I wonder how long it would really take? With enough effort it could probably be done in half the time. Just open up the archives of Area 51, no not the aliens cover story, the really advanced propulsion section, the one with the new toys the rest of the world won't see for the next 50yrs. Can't forget the dark matter engines that will get you to the moon in 10sec, then you can find the original moon landing. "Oh, we're whaling on the moon"
"instead they decided it's OK to feed cows, cows."
thanks to that I've never tasted aged beef made from free range grass fed cow, only the non aged from non free range grain and cow fed cow.
Cats are useless, they just sit there, at least dogs will return some of the attention you give it and you can train some types to be hunting dogs. The animal shelters are over crowded and have no choice but to put some to sleep,(they're not going to let them starve) possibly thosands a day across the country/world. It would be nice if we could get something useful out it.
"can transform waste products such as paper, rubbish and plastic materials into fuel."
If it only generatged over 1.21 giggawatts of electricity instead of combustable fuel. They both appear to work on items you pull out of the trash. As for using dead cats, they're biomatter and they're already dead so it's not going to hurt them. I would have used 'roadkill' instead of 'cats'. No one really thinks about roadkill, and it's not animal specific, it's whatever didn't make it across the road, squirel or 'possum or deer or even cat. Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel had a segment on the nice guys who spend their days cleaning up roadkill, it gets put into compost piles, no reason it can't go into that guy's fuel creation device.
"The Dutch proposal is not "till the grave", but only for the juvenile years."
They DO want to track "till the grave" "Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database -- including health, education, family and police records"
"Especially NOW the overzealous social worker could cause harm, with the proposed new system there would not be a single person or institution dealing with the problem."
That's the problem, someone would be making assumptions/generalizations without all the information.
Yes, there are records kept of people's medical and criminal records but they're not examined for connections. Taking your kid to the emergency room for a street football injury or a high fever won't make you a suspect for future child abuse. There's a chance one part of the records will only show hospital visit but no reason. You'd think there would be some rechecking by another agency, but it is a government system.
Until years later someone makes the generalization that abused children are going to abuse children later in life and they become suspects for abuse they may not commit. Capt Braxton, you are under arrest for crimes your going to commit -Voyager Not a direct quote and it's the only example I can think of at the momment. It's like locking people up or putting them under surveillance before they had the chance to do anything wrong because their genetic profile is similar to lots of convicted violent felons. Punishing the potentially guilty, the way of the future, along with outlawing lawyers by 2015.
that could lead to profiling and profiling is wrong
So they can arrest the parents or take the kids away because in a semi-similar situation the kids were much abused or killed.
So when one abused kid who was charged with something at some time grows up and has kids and severly injurs or kills their kid, then some overzealious young gov't worker brown nosing for a promotion or raise or corner office uses that limited data to create a profile everyone who had jeuvinile charges thrown at them when they were a kid is now a suspect for possible child abuse. I only said charge, not conviction and didn't say what it was for. It could be that some kid broke a neighbor's window while playing baseball when he was 9 and instead of accepting compensation from the kids parents, the kid-hating neighbor gets their DA friend to bring the kid up on charges to teach him a lesson and/or make an example for the rest of the neighborhood kids. Since that system is probably going to record everything, even something pointless like that during childhood can make them a future suspect. In the US you don't have to report legal charges, only convictions and most jeuvinile records are sealed when the person turns 18 and can be petitioned to be destroyed/removed from the permanant record. Yes, that's an extreme example, but possible that something that happened to you many years ago can put you at risk because someone 100yrs before did something similar and then did something worse. And no one caught it because not all law enforcement depts have access to all of it.
How long until that red flag is accompanied by a nice big shiny "$" that will allow you to pay a TDB amount to let you keep the program a little longer?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but doesn't it allow you to keep something you bought, in this case in the form of TiVo hardware and subscription? This has to be a violation of fair-use consumer rights, right, those don't exist anymore. This is like going to a kid Potter fan and saying Rowling called, she wants her book back or to one of those people you saw waiting in line for Star Wars III and saying Lucas called, he wants his toy light saber back and you're not getting a refund. Copyright law says once you own something you can keep it for as long as you want, give it away or resell it or even burn shoot or blow it up, anything other than making and selling copies for profit and showing it at a public performance. There may be some clause in the TiVo EULA that might allow this "upgrade".
This sounds too much like the Broadcast Flag and as last I checked it was thrown out by the courts.
well, that's the last time I try to be polite and rephrase what I was going to say and screw up the wording. No one wants to like that girl you see walking down the street listening to her ipod-like device or talking on her cell phone completely oblivious to everything going on around her and walking into things/people.
"If I can hear the music clearly from your earbuds across the room" I once told that to a friend then tested them myself, for some reason some cheap headphones, the ones that rest on your ear sound louder to everyone else in the room than to the person wearing them. I'm sure there are others who max out the volume to cover up all other noise in the room/bus/train or want to seem "cool" to everyone else, like that guy in Star Trek IV with the boom box, yes, another mid-80s movie. My iPod volume is never over 40%, as much as I like to hear what I'm listening to, I like to be able to hear what's going on around me. I have no desire to be "that guy/girl" completely preoccupied with their music or cell phone that they loose their situational awareness and walk inot cars and other people.
ahhh, good olde "B" drive, how I missed you. The drive itself is 5 7/8" I'll be cashing out those bonus points now. I'm starting to regret not getting the 5.25" 3.5" combo drive I saw at the Trenton Computer Festival, it would have went well with the Netgear 16port hub and the 486DX&SX chips.
That depends on how many bays your tower has. The poster says CDROM bays, should have said 5.25" bays. I have 4, one for my DVD+/-R, no need for another DVD/CD drive. Another bay has a 5.25" floppy drive for decrative purposes, still works. The third has a 9-in-1 removable/internal memory card reader. I havn't decided what to do with the last one. I have spare 3.5" drive mounting brackets so could put a zip drive there, also for decoration. I have two 200gb drives, nowhere near full(yet) so no need for another one. My spare hdd is mounted in an external case. I think I'll leave the last one free for when I find something "cool" to put in it.
The "silver" alumin(i)um CDs are much less durable than the "gold" disks, but both will fail in the space of decades even if kept well.
I've given up on trying to find a storage medium that will last "forever" I'm going with multiple copies on multiple newer mediums. I have a few docs that first lived on 5.25" floppies. I just copied them to the newer option when they became popular, 3.5" floppy then larger hdd then CD then DVD and flash mem card. Storage formats don't go obsolete that fast, the CD has been around since 1980 and it's still used. I still have working 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives taking up space in empty drive bays, they havn't been connected or used in years but they still work. I'm sure there are enough people who have held onto old working hardware that you should have no problem finding something that will read the DVD-&+R formats in 25yrs. Don't bother with finding the "will last forever" format, just keep a couple copies laying around.
I did something similar with old family slides, about 50yrs worth. But my "several thousand" was only about 2200 and I could scan three at a time with the $35 scanner I found on ebay. The originals are still in excellent condition, this was done for easy of distribution, no need to be sending 5 boxes of slides and an old projector around the country, would be bad if any of it was lost or damaged. It's a lot easier to write copies to DVsD and mail them for about $2.50 each. Sounds like you need cheap labor, scannng services are very expensive, I'd go with the younger relative you consider skilled enough not to screw up and who you can pay in the form of pizza and/or other food stuffs. Keep in mind this only works to a point, eventually they grow up and need compensation in cash.
If you're teaching or researching at a school you may be able to find some lab/teaching assistants willing to help out with a few pages once in a while. If you're teaching and want to risk trusting some students in need of extra credit, that's up to you.
Scanning documents is very labor intensive and time consuming. You can either pay a lot and get have it done semi-quickly or be willing to spend lots of time doing it yourself.
I usually use 3 passes, first all zeros, the second random data, random as in roll dice until you get your 8 number pattern then the third is back to zero. For anything more important I use Eraser with 50+ passes, it's usually the notepad docs I create for temporary use, credit card numbers, old resumes, pwords when I want printout of my getting larger list of misc passwords which gets locked in a safe place. 50+ passes doesn't take long for a file no loager than 30k. When a drive is reakky done, the platters get taken out and used as coasters. I'm hoping they'll eventually take enough damage for the data to be unrecoverable.
For anyone who still thinks hard drives are fragile: try throwing the platters at a piece of sheet rock and see which one starts showing damage first. I saw label from an old Seagate which said the warranty would be void if it was subject to a shock in excess of 75Gs, I'm not a physicist but I think 75Gs is a lot.
HDDs are down to about 50cents for 1GB and USB drives are also getting cheaper. It's safer to keep the drive and sell the rest if you want to make up some of the cost of new hardware. If you sell a PC with hdd and software there are probably some legal/license/EULA violations you could be held liable for, probably won't but there's a chance. Even the older slower lower capacity drives can still be put in another PC or external case and used for backups, there's nothing wrong with using all your IDE slots, cd-r/dvd-r and 3hdds. The 2.5GB hdd of my family's first PC is in a closet and the first hdd, a 60gb, from my current PC now having 2x200GB drives, before upgrades, is now in an external case being used for backups. As for flash memory cards&drives, my half dozen old ones are at home sitting in a box in the back of a desk drawer. If you have older/unused PC hardware and you want to make use of ebay, sell it without the hdd, the worst that can happen is someone doesn't read all the description and complains and leaves bad feesback, and you reply with "try reading the description" or take it appart and sell it as parts. If you're going to buy storage, consider it a loss unless you can find another use for it.
Hard drives are like underwear, better if they're only used by one person, then burned and thrown out.
If someone can get a recording device close enough to clearly pick up every keystroke I'd be more concerned about them attaching a logger to my keyboard. How many people, including yourself, do you know who accually check the keyboard before using the a computer, everywhere, home, office, public access(including internet cafe), school computer lab, someone else's. I'd say very few if any. With all the usb devices in use, someone plugging in a device in the back of a computer may be assumed to be plugging in their USB drive. No one would suspect their attaching a keylogger to steal other people's account info.
I did that back in HS, the computer "lab" in the library was crowded and it was very easy for shoulder surfing and watching the person next to you single key typing, slowly. There's always the on screen keyboard, unless you're at the Windows login. You can also hit the right/up arrow keys or a function key not used by the app, they'll break up your typing rythm but won't add characters to a pword you're typing, no need to hit backspace which sometimes has a unique sound if it's one of the larger keys; spc enter/return/shift.
ok, so it wasn't the best example, but it was the only one I could think of. The same name was allowed while there was no conflict of interest, once Apple released iTunes the big problems began. I'm not including the iPod because it's only a media storage device and I'm sure more than enough iPods contain the works of the Beatles/Applecorps, ripped Beales CD or imported from cassette or record.
Why don't they just call it what it is, a naming dispute. I thought similar sounding names were allowed as long as the parties are not in direct competition, Apple Computers and Apple Corp, the music label. And when did "intellectual property" become "IP"? Had to be somewhat recently, maybe whoever invented TCP/IP should sue them. "Does your computer have IP" -Me
"I rather buy things that comes with fully functional battle stations!"
As long as fully functional means having full shields, ray-shielded exhaust ports just aren't enough when you're going up against a customized Noobian R2 unit.
I remember seeing this one in a cartoon 10 or 15yrs ago, possibly on Captain Planet. Someone made a big gravity ray gun that could move the moon and change the path of storms. The other random idea was detonate a clean nuke in the storm, possibly in the eye. The idea was somehow the sudden extreme temperature change would somehow disrupt the storm.
"Not to mention that having an MP3 player and a cell phone sharing the same battery is a stupid idea."
exactly, There goes the battery. As power efficent as these things may be, it's probably still at least doubling the load when you consider the increased processor use and the additional use of the LCD and the speakers/haedphones. Get it and just wait for your battery to die when you're in the middle of/need to make an important call.
Big deal, an iPod phone combo, it's just Cingular using the itunes name to lure in more customers for a 2yr contract. You can do the same thing with a phone with an mp3 decoder and an SD card slot. That's guessing such a phone exists. Even then it's probably intended for light use, still need spend more for a full/mini/nano iPod.
"Attacking companies' online presence and preventing them doing business is only a step away from being as bad as smashing a store's windows in and tossing a stink/smoke bomb in and clearing the store out for an entire day while the workers clean up."
I'd consider it closer to blocking the store's enterance preventing customers from entering. If someone were to do that I wonder what the penalty could be, but it might be more than 18-24mo and monetary fines for any local laws, blocking doors is a fire code violation, blocking the sidewalk should be another, the barracade could be considered littering, maybe someone can fit in disturbing the peace.
It's about time the real weight of these "digital" crimes is considered. Yes, the statutory fines for an unauthorized copy of an audio or video file is up to $250,000 and a few years in prison, but that mp3 file on some kid's computer they got with some p2p program isn't worth $250,000, maybe 99c if it's available from a legal download service or a new or used CD if you can find it. A copy of a Hollywood movie it worth the price of a new copy on DVD. And the RITA (recording Industry Trust of America) abuses the laws designed to take down people reselling bootlegs for profit, not giving it away.
Then there are these people who are hired to take out someone's competition. They're nothing more than hitmen and extortionists, pay up or we'll take out your site. These things cost real companies lots of money, lost sales, lost reputation, customer thinks the site/company may not be very reliable, lost man hours trying to repair the damage. And then they're only looking at 18-24mo or less with good behavior/parole. They're no longer doing drive-bys in upgraded Model Ts with Thompsons, but the concept is similar.
When the cartidge became popular back in the late 1800s it was cheaper to have your gun converted to use cartridges, from ball and powder, then buying a new one. But modern vehicles are a little more complex. It would probably require a change/redesign of the entire engine, if it's at 105+k miles just replace the entire engine block, and may not be possible with the limited room offered by jeeps. If an autobody shop exists that offers those conversions I wouldn't expect it to be cheap.
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I wonder how long it would really take? With enough effort it could probably be done in half the time.
Just open up the archives of Area 51, no not the aliens cover story, the really advanced propulsion section, the one with the new toys the rest of the world won't see for the next 50yrs. Can't forget the dark matter engines that will get you to the moon in 10sec, then you can find the original moon landing. "Oh, we're whaling on the moon"
"instead they decided it's OK to feed cows, cows."
thanks to that I've never tasted aged beef made from free range grass fed cow, only the non aged from non free range grain and cow fed cow.
Cats are useless, they just sit there, at least dogs will return some of the attention you give it and you can train some types to be hunting dogs. The animal shelters are over crowded and have no choice but to put some to sleep,(they're not going to let them starve) possibly thosands a day across the country/world. It would be nice if we could get something useful out it.
"can transform waste products such as paper, rubbish and plastic materials into fuel."
If it only generatged over 1.21 giggawatts of electricity instead of combustable fuel. They both appear to work on items you pull out of the trash. As for using dead cats, they're biomatter and they're already dead so it's not going to hurt them. I would have used 'roadkill' instead of 'cats'. No one really thinks about roadkill, and it's not animal specific, it's whatever didn't make it across the road, squirel or 'possum or deer or even cat. Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel had a segment on the nice guys who spend their days cleaning up roadkill, it gets put into compost piles, no reason it can't go into that guy's fuel creation device.
"The Dutch proposal is not "till the grave", but only for the juvenile years."
They DO want to track "till the grave"
"Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database -- including health, education, family and police records"
"Especially NOW the overzealous social worker could cause harm, with the proposed new system there would not be a single person or institution dealing with the problem."
That's the problem, someone would be making assumptions/generalizations without all the information.
Yes, there are records kept of people's medical and criminal records but they're not examined for connections. Taking your kid to the emergency room for a street football injury or a high fever won't make you a suspect for future child abuse. There's a chance one part of the records will only show hospital visit but no reason. You'd think there would be some rechecking by another agency, but it is a government system.
"Did you miss 'Minority Report'?"
Never got around to seeing it
"This still could be of use in later life"
Until years later someone makes the generalization that abused children are going to abuse children later in life and they become suspects for abuse they may not commit. Capt Braxton, you are under arrest for crimes your going to commit -Voyager
Not a direct quote and it's the only example I can think of at the momment. It's like locking people up or putting them under surveillance before they had the chance to do anything wrong because their genetic profile is similar to lots of convicted violent felons. Punishing the potentially guilty, the way of the future, along with outlawing lawyers by 2015.
that could lead to profiling and profiling is wrong
So they can arrest the parents or take the kids away because in a semi-similar situation the kids were much abused or killed.
So when one abused kid who was charged with something at some time grows up and has kids and severly injurs or kills their kid, then some overzealious young gov't worker brown nosing for a promotion or raise or corner office uses that limited data to create a profile everyone who had jeuvinile charges thrown at them when they were a kid is now a suspect for possible child abuse.
I only said charge, not conviction and didn't say what it was for. It could be that some kid broke a neighbor's window while playing baseball when he was 9 and instead of accepting compensation from the kids parents, the kid-hating neighbor gets their DA friend to bring the kid up on charges to teach him a lesson and/or make an example for the rest of the neighborhood kids. Since that system is probably going to record everything, even something pointless like that during childhood can make them a future suspect. In the US you don't have to report legal charges, only convictions and most jeuvinile records are sealed when the person turns 18 and can be petitioned to be destroyed/removed from the permanant record. Yes, that's an extreme example, but possible that something that happened to you many years ago can put you at risk because someone 100yrs before did something similar and then did something worse. And no one caught it because not all law enforcement depts have access to all of it.
"What is this crap? Fox broadcasting down eight"
How long until that red flag is accompanied by a nice big shiny "$" that will allow you to pay a TDB amount to let you keep the program a little longer?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but doesn't it allow you to keep something you bought, in this case in the form of TiVo hardware and subscription? This has to be a violation of fair-use consumer rights, right, those don't exist anymore. This is like going to a kid Potter fan and saying Rowling called, she wants her book back or to one of those people you saw waiting in line for Star Wars III and saying Lucas called, he wants his toy light saber back and you're not getting a refund. Copyright law says once you own something you can keep it for as long as you want, give it away or resell it or even burn shoot or blow it up, anything other than making and selling copies for profit and showing it at a public performance. There may be some clause in the TiVo EULA that might allow this "upgrade".
This sounds too much like the Broadcast Flag and as last I checked it was thrown out by the courts.
well, that's the last time I try to be polite and rephrase what I was going to say and screw up the wording. No one wants to like that girl you see walking down the street listening to her ipod-like device or talking on her cell phone completely oblivious to everything going on around her and walking into things/people.
I am Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan
"If I can hear the music clearly from your earbuds across the room" I once told that to a friend then tested them myself, for some reason some cheap headphones, the ones that rest on your ear sound louder to everyone else in the room than to the person wearing them. I'm sure there are others who max out the volume to cover up all other noise in the room/bus/train or want to seem "cool" to everyone else, like that guy in Star Trek IV with the boom box, yes, another mid-80s movie.
My iPod volume is never over 40%, as much as I like to hear what I'm listening to, I like to be able to hear what's going on around me. I have no desire to be "that guy/girl" completely preoccupied with their music or cell phone that they loose their situational awareness and walk inot cars and other people.
ahhh, good olde "B" drive, how I missed you.
The drive itself is 5 7/8" I'll be cashing out those bonus points now. I'm starting to regret not getting the 5.25" 3.5" combo drive I saw at the Trenton Computer Festival, it would have went well with the Netgear 16port hub and the 486DX&SX chips.
That depends on how many bays your tower has. The poster says CDROM bays, should have said 5.25" bays. I have 4, one for my DVD+/-R, no need for another DVD/CD drive. Another bay has a 5.25" floppy drive for decrative purposes, still works. The third has a 9-in-1 removable/internal memory card reader. I havn't decided what to do with the last one. I have spare 3.5" drive mounting brackets so could put a zip drive there, also for decoration. I have two 200gb drives, nowhere near full(yet) so no need for another one. My spare hdd is mounted in an external case. I think I'll leave the last one free for when I find something "cool" to put in it.
The "silver" alumin(i)um CDs are much less durable than the "gold" disks, but both will fail in the space of decades even if kept well.
I've given up on trying to find a storage medium that will last "forever" I'm going with multiple copies on multiple newer mediums. I have a few docs that first lived on 5.25" floppies. I just copied them to the newer option when they became popular, 3.5" floppy then larger hdd then CD then DVD and flash mem card. Storage formats don't go obsolete that fast, the CD has been around since 1980 and it's still used. I still have working 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives taking up space in empty drive bays, they havn't been connected or used in years but they still work. I'm sure there are enough people who have held onto old working hardware that you should have no problem finding something that will read the DVD-&+R formats in 25yrs. Don't bother with finding the "will last forever" format, just keep a couple copies laying around.
I did something similar with old family slides, about 50yrs worth. But my "several thousand" was only about 2200 and I could scan three at a time with the $35 scanner I found on ebay. The originals are still in excellent condition, this was done for easy of distribution, no need to be sending 5 boxes of slides and an old projector around the country, would be bad if any of it was lost or damaged. It's a lot easier to write copies to DVsD and mail them for about $2.50 each. Sounds like you need cheap labor, scannng services are very expensive, I'd go with the younger relative you consider skilled enough not to screw up and who you can pay in the form of pizza and/or other food stuffs. Keep in mind this only works to a point, eventually they grow up and need compensation in cash.
If you're teaching or researching at a school you may be able to find some lab/teaching assistants willing to help out with a few pages once in a while. If you're teaching and want to risk trusting some students in need of extra credit, that's up to you.
Scanning documents is very labor intensive and time consuming. You can either pay a lot and get have it done semi-quickly or be willing to spend lots of time doing it yourself.
I usually use 3 passes, first all zeros, the second random data, random as in roll dice until you get your 8 number pattern then the third is back to zero. For anything more important I use Eraser with 50+ passes, it's usually the notepad docs I create for temporary use, credit card numbers, old resumes, pwords when I want printout of my getting larger list of misc passwords which gets locked in a safe place. 50+ passes doesn't take long for a file no loager than 30k. When a drive is reakky done, the platters get taken out and used as coasters. I'm hoping they'll eventually take enough damage for the data to be unrecoverable.
For anyone who still thinks hard drives are fragile: try throwing the platters at a piece of sheet rock and see which one starts showing damage first. I saw label from an old Seagate which said the warranty would be void if it was subject to a shock in excess of 75Gs, I'm not a physicist but I think 75Gs is a lot.
HDDs are down to about 50cents for 1GB and USB drives are also getting cheaper. It's safer to keep the drive and sell the rest if you want to make up some of the cost of new hardware. If you sell a PC with hdd and software there are probably some legal/license/EULA violations you could be held liable for, probably won't but there's a chance. Even the older slower lower capacity drives can still be put in another PC or external case and used for backups, there's nothing wrong with using all your IDE slots, cd-r/dvd-r and 3hdds. The 2.5GB hdd of my family's first PC is in a closet and the first hdd, a 60gb, from my current PC now having 2x200GB drives, before upgrades, is now in an external case being used for backups. As for flash memory cards&drives, my half dozen old ones are at home sitting in a box in the back of a desk drawer. If you have older/unused PC hardware and you want to make use of ebay, sell it without the hdd, the worst that can happen is someone doesn't read all the description and complains and leaves bad feesback, and you reply with "try reading the description" or take it appart and sell it as parts.
If you're going to buy storage, consider it a loss unless you can find another use for it.
Hard drives are like underwear, better if they're only used by one person, then burned and thrown out.
If someone can get a recording device close enough to clearly pick up every keystroke I'd be more concerned about them attaching a logger to my keyboard. How many people, including yourself, do you know who accually check the keyboard before using the a computer, everywhere, home, office, public access(including internet cafe), school computer lab, someone else's. I'd say very few if any. With all the usb devices in use, someone plugging in a device in the back of a computer may be assumed to be plugging in their USB drive. No one would suspect their attaching a keylogger to steal other people's account info.
I did that back in HS, the computer "lab" in the library was crowded and it was very easy for shoulder surfing and watching the person next to you single key typing, slowly. There's always the on screen keyboard, unless you're at the Windows login. You can also hit the right/up arrow keys or a function key not used by the app, they'll break up your typing rythm but won't add characters to a pword you're typing, no need to hit backspace which sometimes has a unique sound if it's one of the larger keys; spc enter/return/shift.
ok, so it wasn't the best example, but it was the only one I could think of. The same name was allowed while there was no conflict of interest, once Apple released iTunes the big problems began. I'm not including the iPod because it's only a media storage device and I'm sure more than enough iPods contain the works of the Beatles/Applecorps, ripped Beales CD or imported from cassette or record.
Why don't they just call it what it is, a naming dispute. I thought similar sounding names were allowed as long as the parties are not in direct competition, Apple Computers and Apple Corp, the music label. And when did "intellectual property" become "IP"? Had to be somewhat recently, maybe whoever invented TCP/IP should sue them.
"Does your computer have IP" -Me
"I rather buy things that comes with fully functional battle stations!"
As long as fully functional means having full shields, ray-shielded exhaust ports just aren't enough when you're going up against a customized Noobian R2 unit.
I remember seeing this one in a cartoon 10 or 15yrs ago, possibly on Captain Planet. Someone made a big gravity ray gun that could move the moon and change the path of storms. The other random idea was detonate a clean nuke in the storm, possibly in the eye. The idea was somehow the sudden extreme temperature change would somehow disrupt the storm.
"Not to mention that having an MP3 player and a cell phone sharing the same battery is a stupid idea."
exactly, There goes the battery. As power efficent as these things may be, it's probably still at least doubling the load when you consider the increased processor use and the additional use of the LCD and the speakers/haedphones. Get it and just wait for your battery to die when you're in the middle of/need to make an important call.
Big deal, an iPod phone combo, it's just Cingular using the itunes name to lure in more customers for a 2yr contract. You can do the same thing with a phone with an mp3 decoder and an SD card slot. That's guessing such a phone exists. Even then it's probably intended for light use, still need spend more for a full/mini/nano iPod.
"Attacking companies' online presence and preventing them doing business is only a step away from being as bad as smashing a store's windows in and tossing a stink/smoke bomb in and clearing the store out for an entire day while the workers clean up."
I'd consider it closer to blocking the store's enterance preventing customers from entering. If someone were to do that I wonder what the penalty could be, but it might be more than 18-24mo and monetary fines for any local laws, blocking doors is a fire code violation, blocking the sidewalk should be another, the barracade could be considered littering, maybe someone can fit in disturbing the peace.
It's about time the real weight of these "digital" crimes is considered. Yes, the statutory fines for an unauthorized copy of an audio or video file is up to $250,000 and a few years in prison, but that mp3 file on some kid's computer they got with some p2p program isn't worth $250,000, maybe 99c if it's available from a legal download service or a new or used CD if you can find it. A copy of a Hollywood movie it worth the price of a new copy on DVD. And the RITA (recording Industry Trust of America) abuses the laws designed to take down people reselling bootlegs for profit, not giving it away.
Then there are these people who are hired to take out someone's competition. They're nothing more than hitmen and extortionists, pay up or we'll take out your site. These things cost real companies lots of money, lost sales, lost reputation, customer thinks the site/company may not be very reliable, lost man hours trying to repair the damage. And then they're only looking at 18-24mo or less with good behavior/parole.
They're no longer doing drive-bys in upgraded Model Ts with Thompsons, but the concept is similar.
When the cartidge became popular back in the late 1800s it was cheaper to have your gun converted to use cartridges, from ball and powder, then buying a new one. But modern vehicles are a little more complex. It would probably require a change/redesign of the entire engine, if it's at 105+k miles just replace the entire engine block, and may not be possible with the limited room offered by jeeps. If an autobody shop exists that offers those conversions I wouldn't expect it to be cheap.