The advantage of having the voter put their ballot in the scanner (in the last election, my county had only one per precinct, not one per voting booth) is that the they know that their ballot that has been scanned and counted (on Sequoia scanner, a visible counter increments and a beep sounds when a ballot has been scanned correctly) hasn't been modified by anybody. If the election workers do it, the voters can never be completely certain that their vote hasn't been altered before it was counted and, as most people don't keep the tear-off receipts that they get from the ballot, there would be no way for a voter to verify it.
The FCC doesn't have to wait - they can create new rules and have them go into effect without the direct consent of either the Legislative or Executive branch.
The FCC is responsible to Congress and either house can advise the FCC through their Telecommunications subcommittees, can override any new or existing FCC rule or can even change the legislation that enables the FCC, but they are only involved in the process of creating new rules if they choose to be.
You can't write to UMD format (which I think is one of Sony's big mistakes with the format), so saying that a MiniSD card is cheaper and smaller than UMD is irrelevant.
CDs, mini CDs and DVDs are the only direct comparison and UMD is smaller than all of those.
If the camera is carrying one of the several models of microdrives, they do. I've always stuck with CF because of write times and storage density, but I know a couple of photographers who like 'em.
Surely a cushion of water wouldn't protect something like a cell phone hitting the concrete
I would assume that the liquid would be considerably more viscous than plain water.
Your second comment shows the problem with changing the maximum speed limit to slow traffic in changing conditions: nobody follows it anyway.
To be effective, you would want to lower the limit some distance *before* the bottleneck to lessen the rate that new cars came in to the affected area. This means that you would be changing limits on areas that don't appear to most drivers to have a traffic problem. In my experience, most people don't slow down until they absolutely have to - even when they can see stopped traffic up ahead. Since they are probably speeding in the first place and can't see why they have to slow down, they probably won't, and the problem doesn't go away.
As to car insurance, the only time the premiums go up is if they are extending you credit.
You may pay higher monthly charges if you make extended payments, but that's due to interest, not changes in your premium. Your yearly premium is set at the beginning of the policy's term and doesn't change.
Your credit rating could affect your overall premium cost if the insurance company shows that having a bad one means that you are at a higher risk of making a claim or that you'll probably have a higher claim on an incident than someone with a better credit rating...
That argument bears no relationship to what's going on.
A more appropriate comparison would be if I had a restaurant and you had a way to make endless copies of my meal items. I have to buy the ingredients, cook the food and hire people to cook, sell and advertise, while you duplicate the items and wave your arms yelling "Food As Good as His Is, for Half the Price!". So long as your minion buys new items when items I change my menu, your business model works fine. How can it possibly fail?
Of course, that makes you dependent on me to make constant changes to satisfy people's changing wants, but as long as I'm stupid enough to provide a constant supply of new things, why should you care?
Google, Yahoo, et al, are good tools for locating information - if you know what you're looking for. Most people that I know - even "computer literate" ones, have almost no idea how to pick search terms in a way that will get them the information that they need quickly. Yes, they know how to use boolean operators, quotes and the other ways that you can tune queries, but if they don't know exactly what they're looking for to start with, they're pretty much lost. They understand the tool but don't know the method.
The "hows and whys" of doing research is something that librarians are exceptionally good at. If The internet is the greatest information-gathering tool on the planet, wouldn't librarians time be better spent helping people to understand how the best ways to accessing it more effectively?
For those of us who aren't terribly interested in dumpster diving and don't the spare equipment laying around, how much would a bare-bones MythTV-capable system really cost?
Yes, we all know that shady accounting is a Sony invention. These techniques were never practiced at MGM, Universal, Fox, Paramount, RKO or Warner Brothers.
Sony rants are popular with the Slashdot crowd, but zero-profit movies have been the practice in Hollywood for a long, long time.
No, it isn't the journalist's job to report "the truth" because there isn't an absolute standard for the truth - the truth is relative.
A journalist's job is to report on facts and their context. If they make no effort to examine both sides of a story, they are injecting their personal bias. That may work for advocacy journalism, but isn't reporting.
An example: In 1996, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and later, CNN, were absolutely certain that Richard Jewel, the man who reported the satchel to the police shortly before it exploded, was responsible for the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. They spent days gathering evidence of why he did it. They knew that they were right and so only gathered information that supported their contention. Their ratings went up as people watched the guilty come to justice. Only one problem: he didn't do it. They had crossed over from reporting what happened to supporting their contention, and someone who should have been considered a hero was pilloried.
This is what can happen when a reporter is sure that they know "the truth".
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the FBI anti-piracy warning that everyone skipped on their VHS copies of the same movie.
This isn't an issue because it doesn't bug them. Just like trailers in movies or the ads that some theaters show before the lights go down, it's just a minor annoyance.
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).
Like commercials during live TV, its something that one has to sit through to get to what you're waiting to see. You can't skip through objectionable ads on live TV, so what's the difference?
- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.
Once again, this isn't an issue with most people because most people (even the ones that have laptops in addition to their home systems) are never going to do it.
Most people don't make copies of DVDs, haven't had any problems playing them nor experienced anything other than mild annoyance in sitting through the stuff you get before you can see the movie, so discussing why DRM is bad is so completely out of context for them one might as well be discussing Ionic architecture in Aramaic. They haven't experienced problems nor know of anybody who has, so it just isn't important.
Since at this point you are driving your customers away I would choose the second option
When the customers that they're potentially driving away are a very small part of the overall base, why should they care?
The DVDs that that majority of people buy will never be used anywhere but in their DVD player. It'll work just fine in their home computer too - all DRM breaks is the ability to make copies, something that most people don't do. If the DRM doesn't break their player in some way, which it generally doesn't, they will never know no even care that it is there.
And why should they? These people aren't stupid, it's just that the encoding that is put on the disks is completely transparent to them and largely affects their ability to play the disks in not at all.
You'd think that the advertisers would be overjoyed by with the idea. Fans who would typically not be watching their ads because the game wasn't available now could be reached. At no additional cost! Since most of the MLB's revenue comes from advertising (either directly or indirectly from the licensed stations), the advertisers would have a bunch of leverage...
Just the Green, Gold and Platinum cards. The Optima and Blue are just like regular credit cards and have spending limits. The difference is you have to pay the entire balance on the former (unless you used sign and travel) and can make monthly payments on the latter.
The best thing a third world country can have is "empty" soil.
Best for whom? For the populace? With nothing of any interest to anybody and no money for infrastructure, how, exactly, are they going to survive? The only influence that most third-world nations have at all is the mineral or biological (trees, plants that are used for medicines, etc.) wealth that they control.
Without something of interest to someone, who would care? Companies looking for a cheap/slave labor pool to pick from, the traffickers that make money selling them and political movements looking for followers, that's who...
Face it. Most documentation is horrible. Between the unspoken assumption that the reader has at least as much technical experience as the writer and the general inability of most documentation writers to express themselves in written communication most first-time users wishing that they'd never picked up the FM in the first place.
Good Tech Writers know that they need to write to their audience - if the users are consciously avoiding reading documentation, maybe the problem isn't with the reader...
My first player, a Sony NW-MS11 Walkman, used OpenMG Jukebox (which later became SonicStage) to store and encode music in Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. You could rip CDs with a third-party application to play them on your PC, but it had to be encoded in ATRAC to be playable on the player.
How did porn kill Beta? I had a Beta player before VHS existed and when the only Hollywood movies you could get were fifth-generation copies recorded at movie theaters. The only prerecorded thing that you COULD get at that point were porno vids.
Not that I had personal experience with this, of course. A friend of mine rented them.
i also question why defense attourney's would be for this. Do they not get proper access to witnesses and other info from the prosecutor before the trial?
Some potential witnesses fear retribution if it were known that they talked to the police, so if they knew that they would be "outed" on the Internet, they might be less likely to get involved. Fewer witnesses means a better chance of acquittal of the defendant.
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage of having the voter put their ballot in the scanner (in the last election, my county had only one per precinct, not one per voting booth) is that the they know that their ballot that has been scanned and counted (on Sequoia scanner, a visible counter increments and a beep sounds when a ballot has been scanned correctly) hasn't been modified by anybody. If the election workers do it, the voters can never be completely certain that their vote hasn't been altered before it was counted and, as most people don't keep the tear-off receipts that they get from the ballot, there would be no way for a voter to verify it.
The FCC is responsible to Congress and either house can advise the FCC through their Telecommunications subcommittees, can override any new or existing FCC rule or can even change the legislation that enables the FCC, but they are only involved in the process of creating new rules if they choose to be.
CDs, mini CDs and DVDs are the only direct comparison and UMD is smaller than all of those.
If the camera is carrying one of the several models of microdrives, they do. I've always stuck with CF because of write times and storage density, but I know a couple of photographers who like 'em.
Surely a cushion of water wouldn't protect something like a cell phone hitting the concrete
I would assume that the liquid would be considerably more viscous than plain water.
To be effective, you would want to lower the limit some distance *before* the bottleneck to lessen the rate that new cars came in to the affected area. This means that you would be changing limits on areas that don't appear to most drivers to have a traffic problem. In my experience, most people don't slow down until they absolutely have to - even when they can see stopped traffic up ahead. Since they are probably speeding in the first place and can't see why they have to slow down, they probably won't, and the problem doesn't go away.
You may pay higher monthly charges if you make extended payments, but that's due to interest, not changes in your premium. Your yearly premium is set at the beginning of the policy's term and doesn't change.
Your credit rating could affect your overall premium cost if the insurance company shows that having a bad one means that you are at a higher risk of making a claim or that you'll probably have a higher claim on an incident than someone with a better credit rating...
As it has been delayed until October at the earliest, I guess we'll just have to wait to see...
A more appropriate comparison would be if I had a restaurant and you had a way to make endless copies of my meal items. I have to buy the ingredients, cook the food and hire people to cook, sell and advertise, while you duplicate the items and wave your arms yelling "Food As Good as His Is, for Half the Price!". So long as your minion buys new items when items I change my menu, your business model works fine. How can it possibly fail?
Of course, that makes you dependent on me to make constant changes to satisfy people's changing wants, but as long as I'm stupid enough to provide a constant supply of new things, why should you care?
Google, Yahoo, et al, are good tools for locating information - if you know what you're looking for. Most people that I know - even "computer literate" ones, have almost no idea how to pick search terms in a way that will get them the information that they need quickly. Yes, they know how to use boolean operators, quotes and the other ways that you can tune queries, but if they don't know exactly what they're looking for to start with, they're pretty much lost. They understand the tool but don't know the method.
The "hows and whys" of doing research is something that librarians are exceptionally good at. If The internet is the greatest information-gathering tool on the planet, wouldn't librarians time be better spent helping people to understand how the best ways to accessing it more effectively?
I wish I had mod points. Calling Smokey and the Bandit classic is the funniest thing I've heard in weeks.
Thanks for the good info. That'll help me decide whether the investment in time and materials is worth it for me (I really don't watch much TV).
For those of us who aren't terribly interested in dumpster diving and don't the spare equipment laying around, how much would a bare-bones MythTV-capable system really cost?
Sony rants are popular with the Slashdot crowd, but zero-profit movies have been the practice in Hollywood for a long, long time.
A journalist's job is to report on facts and their context. If they make no effort to examine both sides of a story, they are injecting their personal bias. That may work for advocacy journalism, but isn't reporting.
An example: In 1996, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and later, CNN, were absolutely certain that Richard Jewel, the man who reported the satchel to the police shortly before it exploded, was responsible for the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. They spent days gathering evidence of why he did it. They knew that they were right and so only gathered information that supported their contention. Their ratings went up as people watched the guilty come to justice. Only one problem: he didn't do it. They had crossed over from reporting what happened to supporting their contention, and someone who should have been considered a hero was pilloried.
This is what can happen when a reporter is sure that they know "the truth".
This isn't an issue because it doesn't bug them. Just like trailers in movies or the ads that some theaters show before the lights go down, it's just a minor annoyance.
- Not being able to fast forward (or skip) through the previews on all of the Disney movies they bought for their kids (therefore leading to their kids wanting all of the crap on the previews; and their kids complaining that the movie hasn't started yet).
Like commercials during live TV, its something that one has to sit through to get to what you're waiting to see. You can't skip through objectionable ads on live TV, so what's the difference?
- Not being able to copy the movie to their laptop hard drive before they go on a trip to prevent having to take that stack of DVDs through airport security and possibly damaging the disc in transit.
Once again, this isn't an issue with most people because most people (even the ones that have laptops in addition to their home systems) are never going to do it.
Most people don't make copies of DVDs, haven't had any problems playing them nor experienced anything other than mild annoyance in sitting through the stuff you get before you can see the movie, so discussing why DRM is bad is so completely out of context for them one might as well be discussing Ionic architecture in Aramaic. They haven't experienced problems nor know of anybody who has, so it just isn't important.
When the customers that they're potentially driving away are a very small part of the overall base, why should they care?
The DVDs that that majority of people buy will never be used anywhere but in their DVD player. It'll work just fine in their home computer too - all DRM breaks is the ability to make copies, something that most people don't do. If the DRM doesn't break their player in some way, which it generally doesn't, they will never know no even care that it is there.
And why should they? These people aren't stupid, it's just that the encoding that is put on the disks is completely transparent to them and largely affects their ability to play the disks in not at all.
You'd think that the advertisers would be overjoyed by with the idea. Fans who would typically not be watching their ads because the game wasn't available now could be reached. At no additional cost! Since most of the MLB's revenue comes from advertising (either directly or indirectly from the licensed stations), the advertisers would have a bunch of leverage...
Just the Green, Gold and Platinum cards. The Optima and Blue are just like regular credit cards and have spending limits. The difference is you have to pay the entire balance on the former (unless you used sign and travel) and can make monthly payments on the latter.
Best for whom? For the populace? With nothing of any interest to anybody and no money for infrastructure, how, exactly, are they going to survive? The only influence that most third-world nations have at all is the mineral or biological (trees, plants that are used for medicines, etc.) wealth that they control.
Without something of interest to someone, who would care? Companies looking for a cheap/slave labor pool to pick from, the traffickers that make money selling them and political movements looking for followers, that's who...
Answer: Anybody who relies on a communications system that cannot provide guaranteed end-to-end delivery for critical communications is a fool.
Face it. Most documentation is horrible. Between the unspoken assumption that the reader has at least as much technical experience as the writer and the general inability of most documentation writers to express themselves in written communication most first-time users wishing that they'd never picked up the FM in the first place.
Good Tech Writers know that they need to write to their audience - if the users are consciously avoiding reading documentation, maybe the problem isn't with the reader...
My first player, a Sony NW-MS11 Walkman, used OpenMG Jukebox (which later became SonicStage) to store and encode music in Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. You could rip CDs with a third-party application to play them on your PC, but it had to be encoded in ATRAC to be playable on the player.
1. They couldn't get the rights to AC/DC music
- or -
2. It just doesn't work without the kilt and and the thought of middle-age rockers jumping around them grossed out the development team.
Not that I had personal experience with this, of course. A friend of mine rented them.
Some potential witnesses fear retribution if it were known that they talked to the police, so if they knew that they would be "outed" on the Internet, they might be less likely to get involved. Fewer witnesses means a better chance of acquittal of the defendant.