Organized criminals and black market aside, most guns used in murders followed by suicide are registered.
I am also among those who believe the registry is completely pointless... or at the very least not worth more than 1% of what it has cost so far. This is far worse than the sponsorship thing.
Sony's players have a marked tendency to be extremely picky about the DVDs' physical condition, I suppose this could be viewed as Sony's way of sharing the frustrating playback experience with a wider audience.
As for the 'question of when', I suspect an ETA of never for most of their affected players... and even for the devices they do release firmware updates for, only a minority of people will know about the updates' existence and how to apply them.
Do these new discs play on all Sony DVD players? Will Sony offer firmware for all their affected players?
My guess is the answers are no and no.
I love how all tech companies that marched the DRM and anti-copy planks are steadily aiming to shoot their own feet... a few more years of this and we'll be liberated from the stupidity. Of course, I wish we had never had to go through this in the first place but now, all we can do is find ways to make it blow up in their faces on a colossal scale sooner than later.
I would be far more concerned with the sky falling.
Cables can snap, structures and components can fail, flying wind turbines get in the way of air traffic, etc. To be reasonably safe, flying power farms would need to be at least 50km from inhabited areas (maybe more, depending on how slowly they and their components crash given any particular failure mode) and 100km away from all commercial air corridors to avoid interference with emergency landings since planes can certainly plow through a wind farm faster than the farm's operators can land its flying turbines.
It seems simply too dangerous for deployment anywhere remotely close to populated areas.... imagine terrorists blowing up the control stations, that could be pretty bad too.
I say suicidal because many of these stocks stayed stable at low values for weeks and simply crashed back down to their pre-reverse-split levels immediately after the reverse-split... basically, traders perceived the companies' share as having a roughly constant worth regardless of how few of them there were - this essentially says the company is considered as a lost cause by investors.
Examples of successful reverse splits are few and far between and the dot-com era had very few if any of these.
Successful reverse-splits do exist but these usually only happen when companies avoid getting into deep trouble... or when companies simply want to reduce the number of shares.
Back in the post-Y2K.com bubble burst, I have seen many stocks going through reverse 5:1 or even 20:1 splits... and in the vast majority of cases, the stocks simply crashed back down immediately after the split. Doing a reverse 20:1 to get your stock from $0.50 to $10 only to have it trade back down to about $2 by the end of the week is pretty bad.
Almost all anti-delisting reverse splits I have seen back then ended up as suicides... and even today, they still translate into extended near-death experiences often followed by bankruptcy.
The Cell would have been nice were it not for the surprisingly slow DMA read problem.
Since Sony announced the oddity last June (verbatim: "~16MB/s (no, this is not a typo)"), I presume it means all PS3 Cell CPUs past and present will carry it on... or at the very least, game developers will not be allowed to use the extra bandwidth should DMA reads be fixed to maintain compatibility with first-gen PS3s.
I use both virtual desktops and dual display together... and I have been using a dual-display setup at home for about seven years now.
As many have pointed out, one of the most fundamental benefits of dual display setups is having input/editors on one screen and output/viewers on the other without having to do any switching of any sort. No window manager however good it may be can do this. I use virtual desktops on top of dual displays so I can keep related windows grouped.
Personally, I would consider going back to single-display in a work environment absolutely unacceptable for anything but the most trivial or momentaneous tasks. On my last job, about 90% of all engineering seats (~300) had either dual-monitor setups or 30" Dells... the remaining 10% had at least triple or quad setups while a few exceptions (under 10 seats) had 6 or 8 displays setups. Even part-timers, junior engineers and interns had dual-display setups.
I guesstimate that having a second display improves my efficiency by about 30% and substantially reduces the frustration of having to continuously open/close windows for every little thing. Going back to single-display (below QWUXGA resolution) after so many years of dual would be something like a 50% handicap for me now.
T3 is only ~50Mbps... if you want 1Gbps, you need to move up to OC24 which provides about 1.2Gbps.
Most places have standardized on OC48 (2.4Gbps) and OC192 (~10Gbps) but even with OC192, it takes only 100 x 10Mbps hogs to saturate it. At a guesstimated fixed cost of over $10k per OC192 link per month, ISPs would have to charge at least $100/month just to cover hog-induced fixed costs escalation. Since ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth to reduce their fixed costs, hogs become a real problem when they cause links to saturate: lost packets cause QoS to go to hell and upset non-hog customers call/eMail to complain about unreliable/slow service. There is also the matter of backbone transit costs ($/GB) which causes hogs to eat directly at the ISP's bottom-line.
Bandwidth is a finite resource: given a fixed quantity and quality of fibers and termination equipment, available bandwidth is constant. Increasing the available bandwidth requires upgrading termination equipment, laying down more fibers or both, both of which being non-trivial expenses. More bandwidth to accommodate occasional peaks cannot be created out of thin air.
And as more of China moves up the tech chain, their per-capita energy demand will only go up until it becomes comparable to developped countries'... this is going to hurt pretty bad 10-20 years down the line. Even if they end up using only half as much as USA people, they'll still consume twice as much collectively.
To GP: you lacked foresight and missed the big picture.
Make that ~5cm since SOI is higher-k than air/vacuum.
Now, if you consider that transmission lines within the chip are not terminated, you are limited to traces well under 1/10th of the wavelength by reflections and standing waves... now we're under 4mm.
Houses are fed with AC because: 1) simple power production: rotate a magnetized rotor in a multi-pole stator, completely brushless for reliability 2) simple power distribution: simple, relatively inexpensive and reliable laminated iron-core transformers (multi-megawatt DC-DC conversion was practical 30+ years ago anyway... and is rarely so even today) 3) compatibility: transformers cannot be plugged on a DC bus and many AC-DC converters have a voltage-doubling input topology that would be incompatible with DC input
So, AC distribution is going to stick around for simplicity, reliability, compatibility, economical and a bunch of other reasons.
"five year old cars are the bread and butter of junkyards"
Huh... 2001 - 1986 = 15+ years.
In many countries, automotive manufacturers are legally required to stock parts for 7-10 years. At ~15 years though, low/mid-range car parts would start to become scarce.
Flash HDDs are not going to become mainstream until they match the GB/$ figures and general storage capacities. 30GB is enough to build a usable box but few people would buy a 30GB Flash drive when there are much less expensive 120GB mechanical drives around - unless they absolutely require the low-power or ruggedness.
Old hardware has little to no resell value and everytime I am told that I should get rid of my old PCs, I tell myself and whoever asks: 1- This old junk is not worth selling 2- Whenever I need old hardware for experiments, I would be asked to pay a small fortune (compared to the price of not dumping/selling my old stuff) to get some, I am better off keeping spare oldies in case I kill one 3- I still have some vacant storage spots for old stuff
As far as computer stuff is concerned, I also try to put it off until absolutely necessary... for core PC components, this usually translates into better, more mature and cheaper parts. I usually try to stretch my main PCs to 3-4 years, that helps to keep the number of 'dark boxes' increase slowly.
As for TFA's 30GB average laptop, seems like they have not looked at the retail market recently - 80GB is mainstream right now. That 30GB average makes it read like their target market is HDD replacement for ~3 years old laptops.
Every time I buy a new HDD, I tell myself I will screen all the stuff I move over to it and use the remaining space to re-organize my other HDDs... but always end up filling up the new drive with new stuff and having to buy yet another new drive because I no longer have enough spare capacity to shuffle my older drives' contents. There must be well over 100GB of stuff I could safely delete but simply do not care to when a new 300GB drive costs only a byte over $100.
Next time I need storage, I think I will look into an eSATA RAID5/6 box with 5/6x300GB... I'll be damned if I manage to fill that and still not manage to do my big re-org before running out of space again - moving the ~1TB I have scattered across PCs and external boxes on the array would be much less painful than connecting a few of my external drives to assemble collections to put back on another drive, repeating for each drive where I want to change the file collection, usually to put stuff I am most likely to need on my newest/fastest drives and dumping stuff I may never use again on loose older drives I dump in anti-static bags between uses.
I really like the way this thing went... charge someone for something stupid, be unlucky enough for the story to make some waves and moments later, be flooded by the backlash.
Hopefully, this will be enough for the school to realize its uber-stupid mistake and for that case to be thrown out.
People do not lobby, entertainment and media organizations do. Most people would be better off without TV but that would hurt the studio's bottom line, taxes and other cashflows too much for the lobbyists' comfort so they push proposals to finance this stuff through. The studios do not want people to realize that there is something called "real life" once reality-TV is shoved aside.
Most governments make decisions for short-term money because the four years election cycles often ruins plans... incomplete projects that get undone by the next government can leave a sour-er taste either way.
I'll simply download movies instead of bothering with the extra inconvenience of locating import shops, buying massively marked-up media and contributing to the media control freaks' bottom-line.... there is no reason for the *AAs to worry about this since there has been hardly anything worth downloading (at least for me) coming out of the major North-American studios for the last many years anyway.
It certainly exists in Canada... I thought the USA would have something like it. I'm surprised that it still does not after 9/11 to make terrorists who may coordinate efforts over the net and other such more potentially traceable, much to the friendly *AA neighbours's pleasure.
There is a law: the Safe Harbour provision in the common data carrier law. To be eligible for Safe Harbour protection against liability, ISPs must track IP address allocation (who owned which IPs and when) as an absolute minimum.
ISPs have to hold relevant records when they receive subpoenas but they may choose not to disclose anything to the requesters and there is nothing that the requesters can do about it in this case - this is privacy protection... I can imagine customers sueing their ISPs for breach of privacy and facilitating the *AA's targetted strong-arming settlement strategy. The only thing that should make ISPs disclose customer information is court orders issued by a judge after a formal lawsuit is filed and accepted so the *AAs would not get to pick their targets and pretend it never happened when they hit a tougher target than they bargained for. That would be the genuine Jon Doe due process - not getting to know the target until deposition day.
They are legally required to if they want "Safe Harbour" protection against liability for their customer's actions. At the very least, Safe Harbour requires keeping track of who owned what IPs and when, increasing the likelyhood of successfully tracking illegal online activity to its source(s).
If ISPs stopped logging IP allocation, they would no longer qualify for Safe Harbour and would be directly liable for their customers' actions. Such an ISP would get sued into oblivion by the *AAs.
Some ISPs will not release customer information unless a court order tells them to... and this is how things should be.
To get these court orders, RIAA/MPAA/etc. usually have to file lawsuits. The *AAs know the ISPs have the customers' info but until they get the court orders, all they have to work with are activity logs showing people from certain IPs accessing illegal content at specific times. Once they have the order, the ISPs are legally required to tell them who owned those IPs at those specific times and amend the lawsuits with the actual names.
Which do you prefer? ISPs readily disclosing customer info to *AA leading the *AA to extort people directly or ISPs refusing to disclose info until forced by the courts during the normal discovery process? Following due process at least prevents the *AA from picking specific targets and also forces them to more thoroughly investigate each case they plan to file. Having to file formal lawsuits also prevents them from pretending it never happened when cases turn out to be dead-ends or backfire.
The *AAs fought long and hard to circumvent due process but they failed, now they're forced to sue Jon Doe by following due process... everybody should be happy that the *AAs are finally using the legal system the way they are supposed to instead of trying to work around it.
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Organized criminals and black market aside, most guns used in murders followed by suicide are registered.
I am also among those who believe the registry is completely pointless... or at the very least not worth more than 1% of what it has cost so far. This is far worse than the sponsorship thing.
Sony's players have a marked tendency to be extremely picky about the DVDs' physical condition, I suppose this could be viewed as Sony's way of sharing the frustrating playback experience with a wider audience.
As for the 'question of when', I suspect an ETA of never for most of their affected players... and even for the devices they do release firmware updates for, only a minority of people will know about the updates' existence and how to apply them.
Do these new discs play on all Sony DVD players?
Will Sony offer firmware for all their affected players?
My guess is the answers are no and no.
I love how all tech companies that marched the DRM and anti-copy planks are steadily aiming to shoot their own feet... a few more years of this and we'll be liberated from the stupidity. Of course, I wish we had never had to go through this in the first place but now, all we can do is find ways to make it blow up in their faces on a colossal scale sooner than later.
I would be far more concerned with the sky falling.
... imagine terrorists blowing up the control stations, that could be pretty bad too.
Cables can snap, structures and components can fail, flying wind turbines get in the way of air traffic, etc. To be reasonably safe, flying power farms would need to be at least 50km from inhabited areas (maybe more, depending on how slowly they and their components crash given any particular failure mode) and 100km away from all commercial air corridors to avoid interference with emergency landings since planes can certainly plow through a wind farm faster than the farm's operators can land its flying turbines.
It seems simply too dangerous for deployment anywhere remotely close to populated areas.
I say suicidal because many of these stocks stayed stable at low values for weeks and simply crashed back down to their pre-reverse-split levels immediately after the reverse-split... basically, traders perceived the companies' share as having a roughly constant worth regardless of how few of them there were - this essentially says the company is considered as a lost cause by investors.
Examples of successful reverse splits are few and far between and the dot-com era had very few if any of these.
Successful reverse-splits do exist but these usually only happen when companies avoid getting into deep trouble... or when companies simply want to reduce the number of shares.
Back in the post-Y2K .com bubble burst, I have seen many stocks going through reverse 5:1 or even 20:1 splits... and in the vast majority of cases, the stocks simply crashed back down immediately after the split. Doing a reverse 20:1 to get your stock from $0.50 to $10 only to have it trade back down to about $2 by the end of the week is pretty bad.
Almost all anti-delisting reverse splits I have seen back then ended up as suicides... and even today, they still translate into extended near-death experiences often followed by bankruptcy.
The Cell would have been nice were it not for the surprisingly slow DMA read problem.
Since Sony announced the oddity last June (verbatim: "~16MB/s (no, this is not a typo)"), I presume it means all PS3 Cell CPUs past and present will carry it on... or at the very least, game developers will not be allowed to use the extra bandwidth should DMA reads be fixed to maintain compatibility with first-gen PS3s.
That was my first thought as well.
I use both virtual desktops and dual display together... and I have been using a dual-display setup at home for about seven years now.
As many have pointed out, one of the most fundamental benefits of dual display setups is having input/editors on one screen and output/viewers on the other without having to do any switching of any sort. No window manager however good it may be can do this. I use virtual desktops on top of dual displays so I can keep related windows grouped.
Personally, I would consider going back to single-display in a work environment absolutely unacceptable for anything but the most trivial or momentaneous tasks. On my last job, about 90% of all engineering seats (~300) had either dual-monitor setups or 30" Dells... the remaining 10% had at least triple or quad setups while a few exceptions (under 10 seats) had 6 or 8 displays setups. Even part-timers, junior engineers and interns had dual-display setups.
I guesstimate that having a second display improves my efficiency by about 30% and substantially reduces the frustration of having to continuously open/close windows for every little thing. Going back to single-display (below QWUXGA resolution) after so many years of dual would be something like a 50% handicap for me now.
T3 is only ~50Mbps... if you want 1Gbps, you need to move up to OC24 which provides about 1.2Gbps.
Most places have standardized on OC48 (2.4Gbps) and OC192 (~10Gbps) but even with OC192, it takes only 100 x 10Mbps hogs to saturate it. At a guesstimated fixed cost of over $10k per OC192 link per month, ISPs would have to charge at least $100/month just to cover hog-induced fixed costs escalation. Since ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth to reduce their fixed costs, hogs become a real problem when they cause links to saturate: lost packets cause QoS to go to hell and upset non-hog customers call/eMail to complain about unreliable/slow service. There is also the matter of backbone transit costs ($/GB) which causes hogs to eat directly at the ISP's bottom-line.
Bandwidth is a finite resource: given a fixed quantity and quality of fibers and termination equipment, available bandwidth is constant. Increasing the available bandwidth requires upgrading termination equipment, laying down more fibers or both, both of which being non-trivial expenses. More bandwidth to accommodate occasional peaks cannot be created out of thin air.
And as more of China moves up the tech chain, their per-capita energy demand will only go up until it becomes comparable to developped countries'... this is going to hurt pretty bad 10-20 years down the line. Even if they end up using only half as much as USA people, they'll still consume twice as much collectively.
To GP: you lacked foresight and missed the big picture.
Make that ~5cm since SOI is higher-k than air/vacuum.
Now, if you consider that transmission lines within the chip are not terminated, you are limited to traces well under 1/10th of the wavelength by reflections and standing waves... now we're under 4mm.
Houses are fed with AC because:
1) simple power production: rotate a magnetized rotor in a multi-pole stator, completely brushless for reliability
2) simple power distribution: simple, relatively inexpensive and reliable laminated iron-core transformers (multi-megawatt DC-DC conversion was practical 30+ years ago anyway... and is rarely so even today)
3) compatibility: transformers cannot be plugged on a DC bus and many AC-DC converters have a voltage-doubling input topology that would be incompatible with DC input
So, AC distribution is going to stick around for simplicity, reliability, compatibility, economical and a bunch of other reasons.
As I have been saying for years: McPigeon... maybe about two units per bird.
"five year old cars are the bread and butter of junkyards"
Huh... 2001 - 1986 = 15+ years.
In many countries, automotive manufacturers are legally required to stock parts for 7-10 years. At ~15 years though, low/mid-range car parts would start to become scarce.
Flash HDDs are not going to become mainstream until they match the GB/$ figures and general storage capacities. 30GB is enough to build a usable box but few people would buy a 30GB Flash drive when there are much less expensive 120GB mechanical drives around - unless they absolutely require the low-power or ruggedness.
I hate that too.
Old hardware has little to no resell value and everytime I am told that I should get rid of my old PCs, I tell myself and whoever asks:
1- This old junk is not worth selling
2- Whenever I need old hardware for experiments, I would be asked to pay a small fortune (compared to the price of not dumping/selling my old stuff) to get some, I am better off keeping spare oldies in case I kill one
3- I still have some vacant storage spots for old stuff
As far as computer stuff is concerned, I also try to put it off until absolutely necessary... for core PC components, this usually translates into better, more mature and cheaper parts. I usually try to stretch my main PCs to 3-4 years, that helps to keep the number of 'dark boxes' increase slowly.
As for TFA's 30GB average laptop, seems like they have not looked at the retail market recently - 80GB is mainstream right now. That 30GB average makes it read like their target market is HDD replacement for ~3 years old laptops.
Hehehe, I know that tune.
Every time I buy a new HDD, I tell myself I will screen all the stuff I move over to it and use the remaining space to re-organize my other HDDs... but always end up filling up the new drive with new stuff and having to buy yet another new drive because I no longer have enough spare capacity to shuffle my older drives' contents. There must be well over 100GB of stuff I could safely delete but simply do not care to when a new 300GB drive costs only a byte over $100.
Next time I need storage, I think I will look into an eSATA RAID5/6 box with 5/6x300GB... I'll be damned if I manage to fill that and still not manage to do my big re-org before running out of space again - moving the ~1TB I have scattered across PCs and external boxes on the array would be much less painful than connecting a few of my external drives to assemble collections to put back on another drive, repeating for each drive where I want to change the file collection, usually to put stuff I am most likely to need on my newest/fastest drives and dumping stuff I may never use again on loose older drives I dump in anti-static bags between uses.
I really like the way this thing went... charge someone for something stupid, be unlucky enough for the story to make some waves and moments later, be flooded by the backlash.
Hopefully, this will be enough for the school to realize its uber-stupid mistake and for that case to be thrown out.
People do not lobby, entertainment and media organizations do. Most people would be better off without TV but that would hurt the studio's bottom line, taxes and other cashflows too much for the lobbyists' comfort so they push proposals to finance this stuff through. The studios do not want people to realize that there is something called "real life" once reality-TV is shoved aside.
Most governments make decisions for short-term money because the four years election cycles often ruins plans... incomplete projects that get undone by the next government can leave a sour-er taste either way.
I'll simply download movies instead of bothering with the extra inconvenience of locating import shops, buying massively marked-up media and contributing to the media control freaks' bottom-line. ... there is no reason for the *AAs to worry about this since there has been hardly anything worth downloading (at least for me) coming out of the major North-American studios for the last many years anyway.
It certainly exists in Canada... I thought the USA would have something like it. I'm surprised that it still does not after 9/11 to make terrorists who may coordinate efforts over the net and other such more potentially traceable, much to the friendly *AA neighbours's pleasure.
I bet it will happen sooner or later.
There is a law: the Safe Harbour provision in the common data carrier law. To be eligible for Safe Harbour protection against liability, ISPs must track IP address allocation (who owned which IPs and when) as an absolute minimum.
ISPs have to hold relevant records when they receive subpoenas but they may choose not to disclose anything to the requesters and there is nothing that the requesters can do about it in this case - this is privacy protection... I can imagine customers sueing their ISPs for breach of privacy and facilitating the *AA's targetted strong-arming settlement strategy. The only thing that should make ISPs disclose customer information is court orders issued by a judge after a formal lawsuit is filed and accepted so the *AAs would not get to pick their targets and pretend it never happened when they hit a tougher target than they bargained for. That would be the genuine Jon Doe due process - not getting to know the target until deposition day.
IANAL either... only an idealist.
They are legally required to if they want "Safe Harbour" protection against liability for their customer's actions. At the very least, Safe Harbour requires keeping track of who owned what IPs and when, increasing the likelyhood of successfully tracking illegal online activity to its source(s).
If ISPs stopped logging IP allocation, they would no longer qualify for Safe Harbour and would be directly liable for their customers' actions. Such an ISP would get sued into oblivion by the *AAs.
Some ISPs will not release customer information unless a court order tells them to... and this is how things should be.
To get these court orders, RIAA/MPAA/etc. usually have to file lawsuits. The *AAs know the ISPs have the customers' info but until they get the court orders, all they have to work with are activity logs showing people from certain IPs accessing illegal content at specific times. Once they have the order, the ISPs are legally required to tell them who owned those IPs at those specific times and amend the lawsuits with the actual names.
Which do you prefer? ISPs readily disclosing customer info to *AA leading the *AA to extort people directly or ISPs refusing to disclose info until forced by the courts during the normal discovery process? Following due process at least prevents the *AA from picking specific targets and also forces them to more thoroughly investigate each case they plan to file. Having to file formal lawsuits also prevents them from pretending it never happened when cases turn out to be dead-ends or backfire.
The *AAs fought long and hard to circumvent due process but they failed, now they're forced to sue Jon Doe by following due process... everybody should be happy that the *AAs are finally using the legal system the way they are supposed to instead of trying to work around it.