I personally welcome the new music inspired by our new cold impersonal world, and hope some high quality cold impersonal music will result. We just haven't had enough cold impersonal music being created for those of us who prefer that sort of thing.
And, by the way, I always thought the title of that other song was spelled:
Don't Let The Son Go Down On Me
Comcast speeds are certainly pretty good when they're working right. However, with sharing, you also get problems if your neighbors have connection problems. For the past several months, my comcast connection has been down as much as it has been up. The very likely culprit is a cut cable line in my neighbors yard that was spliced, perhaps not very well. It generally seems to fail, both for him and me, most often when it's cool or raining. Even when it's up, it sometimes gets packet losses up to 40%. I've had the Comcast "techs" out 3 times now, but if the intermittent connection isn't bad at the moment, they can't find the problem. They don't seem to have the capability to find the problem by scanning the whole area for problems or doing any continuous scanning to fix the problem. I may need to switch to DSL shortly, as a slower connection is much better than an unreliable one.
Yes, but online in Warcraft people don't ask a/s/l. In terms of getting to know you, they just ask,"What's your spec?". Much later they ask, "Does everyone know this fight?", but that's just to see if you need any helpful hints. Beyond that, they judge you by how you play.
Right, that's the way real world auctions work. Ebay has different rules. I do believe back when ebay started and there was actually serious competition, there was another online auction house for which snipeing did not work. On that system, whenever a bid was placed, the auction was extended to last at least another 5 minutes. Thus, you couldn't snipe. Now, similar to an ebay auction it meant you might have to go to the site or read your email and rebid if desired. It also meant you didn't know how long you'd have to watch that auction before it would finish. In the end, we can see ebay didn't go that route. I think people found just bidding their maximum offer works just fine and haggling for an hour at the end of the auction wasn't worth everyone's time.
If you've bid the maximum amount you'd be willing to pay for an auction, the only thing a snipe bid denys you is the better deal you were hoping to get. If they bid earlier, you'd still not get that better deal. The sniping just let you hold onto the hope a bit longer. Why do I snipe? I don't want to deal with the people who don't bid their maximum amount, watch the auction for competition, get emotionally invested in winning the auction, and push up the price I have to pay. By sniping the auction for the amount I'm willing to pay, I win the auction for what I'm willing to pay, and don't if the auction goes higher. There are 2 useful differences between this and a standard bid:
1. People don't get to look at my bid and respond to it. Their bid of how much they're willing
to pay is the only response they get.
2. My bid is retractable up until the time of the auction. This means that I can bid on 10
auctions for identical (to me) items, and stop the other bids if i win an auction.
I find the 2nd benefit quite useful. Ebay doesn't offer anything like this ability. I often shop for items on ebay, find 10 perfectly reasonable auctions, but on ebay I can only bid on 1 auction at a time. Using a sniping system, I can bid on all and set it up to stop when it wins an auction.
Sniping isn't about being an irritant to anyone else. It's just more efficient. If ebay itself offered this bidding option, the seller would essentially get no feedback on his auction until the end, and there wouldn't be any bidding wars to raise the prices. There also wouldn't be any shill bidding, as a reserve bid would work just as well. In my opinion, using sniping bids makes you be diciplined about your bid. You must carefully decide what your maximum bid amount should be (but, you can also change that before the end of the auction, but you can change it up _or_ down). In my opinion, if you're not using the snipe bidding, you aren't shopping as efficiently and carfully as you could.
I have seen these sorts of offers, and had one of my friends at work take one of these second chance offers. What bothered me about his second chance offer, was that they offered it to him at his maximum price (which he accepted, as it was a price he was willing to pay). But if the top bidder was a shill, and it thus exposed his top offer, and the second chance was based on his top offer, he was then abused by the system. The second chance offer really should be based on (at maximum) his winning bid before the shill ever arrived. In the case that there were multiple shills, even that might not be fair.
Now, the situation isn't all that bad, because the buyer can simply walk away from the second chance offer. I know I've done that plenty of times, as I've typically moved on to the next (often identical) auction.
Again this is a case where I suggest using snipe bids. This not only gives people no chance to push your bid up, but it also gives you a chance to withdrawl the bid at any time before the trigger of the snipe. People using snipe bids also has the lovely effect of making shill bidding work against the seller. If shill bids push up the price, any snipes set to trigger below the shill price just won't get triggered, meaning that by using a shill bid to push up someone's bid, you've blocked any snipe bids between the shill bid and the previous high bidder. Thus, even if you get the real bidder to go for a second chance bid, a shill bid may have shut out any number of snipes that offered (slightly) more.
I'm sure those that are making shill bids are somewhat skillfull, but I don't really think that shill bidding on an online auction is nearly as corrupt as shill bidding during a live in-person auction (except if multiple shills are used and any bids are withdrawn). It's quite obvious that if you take 2 shill accounts and bid up the price on an auction until the real bidder is outbidded, then retract the last shill bid, you've exposed the value of the real bidders maximum bid. If no bids are withdrawn, then the shill bids are essentially no different from the seller moving a reserve price upward. If shill bids raise the price on an object past the offers of the real bidders, the seller ends up with a winning shill bid, avoid making a sale that would lose him money (or perhaps losing a sale that would have made him money), but he ends up not selling the item except in ebay's eyes (and he has to pay fees to ebay for the sale). So, as long as ebay continues to show any bid retractions, I believe buyers are pretty fairly treated in any auction where there are no withdrawn bids.
The reason this is so different from a live auction, is that a shill in a live auction has a lot more information they can read from the bidder to determine how far they can push the bidder to pay more. Online, we're all given pretty much perfect poker faces and no other bidder can generally tell just how interested we are in the auction.
The other thing that probably makes shill bidding really tough (for maximizing the sell price rather than for raising the effective reserve price) is the use of sniping bids. I know I typically am attracted to auctions for items I want with as few bidder as possible. I know other bidders will just raise the amount I'll have to pay to win, so it's generally much better for me to put a snipe bid at the end of the auction for the maximum I would want to pay. Shill bidders can still raise the minimum the auction could sell for, but they get no chance to try to push my bid up (unless then can do this in about 3 seconds). All in all, I find ebay to work quite well, at least the way I use it.
Ah, my poor kids have much less control than yours. I have sons 13 and 10, and I've been letting them start playing WOW recently. However, as you might guess from me being here, I know more about computers than they do, and so far we can tightly control computer use.
While I do know the WOW usernames and passwords, that's not how we limit computer use. We have login passwords for the computers and the kids aren't permitted know what they are. When we logoff the computer they don't can't use that machine until we log it back on. We also have all the computers in a public computer room (as well as one for handy access in the kitchen). We've done this for over a year now, so the kids don't even think about telling us to remove accout passwords. They merely beg to have us leave the computers logged in at the end of the day (especially on weekends) so they can play in the morning. We're also rather controlling about bedtimes. Past 9pm or so, the kids can read in their room, but can't be playing video games.
Is this too controlling? It's hard for me to judge, there weren't similar computers when I was growing up. So there weren't similar stay-up-all-night entertainment choices my parents had to deal with.
So far, my sons have been a little more eager to get their karate lessons and such in on weekday nights so their weekend days are more free (for WOW, though they've only been playing for a week or two). I personally think the common computer room is better for their actual enjoyment while playing, as they can play together and talk to each other easily.
I am keeping an watch on addictive behavior. They'll certainly be more restricted if they show less interest in their school friends than online games.
Sure, it doesn't diminish their legal rights, but are they morally out of bounds? They've been purchasing those legal rights by shifting the law in their favor for years. There's little question where the law stands and has been heading (until a court declares the laws unconstitutional). Some people also claim (and they may be fanatics) that a jury has the power to not rule on the letter of the law, but can find for a defendant if the law is unjust.
If a corperation could lobby congress to legalize their extortion, they'd clarly be within their legal rights. Just because something is legally right doesn't make it morally right. They'be managed to move the law quite a bit, they just haven't gotten us used to it so their actions (and not the defendant's) seem morally right. They're working hard to do that of course.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, but it will certainly take some time.
I have a prius. I like the fact that it uses much less gas than my other cars. I didn't need it to be pretty. I'd prefer it to be aerodynamic, more aerodynamic than a Mustang or Grand Prix. Aside from that, I don't find the Mustang or Grand Prix that pretty. Make it look like a Mini Cooper, or a 60's Corvette, and I'd like it's looks quite a bit more.
What I'd ask Diebold is how the election officials expect to verify that the Diebold machines haven't been tampered with without resorting to a $40,000 audit. Can't they at least have some sort of external check on the software.
After thinking about it casually for 5 minutes, I'd at least expect one could pull the HD, connect it read-only to another machine, and do some sort of checksum or hash on every file that shouldn't change. Are their machines so sloppy that they don't know precisely what's on each machine and thus can't trivially check it?
Qwerty keyboards are a bit entrenched. I tried playing around with Dvorak, as my kids were just learning to type and I thought it might be a good alternative. Well, since the school computers weren't going to be dvorak, you can't effectively not learn qwerty. At least with dvorak, you can just switch the layout in software and use a qwerty keyboard for dvorak input. I'd guess that 1% of users likely use Dvorak. With the 53 key keyboard (or any other non-standard keyboard) requiring different hardware (unless you can do a software switch and just ignore half of the keys on a standard keyboard), I'd guess you're going to get maybe 1 user in 10,000 rather than 1 in 100.I think I can assure you that everyone will not be switching.
Now, get a jack installed in your head that just inputs whatever you think (in words rather than letters, so that it does the spelling) and then you'll get a good number of users. Nothing less of an improvement over the current keyboard will kill qwerty.
Andrew
I have a Toyota Prius, and while regenerative braking is one way it charges it's battery, it also charges when the engine has spare power (since the engine is typically run at it's most efficient speed). The electric motor is used for speeds below 12 miles and hour, but it's also used whenever the power of the engine isn't required. This is typically on slight downhill grades or whenever you are slowly decellerating.
So, it's true that if you have a 40 mile commute which has no hills and you're going to drive at a constant speed, and your 4 cylinder motor is well sized for that speed, you'll do even better than a hybrid since it's also carry extra weight for batteries.
There was a recent article online about maximizing the Prius gas milage by a method called pulse and glide (see http://hybridcars.about.com/od/ownership/a/pulsean dglide.htm) They managed to get 109 miles per gallon for a full tank of gas. This method accellerates to 40 and then allows the car to coast back down to 33 before accellerating again. Similar saving occur if you have rolling hills to accellerate up and coast down (without as much speed variation). Now, you can do the same thing in your standard 4 cylinder car, if you're willing to put the car in neutral and turn off the engine at the top of each hill and start it back up when you need to accellerate again (though your starter motor might not last long). The prius doesn't have a small dedicated starter motor, as it just uses it's 44hp motor to spin up the engine (and it can do that all day long).
Hybrids don't get better mileage in stop and go traffic, they get better mileage at low speeds. The batteries aren't 100% efficient, so you do lose plenty of energy with every stop and start (you just don't lose all the energy as a normal car does).
I don't think any 4 cylinder engine car will match the prius's emissions even for constant speed highway driving. The SULEV (super ultra low emission vehicle) rating isn't that easy to achieve. Using the continuously variable transmission and the battery to store excess energy, the Prius runs it's small engine at the most efficient speed to give the lowest emissions. Without the variable transmission and battery, a standard car with equally efficient engine could have have similar low emissions, but only at those speeds where the transmission could keep the engine at the ideal rpm speed. Thus, you may have several speeds where you're emissions could be as good as a hybrid.
All that being said, the hybrid don't do more than pay for themselves. I personally would like to get a plug in hybrid that would manage 40 or so miles before even touching the gas tank (but could then use gas for longer trips). Estimates I've seen claim it would cost about $1000 extra per 10 miles of range (or $4000 for 40 miles). Now, even that might not be cost effective, as 10000 miles a year (Assuming 50 miles per gallon an $2 a gallon) would only save $400 in gas costs thus taking 10 years to pay for itself (and this is ignoring the electric costs, which are said to be equivalent to something like 50 cents a gallon). Even though it might not pay for itself quickly, I might still be tempted by not having to go to the gas station (so long as I didn't forget to plug it in).
Is it still theft if nobody is providing that service to me? I know I'm in the bizarre minority in that I cut my own hair, bit if I don't ask myself to pay for my haircut, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about it being illegal. I'm pretty sure even if I did ask myself to pay for my haircut and refused to pay myself, I don't think any amount of polical contributions could make a prosecutor willing to charge me with not paying myself for a haircut.
As for peer to peer sharing, I think the current US law criminalizes sharing copyrighted data you don't hold the copyright to, but it doesn't go so far as to criminalize copying any data for your own use without displaying the appropriate licencing agreement. It may be that even the music industry doesn't want to go far down that road. Could you imaging hearing the advertisements for music: "This is the greatest collection of love songs ever written, and now, you too can license it (for a single music device only)". The more the industry shoves our nose in the fact that they're pushing the laws to make the music they offer us worth less and less (in terms our of fair use), the less we're going to want it. I personally prefer public domain data, as I think data is worth much more to me if I can share it than if licensing agreements prevent me from sharing it.
Better yet, use a p2p program that lets you keep shared files separate from the ones you've downloaded. Thus, you can have your share full of things you're "safe" sharing but are still desired by others. I think you're right that there's little chance of getting in trouble for what you download, as they'll only be able to trace that if the enforcer is sharing the file they don't want shared.
This is basically true if the worker doesn't actually learn anything and add to his knowledge on the job. A worker that good would certainly be in a position to refuse the non-compete clause and could likely consult for multiple competitors. However, it's more likely the worker has gained lots of knowledge, possibly specific knowledge of a companys operation that could help a competitor. The non-compete clause is used appropriately when a company hires someone who is then going to learn and develop proprietary knowledge, and in exchange for this position and opportunity the worker agrees to not work for the companys competion for a stated period of time.
Okay, this is off topic...
What I'm always amazed at is the people who sign the contract and join the military. Sure, they're patriotic, but they're basically signing their lives away to whoever comes into political power. And some of the clauses in their contract are really brutal. Specifically, you can't get out of the contract early, they can extend the contract indefinitely if they need to, and you are basically theirs to use or use up at their discretion. I wonder if the military will ever get so desparate that they'll have to accept recruits that actually demand other terms than the standard contract.
Yes, and what's even more important, is what happens when you've cut off 12% of the population from your television political ads. Okay, it was 12% of the TVs, but the people who watch those old cheap TV might actually be more likely to vote than people with the money to buy a home theater and HD TV. How can the politicians hope to continue to control our minds if we no longer watch TV? Will we be replacing radio technology to obsolete the old radios too? Don't they realize how close we Americans are coming to possibly thinking for ourselves?
I'd bet you could get those death row prisoners to volunteer if they'd be killed, brought back, and then allowed to live.
Of course, this could lead to sentencing of the sort "Death, plus 3 life sentences", or even, "Death for each of the 7 homicides, plus a life sentence for each, all to be served consecutively".
It would probably get good TV ratings at least.
The way I look at it, there are so many different abilities one can measure, and so many differnt types of intelligence (in different areas). Thus, it's possible to say that all people are unequal, but everyone is superior in some areas and inferior in others. Thus, lacking a measure and weighting of all areas of ability, we can say that all people are essentially incomparable. Thus, saying anyone else is better or worse than anyone else makes sense only with regard to a specific measure. Thus the claim is only as valid as the measurement, and there's an infinite number of possible measurements that would agree and disagree.
I usually take the statement "everyone is equal" to mean everyone is equal under the law. With regard to intelligence, I believe everyone should be treated equally because broad comparisons of inequality are largely invalid. I think every child is gifted and talented, just at different things (not that some things aren't more useful than others).
Umm, I have a several year old Treo (a phone/palm pilot) that has a full keyboard, it just isn't a tiny phone. Now, I may be faster on a real keyboard than on my treo, but I'm pretty sure I'm faster than the morse code operators were in the video clip. I'm way faster than the text messengers they had who were talking about taking 57 seconds to send 167 some characters. In the clip, they (the morse coders) took 21 seconds to send "I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance". Now, I'm not particularly fast at input, but it took me 16 seconds to input that into my Treo. There's a reason morse code has been replaced by typing, even if the keyboard has to be tiny.
I think you missed another choice. Instead keeping quiet and obeying the law vs violating the law, you can complain and boycott. After all, this is the music and entertainment industry. You can simply avoid their products. There's free music available from musicians not part of these groups. There's storage media not supporting even this well connected Spanish group. We can certainly learn to not be their customers.
Keep in mind, everything they're selling, everything they own and don't want you to copy, you don't need. Once enough of their former customers no longer want their product, they might learn to be a little nicer to the ones they have left.
No, simply not buying, copying, nor listening to the music wouldn't be civil disobediance. No one is telling you to buy, copy, or listen, so you're not disobeying by not doing these things.
You are right that quietly copying CDs isn't effective civil disobediance, as nobody can actually tell you're disobeying the law. Now, if you share the music, those you're sharing it with can tell you're disobeying, but this is still pretty private. As others have said, openly sharing to bring attention to the unfair law is what can actually affect change. I don't know if I agree that such disobediance need be done in such a way to directly inform law enforcement or the RIAA. Offering custom CD mixes to people on the street would make a statement. If one were to give away PD or one's own music in such a way, you could illustrate the a legal need to p2p channels.
No, you need to get the streamers that stick out 2 feet on each side supported by a spring that will keep the cars away (unless they like scratches) but not cause you to crash violently if they feel the need to put a scratch down the side of their car.
A lot of p2p traffic is simple sharing, but more of it is copywrite infringement. Call it stealing long enough and you may eventually convince us that it's really a problem. Or, call it stealing long enough and you may eventually convince us that some stealing isn't so bad.
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I personally welcome the new music inspired by our new cold impersonal world, and hope some high quality cold impersonal music will result. We just haven't had enough cold impersonal music being created for those of us who prefer that sort of thing. And, by the way, I always thought the title of that other song was spelled: Don't Let The Son Go Down On Me
Comcast speeds are certainly pretty good when they're working right. However, with sharing, you also get problems if your neighbors have connection problems. For the past several months, my comcast connection has been down as much as it has been up. The very likely culprit is a cut cable line in my neighbors yard that was spliced, perhaps not very well. It generally seems to fail, both for him and me, most often when it's cool or raining. Even when it's up, it sometimes gets packet losses up to 40%. I've had the Comcast "techs" out 3 times now, but if the intermittent connection isn't bad at the moment, they can't find the problem. They don't seem to have the capability to find the problem by scanning the whole area for problems or doing any continuous scanning to fix the problem. I may need to switch to DSL shortly, as a slower connection is much better than an unreliable one.
Yes, but online in Warcraft people don't ask a/s/l. In terms of getting to know you, they just ask,"What's your spec?". Much later they ask, "Does everyone know this fight?", but that's just to see if you need any helpful hints. Beyond that, they judge you by how you play.
Right, that's the way real world auctions work. Ebay has different rules. I do believe back when ebay started and there was actually serious competition, there was another online auction house for which snipeing did not work. On that system, whenever a bid was placed, the auction was extended to last at least another 5 minutes. Thus, you couldn't snipe. Now, similar to an ebay auction it meant you might have to go to the site or read your email and rebid if desired. It also meant you didn't know how long you'd have to watch that auction before it would finish. In the end, we can see ebay didn't go that route. I think people found just bidding their maximum offer works just fine and haggling for an hour at the end of the auction wasn't worth everyone's time.
If you've bid the maximum amount you'd be willing to pay for an auction, the only thing a snipe bid denys you is the better deal you were hoping to get. If they bid earlier, you'd still not get that better deal. The sniping just let you hold onto the hope a bit longer. Why do I snipe? I don't want to deal with the people who don't bid their maximum amount, watch the auction for competition, get emotionally invested in winning the auction, and push up the price I have to pay. By sniping the auction for the amount I'm willing to pay, I win the auction for what I'm willing to pay, and don't if the auction goes higher. There are 2 useful differences between this and a standard bid:
1. People don't get to look at my bid and respond to it. Their bid of how much they're willing
to pay is the only response they get.
2. My bid is retractable up until the time of the auction. This means that I can bid on 10
auctions for identical (to me) items, and stop the other bids if i win an auction.
I find the 2nd benefit quite useful. Ebay doesn't offer anything like this ability. I often shop for items on ebay, find 10 perfectly reasonable auctions, but on ebay I can only bid on 1 auction at a time. Using a sniping system, I can bid on all and set it up to stop when it wins an auction.
Sniping isn't about being an irritant to anyone else. It's just more efficient. If ebay itself offered this bidding option, the seller would essentially get no feedback on his auction until the end, and there wouldn't be any bidding wars to raise the prices. There also wouldn't be any shill bidding, as a reserve bid would work just as well. In my opinion, using sniping bids makes you be diciplined about your bid. You must carefully decide what your maximum bid amount should be (but, you can also change that before the end of the auction, but you can change it up _or_ down). In my opinion, if you're not using the snipe bidding, you aren't shopping as efficiently and carfully as you could.
Andrew
I have seen these sorts of offers, and had one of my friends at work take one of these second chance offers. What bothered me about his second chance offer, was that they offered it to him at his maximum price (which he accepted, as it was a price he was willing to pay). But if the top bidder was a shill, and it thus exposed his top offer, and the second chance was based on his top offer, he was then abused by the system. The second chance offer really should be based on (at maximum) his winning bid before the shill ever arrived. In the case that there were multiple shills, even that might not be fair.
Now, the situation isn't all that bad, because the buyer can simply walk away from the second chance offer. I know I've done that plenty of times, as I've typically moved on to the next (often identical) auction.
Again this is a case where I suggest using snipe bids. This not only gives people no chance to push your bid up, but it also gives you a chance to withdrawl the bid at any time before the trigger of the snipe. People using snipe bids also has the lovely effect of making shill bidding work against the seller. If shill bids push up the price, any snipes set to trigger below the shill price just won't get triggered, meaning that by using a shill bid to push up someone's bid, you've blocked any snipe bids between the shill bid and the previous high bidder. Thus, even if you get the real bidder to go for a second chance bid, a shill bid may have shut out any number of snipes that offered (slightly) more.
Andrew
I'm sure those that are making shill bids are somewhat skillfull, but I don't really think that shill bidding on an online auction is nearly as corrupt as shill bidding during a live in-person auction (except if multiple shills are used and any bids are withdrawn). It's quite obvious that if you take 2 shill accounts and bid up the price on an auction until the real bidder is outbidded, then retract the last shill bid, you've exposed the value of the real bidders maximum bid. If no bids are withdrawn, then the shill bids are essentially no different from the seller moving a reserve price upward. If shill bids raise the price on an object past the offers of the real bidders, the seller ends up with a winning shill bid, avoid making a sale that would lose him money (or perhaps losing a sale that would have made him money), but he ends up not selling the item except in ebay's eyes (and he has to pay fees to ebay for the sale). So, as long as ebay continues to show any bid retractions, I believe buyers are pretty fairly treated in any auction where there are no withdrawn bids.
The reason this is so different from a live auction, is that a shill in a live auction has a lot more information they can read from the bidder to determine how far they can push the bidder to pay more. Online, we're all given pretty much perfect poker faces and no other bidder can generally tell just how interested we are in the auction.
The other thing that probably makes shill bidding really tough (for maximizing the sell price rather than for raising the effective reserve price) is the use of sniping bids. I know I typically am attracted to auctions for items I want with as few bidder as possible. I know other bidders will just raise the amount I'll have to pay to win, so it's generally much better for me to put a snipe bid at the end of the auction for the maximum I would want to pay. Shill bidders can still raise the minimum the auction could sell for, but they get no chance to try to push my bid up (unless then can do this in about 3 seconds). All in all, I find ebay to work quite well, at least the way I use it.
Andrew
Every time I hear the "a marriage is defined to be between one man and one woman" I keep wanting to ask, "Which man and which woman?"
"There can be only one!"
Join me in Highlander hell...
Andrew
Ah, my poor kids have much less control than yours. I have sons 13 and 10, and I've been letting them start playing WOW recently. However, as you might guess from me being here, I know more about computers than they do, and so far we can tightly control computer use.
While I do know the WOW usernames and passwords, that's not how we limit computer use. We have login passwords for the computers and the kids aren't permitted know what they are. When we logoff the computer they don't can't use that machine until we log it back on. We also have all the computers in a public computer room (as well as one for handy access in the kitchen). We've done this for over a year now, so the kids don't even think about telling us to remove accout passwords. They merely beg to have us leave the computers logged in at the end of the day (especially on weekends) so they can play in the morning. We're also rather controlling about bedtimes. Past 9pm or so, the kids can read in their room, but can't be playing video games.
Is this too controlling? It's hard for me to judge, there weren't similar computers when I was growing up. So there weren't similar stay-up-all-night entertainment choices my parents had to deal with.
So far, my sons have been a little more eager to get their karate lessons and such in on weekday nights so their weekend days are more free (for WOW, though they've only been playing for a week or two). I personally think the common computer room is better for their actual enjoyment while playing, as they can play together and talk to each other easily.
I am keeping an watch on addictive behavior. They'll certainly be more restricted if they show less interest in their school friends than online games.
Andrew
Sure, it doesn't diminish their legal rights, but are they morally out of bounds? They've been purchasing those legal rights by shifting the law in their favor for years. There's little question where the law stands and has been heading (until a court declares the laws unconstitutional). Some people also claim (and they may be fanatics) that a jury has the power to not rule on the letter of the law, but can find for a defendant if the law is unjust.
If a corperation could lobby congress to legalize their extortion, they'd clarly be within their legal rights. Just because something is legally right doesn't make it morally right. They'be managed to move the law quite a bit, they just haven't gotten us used to it so their actions (and not the defendant's) seem morally right. They're working hard to do that of course.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, but it will certainly take some time.
Andrew
What I'd ask Diebold is how the election officials expect to verify that the Diebold machines haven't been tampered with without resorting to a $40,000 audit. Can't they at least have some sort of external check on the software.
After thinking about it casually for 5 minutes, I'd at least expect one could pull the HD, connect it read-only to another machine, and do some sort of checksum or hash on every file that shouldn't change. Are their machines so sloppy that they don't know precisely what's on each machine and thus can't trivially check it?
Andrew
Qwerty keyboards are a bit entrenched. I tried playing around with Dvorak, as my kids were just learning to type and I thought it might be a good alternative. Well, since the school computers weren't going to be dvorak, you can't effectively not learn qwerty. At least with dvorak, you can just switch the layout in software and use a qwerty keyboard for dvorak input. I'd guess that 1% of users likely use Dvorak. With the 53 key keyboard (or any other non-standard keyboard) requiring different hardware (unless you can do a software switch and just ignore half of the keys on a standard keyboard), I'd guess you're going to get maybe 1 user in 10,000 rather than 1 in 100.I think I can assure you that everyone will not be switching. Now, get a jack installed in your head that just inputs whatever you think (in words rather than letters, so that it does the spelling) and then you'll get a good number of users. Nothing less of an improvement over the current keyboard will kill qwerty. Andrew
I have a Toyota Prius, and while regenerative braking is one way it charges it's battery, it also charges when the engine has spare power (since the engine is typically run at it's most efficient speed). The electric motor is used for speeds below 12 miles and hour, but it's also used whenever the power of the engine isn't required. This is typically on slight downhill grades or whenever you are slowly decellerating.
n dglide.htm) They managed to get 109 miles per gallon for a full tank of gas. This method accellerates to 40 and then allows the car to coast back down to 33 before accellerating again. Similar saving occur if you have rolling hills to accellerate up and coast down (without as much speed variation). Now, you can do the same thing in your standard 4 cylinder car, if you're willing to put the car in neutral and turn off the engine at the top of each hill and start it back up when you need to accellerate again (though your starter motor might not last long). The prius doesn't have a small dedicated starter motor, as it just uses it's 44hp motor to spin up the engine (and it can do that all day long).
So, it's true that if you have a 40 mile commute which has no hills and you're going to drive at a constant speed, and your 4 cylinder motor is well sized for that speed, you'll do even better than a hybrid since it's also carry extra weight for batteries.
There was a recent article online about maximizing the Prius gas milage by a method called pulse and glide (see http://hybridcars.about.com/od/ownership/a/pulsea
Hybrids don't get better mileage in stop and go traffic, they get better mileage at low speeds. The batteries aren't 100% efficient, so you do lose plenty of energy with every stop and start (you just don't lose all the energy as a normal car does).
I don't think any 4 cylinder engine car will match the prius's emissions even for constant speed highway driving. The SULEV (super ultra low emission vehicle) rating isn't that easy to achieve. Using the continuously variable transmission and the battery to store excess energy, the Prius runs it's small engine at the most efficient speed to give the lowest emissions. Without the variable transmission and battery, a standard car with equally efficient engine could have have similar low emissions, but only at those speeds where the transmission could keep the engine at the ideal rpm speed. Thus, you may have several speeds where you're emissions could be as good as a hybrid.
All that being said, the hybrid don't do more than pay for themselves. I personally would like to get a plug in hybrid that would manage 40 or so miles before even touching the gas tank (but could then use gas for longer trips). Estimates I've seen claim it would cost about $1000 extra per 10 miles of range (or $4000 for 40 miles). Now, even that might not be cost effective, as 10000 miles a year (Assuming 50 miles per gallon an $2 a gallon) would only save $400 in gas costs thus taking 10 years to pay for itself (and this is ignoring the electric costs, which are said to be equivalent to something like 50 cents a gallon). Even though it might not pay for itself quickly, I might still be tempted by not having to go to the gas station (so long as I didn't forget to plug it in).
Is it still theft if nobody is providing that service to me? I know I'm in the bizarre minority in that I cut my own hair, bit if I don't ask myself to pay for my haircut, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about it being illegal. I'm pretty sure even if I did ask myself to pay for my haircut and refused to pay myself, I don't think any amount of polical contributions could make a prosecutor willing to charge me with not paying myself for a haircut. As for peer to peer sharing, I think the current US law criminalizes sharing copyrighted data you don't hold the copyright to, but it doesn't go so far as to criminalize copying any data for your own use without displaying the appropriate licencing agreement. It may be that even the music industry doesn't want to go far down that road. Could you imaging hearing the advertisements for music: "This is the greatest collection of love songs ever written, and now, you too can license it (for a single music device only)". The more the industry shoves our nose in the fact that they're pushing the laws to make the music they offer us worth less and less (in terms our of fair use), the less we're going to want it. I personally prefer public domain data, as I think data is worth much more to me if I can share it than if licensing agreements prevent me from sharing it.
Better yet, use a p2p program that lets you keep shared files separate from the ones you've downloaded. Thus, you can have your share full of things you're "safe" sharing but are still desired by others. I think you're right that there's little chance of getting in trouble for what you download, as they'll only be able to trace that if the enforcer is sharing the file they don't want shared.
This is basically true if the worker doesn't actually learn anything and add to his knowledge on the job. A worker that good would certainly be in a position to refuse the non-compete clause and could likely consult for multiple competitors. However, it's more likely the worker has gained lots of knowledge, possibly specific knowledge of a companys operation that could help a competitor. The non-compete clause is used appropriately when a company hires someone who is then going to learn and develop proprietary knowledge, and in exchange for this position and opportunity the worker agrees to not work for the companys competion for a stated period of time.
Okay, this is off topic... What I'm always amazed at is the people who sign the contract and join the military. Sure, they're patriotic, but they're basically signing their lives away to whoever comes into political power. And some of the clauses in their contract are really brutal. Specifically, you can't get out of the contract early, they can extend the contract indefinitely if they need to, and you are basically theirs to use or use up at their discretion. I wonder if the military will ever get so desparate that they'll have to accept recruits that actually demand other terms than the standard contract.
Yes, and what's even more important, is what happens when you've cut off 12% of the population from your television political ads. Okay, it was 12% of the TVs, but the people who watch those old cheap TV might actually be more likely to vote than people with the money to buy a home theater and HD TV. How can the politicians hope to continue to control our minds if we no longer watch TV? Will we be replacing radio technology to obsolete the old radios too? Don't they realize how close we Americans are coming to possibly thinking for ourselves?
I'd bet you could get those death row prisoners to volunteer if they'd be killed, brought back, and then allowed to live. Of course, this could lead to sentencing of the sort "Death, plus 3 life sentences", or even, "Death for each of the 7 homicides, plus a life sentence for each, all to be served consecutively". It would probably get good TV ratings at least.
The way I look at it, there are so many different abilities one can measure, and so many differnt types of intelligence (in different areas). Thus, it's possible to say that all people are unequal, but everyone is superior in some areas and inferior in others. Thus, lacking a measure and weighting of all areas of ability, we can say that all people are essentially incomparable. Thus, saying anyone else is better or worse than anyone else makes sense only with regard to a specific measure. Thus the claim is only as valid as the measurement, and there's an infinite number of possible measurements that would agree and disagree. I usually take the statement "everyone is equal" to mean everyone is equal under the law. With regard to intelligence, I believe everyone should be treated equally because broad comparisons of inequality are largely invalid. I think every child is gifted and talented, just at different things (not that some things aren't more useful than others).
Umm, I have a several year old Treo (a phone/palm pilot) that has a full keyboard, it just isn't a tiny phone. Now, I may be faster on a real keyboard than on my treo, but I'm pretty sure I'm faster than the morse code operators were in the video clip. I'm way faster than the text messengers they had who were talking about taking 57 seconds to send 167 some characters. In the clip, they (the morse coders) took 21 seconds to send "I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance". Now, I'm not particularly fast at input, but it took me 16 seconds to input that into my Treo. There's a reason morse code has been replaced by typing, even if the keyboard has to be tiny.
I think you missed another choice. Instead keeping quiet and obeying the law vs violating the law, you can complain and boycott. After all, this is the music and entertainment industry. You can simply avoid their products. There's free music available from musicians not part of these groups. There's storage media not supporting even this well connected Spanish group. We can certainly learn to not be their customers.
Keep in mind, everything they're selling, everything they own and don't want you to copy, you don't need. Once enough of their former customers no longer want their product, they might learn to be a little nicer to the ones they have left.
No, simply not buying, copying, nor listening to the music wouldn't be civil disobediance. No one is telling you to buy, copy, or listen, so you're not disobeying by not doing these things. You are right that quietly copying CDs isn't effective civil disobediance, as nobody can actually tell you're disobeying the law. Now, if you share the music, those you're sharing it with can tell you're disobeying, but this is still pretty private. As others have said, openly sharing to bring attention to the unfair law is what can actually affect change. I don't know if I agree that such disobediance need be done in such a way to directly inform law enforcement or the RIAA. Offering custom CD mixes to people on the street would make a statement. If one were to give away PD or one's own music in such a way, you could illustrate the a legal need to p2p channels.
No, you need to get the streamers that stick out 2 feet on each side supported by a spring that will keep the cars away (unless they like scratches) but not cause you to crash violently if they feel the need to put a scratch down the side of their car.
A lot of p2p traffic is simple sharing, but more of it is copywrite infringement. Call it stealing long enough and you may eventually convince us that it's really a problem. Or, call it stealing long enough and you may eventually convince us that some stealing isn't so bad.