..and the last time I got battered by a bunch of assholes who wouldn't dare take me on one-to-one, the cameras were absolutely useless in spotting it. They didn't exactly stop a bunch of people blowing trains up either. We have 20% of the world's CCTV cameras in the UK, and some of the highest violent crime rates as well. I think the more you treat people like criminals (by trying to turn the country into one gigantic panopticon for one), the more they act like criminals.
"I'm astonished that you think there's going to be Internet connectivity at all, even with mesh networking it's extremely unlikely."
A 54g connection is not the Internet. I specifically didn't mention Internet connectivity for much the same reasons that you have mentioned.
Just to make sure you are absolutely crystal clear: I am not suggesting anybody would download books from the Internet (even though they may be able to, and that in itself would be a double bonus). However, thanks to the built-in wifi it should be very easy to share documents and other resources between computers. Not between computers via the Internet.
"I think it's wildly naive and almost certainly counterproductive."
Which, of course, is why Intel and Microsoft want in.
"More books. How cheaply can you print a book? $2? 50 books per child?"
How many books in raw text or html format can you fit in the OLPC's flash drive? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many more if you gzip them?
How long would it take to transfer those books over a 54g connection? Couple of hours, tops?
And yes, there are lots of very pressing problems for people in developing countries that have more to do with getting enough water to drink in a day and less to do with how well the kids can use a computer, but really, I think the OLPC is a great idea. It's like the old cliche; give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. There's plenty of organisations out there that are trying to get wells and farms set up, but how many can you count that have the OLPCs goals?
Giving kids a Windows box will be giving them a whole bunch of fish and no rod, and at some stage those developing countries are going to need to be educated technically if they want to go from "developing" to "developed". I think FOSS is the natural choice for that.
Not sure on exactly how Stalin spied on his subjects (maybe the more old-fashioned encouraging of neighbours to spy on each other), but I do know that Hitler did have a national identity register that was apparently very helpful in locating undesirable sections of the populace. I'm sure everyone here and their mother has seen the "IBM and the Holocaust" links and videos available, so I won't bother linking to something that you can easily Google up. However it is true, Hitler's Nazis did have a card-based system for executing instructions analogous to, say, SELECT * FROM "populace" WHERE religion="Jewish" AND location="North Germany" (excuse me for the possibly bad SQL). I might also mention East Germany during the lifetime of the Berlin Wall, where the Stasi maintained a highly detailed dossier on its citizenry.
And now Hitler has been invoked, can I shout "Godwin"?
My co-axial e-Sky Llama 2 model helicopter is quite stable in a low-wind environment. With the correct trim and no input on the controls it will perform a kind of lazy pirouette around the living room. A larger model would be less susceptible to wind, which is a problem the smaller you go. A more complex gyro-stabilised helicopter is maybe a little harder to control, due to the gyros counteracting the natural corrective effect of having a centre of gravity/centre of rotation lower than the lifting surface, but not to the degree where a computer capable of keeping a Sea King helicopter in a static hover (yes, that's how Sea Kings stay in the same place when the coastguard rescues people) wouldn't be able to fly what is basically a model with a big battery and an on-board camera. That, and the gyros let you do funky things like reversing the blade pitch and flying the helicopter upside down with some practice. Considering the advances made with robots that can now stand and walk like a human being (a far more complex action than flying a four or five-channel RC chopper), it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that unmanned helicopters are in development, if they don't exist already.
That said, yes, aeroplanes would be easier to fly, if less maneuverable. I've not seen the UAV that was apparently hovering around town today, but I've been told by someone that they thought it was "a bat or something" until they realised it was a machine. Anyone have pics of the things to see if they are fixed wing or ornithopter-ish?
And before I go, download the Beta (not alpha - less models available) edition of Flight Model Simulator, and get yourself a dual-stick controller (or USB flight controller box) to play with it. It's close enough to give you a feel of exactly how hard a helicopter is to fly versus a plane.
It depends on what you think of certain acts that are currently labelled as criminal. Surely nobody on here would seriously suggest that walking into a school and shooting anything with a pulse should be a legal activity. However, what of the person caught on camera smoking a joint? It wasn't centuries ago that alcohol was prohibited across the United States (with the associated massive rise in organised crime and general disregard for the law by many). At the moment in the UK, there are so many new invasive laws and ways of enforcing the law coming out that when someone defies them, you're as likely to see a "good on them" response evoked as any kind of public outrage. Speed cameras are a case in point. Sure, lots of people take the "well you shouldn't be speeding" line, but there are also plenty who would be the first to congratulate "Captain Gatso" on his organisation's efforts to destroy what they see as a threat.
Even amongst less shady organisations, car insurance companies are now beginning to say they will not raise premiums for drivers with three penalty points on their license. What was once a shameful mark to have on your license, is now so commonplace due to the mechanisation of the law and the prosecution of absolutely everyone who breaks the speed limit rather than those who are driving dangerously, that even the people who's job it is to assess your risk are saying they will not penalise you for breaking the law!
About UAVs, sure. Use them in situations when you'd use a helicopter - when you think there is a serious crime going on. But, in this country I fear that it'll just be another way for the government to not only spy on everything at once, but find whole new ways to extract yet more tax. With this, a proposed GPS tracking system for all cars to implement a pay-per-mile taxation system (don't drivers pay heftily per mile thanks to fuel duty at getting close to $9-$10 US per gallon?), the National Identity Register and the fact that we already have 20% of the entire world's CCTV cameras on this island, it would take someone with a big set of blinkers on to not think that maybe, just maybe, we really are sleepwalking into, if not an Orwellian surveillance society, then certainly into a state where the mechanisms for some real Big Brother-esque monitoring are all in place and just awaiting the right kind of government.
I don't think beaming however many gigawatts of microwaves through the earth's atmosphere would be the ideal way of power transfer. I don't have the relevant degrees under my belt to be able to calculate this exactly, but I'm guessing much of the energy would be lost in the same way as most of the sun's energy is absorbed, with the side effect that you would heat the atmosphere up. Not to mention that you're seriously suggesting building a multi-gigawatt (that's a guess - it could even be terawatts) maser, hoping that it stays pointed at the right place to within several decimal points of 0 degrees accuracy, and hoping that nobody would ever think of using something like that as a weapon. As much as I like science fiction, the whole "let's aim gigantic death rays at the earth" idea, even if technically possible, really doesn't fill me with confidence. Not to mention that an orbital solar array large enough to generate that kind of power would be very, very visible in the night sky and probably require too much maintenance to be worthwhile.
Something more feasible and more peacable may be to find a way of putting enough power into one packet to make a long trip worthwhile. If the system can be automated to a great enough degree, there's no reason why power generation systems, mining, refining, production and maintenance facilities can't be set up on a planet like Mars, providing there are enough resources. The idea would be that once set up, there would be enough redundant production and maintenance ability that anything broken can be fixed (either automatically or via remote), and the whole system remains in as homeostatic a state as possible, sending a steady stream of hydrogen cells or other form of high-density power units to earth for recovery and usage.
I'm also sure there are some real boffins who work on things like this. Anyone want to find a link or leave a comment?
Well, maybe there's some KDE hackers reading. Would it be too hard to rig something up (maybe from the context menu) that lets you 'right-click -> option "sudo" -> menu o' stuff' on a file?
Where I work it's a 2% levy on all card transactions. For smaller outlets the rules may well be different, as you're just not going to make enough money at those rates to justify providing the outlet with a card machine, linking it into the banking network and keeping it supported. I've read enough complaints on this site from some very tired and angry support staff who've probably had a very bad day and would really like to find every user who refers to the computer as the hard drive and lock them up in a special prison, along with people who format the hard drive to see what it does and yet more who can't understand that downloading three terabytes of warez and porn from USENET and running it indiscriminately will do interesting things to their computer. There, no doubt they would spend joyous hours as the playthings of The Register's Bastard Operator From Hell.
If every ten-transactions-maybe-per-day shop was given a cheap enough deal to not care about a minimum value, an already strained workforce would likely snap under the workload. As much as I feel like smacking my head against a wall on occasion when dealing with those who choose not to make the progression of computer science and the absorbing of esoteric technical knowledge their life's goal, I am not so callous that I would not feel sympathy for someone found with a length of SATA cable wrapped tightly around their neck and a telephone inserted anally.
Or I could have just said "yes they do". I'm in a funny mood though.
As far as I'm aware, organisations always have had the legal cover (if just barely) to distribute spyware, as long as they say it's being installed in the EULA. If not, CoolWebSearch et all would have been sued out of business a long while ago. According to the article, and if I read it correctly, this seems to be more about giving large companies the legal arse-covering required to hack into your computer "just to check" if you've got, say, a dodgy copy of Autodesk Inventor.
What I'd be interested in is how this and other such spyware could be subverted, possibly with some false (and FOSS, naturally) piece of software that sends ridiculous junk to the remote servers. Sort of an anti-spyware, if you will. The best analogy I can think of off-hand would be programs like the fake SubSeven servers, that as I recall made your computer pretend to be infected with the SubSeven trojan. If you got someone connecting, you could give them a false directory tree, or press a button to blast their computer with a gazillion windows in their SubSeven client.
I think maybe a little hacktivism is called for, although naturally I would not advocate breaking any laws in the process! Oh no, sir!
I know it's a troll but I can't help with replying:
'Here's £1000. Go buy this album for me, and you get to keep the change.'
Or on amazon.com, 'yes, my name really is Mr Buttwinkle. Honest!'
I'd love to see a blacklist implemented. I could spend a whole year laughing about that one.
Most of the HP printers I sell come with either standard or low-capacity cartridges, but they are the same low-capacity cartridges that are sold separately (337 black, and 342 for colour). Some do come with high capacity carts though. It's worth noting that only the higher-end domestic models, such as the HP 2575, will take high-capacity cartridges (339 and 344 respectively) at all. Some of the printers will come with a "photo colour" rather than a black, which means if you're printing any amount of text you really should buy a black cart to go with it.
That said, if your printer does take 339 and 344 (or the old 56/57 combo), it'll last a long enough time. I've also not had any problems with the OfficeJet 5510 I bought the mother a couple of years ago, despite the cartridges being the target of many a drill-and-fill before they wear out. I think the built-in print heads help there, as if they clog, the worst that happens is you wreck a cartridge, and most times they can be unclogged with the appropriate application of "cartridge flush" (some kind of isopropyl I assume).
But a response in the affirmative is still a response in the affirmative. It's not that hard to close off a router. You don't even need a particularly secure encryption to make it explicitly clear that access is denied.
As far as I'm concerned you are responsible for your network, and if you're running an open point then you've got to expect people will use it. If you pay for your bandwidth (you poor, poor people), then you've doubly got a reason to make sure you're encrypted, even if it's only with a 64-bit WEP key containing a row of the letter A. It removes all ethical doubt about the matter, and I think would be a lot fairer than the situation that is developing, where it's possible to be convicted because you just happened to find a point that let you in no questions asked.
Or another alternative: offer unlimited bandwidth packages, that will melt your ethernet cable for 5, 10, 20 or more GB/month for people who want their stuff right now. Also, offer unlimited usage packages that will run at a more sedate couple of megabits per second speed for as long as it's connected. Offer bolt-on extras so an unlimited-usage customer can flick a switch and drag 5GB down in a few minutes for $2.50, or an unlimited bandwidth customer continues to get a 256Kb connection after the initial burst allowance for a little extra per month.
Chances of that happening?
You don't buy a cheap car and expect it to be as good as a ferrari, but you do expect it to get to the shops without clattering and clanking the whole journey. As someone in a previous post has suggested, it would make a refreshing change for game manufacturers to put minimum specs on their games that are realistic. Don't tell me it's not misleading to buy a game where the box tells you it'll run on your machine, get it home, fire it up with all graphical details turned off, and still have it play like a bad flickbook.
Now, as someone who works in computer retail (should I duck and run now?), I do tend to advise customers as to whether a machine will run the "Premium" version of Vista or not. It's generally easy because the ones that will have "Premium Ready" stickers, and I had to bone up on a load of MS marketing jargon weeks before Vista was released (a gig of RAM for an operating system? Kee-rist...). However, yes, Microsoft have advertised the Aero experience, rather than Vista, and I don't see anything on the adverts to tell me that a "Vista Capable" PC won't run Aero. It's not like the car adverts that clearly state "not all features available on all models" or somesuch.
Slightly off topic, one of the funnier parts of the job is when people ask me what version of Windows I run and I reply "Kubuntu Linux". The target demographic of the chain I work for is exactly the sort of people who think a hard drive is the whirring box under the desk, the tray that pops out is a cup holder and that "Vista Capable" means Vista Capable. The blank look is definitely a Mastercard Moment.
Talking from a dial-up connection, I can and have been quite capable of waiting for a few gigabytes of stuff to squeeze itself through the eye of a needle that is my Internet connection. I know enough people on broadband, too, for whom downloading a large amount is a case of setting it to go, minimising the limewire/bearshare/azureus/etc window and forgetting about it.
If it's a choice between waiting six months for the R1 release to get an R2 release, or waiting one day for the R1 rip to be saved to your local hard disk drive, a lot of people I know don't really care about the wait. Also, think about this: five years ago, at least in the UK, having a 10Mb connection would be classed as "holy sh*t". Now it's more like "meh". Give it another 5, 10 or 15 years and I wouldn't be surprised if you have 100Mb links to your ISP available. That should be fast enough for HD video...
I'm not paying money to have full screen video when I can use any number of other video players for free. True I can't play a MOV file easily without it, but I don't consider that to be a loss. Maybe on OS X it's good, because it forms the backbone of the Mac's entire video system in a similar way to Windows and Media Player, but outside OS X it really is that dumb, crappy video player that hits me with nag screens about "Going Pro" every time I use it.
(Don't get me started on the Macromedia Shockwave Flash player...)
Just because you have a majority doesn't mean you walk all over the minority, he said. Too often there's more emphasis put on dividing people than on uniting them.
..wouldn't that be a compelling argument for legalisation?
Slashdot Mirror
..and the last time I got battered by a bunch of assholes who wouldn't dare take me on one-to-one, the cameras were absolutely useless in spotting it. They didn't exactly stop a bunch of people blowing trains up either. We have 20% of the world's CCTV cameras in the UK, and some of the highest violent crime rates as well. I think the more you treat people like criminals (by trying to turn the country into one gigantic panopticon for one), the more they act like criminals.
"Or perhaps more like using my child to help you create your own child that you will then enslave for your own profit."
Just like Ancient Greece...
"I'm astonished that you think there's going to be Internet connectivity at all, even with mesh networking it's extremely unlikely."
A 54g connection is not the Internet. I specifically didn't mention Internet connectivity for much the same reasons that you have mentioned.
Just to make sure you are absolutely crystal clear: I am not suggesting anybody would download books from the Internet (even though they may be able to, and that in itself would be a double bonus). However, thanks to the built-in wifi it should be very easy to share documents and other resources between computers. Not between computers via the Internet.
"I think it's wildly naive and almost certainly counterproductive."
Which, of course, is why Intel and Microsoft want in.
"More books. How cheaply can you print a book? $2? 50 books per child?"
How many books in raw text or html format can you fit in the OLPC's flash drive? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many more if you gzip them?
How long would it take to transfer those books over a 54g connection? Couple of hours, tops?
And yes, there are lots of very pressing problems for people in developing countries that have more to do with getting enough water to drink in a day and less to do with how well the kids can use a computer, but really, I think the OLPC is a great idea. It's like the old cliche; give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. There's plenty of organisations out there that are trying to get wells and farms set up, but how many can you count that have the OLPCs goals?
Giving kids a Windows box will be giving them a whole bunch of fish and no rod, and at some stage those developing countries are going to need to be educated technically if they want to go from "developing" to "developed". I think FOSS is the natural choice for that.
Not sure on exactly how Stalin spied on his subjects (maybe the more old-fashioned encouraging of neighbours to spy on each other), but I do know that Hitler did have a national identity register that was apparently very helpful in locating undesirable sections of the populace. I'm sure everyone here and their mother has seen the "IBM and the Holocaust" links and videos available, so I won't bother linking to something that you can easily Google up. However it is true, Hitler's Nazis did have a card-based system for executing instructions analogous to, say, SELECT * FROM "populace" WHERE religion="Jewish" AND location="North Germany" (excuse me for the possibly bad SQL). I might also mention East Germany during the lifetime of the Berlin Wall, where the Stasi maintained a highly detailed dossier on its citizenry.
And now Hitler has been invoked, can I shout "Godwin"?
My co-axial e-Sky Llama 2 model helicopter is quite stable in a low-wind environment. With the correct trim and no input on the controls it will perform a kind of lazy pirouette around the living room. A larger model would be less susceptible to wind, which is a problem the smaller you go. A more complex gyro-stabilised helicopter is maybe a little harder to control, due to the gyros counteracting the natural corrective effect of having a centre of gravity/centre of rotation lower than the lifting surface, but not to the degree where a computer capable of keeping a Sea King helicopter in a static hover (yes, that's how Sea Kings stay in the same place when the coastguard rescues people) wouldn't be able to fly what is basically a model with a big battery and an on-board camera. That, and the gyros let you do funky things like reversing the blade pitch and flying the helicopter upside down with some practice. Considering the advances made with robots that can now stand and walk like a human being (a far more complex action than flying a four or five-channel RC chopper), it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that unmanned helicopters are in development, if they don't exist already.
That said, yes, aeroplanes would be easier to fly, if less maneuverable. I've not seen the UAV that was apparently hovering around town today, but I've been told by someone that they thought it was "a bat or something" until they realised it was a machine. Anyone have pics of the things to see if they are fixed wing or ornithopter-ish?
And before I go, download the Beta (not alpha - less models available) edition of Flight Model Simulator, and get yourself a dual-stick controller (or USB flight controller box) to play with it. It's close enough to give you a feel of exactly how hard a helicopter is to fly versus a plane.
It depends on what you think of certain acts that are currently labelled as criminal. Surely nobody on here would seriously suggest that walking into a school and shooting anything with a pulse should be a legal activity. However, what of the person caught on camera smoking a joint? It wasn't centuries ago that alcohol was prohibited across the United States (with the associated massive rise in organised crime and general disregard for the law by many). At the moment in the UK, there are so many new invasive laws and ways of enforcing the law coming out that when someone defies them, you're as likely to see a "good on them" response evoked as any kind of public outrage. Speed cameras are a case in point. Sure, lots of people take the "well you shouldn't be speeding" line, but there are also plenty who would be the first to congratulate "Captain Gatso" on his organisation's efforts to destroy what they see as a threat.
Even amongst less shady organisations, car insurance companies are now beginning to say they will not raise premiums for drivers with three penalty points on their license. What was once a shameful mark to have on your license, is now so commonplace due to the mechanisation of the law and the prosecution of absolutely everyone who breaks the speed limit rather than those who are driving dangerously, that even the people who's job it is to assess your risk are saying they will not penalise you for breaking the law!
About UAVs, sure. Use them in situations when you'd use a helicopter - when you think there is a serious crime going on. But, in this country I fear that it'll just be another way for the government to not only spy on everything at once, but find whole new ways to extract yet more tax. With this, a proposed GPS tracking system for all cars to implement a pay-per-mile taxation system (don't drivers pay heftily per mile thanks to fuel duty at getting close to $9-$10 US per gallon?), the National Identity Register and the fact that we already have 20% of the entire world's CCTV cameras on this island, it would take someone with a big set of blinkers on to not think that maybe, just maybe, we really are sleepwalking into, if not an Orwellian surveillance society, then certainly into a state where the mechanisms for some real Big Brother-esque monitoring are all in place and just awaiting the right kind of government.
"Perpetual copyright wouldn't necessarily be retroactive. They could apply only to works created after a certain date."
Because of course, "z = z^2 + c" was discovered way back in the middle ages, and not by a mathematician who is still alive today.
I don't think beaming however many gigawatts of microwaves through the earth's atmosphere would be the ideal way of power transfer. I don't have the relevant degrees under my belt to be able to calculate this exactly, but I'm guessing much of the energy would be lost in the same way as most of the sun's energy is absorbed, with the side effect that you would heat the atmosphere up. Not to mention that you're seriously suggesting building a multi-gigawatt (that's a guess - it could even be terawatts) maser, hoping that it stays pointed at the right place to within several decimal points of 0 degrees accuracy, and hoping that nobody would ever think of using something like that as a weapon. As much as I like science fiction, the whole "let's aim gigantic death rays at the earth" idea, even if technically possible, really doesn't fill me with confidence. Not to mention that an orbital solar array large enough to generate that kind of power would be very, very visible in the night sky and probably require too much maintenance to be worthwhile.
Something more feasible and more peacable may be to find a way of putting enough power into one packet to make a long trip worthwhile. If the system can be automated to a great enough degree, there's no reason why power generation systems, mining, refining, production and maintenance facilities can't be set up on a planet like Mars, providing there are enough resources. The idea would be that once set up, there would be enough redundant production and maintenance ability that anything broken can be fixed (either automatically or via remote), and the whole system remains in as homeostatic a state as possible, sending a steady stream of hydrogen cells or other form of high-density power units to earth for recovery and usage.
I'm also sure there are some real boffins who work on things like this. Anyone want to find a link or leave a comment?
Well, maybe there's some KDE hackers reading. Would it be too hard to rig something up (maybe from the context menu) that lets you 'right-click -> option "sudo" -> menu o' stuff' on a file?
Where I work it's a 2% levy on all card transactions. For smaller outlets the rules may well be different, as you're just not going to make enough money at those rates to justify providing the outlet with a card machine, linking it into the banking network and keeping it supported. I've read enough complaints on this site from some very tired and angry support staff who've probably had a very bad day and would really like to find every user who refers to the computer as the hard drive and lock them up in a special prison, along with people who format the hard drive to see what it does and yet more who can't understand that downloading three terabytes of warez and porn from USENET and running it indiscriminately will do interesting things to their computer. There, no doubt they would spend joyous hours as the playthings of The Register's Bastard Operator From Hell.
If every ten-transactions-maybe-per-day shop was given a cheap enough deal to not care about a minimum value, an already strained workforce would likely snap under the workload. As much as I feel like smacking my head against a wall on occasion when dealing with those who choose not to make the progression of computer science and the absorbing of esoteric technical knowledge their life's goal, I am not so callous that I would not feel sympathy for someone found with a length of SATA cable wrapped tightly around their neck and a telephone inserted anally.
Or I could have just said "yes they do". I'm in a funny mood though.
As far as I'm aware, organisations always have had the legal cover (if just barely) to distribute spyware, as long as they say it's being installed in the EULA. If not, CoolWebSearch et all would have been sued out of business a long while ago. According to the article, and if I read it correctly, this seems to be more about giving large companies the legal arse-covering required to hack into your computer "just to check" if you've got, say, a dodgy copy of Autodesk Inventor.
What I'd be interested in is how this and other such spyware could be subverted, possibly with some false (and FOSS, naturally) piece of software that sends ridiculous junk to the remote servers. Sort of an anti-spyware, if you will. The best analogy I can think of off-hand would be programs like the fake SubSeven servers, that as I recall made your computer pretend to be infected with the SubSeven trojan. If you got someone connecting, you could give them a false directory tree, or press a button to blast their computer with a gazillion windows in their SubSeven client.
I think maybe a little hacktivism is called for, although naturally I would not advocate breaking any laws in the process! Oh no, sir!
..yay for /. doing things to what it thinks are tags. Put two less-than tags between 'el[1]' and '" "' for working code!
Don't forget iterators. There's some lovely Perl-like convoluted code that you can do, if you're that kind of twisted.
...I think I've found my new signature.
[[2, "another"], [1, "Just"]].concat([[4, "hacker."], [3, "Ruby"]]).sort{|a, b| a[0] b[0]}.each{|el| print el[1] " "}
I know it's a troll but I can't help with replying: 'Here's £1000. Go buy this album for me, and you get to keep the change.' Or on amazon.com, 'yes, my name really is Mr Buttwinkle. Honest!' I'd love to see a blacklist implemented. I could spend a whole year laughing about that one.
Most of the HP printers I sell come with either standard or low-capacity cartridges, but they are the same low-capacity cartridges that are sold separately (337 black, and 342 for colour). Some do come with high capacity carts though. It's worth noting that only the higher-end domestic models, such as the HP 2575, will take high-capacity cartridges (339 and 344 respectively) at all. Some of the printers will come with a "photo colour" rather than a black, which means if you're printing any amount of text you really should buy a black cart to go with it.
That said, if your printer does take 339 and 344 (or the old 56/57 combo), it'll last a long enough time. I've also not had any problems with the OfficeJet 5510 I bought the mother a couple of years ago, despite the cartridges being the target of many a drill-and-fill before they wear out. I think the built-in print heads help there, as if they clog, the worst that happens is you wreck a cartridge, and most times they can be unclogged with the appropriate application of "cartridge flush" (some kind of isopropyl I assume).
So, Verizon has everyone from Vonage through Skype and Buddyphone to Teamspeak by the short and curlies? There must be a limit somewhere.
But a response in the affirmative is still a response in the affirmative. It's not that hard to close off a router. You don't even need a particularly secure encryption to make it explicitly clear that access is denied.
As far as I'm concerned you are responsible for your network, and if you're running an open point then you've got to expect people will use it. If you pay for your bandwidth (you poor, poor people), then you've doubly got a reason to make sure you're encrypted, even if it's only with a 64-bit WEP key containing a row of the letter A. It removes all ethical doubt about the matter, and I think would be a lot fairer than the situation that is developing, where it's possible to be convicted because you just happened to find a point that let you in no questions asked.
Or another alternative: offer unlimited bandwidth packages, that will melt your ethernet cable for 5, 10, 20 or more GB/month for people who want their stuff right now. Also, offer unlimited usage packages that will run at a more sedate couple of megabits per second speed for as long as it's connected. Offer bolt-on extras so an unlimited-usage customer can flick a switch and drag 5GB down in a few minutes for $2.50, or an unlimited bandwidth customer continues to get a 256Kb connection after the initial burst allowance for a little extra per month. Chances of that happening?
I think multiple moderation reasons could come in handy. "Insightful, Funny"?
You don't buy a cheap car and expect it to be as good as a ferrari, but you do expect it to get to the shops without clattering and clanking the whole journey. As someone in a previous post has suggested, it would make a refreshing change for game manufacturers to put minimum specs on their games that are realistic. Don't tell me it's not misleading to buy a game where the box tells you it'll run on your machine, get it home, fire it up with all graphical details turned off, and still have it play like a bad flickbook.
Now, as someone who works in computer retail (should I duck and run now?), I do tend to advise customers as to whether a machine will run the "Premium" version of Vista or not. It's generally easy because the ones that will have "Premium Ready" stickers, and I had to bone up on a load of MS marketing jargon weeks before Vista was released (a gig of RAM for an operating system? Kee-rist...). However, yes, Microsoft have advertised the Aero experience, rather than Vista, and I don't see anything on the adverts to tell me that a "Vista Capable" PC won't run Aero. It's not like the car adverts that clearly state "not all features available on all models" or somesuch.
Slightly off topic, one of the funnier parts of the job is when people ask me what version of Windows I run and I reply "Kubuntu Linux". The target demographic of the chain I work for is exactly the sort of people who think a hard drive is the whirring box under the desk, the tray that pops out is a cup holder and that "Vista Capable" means Vista Capable. The blank look is definitely a Mastercard Moment.
Talking from a dial-up connection, I can and have been quite capable of waiting for a few gigabytes of stuff to squeeze itself through the eye of a needle that is my Internet connection. I know enough people on broadband, too, for whom downloading a large amount is a case of setting it to go, minimising the limewire/bearshare/azureus/etc window and forgetting about it.
If it's a choice between waiting six months for the R1 release to get an R2 release, or waiting one day for the R1 rip to be saved to your local hard disk drive, a lot of people I know don't really care about the wait. Also, think about this: five years ago, at least in the UK, having a 10Mb connection would be classed as "holy sh*t". Now it's more like "meh". Give it another 5, 10 or 15 years and I wouldn't be surprised if you have 100Mb links to your ISP available. That should be fast enough for HD video...
I'm not paying money to have full screen video when I can use any number of other video players for free. True I can't play a MOV file easily without it, but I don't consider that to be a loss. Maybe on OS X it's good, because it forms the backbone of the Mac's entire video system in a similar way to Windows and Media Player, but outside OS X it really is that dumb, crappy video player that hits me with nag screens about "Going Pro" every time I use it.
(Don't get me started on the Macromedia Shockwave Flash player...)
Just because you have a majority doesn't mean you walk all over the minority, he said. Too often there's more emphasis put on dividing people than on uniting them.
..wouldn't that be a compelling argument for legalisation?
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,3 9164553,00.htm
Next time I'll just paste the URL eh?