...channel changing when my wife walks in the room...at least put a biometric device on the remote. So when your wife walked into the room the TV channel would still change?
Every time I was on it traffic was flowing at 85-90 MPH max. Sometimes it is above 100 MPH in the left hand lane but there are at least two lanes everywhere and the right lanes are generally moving at approximately US highway speed limits. However 100 MPH is not reasonable on a lot of US highways.
That's what people my age (mid 20s) are doing instead of having kids like my parents did; they get a dog and they treat it like a kid. I don't know if it is some sort of self-filtering mechanism a la "if we can handle a dog, then maybe we can have a kid" or, more likely, they simply don't want kids at this stage. Dogs are cheaper and less annoying.
I think he means not allowing patents that have no tangible (physical or virtual) counterpart. So someone couldn't patent essentially the words "a device that predicts heart attacks" without the physical device to back it up. That's what things like the 1-click are, thought without implementation. They didn't patent the source code to make it work, just the idea that they could implement it. Any jackass could say "we need a device that predicts heart attacks" but everyone would think it ridiculous for getting a patent for that statement alone, but that's what business method patents are.
That's my problem with software patents as well. They all say "a program that does X" without actually including the code to do it. Patents exist to put things into the public domain and give limited time protection and those used for software don't contribute to the common good. They only spell out the idea. If software creators were forced to include the code to do what they want to patent I'd be more agreeable to it, just like including a schematic for a machine.
That's because airlines don't actually enforce the carry-on size limitation. People will get away with whatever they can. If they started making people check stuff that is outside the limitation, in 3-6 months it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
I regularly download 500+MB of data just to update my link to the drawing database. Actually pulling things from it instead of my local cache requires more. The less my company has me sit and wait for drawings to load the better for them so I'm sure they'll want this. At home? Almost useless for me. I don't even have GbE and I get along just fine. But we're talking about being way past the saturation point of a SATA bus. We'll have to get better in that area first.
My $350 HTPC can upscale a DVD marvelously at 720p (my TV resolution) and I can't imagine the need for BD to get approximately the same picture (due to downscaling). At 1080p it might make a difference since software would be scaling to ~5x the resolution so your dynamic image processing might take over there. But you're still limited by the display. Besides, you only notice the picture sucks if you set less than ~5ft away;)
They should have pushed the combo discs harder via advertising. I think people would have taken to the idea that they could buy a combo disc (for the same price as a standard HD DVD, eat a little profit there guys) and use it in their DVD player right now and in their HD DVD player when they were cheap enough (like now). But few people knew about them or what they were and they were rarely on the shelves. They made several marketing errors with the format (no v2 xbox360 with HD DVD built in being another) and chose to try to sell it on the definition alone, which wasn't a strength over the BD setup. No region encoding? Awesome.
I really only want documentaries in HD (planet earth) so I don't much care about HD yet and I'm saddened that I'll have to buy some crippled format if I ever want the content. But for me, Blu Ray = Vista, I'll skip it if I can.
And I'll try to convince others of the same. Mrs. "Change Change Change" doesn't vote on something that actually changes the status quo. I'm not surprised. Not that her single vote would have tipped the scales, with so many Democrats voting against it, but if she's not willing to stand up to them now, how is it going to be as President?
I checked the site and both of the senators in my state voted for it so they picked up some "cred" with me. Check on your senators people!
I would think Sony (and others) could do it just like they do for the PSP: Put the latest firmware required to play that disc specifically on that disc. Update and done. I don't know about checking keys and whatnot, but if the player itself needed an update, it could easily be done that way. I do agree that the amount of updates for blu ray and making the older players obsolete already due to changing spec is highly annoying. Dear Blu Ray: People don't want to waste hundreds of dollars, crazy, I know...
you can shut the tap off and you get to pay less. ISPs are still going to sell you a fixed amount (just like cell phones) except that they're not going to roll anything over (they can't roll over bandwidth). So the vast majority of people will still be paying for more than they use (and not less per month for it), this is simply justification to charge some users more than the current rate.
What they're trying to do have tiers for both speed and transfer amount, which is the insane part. Imagine if your water company said you could have X gallons of water per month but only through a 1/4" pipe. If you wanted to pay extra, they could upgrade that pipe to a 1/2" and if you go over X gallons, it is this much more per gallon...everyone would be furious.
ISPs can't reallocate bandwidth the way utilities can allocate natural resources. They have a certain amount of bandwidth whether it is being used or not. They won't even guarantee a minimum amount of bandwidth you will have, just a maximum that you can theoretically hit (other user usage notwithstanding). It is just fancy marketing to try to disguise their actual capacity per user. I mean, why upgrade the infrastructure when you can just try to sway the masses into charging a few users more for trying to use what they pay for?
they're pushing one format (Blu-Ray) and it seems to be doing well enough, why not try another? I can't believe anyone in a company would think limiting the control over transfers would be a good idea, but it is sony so if it was going to come from anywhere, that would be the place.
What leverage do they have with their technology (other than bandwidth) to compete in this arena? The average person isn't going to notice a difference of 80 Mbps (theoretical maximum difference) when they're transferring a few pictures from the digital camera. They will notice the difference between having to buy and have a base plugged into their PCs where they have to drop everything to get it to transfer versus setting it on the desk somewhere and having it hook up to the PC automatically.
I personally liked minidiscs for their durability, portability (even better than tape) and rewritability relative to burned CDs.
It isn't an inalienable right to drive your car, so we outsource the transportation fuel production. Guess what? Gas is friggin expensive and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it but suck it up and pay the price. If you outsource production, who benefits? Not that poor farmer in Bolivia or someone in backwoods China. They still get paid almost nothing for the work they do because their local economies don't require a large wage to live comfortably. Are the common people in Iraq and Kuwait living high on the hog thanks to our lust for gas? No, the people taking advantage of the income disparities are the board members and business owners. Not our business owners, theirs.
So we outsource production and we end up a) being unable to adequately supply ourselves in emergencies/bad production years, b)become totally reliant on someone else to produce things that keep us alive and c) make someone outside our country rich for it. Do you think that it won't just shift to some other corporation (or one of ours) taking advantage of farmers somewhere else?
I'll agree that the current system is the best, but it does help farmers and local economies. I grew up in one of those. It isn't about heritage, it is about self reliance. Everyone is screaming that we need to wean ourselves off foreign oil and you want to sell out our farmers instead? No thanks. I don't have much faith in the free market when corporations get to do almost whatever they want to try to control the situation.
Seriously, mod this person up. Every time I've been through the airport, even on the holidays, there have been half the security lines open, MAX. Airports know EXACTLY how many people are coming through, how can they not forecast this demand? Oh, right, they're too cheap.
I just want some of those "fines" to actually go back to the people who were the target of this kind of behavior for once instead of just rolling it into the FCC budget. It seems like a class action lawsuit is the only way to get any compensation in this country...
If they had been required to send a notice saying "hey, we're going to do X, if you don't like it you're free to opt out of your contract (no penalty), if you don't do anything we assume you're ok with it" then it wouldn't have been a big deal. I happened to be changing apartments at the time and heard about this, so I decided not to take my comcast service with me. Haven't really noticed a difference in performance with my 7mbit DSL except for VPN, which seems slightly less responsive. And I'm saving myself ~$10 a month. Vote with your dollars/feet people.
That would be an airplane, and anyone within a couple hundred yards of an anti-missile laser destroying an ICBM has bigger problems than retinal damage. Never mind that they wouldn't be in direct line-of-fire to the laser, which is the only way you can get any eye damage from lasers.
Considering I know my mother has the skill to register on Wikipedia and edit an entry but I'm absolutely certain she has no idea what an IP is. The point is, there are these types of people everywhere and this happening is totally conceivable.
They suck for cars. Period. More efficient than gas, sure. But:
1. Requires a complete infrastructure rework, just like electric would. 2. Still lower efficiency. 3. Harder to implement in a vehicle, requiring much more exotic material for efficient energy storage vs. battery tech we already have.
I just want an electric car. Ok, actually, I want an affordable (sub-40k) Tesla Roadster-style car, but with four seats and a trunk.
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...channel changing when my wife walks in the room...at least put a biometric device on the remote.So when your wife walked into the room the TV channel would still change?
Every time I was on it traffic was flowing at 85-90 MPH max. Sometimes it is above 100 MPH in the left hand lane but there are at least two lanes everywhere and the right lanes are generally moving at approximately US highway speed limits. However 100 MPH is not reasonable on a lot of US highways.
We like to call this advanced space-pizza "Hot Pockets."
That's what people my age (mid 20s) are doing instead of having kids like my parents did; they get a dog and they treat it like a kid. I don't know if it is some sort of self-filtering mechanism a la "if we can handle a dog, then maybe we can have a kid" or, more likely, they simply don't want kids at this stage. Dogs are cheaper and less annoying.
I think he means not allowing patents that have no tangible (physical or virtual) counterpart. So someone couldn't patent essentially the words "a device that predicts heart attacks" without the physical device to back it up. That's what things like the 1-click are, thought without implementation. They didn't patent the source code to make it work, just the idea that they could implement it. Any jackass could say "we need a device that predicts heart attacks" but everyone would think it ridiculous for getting a patent for that statement alone, but that's what business method patents are.
That's my problem with software patents as well. They all say "a program that does X" without actually including the code to do it. Patents exist to put things into the public domain and give limited time protection and those used for software don't contribute to the common good. They only spell out the idea. If software creators were forced to include the code to do what they want to patent I'd be more agreeable to it, just like including a schematic for a machine.
That's because airlines don't actually enforce the carry-on size limitation. People will get away with whatever they can. If they started making people check stuff that is outside the limitation, in 3-6 months it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
I regularly download 500+MB of data just to update my link to the drawing database. Actually pulling things from it instead of my local cache requires more. The less my company has me sit and wait for drawings to load the better for them so I'm sure they'll want this. At home? Almost useless for me. I don't even have GbE and I get along just fine. But we're talking about being way past the saturation point of a SATA bus. We'll have to get better in that area first.
My $350 HTPC can upscale a DVD marvelously at 720p (my TV resolution) and I can't imagine the need for BD to get approximately the same picture (due to downscaling). At 1080p it might make a difference since software would be scaling to ~5x the resolution so your dynamic image processing might take over there. But you're still limited by the display. Besides, you only notice the picture sucks if you set less than ~5ft away ;)
They should have pushed the combo discs harder via advertising. I think people would have taken to the idea that they could buy a combo disc (for the same price as a standard HD DVD, eat a little profit there guys) and use it in their DVD player right now and in their HD DVD player when they were cheap enough (like now). But few people knew about them or what they were and they were rarely on the shelves. They made several marketing errors with the format (no v2 xbox360 with HD DVD built in being another) and chose to try to sell it on the definition alone, which wasn't a strength over the BD setup. No region encoding? Awesome.
I really only want documentaries in HD (planet earth) so I don't much care about HD yet and I'm saddened that I'll have to buy some crippled format if I ever want the content. But for me, Blu Ray = Vista, I'll skip it if I can.
And I'll try to convince others of the same. Mrs. "Change Change Change" doesn't vote on something that actually changes the status quo. I'm not surprised. Not that her single vote would have tipped the scales, with so many Democrats voting against it, but if she's not willing to stand up to them now, how is it going to be as President?
I checked the site and both of the senators in my state voted for it so they picked up some "cred" with me. Check on your senators people!
It is Omicron Persei 8!
Fine! I'll make my own Patent Office, with blackjack, and hookers!
I would think Sony (and others) could do it just like they do for the PSP: Put the latest firmware required to play that disc specifically on that disc. Update and done. I don't know about checking keys and whatnot, but if the player itself needed an update, it could easily be done that way. I do agree that the amount of updates for blu ray and making the older players obsolete already due to changing spec is highly annoying. Dear Blu Ray: People don't want to waste hundreds of dollars, crazy, I know...
you can shut the tap off and you get to pay less. ISPs are still going to sell you a fixed amount (just like cell phones) except that they're not going to roll anything over (they can't roll over bandwidth). So the vast majority of people will still be paying for more than they use (and not less per month for it), this is simply justification to charge some users more than the current rate.
What they're trying to do have tiers for both speed and transfer amount, which is the insane part. Imagine if your water company said you could have X gallons of water per month but only through a 1/4" pipe. If you wanted to pay extra, they could upgrade that pipe to a 1/2" and if you go over X gallons, it is this much more per gallon...everyone would be furious.
ISPs can't reallocate bandwidth the way utilities can allocate natural resources. They have a certain amount of bandwidth whether it is being used or not. They won't even guarantee a minimum amount of bandwidth you will have, just a maximum that you can theoretically hit (other user usage notwithstanding). It is just fancy marketing to try to disguise their actual capacity per user. I mean, why upgrade the infrastructure when you can just try to sway the masses into charging a few users more for trying to use what they pay for?
they're pushing one format (Blu-Ray) and it seems to be doing well enough, why not try another? I can't believe anyone in a company would think limiting the control over transfers would be a good idea, but it is sony so if it was going to come from anywhere, that would be the place.
What leverage do they have with their technology (other than bandwidth) to compete in this arena? The average person isn't going to notice a difference of 80 Mbps (theoretical maximum difference) when they're transferring a few pictures from the digital camera. They will notice the difference between having to buy and have a base plugged into their PCs where they have to drop everything to get it to transfer versus setting it on the desk somewhere and having it hook up to the PC automatically.
I personally liked minidiscs for their durability, portability (even better than tape) and rewritability relative to burned CDs.
It isn't an inalienable right to drive your car, so we outsource the transportation fuel production. Guess what? Gas is friggin expensive and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it but suck it up and pay the price. If you outsource production, who benefits? Not that poor farmer in Bolivia or someone in backwoods China. They still get paid almost nothing for the work they do because their local economies don't require a large wage to live comfortably. Are the common people in Iraq and Kuwait living high on the hog thanks to our lust for gas? No, the people taking advantage of the income disparities are the board members and business owners. Not our business owners, theirs.
So we outsource production and we end up a) being unable to adequately supply ourselves in emergencies/bad production years, b)become totally reliant on someone else to produce things that keep us alive and c) make someone outside our country rich for it. Do you think that it won't just shift to some other corporation (or one of ours) taking advantage of farmers somewhere else?
I'll agree that the current system is the best, but it does help farmers and local economies. I grew up in one of those. It isn't about heritage, it is about self reliance. Everyone is screaming that we need to wean ourselves off foreign oil and you want to sell out our farmers instead? No thanks. I don't have much faith in the free market when corporations get to do almost whatever they want to try to control the situation.
I expect many of them have clauses about only people in the household can use the connection, so at worst you would be violating the ToS of your ISP.
Seriously, mod this person up. Every time I've been through the airport, even on the holidays, there have been half the security lines open, MAX. Airports know EXACTLY how many people are coming through, how can they not forecast this demand? Oh, right, they're too cheap.
I just want some of those "fines" to actually go back to the people who were the target of this kind of behavior for once instead of just rolling it into the FCC budget. It seems like a class action lawsuit is the only way to get any compensation in this country...
If they had been required to send a notice saying "hey, we're going to do X, if you don't like it you're free to opt out of your contract (no penalty), if you don't do anything we assume you're ok with it" then it wouldn't have been a big deal. I happened to be changing apartments at the time and heard about this, so I decided not to take my comcast service with me. Haven't really noticed a difference in performance with my 7mbit DSL except for VPN, which seems slightly less responsive. And I'm saving myself ~$10 a month. Vote with your dollars/feet people.
We're comparing 1993 percentages! Add inflation, ~1% per year, so it is really an extra 15% better on top of the 60%!
That would be an airplane, and anyone within a couple hundred yards of an anti-missile laser destroying an ICBM has bigger problems than retinal damage. Never mind that they wouldn't be in direct line-of-fire to the laser, which is the only way you can get any eye damage from lasers.
Considering I know my mother has the skill to register on Wikipedia and edit an entry but I'm absolutely certain she has no idea what an IP is. The point is, there are these types of people everywhere and this happening is totally conceivable.
Since it is nothing but an infinite left turn in the US and anywhere that drives on the opposite side, you have to make a left to get out.
Those will still be in place as public urinals. They just won't have that occasional annoying ringing while you're in there now.
They suck for cars. Period. More efficient than gas, sure. But:
1. Requires a complete infrastructure rework, just like electric would.
2. Still lower efficiency.
3. Harder to implement in a vehicle, requiring much more exotic material for efficient energy storage vs. battery tech we already have.
I just want an electric car. Ok, actually, I want an affordable (sub-40k) Tesla Roadster-style car, but with four seats and a trunk.