So people with pre-existing conditions simply can't have the luxury of health care
Yes exactly. I'm for healthcare reform (vs health insurance reform) but this is stupid. If I came up to you for a policy and upfront I told you I'll need $1k a month for treatment and it will only get worse with time, what would you charge me?
Now repeat that question for $10k a month and $100k a month. There may not be a compassion cutoff point but there is certainly a financial cutoff point that makes the decision for you. Healthcare rationing is a hard requirement and eventually someone will have to be told their treatment is getting cutoff. Which is why it should be ran by government.
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
No kidding, can you imagine the resources Google's legal team has to build a case. It's not just the support they get for customized searches of case law. They can get a report of all search terms used by Viacom's legal team. They can see every page loaded that's using adsense. God forbid if viacom is using gmail, google docs, or google voice.
I really take perverse pleasure in imagining Google serving customized goatse ads to Viacom's legal team. "Oh I'm sorry our advanced algorithms determined based on your browsing history that it was relevant to your interests"
If you're waiting for a new technology around the corner, then you'll never buy any technology. I got one a few months ago and have already read over a dozen books and I read blogs on it. I could have waited, but then I wouldn't have gotten the enjoyment out of using it.
That's like telling someone still using a 4 year old phone that they should wait to buy an iphone because a new version is coming out.
I consider it irresponsible not to browse the web with a really good ad/Flash/javascript blocker. Not just because of the annoyance factor, but because it is a significant vector of malicious code attacks.
Exactly. I will gladly view the ads if they were served by Ars (yes I know this isn't how web advertising economics works). I have a relationship with ars, they provide me with content. I'm willing to reciprocate in some way but I'm not giving the keys to my computer to some stranger who writes Ars a check. I don't have a relationship with doubleclick, adsense or f7feghn.cn. I don't trust those sites, and even if they served me plain static images I don't want them tracking my web browsing. I'm a kindle subscriber to Ars and I adblock them on my PC.
What Americans and right wingers don't get, is that some people prefer a humane society over low taxes in a hellish environment were there is a dollar amount for every human life.
The dollar amount isn't completely arbitrary (although quite inflated). It takes time and resources to provide healthcare. You can spend arbitrarily large amounts on healthcare to keep people alive that are further out into that bell curve. But eventually you have to draw a line or bankruptcy will draw it for you. Let's face it, ultimately a whole team of people (including all the people in the background) working fulltime to keep a person alive but bedridden is a waste.
I'm for government health care but not one that goes in with the mindset of "Life is priceless." Because they will have a budget, and I don't want them blowing huge amounts on people that will not only never contribute again to society but will never even be without pain when there will be plenty of people with need. The republican fear-mongering on death panels is amusing, because no one wants to acknowledge it's an inevitability (and it's better then what we have now).
Apparently not jacking up prices as high as you can - even if the markup is 500% and beyond - and screw everyone not able to afford it - is bad because it's a "market inefficiency".
Yes market inefficiencies are bad. While the demand may go up with lower prices it doesn't raise the supply. Seats at a venue are limited. The ideal price is one where it sells out exactly, so everyone that wants a ticket at that price can get a ticket. If you lower the price, consumers scramble for tickets that just don't exist. Well intentioned scalpers provide a service. They guarantee you can get a ticket (if you're desperate enough.) But initially the "scalpers" are few and the potential buyers are many. The "scalped" efficient price far exceeds the market efficient price. After all they have to price for the majority of customers with a pittance of tickets.
The problem is speculators move in, creating artificial demand, which raises prices further. The solution is raise supply (not easy, larger venues change the experience) or lower the demand (raise prices)
The problem with (digital) scalping is that the organized scalper will swamp the servers with thousands of connections at once, thus preventing many honest customers from getting a ticket or even to be able to connect to the servers.
Arbitrage will crop up anytime there's a significant difference between the seller's offered price and the price the buyer is willing to pay (for anything scarce). Had the price been close to the market value, the scalpers would be unable to sell marked up tickets.
How the hell could it "help with a murder investigation" to provide them with a sample of your DNA?
If it happened in your home and your DNA is contaminating the crime scene. They have multiple samples of DNA and would like to eliminate some. I wouldn't want to trust the police with my DNA either, but if my wife was murdered in our bed (while I had an airtight alibi), it'd be a hard problem but I'd want a lawyer first.
Gyros can be used to *rotate* an object in orbit, but unless they rewrote the laws of physics since I went to school there's no way to get "thrust" out of one.
And yet when I turn off swap on my 32-bit Vista laptop performance increases 1,000 - 10,000% easily.
Dear god did you try to put your page file in the cloud?? Your box is majorly screwed up if that makes that big of difference. I'd say you either have a rootkit or your hard drive is failing. Check your SMART data.
It all depends on intended use case. I find eInk makes a much more comfortable and enjoyable read. Smart Phones are perfectly acceptable for some cases. The biggest factor is how long are your reading sessions. Remember all the ebook readers support drm-free books, they just don't sell them that way. I'll break down common use patterns for electronic reading.
Commuter: If you're on the subway, your short read means eye-strain is less of an issue. Plenty of lighting so any screen is fine. Battery usage is irrelevant. You'll likely have a bag so the extra device doesn't matter. It's a toss-up, I'd personally lean towards eInk since it's more comfortable. I think the kindle for it's blog support is best in this case (the nook probably has a hack to do this).
Traveler: You could be reading for 6 hours on a flight, you'll want the eInk. Battery usage is also important. You'll have a bag and plenty of lighting. Definitely use an ebook reader. No wireless on plane so books will have to be preloaded, any of ereaders are fine. If international you'll want an ebook reader with wifi (nook).
Opportunity reading: smart phone wins hand down. It will be with you when you're stuck by chance waiting for an hour.
Home reading: Long reads with lighting. eInk will provide ideal reading experience. Any ebook reader is fine since other capabilities don't matter much since presumably you'll have a computer nearby (no need to play mp3's are look up wikipedia on kindle).
Bed reading: Short reading in low light, smart phone is better. eInk will need a light.
Classroom: Use the textbook. Neither smart phones nor readers can display large graphs. Readers also can't do color figures. Absent of those restrictions the search, annotations and note-taking (not your classnotes!) features are nice. I think it'd be hard to follow along with a small screen of a smart phone. But if you want to take classnotes you'll need old-fashioned pen and paper or a netbook.
Reference Library: Similar restrictions to classroom but allows you to take your whole reference library which you can't just do with textbooks. May need to use phone and reader at same time. Larger screen and easy operation might be a plus. Depends on whether you need your library when you're unprepared like unexpectedly helping a friend (use smart phone) or you are prepared like going to a conference (use a reader, preferably a kindle DX for large screen and better PDF support).
Care to point me in the direction of any women who have managed to make General, in any branch of service? Last I checked, there were none. So women may be in the military, but they either lack the same potential as men -- or environmental factors are holding them back. Which one do you suppose it is?
There are plenty of women generals. Maybe you should actually check and recognize the accomplishments of some great women rather then just saying women can't succeed in the military. Women fill officer ranks in higher proportion then women in military and they're promoted faster.
In 2005 http://prhome.defense.gov/poprep2005/summary/summary.html Women are 15% of military Women are 16% of Officers Women received 16% of promotions Women received 20% of officer promotions 92% of career fields are open to women
But when you take the numbers of Military with 25+ years in military it's far less. Which is why there's the holes in highest ranks (only 8% for 4-star generals the highest rank). That's not a matter of personal potential or environmental factors, it's a matter of 25 years ago things weren't as good as they are now.
Recruitment of women sucks (it actually started declining after the war started too), despite several attempts to target women for recruitment. Maybe they're driven away by the same ancient myths that women can't succeed in the military.
It's more than just an iPod touch that won't fit in your pocket
That's the best feature, even though I won't be buying one. That means people will need bags to hold it in. 2010 will be the year of the manpurse. Finally geeks will be able to carry gadgets in a convenient bag without getting mocked!
The iPad removes the need for a kindle+netbook+itouch, just like the iphone eliminated the need for carrying 3 devices, in a similar way, this combines features in the niche. It does not remove the laptop requirement. As an ebook reader it is "good enough" for most people. And that is all that most non-geeks want.
It will meet the requirement of an ebook reader without being a good ebook reader. What I mean, is it will be "good enough" that the consumers won't want to buy an ebook reader. But it won't be a good enough ereader that people actually use it to read books. It's the wrong type of display.
It will be a good enough netbook as long as you don't want to type anything lengthy. I certainly wouldn't want to ssh home with it.
My opinion is it lends itself best to streaming video. This is a device I can be watching TV and take it with me into the bathroom while I take a shit. That is the killer app for the ipad. Unfortunately no flash will limit this at launch but I expect there will be good sources for video before long. The standalone unlocked 3g dataplan offered is also awesome.
For them, LCD is superior to eInk in just about every way
For them, LCD is superior to eInk in just about every way except for reading. You obviously haven't used eInk. It's like advertising HD movies on a SD screen, no one can tell the difference until they actually try it.
No, assuming he had a share ratio of 100 per song, that number is a good ballpark figure.
Given the nature of the Internet, and how long the defendant was known to be sharing, it's perfectly reasonable to allege that the works were shared with over 100 people each.
No, it's not. For every upload, there is exactly one download, and vice versa simply by definition. She may easily have uploaded 1/100th of the song to 100 people, but that's a far cry from a share ratio of 100. By your figures, if a total of 500 people downloaded, they should be able to sue each of them as if they uploaded to 100 people, for a total of 50k downloads. Now you can argue that she's a much much heavier (100x!!) sharer then the average person, but don't say the average person uploads 100 times.
If I get rearended on tuesday, then you hit my car on wednesday, I can't sue you both for the full cost of repairs. It's also not fair for me to sue one of you for the total costs caused by both of you.
250GB is more than eight days of Netflix movies streaming
Average American watches 145 hours of TV a month, or 6 days. Average American Household has 2.7 TVs and 2.5 people. In other words the Average American household would hit this cap if they moved to streaming TV to replace cable. Comcast wants to label these statistical outliers Bandwidth Hogs. I call them Early-Adopters. Their usage isn't abnormal, in fact it's completely average, they just don't get their TV-Fix through Comcast CableTV.
How much of this is concerns for the network congestion and how much of this is killing off the emerging market of streaming cableboxes like Boxee. On-Demand doesn't count against bandwidth but Streaming does. It's a conflict having your CableTV Company be your Cable Internet provider also.
I think it is you who doesn't get it. In principle China can just redirect all access to external CAs to their own servers.
When I'm using HTTPS when do I connect to the CA? Only to check revocation lists. The certificate every SSL webserver will provide has the CA's signature included, encrypted by the CA private key.
China can say they are Verisign and generate a new certificate with a new private key. My browser will have the real Verisign's certificate with their public key though. China-Verisign's certificate with their different public key won't be in my browser's trusted CA list. Now if I download firefox in China, China could alter my installer so it loads China-Verisign as a trusted CA. This is a real vulnerability, China could try to modify all installers for browsers.
But the scope is huge. Consider firefox could be downloaded over SSL itself! The first step for many people to get their trusted CA is the OS install. To accomplish this China would have to alter Linux ISO's, Windows install disks... Can they get many people, yes but not everyone and the Rogue CA-Certificate would be quickly identified. A couple clicks later it's marked untrusted in the browser.
Consider this, Every one of Verisign's servers could be nuked, and their issued certificates would work until their expired. SSL is not designed with the assumption you have a secure communication channel with the CA. The real way to attack SSL is not on the cryptography side, but to attack by social engineering the user to install your CA as trusted. Make all government sites require it to function without generating all sorts of SSL warnings.
And yet they did not issue a firmware update that would remove the easily abused feature.
The fault is the law, not Amazon. The copyright status of this book is confusing enough that an honest mistake was made by a publisher that sold an unlicensed book on Amazon. The extreme penalties associated with this mistake could have killed off the whole kindle product line with a massive judgment.
Patching this "feature" out would be pointless at this point, because it can always be patched back in if they ever want to recall again. The customers were rightfully upset so Amazon had to make a policy. They say they will recall a book for: 1. Fraud(book was never purchased) 2. Malware (book causes system problems) 3. Customer asks for a refund 4. Legal judgment (which means they jumped the gun for 1984)
I think Amazon's response was awesome. They acted promptly, kept their customers informed, refunded then ultimately restored without loss of personal annotations and publicly responded to criticism.
If this was Microsoft, opening the book would suddenly start giving generic error messages without any explanation. After a lot of support runaround you'd finally get an explanation. With further customer service complaints you'd be given store credit but each CSR would give varying amounts to customers. Annotations would be permanently lost.
Blinding weapons are a violation of the Geneva Conventions (Protocol IV, if I recall correctly - and no, the USA isn't a signatory to Protocol IV last I looked).
Weapons designed to blind are a violation. Weapons that may inadvertently cause blindness are acceptable. Just about every weapon we have can cause blindness. I suspect this weapon will be designed to burn a hole into their head rather then blind.
But Law of War also says you limit collateral damage. Will diffuse reflections from these lasers cause collateral blindness. When dealing with highpower lasers in a dynamic environment, there's really no predicting where reflections might end up.
The only realistic alternative is hitting a car travelling in the other direction but since police are trained to only use a radar gun on a straight road and at a certain angle that might be unlikely too.
Really in this day of mobile technology, radar guns should be much more advanced. When a reading is being taken it should take several photos of where the gun is aimed. The photos should be timestamped, show a GPS coordinate where reading was taken, and show date of last calibration of gun, then signed by the gun. If the officer pulls the person over, it would be uploaded to central server. Time, GPS, Speed, and Calibration will also be printed on ticket, along with a hash of uploaded photos. Both the officer and driver will sign and get a copy.
Yes it's still based on officer's judgment, but we should not be relying solely on their witness account.
Your vision is nice, but I'll probably be dead before Cable channels like TNT or Spike give-up their exclusive rights to shows, and get replaced by your "video on demand" box. I'd honestly rather have the a la carte option NOW, so then I could subscribe to SyFy Channel for cheap, rather than for $65 a month.
If all you want cheap syfy, ditch your cable. The only first-run shows they don't have available online is ECW and Who Wants to be a Superhero. Which was my point, just about any new content is available free and legitimately online... and the amount of it is growing fast.
Let's face it, the vast majority of people doing 200GB+/month down are not getting all their content legitimately.
That argument might of worked a few years ago, but it's meaningless now. The heaviest bandwidth hog today is video and there's plenty of legitimate video available. 4 hours a day, all it takes, nowadays that wouldn't even be considered a "couch potato".
The other thing we need in this country is A La Carte, where you can pay a base fee of $5 plus $1 for every extra channel you desire. (Or if you prefer, stick with the current package deal.)
A La Carte's chance has passed. Cable missed the opportunity, there would be no real demand for it anymore because of the surge of streaming (and on-demand) options. Just as you pay now for a bundle of channels, a-la-carte is just bundling of shows in a channel. The model will be to subscribe to shows and then stream them when you want to watch. In the next couple of years, there will be a surge of set top boxes that the main source of content will not be from cable TV. They will be consumer media centers that have been simplified enough for the average consumer to operate.
This will be a great win for the consumer. Cable companies have stifled innovations of cable boxes and DVR's... support for third party boxes with cablecards is a joke. They have not given consumers any reasonable choice of content, bundling these expensive and bloated plans (although the content providers are as much at fault). Meanwhile they're getting left behind by online services and consumer electronics. Companies are uniting to bypass the cable distribution system and give consumers what they want. Cable will have to bring a compelling product to consumers or get left behind as dumb pipes.
Seriously, at the rates cable charges, shouldn't they be able to compete with Netflix in their offering. They have a captive audience and they control the network.
Slashdot Mirror
So people with pre-existing conditions simply can't have the luxury of health care
Yes exactly. I'm for healthcare reform (vs health insurance reform) but this is stupid. If I came up to you for a policy and upfront I told you I'll need $1k a month for treatment and it will only get worse with time, what would you charge me?
Now repeat that question for $10k a month and $100k a month. There may not be a compassion cutoff point but there is certainly a financial cutoff point that makes the decision for you. Healthcare rationing is a hard requirement and eventually someone will have to be told their treatment is getting cutoff. Which is why it should be ran by government.
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
No kidding, can you imagine the resources Google's legal team has to build a case. It's not just the support they get for customized searches of case law. They can get a report of all search terms used by Viacom's legal team. They can see every page loaded that's using adsense. God forbid if viacom is using gmail, google docs, or google voice.
I really take perverse pleasure in imagining Google serving customized goatse ads to Viacom's legal team. "Oh I'm sorry our advanced algorithms determined based on your browsing history that it was relevant to your interests"
If you're waiting for a new technology around the corner, then you'll never buy any technology. I got one a few months ago and have already read over a dozen books and I read blogs on it. I could have waited, but then I wouldn't have gotten the enjoyment out of using it.
That's like telling someone still using a 4 year old phone that they should wait to buy an iphone because a new version is coming out.
I consider it irresponsible not to browse the web with a really good ad/Flash/javascript blocker. Not just because of the annoyance factor, but because it is a significant vector of malicious code attacks.
Exactly. I will gladly view the ads if they were served by Ars (yes I know this isn't how web advertising economics works). I have a relationship with ars, they provide me with content. I'm willing to reciprocate in some way but I'm not giving the keys to my computer to some stranger who writes Ars a check. I don't have a relationship with doubleclick, adsense or f7feghn.cn. I don't trust those sites, and even if they served me plain static images I don't want them tracking my web browsing. I'm a kindle subscriber to Ars and I adblock them on my PC.
What Americans and right wingers don't get, is that some people prefer a humane society over low taxes in a hellish environment were there is a dollar amount for every human life.
The dollar amount isn't completely arbitrary (although quite inflated). It takes time and resources to provide healthcare. You can spend arbitrarily large amounts on healthcare to keep people alive that are further out into that bell curve. But eventually you have to draw a line or bankruptcy will draw it for you. Let's face it, ultimately a whole team of people (including all the people in the background) working fulltime to keep a person alive but bedridden is a waste.
I'm for government health care but not one that goes in with the mindset of "Life is priceless." Because they will have a budget, and I don't want them blowing huge amounts on people that will not only never contribute again to society but will never even be without pain when there will be plenty of people with need. The republican fear-mongering on death panels is amusing, because no one wants to acknowledge it's an inevitability (and it's better then what we have now).
Apparently not jacking up prices as high as you can - even if the markup is 500% and beyond - and screw everyone not able to afford it - is bad because it's a "market inefficiency".
Yes market inefficiencies are bad. While the demand may go up with lower prices it doesn't raise the supply. Seats at a venue are limited. The ideal price is one where it sells out exactly, so everyone that wants a ticket at that price can get a ticket. If you lower the price, consumers scramble for tickets that just don't exist. Well intentioned scalpers provide a service. They guarantee you can get a ticket (if you're desperate enough.) But initially the "scalpers" are few and the potential buyers are many. The "scalped" efficient price far exceeds the market efficient price. After all they have to price for the majority of customers with a pittance of tickets.
The problem is speculators move in, creating artificial demand, which raises prices further. The solution is raise supply (not easy, larger venues change the experience) or lower the demand (raise prices)
The problem with (digital) scalping is that the organized scalper will swamp the servers with thousands of connections at once, thus preventing many honest customers from getting a ticket or even to be able to connect to the servers.
Arbitrage will crop up anytime there's a significant difference between the seller's offered price and the price the buyer is willing to pay (for anything scarce). Had the price been close to the market value, the scalpers would be unable to sell marked up tickets.
How the hell could it "help with a murder investigation" to provide them with a sample of your DNA?
If it happened in your home and your DNA is contaminating the crime scene. They have multiple samples of DNA and would like to eliminate some. I wouldn't want to trust the police with my DNA either, but if my wife was murdered in our bed (while I had an airtight alibi), it'd be a hard problem but I'd want a lawyer first.
Gyros can be used to *rotate* an object in orbit, but unless they rewrote the laws of physics since I went to school there's no way to get "thrust" out of one.
Have you tried ejecting it?
And yet when I turn off swap on my 32-bit Vista laptop performance increases 1,000 - 10,000% easily.
Dear god did you try to put your page file in the cloud?? Your box is majorly screwed up if that makes that big of difference. I'd say you either have a rootkit or your hard drive is failing. Check your SMART data.
It all depends on intended use case. I find eInk makes a much more comfortable and enjoyable read. Smart Phones are perfectly acceptable for some cases. The biggest factor is how long are your reading sessions. Remember all the ebook readers support drm-free books, they just don't sell them that way. I'll break down common use patterns for electronic reading.
Commuter: If you're on the subway, your short read means eye-strain is less of an issue. Plenty of lighting so any screen is fine. Battery usage is irrelevant. You'll likely have a bag so the extra device doesn't matter. It's a toss-up, I'd personally lean towards eInk since it's more comfortable. I think the kindle for it's blog support is best in this case (the nook probably has a hack to do this).
Traveler: You could be reading for 6 hours on a flight, you'll want the eInk. Battery usage is also important. You'll have a bag and plenty of lighting. Definitely use an ebook reader. No wireless on plane so books will have to be preloaded, any of ereaders are fine. If international you'll want an ebook reader with wifi (nook).
Opportunity reading: smart phone wins hand down. It will be with you when you're stuck by chance waiting for an hour.
Home reading: Long reads with lighting. eInk will provide ideal reading experience. Any ebook reader is fine since other capabilities don't matter much since presumably you'll have a computer nearby (no need to play mp3's are look up wikipedia on kindle).
Bed reading: Short reading in low light, smart phone is better. eInk will need a light.
Classroom: Use the textbook. Neither smart phones nor readers can display large graphs. Readers also can't do color figures. Absent of those restrictions the search, annotations and note-taking (not your classnotes!) features are nice. I think it'd be hard to follow along with a small screen of a smart phone. But if you want to take classnotes you'll need old-fashioned pen and paper or a netbook.
Reference Library: Similar restrictions to classroom but allows you to take your whole reference library which you can't just do with textbooks. May need to use phone and reader at same time. Larger screen and easy operation might be a plus. Depends on whether you need your library when you're unprepared like unexpectedly helping a friend (use smart phone) or you are prepared like going to a conference (use a reader, preferably a kindle DX for large screen and better PDF support).
Care to point me in the direction of any women who have managed to make General, in any branch of service? Last I checked, there were none. So women may be in the military, but they either lack the same potential as men -- or environmental factors are holding them back. Which one do you suppose it is?
Last you checked must have been before 1970 when the Army promoted their first general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Mae_Hays
Airforce in 1971:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Holm
Navy in 1972:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alene_B._Duerk
There are plenty of women generals. Maybe you should actually check and recognize the accomplishments of some great women rather then just saying women can't succeed in the military. Women fill officer ranks in higher proportion then women in military and they're promoted faster.
In 2005
http://prhome.defense.gov/poprep2005/summary/summary.html
Women are 15% of military
Women are 16% of Officers
Women received 16% of promotions
Women received 20% of officer promotions
92% of career fields are open to women
But when you take the numbers of Military with 25+ years in military it's far less. Which is why there's the holes in highest ranks (only 8% for 4-star generals the highest rank). That's not a matter of personal potential or environmental factors, it's a matter of 25 years ago things weren't as good as they are now.
Recruitment of women sucks (it actually started declining after the war started too), despite several attempts to target women for recruitment. Maybe they're driven away by the same ancient myths that women can't succeed in the military.
It's more than just an iPod touch that won't fit in your pocket
That's the best feature, even though I won't be buying one. That means people will need bags to hold it in. 2010 will be the year of the manpurse. Finally geeks will be able to carry gadgets in a convenient bag without getting mocked!
The iPad removes the need for a kindle+netbook+itouch, just like the iphone eliminated the need for carrying 3 devices, in a similar way, this combines features in the niche. It does not remove the laptop requirement. As an ebook reader it is "good enough" for most people. And that is all that most non-geeks want.
It will meet the requirement of an ebook reader without being a good ebook reader. What I mean, is it will be "good enough" that the consumers won't want to buy an ebook reader. But it won't be a good enough ereader that people actually use it to read books. It's the wrong type of display.
It will be a good enough netbook as long as you don't want to type anything lengthy. I certainly wouldn't want to ssh home with it.
My opinion is it lends itself best to streaming video. This is a device I can be watching TV and take it with me into the bathroom while I take a shit. That is the killer app for the ipad. Unfortunately no flash will limit this at launch but I expect there will be good sources for video before long. The standalone unlocked 3g dataplan offered is also awesome.
For them, LCD is superior to eInk in just about every way
For them, LCD is superior to eInk in just about every way except for reading. You obviously haven't used eInk. It's like advertising HD movies on a SD screen, no one can tell the difference until they actually try it.
No, assuming he had a share ratio of 100 per song, that number is a good ballpark figure.
Given the nature of the Internet, and how long the defendant was known to be sharing, it's perfectly reasonable to allege that the works were shared with over 100 people each.
No, it's not. For every upload, there is exactly one download, and vice versa simply by definition. She may easily have uploaded 1/100th of the song to 100 people, but that's a far cry from a share ratio of 100. By your figures, if a total of 500 people downloaded, they should be able to sue each of them as if they uploaded to 100 people, for a total of 50k downloads. Now you can argue that she's a much much heavier (100x!!) sharer then the average person, but don't say the average person uploads 100 times.
If I get rearended on tuesday, then you hit my car on wednesday, I can't sue you both for the full cost of repairs. It's also not fair for me to sue one of you for the total costs caused by both of you.
250GB is more than eight days of Netflix movies streaming
Average American watches 145 hours of TV a month, or 6 days. Average American Household has 2.7 TVs and 2.5 people. In other words the Average American household would hit this cap if they moved to streaming TV to replace cable. Comcast wants to label these statistical outliers Bandwidth Hogs. I call them Early-Adopters. Their usage isn't abnormal, in fact it's completely average, they just don't get their TV-Fix through Comcast CableTV.
How much of this is concerns for the network congestion and how much of this is killing off the emerging market of streaming cableboxes like Boxee. On-Demand doesn't count against bandwidth but Streaming does. It's a conflict having your CableTV Company be your Cable Internet provider also.
I think it is you who doesn't get it. In principle China can just redirect all access to external CAs to their own servers.
When I'm using HTTPS when do I connect to the CA? Only to check revocation lists. The certificate every SSL webserver will provide has the CA's signature included, encrypted by the CA private key.
China can say they are Verisign and generate a new certificate with a new private key. My browser will have the real Verisign's certificate with their public key though. China-Verisign's certificate with their different public key won't be in my browser's trusted CA list. Now if I download firefox in China, China could alter my installer so it loads China-Verisign as a trusted CA. This is a real vulnerability, China could try to modify all installers for browsers.
But the scope is huge. Consider firefox could be downloaded over SSL itself! The first step for many people to get their trusted CA is the OS install. To accomplish this China would have to alter Linux ISO's, Windows install disks... Can they get many people, yes but not everyone and the Rogue CA-Certificate would be quickly identified. A couple clicks later it's marked untrusted in the browser.
Consider this, Every one of Verisign's servers could be nuked, and their issued certificates would work until their expired. SSL is not designed with the assumption you have a secure communication channel with the CA. The real way to attack SSL is not on the cryptography side, but to attack by social engineering the user to install your CA as trusted. Make all government sites require it to function without generating all sorts of SSL warnings.
The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
I'm surprised it fit in the tube.
Networking 101: fragmentation
And yet they did not issue a firmware update that would remove the easily abused feature.
The fault is the law, not Amazon. The copyright status of this book is confusing enough that an honest mistake was made by a publisher that sold an unlicensed book on Amazon. The extreme penalties associated with this mistake could have killed off the whole kindle product line with a massive judgment.
Patching this "feature" out would be pointless at this point, because it can always be patched back in if they ever want to recall again. The customers were rightfully upset so Amazon had to make a policy. They say they will recall a book for:
1. Fraud(book was never purchased)
2. Malware (book causes system problems)
3. Customer asks for a refund
4. Legal judgment (which means they jumped the gun for 1984)
Any future court case on any future e-reader the publisher will request a remote wipe. Not having the feature would not prevent a judge from ordering it. Judges have made odd computer demands without concern for ability before. Such as a judge ordering the contents of RAM for discovery:
http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/judge-affirms-magistrates-decision-in-the-ram-memory-case-no-minimum-storage-time-for-electronic-information-before-it-is-discoverable/
I think Amazon's response was awesome. They acted promptly, kept their customers informed, refunded then ultimately restored without loss of personal annotations and publicly responded to criticism.
If this was Microsoft, opening the book would suddenly start giving generic error messages without any explanation. After a lot of support runaround you'd finally get an explanation. With further customer service complaints you'd be given store credit but each CSR would give varying amounts to customers. Annotations would be permanently lost.
Blinding weapons are a violation of the Geneva Conventions (Protocol IV, if I recall correctly - and no, the USA isn't a signatory to Protocol IV last I looked).
Weapons designed to blind are a violation. Weapons that may inadvertently cause blindness are acceptable. Just about every weapon we have can cause blindness. I suspect this weapon will be designed to burn a hole into their head rather then blind.
But Law of War also says you limit collateral damage. Will diffuse reflections from these lasers cause collateral blindness. When dealing with highpower lasers in a dynamic environment, there's really no predicting where reflections might end up.
The only realistic alternative is hitting a car travelling in the other direction but since police are trained to only use a radar gun on a straight road and at a certain angle that might be unlikely too.
Really in this day of mobile technology, radar guns should be much more advanced. When a reading is being taken it should take several photos of where the gun is aimed. The photos should be timestamped, show a GPS coordinate where reading was taken, and show date of last calibration of gun, then signed by the gun. If the officer pulls the person over, it would be uploaded to central server. Time, GPS, Speed, and Calibration will also be printed on ticket, along with a hash of uploaded photos. Both the officer and driver will sign and get a copy.
Yes it's still based on officer's judgment, but we should not be relying solely on their witness account.
Your vision is nice, but I'll probably be dead before Cable channels like TNT or Spike give-up their exclusive rights to shows, and get replaced by your "video on demand" box. I'd honestly rather have the a la carte option NOW, so then I could subscribe to SyFy Channel for cheap, rather than for $65 a month.
If all you want cheap syfy, ditch your cable. The only first-run shows they don't have available online is ECW and Who Wants to be a Superhero. Which was my point, just about any new content is available free and legitimately online... and the amount of it is growing fast.
Let's face it, the vast majority of people doing 200GB+/month down are not getting all their content legitimately.
That argument might of worked a few years ago, but it's meaningless now. The heaviest bandwidth hog today is video and there's plenty of legitimate video available. 4 hours a day, all it takes, nowadays that wouldn't even be considered a "couch potato".
The other thing we need in this country is A La Carte, where you can pay a base fee of $5 plus $1 for every extra channel you desire. (Or if you prefer, stick with the current package deal.)
A La Carte's chance has passed. Cable missed the opportunity, there would be no real demand for it anymore because of the surge of streaming (and on-demand) options. Just as you pay now for a bundle of channels, a-la-carte is just bundling of shows in a channel. The model will be to subscribe to shows and then stream them when you want to watch. In the next couple of years, there will be a surge of set top boxes that the main source of content will not be from cable TV. They will be consumer media centers that have been simplified enough for the average consumer to operate.
This will be a great win for the consumer. Cable companies have stifled innovations of cable boxes and DVR's... support for third party boxes with cablecards is a joke. They have not given consumers any reasonable choice of content, bundling these expensive and bloated plans (although the content providers are as much at fault). Meanwhile they're getting left behind by online services and consumer electronics. Companies are uniting to bypass the cable distribution system and give consumers what they want. Cable will have to bring a compelling product to consumers or get left behind as dumb pipes.
Seriously, at the rates cable charges, shouldn't they be able to compete with Netflix in their offering. They have a captive audience and they control the network.