How is withholding this domain possibly extorting the county?
Since I live here, in Macomb County, I was kinda thinking the same thing. Then I read the part about the county needing to change the ip-address text on the police cars, business cards, and letterhead.
I'm not sure what exactly transpired. The guy might have simply said he was going to call it quits unless he was better compensated. He was originally doing it as 'a favor' but probably got in over his head as the site got popular and wasn't generating into other business. Spouting off at the Sheriff is probably not a good idea. Our local Sheriff's office is well-known for being tough on crime, any crime. When they couldn't get the domain transferred they apparently saw this as "extortion". Grabbing all his stuff was probably overkill. The real story is probably somewhere in the middle.
The most disturbing fact to me is how our county was so eagerly pointing at this domain (on the police cars, even!) without owning it nor with a valid contract of any kind.
A bit off topic and I apologise, but I can't let this comment go unchallenged. I assume you are talking primarily about the rape conviction of Mark Sr. (Hackel's dad, and former Sheriff himself). That Hackel, by the way, is currently in prison.
I live in Macomb County. Most accounts I've read about and heard about in the county are very positive about our current Sheriff's office. And one thing for sure, they don't take any form of crime lightly (even "cybercrime"), so based upon the article I'm not surprised they locked him up and confiscated his equipment. I'm sure there is more to this story than what has been printed thus far in the newspaper.
Exactly as you said, she did want her image sullied by a car commercial. The issue is not really the "voice sample," the issue instead is professional image. Bette Middler is an established celebrity, Mercury couldn't get her for one of her well known songs, so they deceptively used a voice-double on the same song to fool consumers. Another song, or an obviously different voice would've been fine. But the fact that they tried to contact Middler first helps strengthen the 'intent' part of their deception. The judge (correctly) decided that her 'image' was at stake, not her voice per se.
Voice sampling will come into its own. Mostly you'll be hearing samples from non-established actors/singers who are paid for their sampling work, and the issue should end then and there. And as long as you're not trying to deceptively pass off your new sampled creation as "Bette Middler in this song" you'll be fine.
The standard practice is to recover assets when leaving a building.
My wife just went through this. She moved from a small office to a bigger office, and we left the Cat-5 wiring and patch panels behind. We took the switches, but all the wall jacks and the patch panel stayed behind.
The issue is what is considered to be "assets". The problem is many of these improvements could quite easily be considered "capital improvments" which need to stay with the property, even if you move out. I think wiring easily falls into this definition. As the article points out, some leases need modern language to more clearly include other items -- perhaps such as patch panels an termination blocks. If you run wiring and then mount a patch panel to the wall (or floor for the bigger ones) I don't think it's unreasonable for the landlord to want to keep it intact, just as if you were to, say, build a garage on the back lot.
When old tenants cut wiring to unusable levels but leave it dangling through the walls like leftover trash, that could be a potential legal offense.
... Yang has a choice of 20 different space meals to enjoy, including "spicy and sour shredded meat and diced chicken,"... The food was designed to be "nutritious enough for space missions while tasting good,"...
All I could keep thinking is that he'll be hungry again an hour later! (Luckily it is only a short flight.)
The article offers some insight into Sculley's ongoing technological ineptitude.
Much like selling fizzy water products, this guy kept trying anything to lower costs while maintaining high margins (Gee, just like soda pop). The end result was horrible hardware quality and multitudes of machine-specific OS patches to attempt to work around various hardware flaws. As a support guy at my U's college of education, Sculley and this lack of quality (followed by Gil Amelio's lack of direction) is what eventually drove me from the Apple brand. I just wasn't getting what I was paying for, and stuck dealing with mountains of reliability problems.
This revisionist history is laughable. Sculley appaarently thinks that Intel chips would have saved him more money while allowing him to continue charging high prices (like soda pop). Even though at the time Pentiums were just coming out, hugely expensive, and not compatible in any way with the current MacOS/Motorola CPUs requiring massive redirection of programming resources both at Apple and by third party developers.
From the story, it sounds like Nokia is blaming "unauthorized" third-party batteries for the problem.
In other news: Taking a cue from cellphone makers, inkjet printer makers announced they will incorporate exploding cartridge systems to prevent you from using cheaper, third-party ink in them.
That was even worse! It introduced another failure mode: out of paper on the console.
Well, back in the day when storage was still expensive system messages/errors on printout were normal.
But I have to admit, when I saw setups like this on campus at my alma mater, consoles with attached printers, still around in 1997 (!) I thought it was more wasteful than helpful. Errors can easily be saved to logfiles, rotated out and deleted automatically as needed. And if the hard drive fails, well then, hell! At least you know what the problem is.:-)
When I queried the site admins about it, they got all defensive about needing to (physically) log errors in the event of problems. Basically old curmudgeons set in their ways, who refused to update with the times even though they must've been spending a small fortune on output paper and printer maintenance.
especially as this console is rarely used, and operators normally use network connections to access the machine.
Often times, although probably less now than in the past, these console terminals would dump console input/output to an attached printer. Sort of a permanent record, especially if something really bad(tm) happened and killed the machine (you could see the last few lines of output on the printout).
But don't you see: a database lookup would be the much needed watershed action to promote all those internet-enabled washing machines (and refrigeraters) we were promised to us in the 90's! (Running Sun's Jini, of course!)
[Apple] They sell you quality stuff, and they charge you for that quality.
Yeah, and they also charge you when you need to get that "quality" fixed. Quite a lot, in fact!
(Okay, I admit this is a bit of a troll. But they're repair practices and price structure seem more of a racket than auto dealers. I stopped buying Apple products back in the mid 90's because of it.)
What does a lawyer do that requires them to be in the US?
Book knowledge doesn't necessarily require being local, but other things do. Little things like: filing and time-stamping paperwork with the court, especially time-sensitive documents.
A lawyer also needs to be an active member of the local (and depending on the practice the federal) Bar Association, and subject to its rules of conduct. I suppose in some cases you could try to hire a foreign lawyer to represent you, but its doubtful they would take your case, and even more doubtful a court would recognise them as a proper counsel. At the least you would always end up with sub-contracted local co-counsel and pay for it.
Along with the lines of IT jobs going overseas: Did you also know that in the U.S. lawyers are the only group which are legally barred from 'non-compete' clauses. They take care of their own, I tell ya!
Lawyers will probably end up being the last bastion of middle-class in this country.
So, basically the article says that regular folks/workers/blue-collars don't like IT people (geeks, wierdos, whatever), and neither do management. We're hated from both sides. And after years of setting up corporate systems where every worker is a replaceable cog, they now have the commodity hardware and a monopoly OS which (in their eyes) makes IT workers also replaceable cogs. The gist: Indian cogs work just as well as American ones, and cheaper too.
I'm not really surprised. I recall with both admiration and disdain reading many stories in the mid- to late 90's about IT job hopping, and watching many of my counterparts jump from one job to the next higher paying gig every year or so, with no semblence of loyalty. It was a crazy time, and now it is time to pay the piper.
/addendum: I'm still not sure where they keep getting these $60,000 just- out- of- college figures, since here in the midwest we worked our asses off and still never got close to that much.
Joe Sixpack might not shed a tear for US IT jobs being shipped overseas, but he WILL get irate when he calls for support for his shiny new Dell, and Apu in Mumbai answers the phone... This is where the offshoring scheme is going to start getting sticky, when consumers start getting fed up with talking to someone in India whenever they call a helpdesk for a product they've purchased...
I've already had some dealings with this. Dell customer service apparently defaults to an Indian call center, and the last three company purchases have required some sort of followup (various issues). Every single time, I get an thick accented Indian who doesn't know what's holding up the order, doesn't know how to fix it, and can't help me at all. Completely useless. After 20 minutes or so on hold and getting no help (hey, I'm trying to spend money here!) then necessitates another call to next level support in Texas. The thing that gets my ire is that this Indian call center is completely wasting my time (and Dell's), and IMHO seems more a waste of money than a savings.
And this is just for orders! Lord help me if I ever need to call for service on a hardware issue.
Basicly there are only a few cases where you can legitimatly recieve calls.
* Charities
* Politicians
* To set up a personal meeting where no selling occurs over the phone
You forgot airlines and banks.
/me predicts banks in the near future to quickly expand into "telephone services" for outside business clients.
The government has managed in a surprisingly small amount of time to compile a database linking phone numbers and email addresses with 41M entries.
I would rather mark it down as scary, since IIRC it was AT&T which won the contract to set up and handle this initial database. Something around US$3 million. Yes, that's right: One of the worst telemarketers is in charge of the anti-telemarketing list!
"Diamond is expected to be the next generation semiconductor material because of its high thermal conductivity, high breakdown voltage and high carrier mobility. Together, these characteristics makes diamond semiconductors most suitable for high frequency, high power devices."
In other words: Diamonds are used because they can take high voltage and high heat. I.e. they run damn hot! Just wait until these things make their way into your typical laptop computer cellphone.
/me waiting for a whole new world of class-action burned-ear (or scarred lap) lawsuits.
With the recent blackout, especially here in Detroit/S.E. Michigan, I'm surprised I haven't heard much about converting to LED traffic signals. The power draw would be a lot less (less drain on power grid) and they could recover the higher parts cost because of less labor involved in replacing the traffic bulbs i.e. the LEDs last a lot longer than bulbs. You can even see them in the sunshine.
And lord knows, anyone who has driven through Detroit is familiar with burned-out traffic bulbs. LEDs seem like the ideal replacement.
regarding their 'troubled partnership'? I'm curious as to what's been happening.
In short, nVidia was not willing to slash their own throats on the part costs. I'm sure they are laughing all the way to the bank about ATi's new (mis-)fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
How is withholding this domain possibly extorting the county?
Since I live here, in Macomb County, I was kinda thinking the same thing. Then I read the part about the county needing to change the ip-address text on the police cars, business cards, and letterhead.
I'm not sure what exactly transpired. The guy might have simply said he was going to call it quits unless he was better compensated. He was originally doing it as 'a favor' but probably got in over his head as the site got popular and wasn't generating into other business. Spouting off at the Sheriff is probably not a good idea. Our local Sheriff's office is well-known for being tough on crime, any crime. When they couldn't get the domain transferred they apparently saw this as "extortion". Grabbing all his stuff was probably overkill. The real story is probably somewhere in the middle.
The most disturbing fact to me is how our county was so eagerly pointing at this domain (on the police cars, even!) without owning it nor with a valid contract of any kind.
A bit off topic and I apologise, but I can't let this comment go unchallenged. I assume you are talking primarily about the rape conviction of Mark Sr. (Hackel's dad, and former Sheriff himself). That Hackel, by the way, is currently in prison.
I live in Macomb County. Most accounts I've read about and heard about in the county are very positive about our current Sheriff's office. And one thing for sure, they don't take any form of crime lightly (even "cybercrime"), so based upon the article I'm not surprised they locked him up and confiscated his equipment. I'm sure there is more to this story than what has been printed thus far in the newspaper.
Exactly as you said, she did want her image sullied by a car commercial. The issue is not really the "voice sample," the issue instead is professional image. Bette Middler is an established celebrity, Mercury couldn't get her for one of her well known songs, so they deceptively used a voice-double on the same song to fool consumers. Another song, or an obviously different voice would've been fine. But the fact that they tried to contact Middler first helps strengthen the 'intent' part of their deception. The judge (correctly) decided that her 'image' was at stake, not her voice per se.
Voice sampling will come into its own. Mostly you'll be hearing samples from non-established actors/singers who are paid for their sampling work, and the issue should end then and there. And as long as you're not trying to deceptively pass off your new sampled creation as "Bette Middler in this song" you'll be fine.
My wife just went through this. She moved from a small office to a bigger office, and we left the Cat-5 wiring and patch panels behind. We took the switches, but all the wall jacks and the patch panel stayed behind.
The issue is what is considered to be "assets". The problem is many of these improvements could quite easily be considered "capital improvments" which need to stay with the property, even if you move out. I think wiring easily falls into this definition. As the article points out, some leases need modern language to more clearly include other items -- perhaps such as patch panels an termination blocks. If you run wiring and then mount a patch panel to the wall (or floor for the bigger ones) I don't think it's unreasonable for the landlord to want to keep it intact, just as if you were to, say, build a garage on the back lot.
When old tenants cut wiring to unusable levels but leave it dangling through the walls like leftover trash, that could be a potential legal offense.
As this is my first introduction to Rekall, I initially read the headline as "Wreck All". Not the kind of thing I'd want running in my small office.
Perhaps just maybe a name change might be in order.
It took me a little while to find the info, but I knew I remember AT&T getting $3.5 million (USD) to put this DNC list together.
So why is it that the same company which built the Do-Not-Call registry cannot seem to abide by the list they created and maintained?
I loved this bit from CNN.com:
All I could keep thinking is that he'll be hungry again an hour later! (Luckily it is only a short flight.)
The article offers some insight into Sculley's ongoing technological ineptitude.
Much like selling fizzy water products, this guy kept trying anything to lower costs while maintaining high margins (Gee, just like soda pop). The end result was horrible hardware quality and multitudes of machine-specific OS patches to attempt to work around various hardware flaws. As a support guy at my U's college of education, Sculley and this lack of quality (followed by Gil Amelio's lack of direction) is what eventually drove me from the Apple brand. I just wasn't getting what I was paying for, and stuck dealing with mountains of reliability problems.
This revisionist history is laughable. Sculley appaarently thinks that Intel chips would have saved him more money while allowing him to continue charging high prices (like soda pop). Even though at the time Pentiums were just coming out, hugely expensive, and not compatible in any way with the current MacOS/Motorola CPUs requiring massive redirection of programming resources both at Apple and by third party developers.
From the story, it sounds like Nokia is blaming "unauthorized" third-party batteries for the problem.
In other news: Taking a cue from cellphone makers, inkjet printer makers announced they will incorporate exploding cartridge systems to prevent you from using cheaper, third-party ink in them.
Well, back in the day when storage was still expensive system messages/errors on printout were normal.
But I have to admit, when I saw setups like this on campus at my alma mater, consoles with attached printers, still around in 1997 (!) I thought it was more wasteful than helpful. Errors can easily be saved to logfiles, rotated out and deleted automatically as needed. And if the hard drive fails, well then, hell! At least you know what the problem is. :-)
When I queried the site admins about it, they got all defensive about needing to (physically) log errors in the event of problems. Basically old curmudgeons set in their ways, who refused to update with the times even though they must've been spending a small fortune on output paper and printer maintenance.
Often times, although probably less now than in the past, these console terminals would dump console input/output to an attached printer. Sort of a permanent record, especially if something really bad(tm) happened and killed the machine (you could see the last few lines of output on the printout).
But don't you see: a database lookup would be the much needed watershed action to promote all those internet-enabled washing machines (and refrigeraters) we were promised to us in the 90's! (Running Sun's Jini, of course!)
Yeah, and they also charge you when you need to get that "quality" fixed. Quite a lot, in fact!
(Okay, I admit this is a bit of a troll. But they're repair practices and price structure seem more of a racket than auto dealers. I stopped buying Apple products back in the mid 90's because of it.)
Nano-ITX the smallest yet. Now I can put a fully functional computer into a slice of bread, or an old shoe! Think of all the possibilities!
Ah, but in fact they did: Losing market share and loss of dominance. :-)
Read the crap going on about Half Life 2 and nVidia's optimisations issues. I've never seen nVidia in such a bad way until after they bought out 3DFX.
Magnetic fields? I'd be more worried in what happens when teenagers spray paint these things, as they tend to do.
Or thinking more specifically about my area (Detroit), how does this billboard handle a couple of handgun shells unloaded into it?
Book knowledge doesn't necessarily require being local, but other things do. Little things like: filing and time-stamping paperwork with the court, especially time-sensitive documents.
A lawyer also needs to be an active member of the local (and depending on the practice the federal) Bar Association, and subject to its rules of conduct. I suppose in some cases you could try to hire a foreign lawyer to represent you, but its doubtful they would take your case, and even more doubtful a court would recognise them as a proper counsel. At the least you would always end up with sub-contracted local co-counsel and pay for it.
Along with the lines of IT jobs going overseas: Did you also know that in the U.S. lawyers are the only group which are legally barred from 'non-compete' clauses. They take care of their own, I tell ya!
Lawyers will probably end up being the last bastion of middle-class in this country.
(IANAL - but my wife is!)
So, basically the article says that regular folks/workers/blue-collars don't like IT people (geeks, wierdos, whatever), and neither do management. We're hated from both sides. And after years of setting up corporate systems where every worker is a replaceable cog, they now have the commodity hardware and a monopoly OS which (in their eyes) makes IT workers also replaceable cogs. The gist: Indian cogs work just as well as American ones, and cheaper too.
I'm not really surprised. I recall with both admiration and disdain reading many stories in the mid- to late 90's about IT job hopping, and watching many of my counterparts jump from one job to the next higher paying gig every year or so, with no semblence of loyalty. It was a crazy time, and now it is time to pay the piper.
/addendum: I'm still not sure where they keep getting these $60,000 just- out- of- college figures, since here in the midwest we worked our asses off and still never got close to that much.
I've already had some dealings with this. Dell customer service apparently defaults to an Indian call center, and the last three company purchases have required some sort of followup (various issues). Every single time, I get an thick accented Indian who doesn't know what's holding up the order, doesn't know how to fix it, and can't help me at all. Completely useless. After 20 minutes or so on hold and getting no help (hey, I'm trying to spend money here!) then necessitates another call to next level support in Texas. The thing that gets my ire is that this Indian call center is completely wasting my time (and Dell's), and IMHO seems more a waste of money than a savings.
And this is just for orders! Lord help me if I ever need to call for service on a hardware issue.
You forgot airlines and banks.
/me predicts banks in the near future to quickly expand into "telephone services" for outside business clients.
I would rather mark it down as scary, since IIRC it was AT&T which won the contract to set up and handle this initial database. Something around US$3 million. Yes, that's right: One of the worst telemarketers is in charge of the anti-telemarketing list!
Well, it seems the obvious solution is for both DeBeers and the RIAA to team together. I can see it now:
Diamond-coated CDs! ...Hmm... or how about:
"for the music you really love!"
"A Diamond CD lasts forever!"
From the article:
In other words: Diamonds are used because they can take high voltage and high heat. I.e. they run damn hot! Just wait until these things make their way into your typical laptop computer cellphone.
/me waiting for a whole new world of class-action burned-ear (or scarred lap) lawsuits.
With the recent blackout, especially here in Detroit/S.E. Michigan, I'm surprised I haven't heard much about converting to LED traffic signals. The power draw would be a lot less (less drain on power grid) and they could recover the higher parts cost because of less labor involved in replacing the traffic bulbs i.e. the LEDs last a lot longer than bulbs. You can even see them in the sunshine.
And lord knows, anyone who has driven through Detroit is familiar with burned-out traffic bulbs. LEDs seem like the ideal replacement.
In short, nVidia was not willing to slash their own throats on the part costs. I'm sure they are laughing all the way to the bank about ATi's new (mis-)fortune.