Here in the UK, there are no fees for using a bank ATM. Most accounts will also permit you to withdraw from the ATMs of other banks, again with no fee. My account (and I don't think it's unusual) will permit you to withdraw money from any bank ATM in the UK with no fee.
The only ATMs that charge fees are those provided by convenience stores and garages (and yes, the fees are extortionate). But I can withdraw from any of them too.
It wasn't always the case that there were no fees, but I believe we started off with no fees for withdrawal from your "home bank". Then enough fuss was made about "foreign" withdrawal that as soon as one bank broke ranks, all the others followed suit.
Are the ATMs in the USA well networked? Can you withdraw from any of them? This would seem to be the first step to getting fees dropped.
They do use fibre bundles for endoscopes ; they're very expensive ($10,000 kind of expensive).
CMOS sensors are actually a significant step up in terms of
* durability - whack a fibre endoscope on the edge of a surgical trolley and you just broke half the fibres in the bundle. Not so with a wire bundle. * price - a CMOS sensor, even a medically certified one, is much cheaper than a carefully aligned bundle of photographic class optical fibres
And I reckon you can probably make sensors of a usable size and resolution, with lenses, much smaller than an equivalent fibre assembly.
That's down to compressed stream buffering. An analog box could be instant because every frame was transmitted uncompressed. With digital TV, you have to wait for a keyframe at least.
I can't comprehend why the phone app isn't in memory on boot. It's a PHONE. Instead, when the phone rings you have to wait several seconds for the phone application to load.
In contrast, my wife's new HTC Z snaps and zings along with Android, even though it's "bloaty" Java / Davlik.
It works out in the long run. If you can keep costs down, yes, you enjoy a fatter margin. But costs inevitably rise via inflation ; if your margin was high, you can fix your price for longer, so eventually, the customer sees a saving.
Don't make me laugh... there is a substantial industry churning out copyrighted religious material. As the sibling points out, the de-facto standard bible for modern times, the NIV (New International Version) is copyrighted.
On top of that, you have bible study aids like concordances, multifarious "prayer of the day" booklets, novels, factual books, "factual" books, books that are rebuttals of secular material, songbooks, sheet music, recorded music, films, and probably the most insidious of all - the Christian self-help book (there are many, but they all say the same thing - pray and listen to God and your life will improve).
The self-help books on finance, predictably, do say "make sure you tithe - God will help sort out the rest".
Churches must pay royalties to use much of this material, typically the new wave of song music.
I think that modern information technology permits a much smaller stratum of middlemen than at any other time in history ; middlemen have thrived historically because the effort required to specialize and be productive left little time for the actual producers and consumers of the world to perform the services that middlemen provide - and that was fine, because they were providing value.
The balance swung in their favour though. They accumulated more wealth and power. They began to buy out the assets that the producers worked on, leaving them mere tenants. In an open market such as that allegedly desired by capitalists, modern technologies would rapidly reduce the slice of pie that middlemen could claim, because the reduced effort required to provide the service of trade logically adds less value. Instead, these technologies are used to leverage a higher margin, concentrating yet more wealth and thus power in the hands of those who are rigging the market in their favour.
They bought the side of a whole building near my office (in the UK)... my initial instinct was that it's a product like Grey Goose, thought up just to meet a price point. It's a little older than that though.
I still think it has an element of the price being an important part of it's brand value, but at least it isn't just gussied up grain alcohol.
I have to say that this seems to have improved greatly recently. Historically I've avoided it but when I do it accidentally my HP laptop is fine with it on more recent kernels.
Also, isn't half the reason that people use sleep mode on laptops because Windows takes an age to boot when loaded down with all the software that enterprises demand to keep the OS safe from it's users... and the enterprise safe from it's employees?
My Windows install takes 4-5 minutes to boot ; Ubuntu takes less than a minute. I don't think twice about shutting down Ubuntu. I send Windows to sleep mode.
I presume they work for a major label - that would be the only legit reason to know the plans of both companies with regard to this product. And I expect that being the case, they have a number of incentives to keep their mouth shut, not least the pack of vicious attack lawyers.
i) What the hell does anyone need 1.5Gbit/s for, unless they are a business.
That's more than 50 HD video streams. Know anyone with 50 TVs? Maybe when full immersion holographic projectors are invented, you'll need that much for conferencing.
ii) For that matter, what the hell does anyone need their current top tier product for?
Apart from warez, of course. About the only answer I can come up with is more immediate delivery of videogames ; it took me 3 hours to download Portal 2 on my 10Mbit/s connection, and I had to wait until after 2100, or I would have been throttled back to 2.5Mbit/s after the first 750MB. 3 hours is mildly annoying, but I'm prepared to put up with that occasionally to save some money on recurring service fees.
iii) Because they don't invest in infrastructure, I don't get to use the service they advertise.
Sure, 10Mbit/s isn't the coolest new thing. But it sure would be nice to have it all the time. Now I'm back to doing things I hadn't done since the modem days, scheduling any big downloads to coincide with un-throttled periods (ie - the small hours of the night). If I need to download a DVD ISO (e.g. Knoppix) during peak hours? Tough underpants, all the people running torrents spoiled that because they didn't anticipate it (despite "downloading movies, music and games, faster than ever before" being the core platform of their marketing).
Bah.
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
On the UK ingredients list it's listed as "sugar", not HFCS. It's probably beet sugar since that's our local product.
The difference is very noticeable in terms of flavour ; my wife loves Coke in the UK, but tried some in Florida and pronounced it "vile".
They still use cane sugar in Mexico, for those in the USA that want proper Coke.
Rephrase ; the authors of GPL v2 overlooked the practice of tivoization because at the time of writing, it was unknown.
The stated purpose of the GPL was to retain the right for users to modify software that was distributed to them to serve their own needs, under that license. Tivo managed to find a way around that - modifying the software they shipped was possible, but pointless, because the Tivo hardware would refuse to load binaries unless they were signed with a cryptographic key only known to Tivo Inc.
As you note, this was not illegal, since Tivo Inc. complied with the license in so far as they distributed the sources they changed for use in their product. On the other hand, the practice was clearly not in line with the spirit of the GPL license and thus the spirit in which that software was offered. Morals are not as black and white as the law, I'll grant you, but I don't think you'll find many who think that shipping a device dependent on a stack of software licensed in a way designed to promote the freedom to tinker, but with a lock on it that prevents any such tinkering, is an unassailable moral position.
They have an established reputation for luring companies into business deals and then after getting what they wanted, cut ties and go out on their own.
Like Microsoft? Seriously, the above could refer to any cut-throat capitalist enterprise.
What people are really ticked off about is that the Chinese have learned all our dirty tricks, which just doesn't seem fair to, after we generously sent them all our manufacturing capacity n'all.
A lot of so called business applications are hideous ad-hocceries developed in VBA and use extended parts of the API and other libraries that LibreOffice doesn't support (it does have limited VBA support). A lot of budding programmers took advantage of VBA since Visual Studio 6 cost money, but everyone had Office.
The major blockers for migrating from MS Office to LibreOffice are not about the basic functionality of the programs, but
* Formatting incompatibilities * Applications written as VBA macros in Excel and other programs * Applications written on top of Access
France is particularly draconian about encryption. I'm not sure what their exact legal situation is.. in the UK you can be jailed for not giving up your encryption keys on demand, so you have to weigh up the sentence for that versus what you'd get for the crimes they'd convict you for if you did.
It appears that anything above 40-bit keys is illegal in France unless you use key escrow.
Except for latency, which isn't going anywhere because the speed of light doesn't change.
And let's face it, if you can command that much performance in the cloud for little money, hackers can too. Your data won't be secure unless it's on hardware you control.
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Here in the UK, there are no fees for using a bank ATM. Most accounts will also permit you to withdraw from the ATMs of other banks, again with no fee. My account (and I don't think it's unusual) will permit you to withdraw money from any bank ATM in the UK with no fee.
The only ATMs that charge fees are those provided by convenience stores and garages (and yes, the fees are extortionate). But I can withdraw from any of them too.
It wasn't always the case that there were no fees, but I believe we started off with no fees for withdrawal from your "home bank". Then enough fuss was made about "foreign" withdrawal that as soon as one bank broke ranks, all the others followed suit.
Are the ATMs in the USA well networked? Can you withdraw from any of them? This would seem to be the first step to getting fees dropped.
They do use fibre bundles for endoscopes ; they're very expensive ($10,000 kind of expensive).
CMOS sensors are actually a significant step up in terms of
* durability - whack a fibre endoscope on the edge of a surgical trolley and you just broke half the fibres in the bundle. Not so with a wire bundle.
* price - a CMOS sensor, even a medically certified one, is much cheaper than a carefully aligned bundle of photographic class optical fibres
And I reckon you can probably make sensors of a usable size and resolution, with lenses, much smaller than an equivalent fibre assembly.
That's down to compressed stream buffering. An analog box could be instant because every frame was transmitted uncompressed. With digital TV, you have to wait for a keyframe at least.
The N900 suffers from this, alas.
I can't comprehend why the phone app isn't in memory on boot. It's a PHONE. Instead, when the phone rings you have to wait several seconds for the phone application to load.
In contrast, my wife's new HTC Z snaps and zings along with Android, even though it's "bloaty" Java / Davlik.
It works out in the long run. If you can keep costs down, yes, you enjoy a fatter margin. But costs inevitably rise via inflation ; if your margin was high, you can fix your price for longer, so eventually, the customer sees a saving.
Debian has 9 projects. As a Debian derivative, Ubuntu will benefit.
At least one of them is being mentored by Canonical / Ubuntu (Matt Zimmerman, the Ubuntu CTO).
Don't make me laugh ... there is a substantial industry churning out copyrighted religious material. As the sibling points out, the de-facto standard bible for modern times, the NIV (New International Version) is copyrighted.
On top of that, you have bible study aids like concordances, multifarious "prayer of the day" booklets, novels, factual books, "factual" books, books that are rebuttals of secular material, songbooks, sheet music, recorded music, films, and probably the most insidious of all - the Christian self-help book (there are many, but they all say the same thing - pray and listen to God and your life will improve).
The self-help books on finance, predictably, do say "make sure you tithe - God will help sort out the rest".
Churches must pay royalties to use much of this material, typically the new wave of song music.
I think that modern information technology permits a much smaller stratum of middlemen than at any other time in history ; middlemen have thrived historically because the effort required to specialize and be productive left little time for the actual producers and consumers of the world to perform the services that middlemen provide - and that was fine, because they were providing value.
The balance swung in their favour though. They accumulated more wealth and power. They began to buy out the assets that the producers worked on, leaving them mere tenants. In an open market such as that allegedly desired by capitalists, modern technologies would rapidly reduce the slice of pie that middlemen could claim, because the reduced effort required to provide the service of trade logically adds less value. Instead, these technologies are used to leverage a higher margin, concentrating yet more wealth and thus power in the hands of those who are rigging the market in their favour.
They bought the side of a whole building near my office (in the UK) ... my initial instinct was that it's a product like Grey Goose, thought up just to meet a price point. It's a little older than that though.
I still think it has an element of the price being an important part of it's brand value, but at least it isn't just gussied up grain alcohol.
This is just an advert for "Maker's Mark" whiskey. The copy blurbs on about how the car runs best on it.
Yet another product who's value mostly lies in the psychological profile built up by it's advertising.
I have to say that this seems to have improved greatly recently. Historically I've avoided it but when I do it accidentally my HP laptop is fine with it on more recent kernels.
Also, isn't half the reason that people use sleep mode on laptops because Windows takes an age to boot when loaded down with all the software that enterprises demand to keep the OS safe from it's users... and the enterprise safe from it's employees?
My Windows install takes 4-5 minutes to boot ; Ubuntu takes less than a minute. I don't think twice about shutting down Ubuntu. I send Windows to sleep mode.
Unity is just the default desktop. Currently you can still use GNOME 2 ... but I'm not sure what will become of that by 12.04
You can use the "fast" links on dilbert.com
http://dilbert.com/fast/2011-01-07/
Much less pagecruft.
I presume they work for a major label - that would be the only legit reason to know the plans of both companies with regard to this product. And I expect that being the case, they have a number of incentives to keep their mouth shut, not least the pack of vicious attack lawyers.
Might I suggest something like this then?
Self-replicating file server
Disclaimer : I met the founder of the company once, at a geek social, and liked him. Knows what he's talking about.
i) What the hell does anyone need 1.5Gbit/s for, unless they are a business.
That's more than 50 HD video streams. Know anyone with 50 TVs? Maybe when full immersion holographic projectors are invented, you'll need that much for conferencing.
ii) For that matter, what the hell does anyone need their current top tier product for?
Apart from warez, of course. About the only answer I can come up with is more immediate delivery of videogames ; it took me 3 hours to download Portal 2 on my 10Mbit/s connection, and I had to wait until after 2100, or I would have been throttled back to 2.5Mbit/s after the first 750MB. 3 hours is mildly annoying, but I'm prepared to put up with that occasionally to save some money on recurring service fees.
iii) Because they don't invest in infrastructure, I don't get to use the service they advertise.
Sure, 10Mbit/s isn't the coolest new thing. But it sure would be nice to have it all the time. Now I'm back to doing things I hadn't done since the modem days, scheduling any big downloads to coincide with un-throttled periods (ie - the small hours of the night). If I need to download a DVD ISO (e.g. Knoppix) during peak hours? Tough underpants, all the people running torrents spoiled that because they didn't anticipate it (despite "downloading movies, music and games, faster than ever before" being the core platform of their marketing).
Bah.
On the UK ingredients list it's listed as "sugar", not HFCS. It's probably beet sugar since that's our local product.
The difference is very noticeable in terms of flavour ; my wife loves Coke in the UK, but tried some in Florida and pronounced it "vile".
They still use cane sugar in Mexico, for those in the USA that want proper Coke.
It rankles even more when your ISP specifically advertises that you can download "Games, Music and Movies, faster than ever!"
Rephrase ; the authors of GPL v2 overlooked the practice of tivoization because at the time of writing, it was unknown.
The stated purpose of the GPL was to retain the right for users to modify software that was distributed to them to serve their own needs, under that license. Tivo managed to find a way around that - modifying the software they shipped was possible, but pointless, because the Tivo hardware would refuse to load binaries unless they were signed with a cryptographic key only known to Tivo Inc.
As you note, this was not illegal, since Tivo Inc. complied with the license in so far as they distributed the sources they changed for use in their product. On the other hand, the practice was clearly not in line with the spirit of the GPL license and thus the spirit in which that software was offered. Morals are not as black and white as the law, I'll grant you, but I don't think you'll find many who think that shipping a device dependent on a stack of software licensed in a way designed to promote the freedom to tinker, but with a lock on it that prevents any such tinkering, is an unassailable moral position.
Or an elf.
They have an established reputation for luring companies into business deals and then after getting what they wanted, cut ties and go out on their own.
Like Microsoft? Seriously, the above could refer to any cut-throat capitalist enterprise.
What people are really ticked off about is that the Chinese have learned all our dirty tricks, which just doesn't seem fair to, after we generously sent them all our manufacturing capacity n'all.
A lot of so called business applications are hideous ad-hocceries developed in VBA and use extended parts of the API and other libraries that LibreOffice doesn't support (it does have limited VBA support). A lot of budding programmers took advantage of VBA since Visual Studio 6 cost money, but everyone had Office.
The major blockers for migrating from MS Office to LibreOffice are not about the basic functionality of the programs, but
* Formatting incompatibilities
* Applications written as VBA macros in Excel and other programs
* Applications written on top of Access
France is particularly draconian about encryption. I'm not sure what their exact legal situation is.. in the UK you can be jailed for not giving up your encryption keys on demand, so you have to weigh up the sentence for that versus what you'd get for the crimes they'd convict you for if you did.
It appears that anything above 40-bit keys is illegal in France unless you use key escrow.
Sounds like a classic protection racket to me ....
"Buy GMod .. or your account might get banned."
Except for latency, which isn't going anywhere because the speed of light doesn't change.
And let's face it, if you can command that much performance in the cloud for little money, hackers can too. Your data won't be secure unless it's on hardware you control.