It's 6 years max. Personally, I'd expect any electronic with minimal moving parts to last 6 years - the limitation should be down to the MTBF of the components, eg a Seagate Barracuda has an MTBF of 750,000 hours according to this site, which is 85 years! So, barring hinges on the screen, keyboard, DVD/floppy and connector failures and failures due to user clumsiness - that laptop should last the 6 years easily - or so I would argue if it broke...
Given that NSA cryptographers have had a bash at it in the 50s (as have many other experienced linguists/cryptographers/... in the last 400 years or so), I suspect they may have considered that the decrypt wasn't in english and that they would have looked at letter frequencies of languages at the time of the authorship of the work. The wiki (font of all true facts, I know) mentions that the best fit of the language structure is something from the orient, even.
You don't count being held in a compound surrounded by razor wire and forced to work 16-24 hours a day at age 8 as "involuntary servitude"? Wow, you must have had a much rougher childhood than me.
Churches (outside CoS) aren't "pay to play." but rely on donations to stay open. They don't charge you for coming to church sunday morning... if they did, I think about 90% of the people that go to church wouldn't anymore.
How about the Mormon tithe, then? While not "mandatory" to contribute the full amount, it would seem that there would be a lot of pressure to stump up that 10%. It even applies to children, too.
Or then there's Islamic Zakat - a compulsory 2.5% (although I guess you get to give it direct to a charitable cause, and not to the central church).
Of course they can, it's all in the Call Detail Records generated each time you connect & disconnect from the network. How long they store them for is another question...
They could do what Spain did and bring in legislation that requires those pre-pay SIMs to be registered to an ID document. Of course no-one will bother, and they'll all be deleted from the network (much as what happened in Spain, too).
I seem to recall that there were proposals for a similar law in the UK, but I'm not sure of its' progress through the system
That's on contract, so they have your name and address courtesy of the credit check they did when you signed up.
Although I'm not sure on the progress on NuLabs proposal for everyone to have to hand over verified ID to get a pre-pay phone - this difference may not last for long (think of the terrorists!)
Not really. For 35 pounds, which is the price of 5 albums on itunes, you can get a 7GB package
For a few dollars a month you can get a proxy IP service in another country and download as much as you like.
...plus the cost of your domestic broadband connection (in the UK, typically £15-£30 depending on your preference for caps and customer service, so overall not too dissimilar).
Ask these students. There are other folks who've done it more "officially", but my Google-fu is weak today, and pretty much any search on "copyright" usually trawls up RIAA/MPAA links
You bring up an interesting point about which I've always wondered; how is it legal for a company to change the ToS, and still claim that a customer "signed" it? Are all contracts "update-able" in the same manner? What language would I have to use when writing a contract to reflect that property?
I tried that with my work contract once by adding a couple of zeros to the end of the salary field... Unfortunately my paychecks have yet to reflect the change...
My bank does it regularly - every so often I get an updated T&Cs booklet. If I keep using the service, then I have implicitly accepted the changes. Saying that, the envelope is not posted Recorded Delivery, so they would have a hard time proving that I had received it - but the changes have never been substantive (so far).
Technically speaking, my employer also does it every time I get a raise (not that this is happening as often, or as voluminously, as I'd like nowadays) or a promotion (ditto).
The patent itself has screenshots of a Mac desktop, so I'd imagine this is along the lines of "Here's a subsidised computer, but you'll have to watch our ads" - which has been done many times before. Here they present a "new" implementation.
On the other hand, I'd hate to be in their legal team the first time someone comes unstuck using Skype (or equiv) from their computer for an emergency call, and obviously they've also written the patent to apply to stuff like phones & PDAs with reference to iTunes (see [0048] on p12). Odd that they didn't include language to be able to bypass this advertising for certain instances of the function being blocked (e.g. dialling 911 rather than dialling a chum).
I wonder what would happen if you 127.0.0.1 the advertising IPs in your hosts file? Conceivably you'd be bricking the box (while breaking the ToS you signed up to, too, no doubt).
That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.
Not so - the ASA don't care as long as you can demonstrate that the vast majority of your subscribers aren't impacted by the cap and that you mention clearly that a fair use policy applies. See here, here, here, and especially here. Extract from ASA ruling:
The ASA noted all the ads made clear that a fair-use policy applied to the service and the level at which the allowance was set. We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance. We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim "unlimited mobile internet".
Sue all you like - they'll find a loop-hole somewhere and the only people to really gain will be the lawyers.
They're dodging the issue, somewhat - as long as there's enough prominence of a Fair Usage Policy, ISPs and their ilk can bandy the term "unlimited" as much as they like. Some folks they've slapped down for using it without being clear about the (*) at the end of "unlimited(*)" (or even lacking it), but they have said that the term is valid for use in this way. Bastards.
I seem to remember that maybe the Sony Centre (or some such company, I think the shop was in the Trocadero in London so maybe it was in SegaWorld) did something very similar. You got in to a big ball shaped thing, and there was an omnidirectional treadmill for you to run about on while shooting things (don't know if they did anything like tilting it to mimic the landscape you were travelling over though). The inner surface of the ball was, obviously, a full-surround screen.
The main problem with the treadmill would be in how the user gets it to move in a particular direction (maybe it tries to put the midpoint of the pressure points (i.e. footfalls) in the centre?). It would need to be motorised, otherwise the muscle usage would be completely different to real movement, and would detract from the experience.
I wanted to have a go on one, but was nowhere near at the time (and skint).
It's also a fairly old idea - my local gym has bikes with games consoles on them and has done for years. Go faster and you get more power ups. There's also rather a lot of communities of networked exercise games - rowing, running & cycling are probably the more popular, but I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of other sports making the leap into the internet. They're not even confined to gyms - there is PC software out there to support the home user.
The key problem to adding more movement beyond the thumbs and fingers is making it fun, and even augmenting the gaming experience. Adding large, coarse movements risks the loss of any fine control due to the user having to counter these forces when making those fine controls. You could argue that this makes it more "real" (e.g. running and firing a gun is highly unlikely to achieve much beyond scaring your opponents), but if your opponent doesn't need to use the device, they then have the advantage (as you point out) which detracts from the fun.
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It's 6 years max. Personally, I'd expect any electronic with minimal moving parts to last 6 years - the limitation should be down to the MTBF of the components, eg a Seagate Barracuda has an MTBF of 750,000 hours according to this site, which is 85 years! So, barring hinges on the screen, keyboard, DVD/floppy and connector failures and failures due to user clumsiness - that laptop should last the 6 years easily - or so I would argue if it broke...
Given that NSA cryptographers have had a bash at it in the 50s (as have many other experienced linguists/cryptographers/... in the last 400 years or so), I suspect they may have considered that the decrypt wasn't in english and that they would have looked at letter frequencies of languages at the time of the authorship of the work. The wiki (font of all true facts, I know) mentions that the best fit of the language structure is something from the orient, even.
You don't count being held in a compound surrounded by razor wire and forced to work 16-24 hours a day at age 8 as "involuntary servitude"? Wow, you must have had a much rougher childhood than me.
When I was a child, that was considered luxury
Churches (outside CoS) aren't "pay to play." but rely on donations to stay open. They don't charge you for coming to church sunday morning... if they did, I think about 90% of the people that go to church wouldn't anymore.
How about the Mormon tithe, then? While not "mandatory" to contribute the full amount, it would seem that there would be a lot of pressure to stump up that 10%. It even applies to children, too.
Or then there's Islamic Zakat - a compulsory 2.5% (although I guess you get to give it direct to a charitable cause, and not to the central church).
Of course they can, it's all in the Call Detail Records generated each time you connect & disconnect from the network. How long they store them for is another question...
Just leave Spotify running, that will eat through your allowance (assuming O2's network manages to hold up under the strain).
They could do what Spain did and bring in legislation that requires those pre-pay SIMs to be registered to an ID document. Of course no-one will bother, and they'll all be deleted from the network (much as what happened in Spain, too).
I seem to recall that there were proposals for a similar law in the UK, but I'm not sure of its' progress through the system
In Spain it is also required, and they've just cut-off 3 million phones that hadn't been registered with an ID document per their new legislation.
That's on contract, so they have your name and address courtesy of the credit check they did when you signed up.
Although I'm not sure on the progress on NuLabs proposal for everyone to have to hand over verified ID to get a pre-pay phone - this difference may not last for long (think of the terrorists!)
Not really. For 35 pounds, which is the price of 5 albums on itunes, you can get a 7GB package
For a few dollars a month you can get a proxy IP service in another country and download as much as you like.
...plus the cost of your domestic broadband connection (in the UK, typically £15-£30 depending on your preference for caps and customer service, so overall not too dissimilar).
Ask these students. There are other folks who've done it more "officially", but my Google-fu is weak today, and pretty much any search on "copyright" usually trawls up RIAA/MPAA links
Is it pure coincidence that the restaurant "Moto" is in the same city as a similarly titled mobile phone & network infrastructure company?
Indeed I was, however it was a bit shabbily phrased :-)
You bring up an interesting point about which I've always wondered; how is it legal for a company to change the ToS, and still claim that a customer "signed" it? Are all contracts "update-able" in the same manner? What language would I have to use when writing a contract to reflect that property?
I tried that with my work contract once by adding a couple of zeros to the end of the salary field... Unfortunately my paychecks have yet to reflect the change...
My bank does it regularly - every so often I get an updated T&Cs booklet. If I keep using the service, then I have implicitly accepted the changes. Saying that, the envelope is not posted Recorded Delivery, so they would have a hard time proving that I had received it - but the changes have never been substantive (so far).
Technically speaking, my employer also does it every time I get a raise (not that this is happening as often, or as voluminously, as I'd like nowadays) or a promotion (ditto).
The patent itself has screenshots of a Mac desktop, so I'd imagine this is along the lines of "Here's a subsidised computer, but you'll have to watch our ads" - which has been done many times before. Here they present a "new" implementation.
On the other hand, I'd hate to be in their legal team the first time someone comes unstuck using Skype (or equiv) from their computer for an emergency call, and obviously they've also written the patent to apply to stuff like phones & PDAs with reference to iTunes (see [0048] on p12). Odd that they didn't include language to be able to bypass this advertising for certain instances of the function being blocked (e.g. dialling 911 rather than dialling a chum).
I wonder what would happen if you 127.0.0.1 the advertising IPs in your hosts file? Conceivably you'd be bricking the box (while breaking the ToS you signed up to, too, no doubt).
So please tell me how you can get your public domain works out of 70,000 pages of text.
Use a handheld scanner on the computer display, followed by a bout of OCR on the scans :-)
Then crowdsource the checking of the OCR text
That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.
Not so - the ASA don't care as long as you can demonstrate that the vast majority of your subscribers aren't impacted by the cap and that you mention clearly that a fair use policy applies. See here, here, here, and especially here. Extract from ASA ruling:
The ASA noted all the ads made clear that a fair-use policy applied to the service and the level at which the allowance was set. We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance. We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim "unlimited mobile internet".
Sue all you like - they'll find a loop-hole somewhere and the only people to really gain will be the lawyers.
Agreed - they're all bastards
They're dodging the issue, somewhat - as long as there's enough prominence of a Fair Usage Policy, ISPs and their ilk can bandy the term "unlimited" as much as they like. Some folks they've slapped down for using it without being clear about the (*) at the end of "unlimited(*)" (or even lacking it), but they have said that the term is valid for use in this way. Bastards.
Hah - in the UK a cap as low as 250 MB is unlimited. Such is life.
Presto!!
Al Capone was ostensibly a Catholic
Allegedly the Elronners do kill folks they don't like - the process is R2-45. I wonder if that's what happened to Susan Meister?
Maybe they should just let Hackney or Lambeth (or Toxteth, Moss Side or any number of other areas) devolve into GTA arenas? :-)
The main problem with the treadmill would be in how the user gets it to move in a particular direction (maybe it tries to put the midpoint of the pressure points (i.e. footfalls) in the centre?). It would need to be motorised, otherwise the muscle usage would be completely different to real movement, and would detract from the experience.
I wanted to have a go on one, but was nowhere near at the time (and skint).
The key problem to adding more movement beyond the thumbs and fingers is making it fun, and even augmenting the gaming experience. Adding large, coarse movements risks the loss of any fine control due to the user having to counter these forces when making those fine controls. You could argue that this makes it more "real" (e.g. running and firing a gun is highly unlikely to achieve much beyond scaring your opponents), but if your opponent doesn't need to use the device, they then have the advantage (as you point out) which detracts from the fun.