Well, not officially. However, my 2 DTivos have HMO. While you can't get Tivo2Go, it sucks anyway. You get extraction, which doesn't suffer from idiot DRM and crippled speed and you don't have to buy a $50 program to use it! Note: I can extract a 1 hour program (about 1Gig) in about 10 minutes. Tivo2Go users report download times measured in HOURS.
This works on all RID based units EXCEPT the R10. To check if you have a RID unit, look on the back, it will have a RID number if it is. Older, non-RID units have an even eaiser hack procedure for 4.x/HMO.
If they do support it, they usually say so right on the box. For guaranteed support, get a Phillips DVP642. Available online and at Target, Walmart, etc.. I own 2 and they work wonderfully.
My 2 DTivos are very hacked up and this new ad thing won't affect me at all. My 30sec skip is enabled 100% of the time via binary patch and my software updates are disabled.
Setting aside the legal issues, I see this as the flipside of globalization. The big corps are thrilled to tout the benefits of globalization when they want to exploit third world workers for pennies on the dollar. Now they can get hit with the other side of the equation, we can choose to BUY things from other countries for less than we can here for the same reasons. Oh wait, now that it's THIER wallet being hit, it's "wrong". Poor, poor billionaires. I feel soooo bad for them.
I'm tired of the corps having thier cake and eating it too. And I consider myself libertarian, so that should tell you something. Corporations, like Copyrights, are SUPPOSED to be part of a balance of power between them and the rest of us. We are supposed to benefit as well. The balance has been lost.
I don't know what your setup is, but MFSFTP doesn't lock up my Tivos. I have an S1 DTivo and 2 S2 DTivos. I can use all of them while I extract. It slows down the UI, but it works fine. I use tytool a lot as well, and have great results from that. I can get over 3MB/s without making the box unusable. MRV transfers work great as well.
Obviously these are heavily hacked units, my S2s run 4.0.1b.;)
STOP in the middle of a busy street for no reason so they can put on their glasses.
I had an old guy slam the brakes to a FULL STOP in the MIDDLE lane of an Interstate (I-15 to be exact) because he missed his exit. This was 65-0 with tires locked up. I damn near rear-ended him and I had about 5 seconds between us. They car behined me almost hit me, etc.. It was damn near a chain-reaction accident. As it was, we had about 1/4 mile worth of cars backed up while he made a hard right to get on the off-ramp. I just about got out of my car to kick his ass for that one. Could have killed any number of people if everyone else on the road hadn't been paying attention.
Competency testing should be REQUIRED for ALL ages. I don't care if you're 16 or 90, if you can't drive safely, get the hell off the road! If we had cops watching more for this kind of shit and less sitting around eating donuts with thier radar on, perhaps the roads would get a little safer.
I've owned and used both. Your relative has some options here. The first is easy, just turn off the sounds. It's available in the configuration menu. I like them set low, but not off. Some have different prefferences. The other involves hacking, but you can make the 30-second skip the default. If you don't want to do that, a remote macro can make it simple to turn back on if you have a remote capable of that. The FF w/auto correction is also very fast once you get used it it. I agree that the 30sec skip should be a menu option at the very least. I wouldn't give either the edge on speed. On both my S1 and S2 DTivo units, 30sec skip is about the same speed as it was on my DishPVR boxes.
TiVo has a number of options that help it stand out from simple PVRs like the Dish boxes. Season Passes are smart, they can tell when a show skips a week, has special airings, and compensates for the stupid network tricks like 1 or 2 minute longer episodes. It can also skip re-runs and has MUCH better space management features. Suggestions are interesting, and wishlists are excellent. Some people don't use all these features, but many do. Add in HMO, and you've got a really nice box. HMO adds the ability to transfer shows between TiVos, show pictures and play music. With the JavaHMO server on your network, you can get weather info, movie showtimes, listen to shoutcast streams, and integrate with iTunes. That's just the stuff I use myself, there are many other options.
If you're willing to hack, you can do things like add a network adapter, add a web server so you can manage it remotely, extract digital video over the network, and serve RSS streams.
That's not to say there is no place for the simple PVR boxes like the Dish units. Some people want a simple, integrated box that they don't have to pay for. Dish and cable companies offer that.
I agree with your final point though, TiVo needs to stop sucking off the media companies and give thier customers what they want. This SDK is a nice idea, we'll see how well it works out.
Go to dealdatabase.com/forums and look for the 4.x on RID threads. It's not that hard to enable all the fun stuff on the DTV boxes. And you can get normal FTP access to the content that way, no need for Tivo2Go. I've got full HMO and video extraction with no limits on my SD-DVR80s.
All S2 units have USB2 ports. Google for mfs_ftp if you want the FTP support. I use it frequently to get shows off my Tivo, been doing it for years. Then you just need TyTools to process them into MPEG2 files.
FTA isn't very usefull. I think the poster wants something that can work with an access card. If I could buy a card that can do encrypted DTV or DishNet I would be all over it. I have yet to find one, though Adaptec had a prototype years ago. It would have to accept a standard access card and view any channels I'm paying for with the account that card is connected to. That would require support from the sat company, which they are not likely to give us.
"mount, ls, cp" - you call that easy? Sure, I can do that, but nobody else in my family could. Most of my friends can't do it either. The copy/paste method brings in probably 40% of people I deal with on a frequent basis.
Compare that to "plug it in, wait till iTunes says it's done, unplug". Add in things like smart playlists, and no player I have used comes close for ease of use and capability.
The fact is, people like you and I that CAN deal with this stuff are about 10% of the target market for a music player. If someone wants to make an "iPod killer" they NEED this. Include USB-Storage and let people use copy/paste or mount/ls/cp if they WANT to, but unless it comes with FREE ($) software that can do what iTunes + iPod can do, it won't win. Add in iTMS, which many people love, and Apple is where it's at.
For those people that don't like the ease of use iTunes gives you, just use ephPod or one of the other simple transfer apps. Or even iTunes in manual mode. Even though I am perfectly capable of managing my library by myself, I now let iTunes do it. Why? Because I have better things to do.
I agree. I would pay close to $1/song, if and only if I were to receive it in an open, lossless, non-DRMed format. FLAC would do nicely. I will also pay for non-DRMed MP3 files in LAME-Standard for significantly less, say $.50/song. I will NOT pay for music in ANY DRM format.
To get me to pay for said files, I require a well designed website, accessable with standard HTTPS in FireFox on ANY platform from ANY country with a transfer rate of at least 100KBytes/sec (~1Mbit/sec). iTMS on steroids, basicly. I would also accept BitTorrent style transfers, so long as the music company site seeded it at said transfer rate. Bonus points for supporting OGG, AAC, and WMA. More bonus points for remembering my license so I can re-download for a small fee (.10/song maybe? Have to cover bandwidth charges) should I lose my copy.
If they do this, I will cease all P2P activity, and all offshore site activity and use thier music services. Same goes for TV, Movies, etc.. The prices would have to be higher for those given the larger bandwidth required.
I'm willing to pay, if I get what I want. For example, I pay a certain Russian website (always mentioned on/.) for music these days because it's eaiser and faster than messing with P2P networks. The price is reasonable, no DRM, and the music sounds good. I'd pay more than I pay the Russians, but I want to see what I mentioned above with the entire back catalog to about 1970 to start with. Completing the back catalog at about a decade per year should be reasonable. For new stuff, I'd settle for it coming available something like 1 week after store release on CD.
You don't *HAVE* to install the firmware upgrade. Hell, there isn't even one to install for my 15GB iPod. The whole thing is stupid and nothing more than a corporate pissing match. They should get together and come up with something that will work and they can both get something from. Instead they point fingers and lay blame.
Real's format was never supported by the iPod officially. To re-use your car analogy, it's more like buying a Focus and being upset that it doesn't run on Jim Bob's Water (Jim Bob *SAID* it works!). Even if it seemed to before. Ford never said it would, so if it did for a while, that's a happy coincidence. But they shouldn't be forced to support it.
The difference is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, Apple is not. Apple *MAY* be the "market leader", you may even argue that they are a monopolist. But the fact remains that they have not been convicted in a court of law. I would think you would have your work cut out for you if you tried to change that. The iPod may be a leader, but I doubt they have even 50% of the market. iTMS is hardly in a better situation.
While I think it's damned stupid for Apple not to play DRMed Real and WMA files, it's thier business and they can do whatever they want to it. Hell, they could probably cross-license the patents and get permission for free! They would have to write the code, but it would open up whole market segments. I'm not an MBA though, so maybe there is a good reason Apple chooses not to go this route.
I see this as no different than Sony not supporting MP3 on thier players. It's stupid, but it's thier right to be stupid if they want to. IMO, Apple should add Real, WMA, OGG and FLAC at the very least, with DRM support where possible. I don't like DRM, but I can just choose to buy music that doesn't have it. Some people like the various music stores, and if it sells iPods, I would think it would be a win.
Disclaimer: I own a 15GB iPod, and I think it's a wonderfull device. I don't own stock in Apple or any other company mentioned in this post.
And in the real world, Congress would fritter all the money away and little to none of it would go to the programs you suggest funding. For a real-life example of how this would happen, see Social Security.
On top of that, some of us don't have a choice. To get to work, I *MUST* drive. There is no public transport that will work, and I don't have any coworkers close enough to carpool. I plan to buy a Prius to help out some with the gas issue, and my motorcycle is almost up and running. My current car gets about 38MPG (Geo Prizm). Yes, I have explored other employment, but with the economy down, I have to go where the work is. Nor can I sell my house, for the same reason.
As for the CF bulbs, have they fixed the flicker problem yet? *EVERY* one I have seen used flickers. Yes, I can see it, even when I don't know it's a CF bulb. I have the lights disabled over my desk at work because of this. It gives me a massive headache after a few hours. I will not even consider replacing bulbs in my house until I see this problem fixed.
Does your hosting company have the submission port (587) open? If so, you might be able to get around your ISP port 25 blocks.
The reality of spam and network abuse means that we are going to have to move to something more locked down. SPF and YDK give us this without ditching SMTP. It does mess some people up, but there are existing soultions for all those problems. The submission port is one of those. There are also SMTP-Auth and POP-before-SMTP. I also have a webmail service running for my home email. That helps me with the port blocks and proxy server issues when roaming. There are numerous options for all the complaints I see about SPF and YDK, but it requrires people to change how they do things. Yeah, it sucks. But unless you want to give email to the spammers, it has to be done.
We don't know we're destroying the world. We THINK we MIGHT be causing a problem, but can't prove it. Even if we KNEW we were, a religous nut would just say that God wouldn't let us do it if he didn't want it done.
Using religion in an argument is worthless. The zealot will just come up with some loony process by which it's OK to do whatever it is they want to do.
Solar, wind and tidal CAN'T SUPPLY ENOUGH POWER. That's reality, today. It may change in the future, but geeks are, by deffinition, scientists. We care about what technology can do TODAY. Not some pie-in-the-sky future technology that doesn't even exist in a LAB yet.
OK, not all of us, but you get the point. Nuclear reactors can supply all the world's energy needs TODAY. We don't need new tech for this, it works NOW. But since people are ignorant, we continure to spew junk into the air instead. Do you realize that a coal plant puts more radiation into the air than any nuclear plant?
Waste: recycle the stuff. If it's still radioactive, there's still energy there. We have some idea how to reprocess it, but it makes plutonium. So what? react that too and make power. There will still be some waste, but we are allready building facilities to store it.
Meltdown: Let's see, there have been, what, 2 of them? Both based on ancient tech, and likely caused by human error. One didn't cause any noticable problem. The other, Chrenobyl, killed less than 100 and was caused by idiots doing stuff the nuclear scientists TOLD THEM NOT TO DO!! It was also an error prone design to begin with. Modern reactors are damned near impossible to melt down. Not to mention, even a meltdown isn't a "timebomb", there is no explosion. A nuclear bomb requires some very special circumstances to do what it does. Circumstances that don't exist in a reactor core.
Like the Republican Party with gay marriage or abortion rights? And what exactly is wrong with the states having the right to regulate it? I don't see any clause in the 2nd amendment that says you have the right to carry a concealed weapon.
Exactly. The Republicans are every bit as bad, and as someone else pointed out, it just depends on which parts of the Constitution you wish to ignore.
As for your point on concealed weapons.. The Constitution does not stipulate HOW you may "keep and bear arms". It also specificly states that the government is not to infringe that right. Is it OK for a state government to do things that the federal Constitution prohibits? Maybe, but I would think long and hard about that, with ANY of the clauses, not just the 2nd amendment. After all, if one of them is fair game, what's to stop them when one you like gets gutted?
As you seem to not like concealed carry, would be you happier with open carry? There are good reasons for concealed carry. Many people have an irrational fear of guns. Concealed carry allows those of us who wish to protect ourselves the ability to do so without causing a panic in the general population. I see this as a good thing.
To be fair, I'll state my bias. I hold a concealed carry permit. I also live in a state that alows open carry, though it's frowned upon for the panic reason above. That means that I can, legally, strap on an old-west style gun belt and walk the streets downtown. Which would you preffer?
Which is one of the many reasons I keep my ham radio license active and a 2M transciever. If I need help and everything is out, I can get it. Well, ask for it anyway.;)
I don't keep a POTS line, I never used it. Cell phone, satelite TV, wireless internet.
The author was trying to get back to where he stopped listening to an audiobook file. As an audiobook listener, I can understand where he is coming from. Hell, the ones I download from Audible.com come in 6 hour chunks. You don't want to skip it, because there is still a fair bit to listen to at the end.
The iPod isn't perfect for audiobooks either. I can FF *VERY* quickly. But the bookmarks leave much to be desired. I sometimes have issues with it forgeting where I was. Apparently, the work-around is to play something else and when I come back to that file, it remembers. Annoying. It should be able to save when I power down.
I think the op is reffering to the lusers that only know about the software at Best Buy and such. Yes, we the techogeeks know about Firefox and Google toolbar. We also know about free or low cost alternatives to everything mentioned in that post. The point is, the average computer user does not, and does not always have one of us around to help them. Some of them don't want to replace what they know or what "everyone else uses" with something that is cheap or free and works just as well for what they need.
The main point of the op still stands though. The primary cause of software copyright infringment is not the high cost of hardware as Balmer would have us believe. It's the high cost of SOFTWARE that's the problem. As others have pointed out allready, when the OS costs more than the machine that runs it, people start to feel the pain. Dropping the computer cost to $100 and still expecting people to pay $200 for XP is ridiculous. It won't happen. People will get a copy from someone. Microsoft needs to understand that people aren't willing to pay 2x thier computer cost for the OS. People probably won't pay 50% either. It doesn't make copying the software the right thing to do. But if you make the right thing to do less painfull, more people will do it.
I don't know about everyone else here, but I use part of my iPod storage space to move data files between computers. On my 15GB model, there's usually about 5GB of data files along with another 5GB or so of music content. Mostly MP3s I ripped from my CD collection. I'd probably tote more data around if I had a bigger iPod. I really like the removable HD part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not officially. However, my 2 DTivos have HMO. While you can't get Tivo2Go, it sucks anyway. You get extraction, which doesn't suffer from idiot DRM and crippled speed and you don't have to buy a $50 program to use it! Note: I can extract a 1 hour program (about 1Gig) in about 10 minutes. Tivo2Go users report download times measured in HOURS.
This works on all RID based units EXCEPT the R10. To check if you have a RID unit, look on the back, it will have a RID number if it is. Older, non-RID units have an even eaiser hack procedure for 4.x/HMO.
http://www.dellanave.com/projects/tivo/4xrid.html
If they do support it, they usually say so right on the box. For guaranteed support, get a Phillips DVP642. Available online and at Target, Walmart, etc.. I own 2 and they work wonderfully.
My 2 DTivos are very hacked up and this new ad thing won't affect me at all. My 30sec skip is enabled 100% of the time via binary patch and my software updates are disabled.
Setting aside the legal issues, I see this as the flipside of globalization. The big corps are thrilled to tout the benefits of globalization when they want to exploit third world workers for pennies on the dollar. Now they can get hit with the other side of the equation, we can choose to BUY things from other countries for less than we can here for the same reasons. Oh wait, now that it's THIER wallet being hit, it's "wrong". Poor, poor billionaires. I feel soooo bad for them.
I'm tired of the corps having thier cake and eating it too. And I consider myself libertarian, so that should tell you something. Corporations, like Copyrights, are SUPPOSED to be part of a balance of power between them and the rest of us. We are supposed to benefit as well. The balance has been lost.
I don't know what your setup is, but MFSFTP doesn't lock up my Tivos. I have an S1 DTivo and 2 S2 DTivos. I can use all of them while I extract. It slows down the UI, but it works fine. I use tytool a lot as well, and have great results from that. I can get over 3MB/s without making the box unusable. MRV transfers work great as well.
;)
Obviously these are heavily hacked units, my S2s run 4.0.1b.
I had an old guy slam the brakes to a FULL STOP in the MIDDLE lane of an Interstate (I-15 to be exact) because he missed his exit. This was 65-0 with tires locked up. I damn near rear-ended him and I had about 5 seconds between us. They car behined me almost hit me, etc.. It was damn near a chain-reaction accident. As it was, we had about 1/4 mile worth of cars backed up while he made a hard right to get on the off-ramp. I just about got out of my car to kick his ass for that one. Could have killed any number of people if everyone else on the road hadn't been paying attention.
Competency testing should be REQUIRED for ALL ages. I don't care if you're 16 or 90, if you can't drive safely, get the hell off the road! If we had cops watching more for this kind of shit and less sitting around eating donuts with thier radar on, perhaps the roads would get a little safer.
You're thinking of BYU. Believe me, the UofU knows all about alcohol!
I've owned and used both. Your relative has some options here. The first is easy, just turn off the sounds. It's available in the configuration menu. I like them set low, but not off. Some have different prefferences. The other involves hacking, but you can make the 30-second skip the default. If you don't want to do that, a remote macro can make it simple to turn back on if you have a remote capable of that. The FF w/auto correction is also very fast once you get used it it. I agree that the 30sec skip should be a menu option at the very least. I wouldn't give either the edge on speed. On both my S1 and S2 DTivo units, 30sec skip is about the same speed as it was on my DishPVR boxes.
TiVo has a number of options that help it stand out from simple PVRs like the Dish boxes. Season Passes are smart, they can tell when a show skips a week, has special airings, and compensates for the stupid network tricks like 1 or 2 minute longer episodes. It can also skip re-runs and has MUCH better space management features. Suggestions are interesting, and wishlists are excellent. Some people don't use all these features, but many do. Add in HMO, and you've got a really nice box. HMO adds the ability to transfer shows between TiVos, show pictures and play music. With the JavaHMO server on your network, you can get weather info, movie showtimes, listen to shoutcast streams, and integrate with iTunes. That's just the stuff I use myself, there are many other options.
If you're willing to hack, you can do things like add a network adapter, add a web server so you can manage it remotely, extract digital video over the network, and serve RSS streams.
That's not to say there is no place for the simple PVR boxes like the Dish units. Some people want a simple, integrated box that they don't have to pay for. Dish and cable companies offer that.
I agree with your final point though, TiVo needs to stop sucking off the media companies and give thier customers what they want. This SDK is a nice idea, we'll see how well it works out.
Go to dealdatabase.com/forums and look for the 4.x on RID threads. It's not that hard to enable all the fun stuff on the DTV boxes. And you can get normal FTP access to the content that way, no need for Tivo2Go. I've got full HMO and video extraction with no limits on my SD-DVR80s.
All S2 units have USB2 ports. Google for mfs_ftp if you want the FTP support. I use it frequently to get shows off my Tivo, been doing it for years. Then you just need TyTools to process them into MPEG2 files.
FTA isn't very usefull. I think the poster wants something that can work with an access card. If I could buy a card that can do encrypted DTV or DishNet I would be all over it. I have yet to find one, though Adaptec had a prototype years ago. It would have to accept a standard access card and view any channels I'm paying for with the account that card is connected to. That would require support from the sat company, which they are not likely to give us.
Was that your initial reaction to color screens on cell phones? Got one yet?
What the hell for, and no.
ephPod.
"mount, ls, cp" - you call that easy? Sure, I can do that, but nobody else in my family could. Most of my friends can't do it either. The copy/paste method brings in probably 40% of people I deal with on a frequent basis.
Compare that to "plug it in, wait till iTunes says it's done, unplug". Add in things like smart playlists, and no player I have used comes close for ease of use and capability.
The fact is, people like you and I that CAN deal with this stuff are about 10% of the target market for a music player. If someone wants to make an "iPod killer" they NEED this. Include USB-Storage and let people use copy/paste or mount/ls/cp if they WANT to, but unless it comes with FREE ($) software that can do what iTunes + iPod can do, it won't win. Add in iTMS, which many people love, and Apple is where it's at.
For those people that don't like the ease of use iTunes gives you, just use ephPod or one of the other simple transfer apps. Or even iTunes in manual mode. Even though I am perfectly capable of managing my library by myself, I now let iTunes do it. Why? Because I have better things to do.
I agree. I would pay close to $1/song, if and only if I were to receive it in an open, lossless, non-DRMed format. FLAC would do nicely. I will also pay for non-DRMed MP3 files in LAME-Standard for significantly less, say $.50/song. I will NOT pay for music in ANY DRM format.
/.) for music these days because it's eaiser and faster than messing with P2P networks. The price is reasonable, no DRM, and the music sounds good. I'd pay more than I pay the Russians, but I want to see what I mentioned above with the entire back catalog to about 1970 to start with. Completing the back catalog at about a decade per year should be reasonable. For new stuff, I'd settle for it coming available something like 1 week after store release on CD.
To get me to pay for said files, I require a well designed website, accessable with standard HTTPS in FireFox on ANY platform from ANY country with a transfer rate of at least 100KBytes/sec (~1Mbit/sec). iTMS on steroids, basicly. I would also accept BitTorrent style transfers, so long as the music company site seeded it at said transfer rate. Bonus points for supporting OGG, AAC, and WMA. More bonus points for remembering my license so I can re-download for a small fee (.10/song maybe? Have to cover bandwidth charges) should I lose my copy.
If they do this, I will cease all P2P activity, and all offshore site activity and use thier music services. Same goes for TV, Movies, etc.. The prices would have to be higher for those given the larger bandwidth required.
I'm willing to pay, if I get what I want. For example, I pay a certain Russian website (always mentioned on
You don't *HAVE* to install the firmware upgrade. Hell, there isn't even one to install for my 15GB iPod. The whole thing is stupid and nothing more than a corporate pissing match. They should get together and come up with something that will work and they can both get something from. Instead they point fingers and lay blame.
Real's format was never supported by the iPod officially. To re-use your car analogy, it's more like buying a Focus and being upset that it doesn't run on Jim Bob's Water (Jim Bob *SAID* it works!). Even if it seemed to before. Ford never said it would, so if it did for a while, that's a happy coincidence. But they shouldn't be forced to support it.
The difference is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, Apple is not. Apple *MAY* be the "market leader", you may even argue that they are a monopolist. But the fact remains that they have not been convicted in a court of law. I would think you would have your work cut out for you if you tried to change that. The iPod may be a leader, but I doubt they have even 50% of the market. iTMS is hardly in a better situation.
While I think it's damned stupid for Apple not to play DRMed Real and WMA files, it's thier business and they can do whatever they want to it. Hell, they could probably cross-license the patents and get permission for free! They would have to write the code, but it would open up whole market segments. I'm not an MBA though, so maybe there is a good reason Apple chooses not to go this route.
I see this as no different than Sony not supporting MP3 on thier players. It's stupid, but it's thier right to be stupid if they want to. IMO, Apple should add Real, WMA, OGG and FLAC at the very least, with DRM support where possible. I don't like DRM, but I can just choose to buy music that doesn't have it. Some people like the various music stores, and if it sells iPods, I would think it would be a win.
Disclaimer: I own a 15GB iPod, and I think it's a wonderfull device. I don't own stock in Apple or any other company mentioned in this post.
And in the real world, Congress would fritter all the money away and little to none of it would go to the programs you suggest funding. For a real-life example of how this would happen, see Social Security.
On top of that, some of us don't have a choice. To get to work, I *MUST* drive. There is no public transport that will work, and I don't have any coworkers close enough to carpool. I plan to buy a Prius to help out some with the gas issue, and my motorcycle is almost up and running. My current car gets about 38MPG (Geo Prizm). Yes, I have explored other employment, but with the economy down, I have to go where the work is. Nor can I sell my house, for the same reason.
As for the CF bulbs, have they fixed the flicker problem yet? *EVERY* one I have seen used flickers. Yes, I can see it, even when I don't know it's a CF bulb. I have the lights disabled over my desk at work because of this. It gives me a massive headache after a few hours. I will not even consider replacing bulbs in my house until I see this problem fixed.
Does your hosting company have the submission port (587) open? If so, you might be able to get around your ISP port 25 blocks.
The reality of spam and network abuse means that we are going to have to move to something more locked down. SPF and YDK give us this without ditching SMTP. It does mess some people up, but there are existing soultions for all those problems. The submission port is one of those. There are also SMTP-Auth and POP-before-SMTP. I also have a webmail service running for my home email. That helps me with the port blocks and proxy server issues when roaming. There are numerous options for all the complaints I see about SPF and YDK, but it requrires people to change how they do things. Yeah, it sucks. But unless you want to give email to the spammers, it has to be done.
We don't know we're destroying the world. We THINK we MIGHT be causing a problem, but can't prove it. Even if we KNEW we were, a religous nut would just say that God wouldn't let us do it if he didn't want it done.
Using religion in an argument is worthless. The zealot will just come up with some loony process by which it's OK to do whatever it is they want to do.
Solar, wind and tidal CAN'T SUPPLY ENOUGH POWER. That's reality, today. It may change in the future, but geeks are, by deffinition, scientists. We care about what technology can do TODAY. Not some pie-in-the-sky future technology that doesn't even exist in a LAB yet.
OK, not all of us, but you get the point. Nuclear reactors can supply all the world's energy needs TODAY. We don't need new tech for this, it works NOW. But since people are ignorant, we continure to spew junk into the air instead. Do you realize that a coal plant puts more radiation into the air than any nuclear plant?
Waste: recycle the stuff. If it's still radioactive, there's still energy there. We have some idea how to reprocess it, but it makes plutonium. So what? react that too and make power. There will still be some waste, but we are allready building facilities to store it.
Meltdown: Let's see, there have been, what, 2 of them? Both based on ancient tech, and likely caused by human error. One didn't cause any noticable problem. The other, Chrenobyl, killed less than 100 and was caused by idiots doing stuff the nuclear scientists TOLD THEM NOT TO DO!! It was also an error prone design to begin with. Modern reactors are damned near impossible to melt down. Not to mention, even a meltdown isn't a "timebomb", there is no explosion. A nuclear bomb requires some very special circumstances to do what it does. Circumstances that don't exist in a reactor core.
Exactly. The Republicans are every bit as bad, and as someone else pointed out, it just depends on which parts of the Constitution you wish to ignore.
As for your point on concealed weapons.. The Constitution does not stipulate HOW you may "keep and bear arms". It also specificly states that the government is not to infringe that right. Is it OK for a state government to do things that the federal Constitution prohibits? Maybe, but I would think long and hard about that, with ANY of the clauses, not just the 2nd amendment. After all, if one of them is fair game, what's to stop them when one you like gets gutted?
As you seem to not like concealed carry, would be you happier with open carry? There are good reasons for concealed carry. Many people have an irrational fear of guns. Concealed carry allows those of us who wish to protect ourselves the ability to do so without causing a panic in the general population. I see this as a good thing.
To be fair, I'll state my bias. I hold a concealed carry permit. I also live in a state that alows open carry, though it's frowned upon for the panic reason above. That means that I can, legally, strap on an old-west style gun belt and walk the streets downtown. Which would you preffer?
Which is one of the many reasons I keep my ham radio license active and a 2M transciever. If I need help and everything is out, I can get it. Well, ask for it anyway. ;)
I don't keep a POTS line, I never used it. Cell phone, satelite TV, wireless internet.
The author was trying to get back to where he stopped listening to an audiobook file. As an audiobook listener, I can understand where he is coming from. Hell, the ones I download from Audible.com come in 6 hour chunks. You don't want to skip it, because there is still a fair bit to listen to at the end.
The iPod isn't perfect for audiobooks either. I can FF *VERY* quickly. But the bookmarks leave much to be desired. I sometimes have issues with it forgeting where I was. Apparently, the work-around is to play something else and when I come back to that file, it remembers. Annoying. It should be able to save when I power down.
I think the op is reffering to the lusers that only know about the software at Best Buy and such. Yes, we the techogeeks know about Firefox and Google toolbar. We also know about free or low cost alternatives to everything mentioned in that post. The point is, the average computer user does not, and does not always have one of us around to help them. Some of them don't want to replace what they know or what "everyone else uses" with something that is cheap or free and works just as well for what they need.
The main point of the op still stands though. The primary cause of software copyright infringment is not the high cost of hardware as Balmer would have us believe. It's the high cost of SOFTWARE that's the problem. As others have pointed out allready, when the OS costs more than the machine that runs it, people start to feel the pain. Dropping the computer cost to $100 and still expecting people to pay $200 for XP is ridiculous. It won't happen. People will get a copy from someone. Microsoft needs to understand that people aren't willing to pay 2x thier computer cost for the OS. People probably won't pay 50% either. It doesn't make copying the software the right thing to do. But if you make the right thing to do less painfull, more people will do it.
I don't know about everyone else here, but I use part of my iPod storage space to move data files between computers. On my 15GB model, there's usually about 5GB of data files along with another 5GB or so of music content. Mostly MP3s I ripped from my CD collection. I'd probably tote more data around if I had a bigger iPod. I really like the removable HD part of it.