind. SuperMicro has or will be releasing a 45 drive 4U enclosure and I'd entertain the idea of getting one if I had a lot of expendable cash.
My current setup is just a basic mid-tower I reused with 3x1.5TB drives, the cheapest ($20) 64-bit AMD processor I could get at the time, and it boots FreeBSD off of a USB thumbdrive hanging out in the case. I use ZFS for the three HDDs and they're strictly for storing my crap; all software the OS uses is kept on the USB drive. The USB drive only added 10 seconds to boot times and there's a one second lag when saving config files; other than that, there is no difference to a regular drive. If I had the money to get more and bigger drives, I'd probably scale this setup. Though, I'd look into other OSes that are designed for more of a NAS setup. One thing is for sure, I'd still boot the OS off of a USB thumbdrive and I'd use ZFS to handle the filesystem and RAID. I use to talk smack about software RAIDs, but with these every increasing larger drives, the issues with some hardware RAIDs, and how ZFS is setup, I've been pretty convinced ZFS is the way to go.
What really impressed me beyond the lack of lag and CPU utilization was being able to reinstall the OS and not have to back anything up in order to mount the ZFS RAID. I had originally installed the OS on an old HDD and setup the ZFS RAIDz on the three drives. Later on I came across a good deal on a cheap USB thumbdrive that had more than enough capacity for the OS (32GB for $40 two years ago), software, CVS source copy, space for compiling, and extra room on top. I just yanked the OS HDD out, slapped in the USB drive, reinstalled the OS on the USB, and then told ZFS to mount. It mounted up perfectly with no complaints and no config file; impressive.
What gets me is the loosing of profits statement. Apple has a well documented history of bringing out redesigned or refreshed iPods and iPhones every year at around the same time respectively. I have little sympathy for those that buy an iPhone in April whine, moan, and stand in shock that Apple releases the next gen. iPhone a few months later. It's like someone who buys a new car in August and then is surprised when manufacturer releases an even better model soon after. It's a part of the buyer's due diligence to research a product before they purchase it.
Hypothetically, if today I had decided that I'm going to buy a new iPod, I'd wait to see what new products they came out with in a few months. Maybe something would strike my fancy; maybe it wouldn't be completely worth the wait.
I am truly interested in the point of my tax money being spent on this. This just seems like a waste of money. We have better things to do with tax money than point fingers at other countries' IP Laws in how they don't compare to the "USA's totally awesome laws".
The only reason I can think of is to get businesses to setup shop over here than elsewhere. No company can take this report as being objective. This is just childish talk like a boy putting down another boy just to impress a girl; sure BoyA may claim that BoyB failed Math class where BoyA got an A, but that doesn't change the fact that BoyA failed Science class.
Seriously. Let's fix our shit first before calling out someone else's crap just to look good. There are more important things to spend tax money on than this foolishness. Plus, I don't think we have the best IP laws anyways.
Disclaimer: IANAL nor do I know all of the pertaining US laws (some have already been quoted in other comments), however I work for a credit card processing gateway (known as a "Merchant Acquirer" in the industry) and am familiar with processing from that perspective.
The card holder has the right to dispute (chargeback) any transaction that they didn't authorize, receive the products, or services, to name a few, for up to six months (the chargeback period) and in extreme cases, nine months. Essentially the card holder goes to the card issuing bank and files a dispute. The bank issues a chargeback and the funds are soon after taken from the merchant's bank account along with fees and the amount the card holder was debited would be credited to their account. If the merchant doesn't have the funds in their account, the processor is liable and has to hand over the funds to the card holder. It's up to the merchant to provide documentation to support (prove) that the transaction was authorized by the card holder and they appropriately received the products or services they were billed for.
Obviously the processor doesn't want to maintain that risk, so they can get quite intrusive with knowing the merchant's ability to fund chargebacks, maintaining good documentation to support that the transaction was legitimate, and overall how they do business. This is generally done with the merchant agreement/contract stipulating that the merchant would provide any documentation to the processor the account is with and can include bank statements, signed receipts, signed invoices, signed contracts, invoices from suppliers, and even pictures of the facility in the case of brick and mortar businesses. If the processor isn't completely comfortable with how the merchant does business (ex: the merchant is using the transaction funds to buy the product from their supplier or they just don't keep a high enough balance in the account) or even a particular transaction, the processor can hold the funds for the one or all transactions for the chargeback period or possibly institute a rolling reserve where a percentage of the transaction funds are held by the processor for a specific time and then deposited into the merchant's account; this is done so processor can fund any chargebacks that may occur to reduce their overall financial risk.
In the case of a merchant fighting a chargeback, they would have to provide signed receipts, signed invoices, signed contracts, tracking numbers, and/or any other supporting documentation that is needed to prove the transaction was legitimate. This information is provided to the card issuing bank who needs to make an assessment. If the merchant wins, the original transaction amount is taken from the card holder and deposited back into the merchant's account minus any transaction fees. Even then, the merchant is screwed out of transaction fees three times (original transaction, chargeback transaction, and then winning the dispute) and the chargeback fee.
The card holder is in a good position to get their money back if the transaction is fraud or the merchant doesn't provide the product or service as advertised. A legitimate merchant is in a really crappy position no matter what.
Some light reading for those that want a little more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback
-I know there are citations needed, but this article that I didn't write appears to be on the money from what I understand of the rules and regulations, which one can further review with Visa, MC, Discover, Amex, and PCI.
Not to mention the state of the economy.
I'm not making as much as I use to, so money is tighter and I'm thankful to just have a damn job. We've budgeted to have a NetFlix subscription and go out to a movie once every three months. That budget is considered luxurious by some people I know.
Quoting piracy as a reason for dwindling sales is a cop-out IMHO. Anti-Piracy groups need to focus on the people selling pirated DVDs as legitimate ones; they're really taking traceable sales away. Is it possible to download a pirated copy of a movie for free? Yes. Will it always be in high quality, not require you to go find some new or obscure codec,and can be had in a matter of minutes? Hell no. My time is worth something and all that dicking around just isn't worth it for me and I may not even end up with what I was downloading not to mention the legal ramifications and possibilities of a fun lawsuit.
NetFlix is a good deal for me. I have the patience to wait for the disc in the mail and Watch Now (on demand) is great. It's a little annoying that they're cutting deals with the studios to hold off for 28 days, more so for the wife than me, but it means more content that can be streamed to the TV and not take up a slot in the mail queue.
MOVIE STUDIOS, I have some advice for you:
1. Stop making a lot of crappy movies just to see if they'll stick to the wall.
2. Make better movies and it doesn't always require $100+ million budget.
3. Understand that your low sales isn't a 100% result of piracy.
4. Understand that spending a lot of money on a movie doesn't mean it's going to net a lot of profit.
5. Appreciate that piracy in the US isn't as bad as it is in other countries.
6. Invest most of your anti-piracy efforts in the groups that are mass producing pirated DVDs for profit. They're taking significant profit away from you.
7. It's fine to educate people within reason that pirating is illegal.
8. Stop with all the DRM and DMCA. All it does is hurt your legitimately purchasing consumer and can potentially cost you money in the long run with refunds when shit doesn't work right or the authorizing servers go offline (e.g. Yahoo music).
9. Understand that fair use isn't costing you much money. I have the right to make a copy for my personal use and I'm going to do that so the original doesn't get damaged. If it did get damaged and I didn't have a copy of it, that doesn't mean I'm going to go and buy a new one. I'm not going to dick around with re-encoding it so it fits on a single-layer (dual-layer is too much and you might as well go legit for the cost) that I'm going to give to my friend, plus he can go out and pirate it himself or go down the street and rent it from RedBox for $1.
10. Understand that if people don't have a lot of disposable income, they aren't going to spend money on your product that they don't need to live. If you have a problem with that, either do something positive to get the economy rolling so people have disposable income to trade with you or change your business to something that involves basic needs like food, clothing, and/or shelter.
I hope you're right. I'll probably be on the job hunt soon if things don't shape up well for me in the current job.
I do have a smartphone running Android with the Google Voice app and this is not the case. As MDMurphy stated, GV is a forwarder and this is how the app functions; outbound GV calls still call the local GV number and use minutes. I believe alop has a Gizmo5 account, which is a SIP service acquired by Google in November, and is the only SIP service supported to directly work with GV without a POTS call having to be initiated.
Googles FAQ backup what MDMurphy and myself are saying:
http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115079
http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115104
Even if one were to have a Gizmo5 account before they stopped accepting new accounts when Google acquired them, a SIP client app is still required; the GV app for Android will not connect via SIP and will still use airtime. The only way around this is to get a SIP account, Gizmo5 or not, and use a SIP client. GV can be optionally used depending on what services the SIP account provides and what you want to do. Additionally a service like SIP Sorcery might be needed depending on what you're doing:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ae8glDUXDsh9ZGR2eG43cjRfMzNkOTM4ZjNjeA&hl=en&pli=1
Google has stated that they plan on bringing SIP connectivity to the GV service in the future as part of their Gizmo5 purchase. Besides having a Gizmo5 account or jumping through the hoops of what's documented in the last link, I'm interested in how one can use GV via SIP or WiFi and no call over POTS or a mobile network using minutes.
This. Perhaps it isn't the next asbestos, but I know that certain radio waves * intensity * proximity distance * exposure time = highly unfavorable effects to the human body. Even if you had been living there for a couple of years with no ill effects and were selling it, the moment I saw that tower out the window, I'd be heading towards the door with my wife in tow mumbling about not wanting my balls to fall off. I wouldn't be surprised if most potential buyers would scoff at the site of that tower.
I don't know about Best Buy, however CompUSA use to do that years back. There's was really "any reason". I upgraded a couple of things under that and one upgrade was with a device in perfectly working condition. Buddy of mine worked the service counter and one day a guy brought in a mini-tower with a big hole in the side. While he was filling out the paperwork he asked what happened. The customer stated that he took a shotgun to it. When asked why he did that, he said he wanted to see if they'd actually replace it.
The iPhone doesn't have a user replaceable/removable battery. IIRC the battery leads are even soldered to the board.
The legitimacy or how real world it applies aside, I'm disappointed with Motorola on this one. The Droid is an expensive device from a brand name manufacturer made in 2009. I expect a level of build quality, feature set, and accuracy. For a capacitance touch screen released in 2009, I would expect a level of accuracy that's at least comparable to the last generation of the iPhone, not accuracy that's poorer than a first gen iPhone.
Coming from resistive touchscreens on Windows Mobile and Palm devices and the device in general, I am overall pretty happy with my Droid. I do have inaccuracies from time to time, but it's ok. Using the onscreen keyboard has been pretty accurate; most of my errors I have attributed to my finger being in the wrong place. Sadly, this is another weapon for the annoying Apple fanboy; pissing contests are annoying and the constant Apple fanboy counter argument of being about to talk and do data at the same time is getting really old and doesn't apply to how I generally use the device.
At the company I work for, the users had unrestricted access to the internet. Then they started abusing that freedom by going to porn sites, soaking up all the bandwidth with streaming music and YouTube, and happily going to every malware website possible. We got fed up with blocking IP ranges at the firewall, having to tell a user not to stream media, and finding out how creative a user can get with getting malware. I campaigned for and got a content filter. Not everyone gets a "no internets" policy. We start off with restricting the really malicious sites first, then allow full access to those that need it (e.g. underwriting), then make category blocks like porn, and then granular as each department head sees fit. So far everyone has gotten use to it. Sites do get miscategorized from time to time, but we can unblock them and recategorize them as needed. Really we should have had something like this when I first started since there is a possibility for unrestricted access to become a liability. OP, if you want a website unblocked, put a request to the netadmin to have it unblocked. Otherwise appreciate that you do have some level of an internet connection that you're not paying for, get some means of a VPN that wont restrict internet access, or pay a hefty sum for an aircard.
This reminds me of William Shatner's Tek War series.
This crap has been circling the web and it's not completely accurate. With the $30 and $45 data plans for smartphones, you get unlimited data for the phone itself. If you want to tether, it's an additional $30 for the $30 plan or $15 for the $45 plan and will allow you 5GB of tethered data and unlimited on the phone. In any case, if you want to tether and be within their TOS, you need to pay $60. It's still possible to tether without the extra cost and their software, it's just not within their TOS
The difference between the $30 and $45 data plan isn't documented well and leads to a lot of confusion. I fault VZW for not getting this strait. All the $45 gets you is access their WirelessSync service and supposedly allow you to do Exchange ActiveSync within the TOS. The $30 plan CAN DO Exchange ActiveSync, but it's supposedly not ok within their poorly documented TOS and every VZW employee will tell you that you need the $45 plan if you're going to do Exchange ActiveSync.
If you do use a lot of data on your phone, VZW can cancel your data account according to their TOS. I've used >5GB/month without a peep from VZW and any additional charge on my bill. It has been said in HoFo, if the data usage is extreme by VZW opionion, they could consider that your must be doing something that's violating the TOS. If VZW was smart, they wouldn't do much canceling since they're launching a bunch of Android phones and saying streaming YouTube and music is ok, which obviously will soak up a lot of bandwidth.
I suggest that Pickens and the article author do some fact checking before publishing assumptions and hearsay.