Another example. I know several VW Beetle restorers who have gone from San Diego to Tijuana, bought complete VW interiors and powertrains from Beetle dealers in Mexico, restored their cars, and driven back. As long as you don't change the VIN on the pan, it's the same car. Even to California. Fortunately or unfortunately. (Unfortunately, you can't do certain beneficial things in CA, such as upgrading carb to FI. Fortunately, because you can do this and the results are pretty nice.)
So, if you keep the pan and build a car on it with all new parts, that's OK, but you can't buy the same car and bring it into the States.
>And then the "winners" of the show have to sell the >car in order to pay the insane taxes they are >hit with for getting something like that.
Do you know the specific rules on this?
They're getting a service performed on their old car, not getting a new car. I don't know how California works it, but there's no tax on mechanic services in most states. If your restoration has the same VIN, it's the same car.
"well there would only be a problem if the person calling didnt know it was voip AND the person in trouble ISNT the voip subscriber."
It's happened already. It's not just a hypothetical scenario. Of COURSE you have to deal with this case. It's not some kind of boundary case, it's COMMON, except for complete introverts who never allow anyone else in their home.
I'm not at all convinced that "a sticker stating 911 doesn't work" is an option, for reasons you obviously don't agree with. I don't think emergency service is something you should even be allowed to opt out of. Neighbor's house burning down? You can't call 911 for them from your phone? I'd hold you to some responsibility.
"Seriously, the point of tax is not to provide 'fairness'"
That's fine, but it wouldn't be a joke if it actually crossed the line where it abridged my right to expression. A tax could ultimately be such a suppression, if it goes far enough. And if this can stand as a precedent, what's next? The right to write taken away, to be granted only to those who can afford to pay a tax?
If my entire use of my audio equipment is to record and playback music that I have written, performed, and recorded, is it fair to ask me to pay this tax?
It's not a hypothetical question. I use my musical gear exclusively for music that I write, perform and record myself.
"look all they need to do is tell people when they sign up that voip has no 911 service. then if people accept that and use voip as their only means of telephone communication i dont see the problem."
The problem arises when the person who picks up the phone to dial the emergency number does not know that it's VOIP. And then you have a life-and-death situation. You can't make that situation go away with a EULA.
It's not obvious to everyone. The line between "stealing" and "just listening" is pretty fuzzy actually. It can be quite difficult to explain to some people the difference between Radio, Television, Internet Radio, and P2P.
In fact, I'm not really sure I see the differences all that clearly myself.
If a GTK+ based graphical installer can work on your system, you are past the point of needing an installer, and what you need now is a configuration manager.
I don't know too many people who have ever really had installation problems per se. Configuring sound devices for multitrack recording, or configuring a voice modem to send and receieve faxes and run voice mail, or configuring 3D graphic support for games, or configuring a WiFi card, or a remote printer on a windows box via SMB, those things become complicated, and there's rarely anything fun/intuitive/easy available to help.
I still haven't heard an argument against dselect that makes any sense to me, a user who is happily using it.
Re:The More Attention This Gets, The Better
on
Phishing for Credit
·
· Score: 1
"That's precisely what they did. The whole thing was authorized from top to bottom."
What's amusing is that the value assumption seems to be that the results could have been dismissed on the basis of authority, regardless of repeatability, falsifiability, documentation, testability, etc.
The ethical and bureaucratic considerations are a separate issue from the research goals and the scientific method.
If that turns out to be the case, then the revolution will be fought by the retailers, who are unable to sell the product at the margins required. They will demand lower wholesale prices, and will eventually refuse to stock the product.
The truth is, $15 for a CD *isn't* too much, and the market is bearing this price level just fine.
"We're trying to figure out how best to make the world a peaceful place.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. It fool me. We can't get fooled again."
President George W. Bush, speaking before a Tennessee High School.
I'm pretty sure he was trying to say "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.", but the very idea of saying "shame on me" is so abhorrent to this man at an unconscious level, that he could not utter the words.
>1. the product you want is available for purchase >2. the price is more than you're willing to pay > >Therefore: You're going to get it illegally.
I saw nothing in his post that led me to that conclusion. Today, there are more legal ways to download music than illegal ones, it seems. If that title is available online, it's certainly for less than the $2.60 per track that was being asked for the CD.
I'm still not convinced that listening to music you didn't pay for is a crime. Distributing it without license from the copyright holder is usually a crime, but listening probably isn't, and should't be.
"I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise."
It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000 number without understanding it in terms of their expenses. Is Debian a US corporation? A LLC? A NPO? What does $40,000 represent?
I'm sure you could find all kinds of businesses that don't keep $40,000 in a cash fund.
This reveals to me that the company is more interested in an arbitrary control than in getting the product into the consumer's hands.
It's a bit like a DJ starting a track, then stopping it, to say "oops...wrong song".
What's the customer supposed to think here? The only message I get is that some desire to have absolute control over a minor aspect of distribution is more important than providing the best (or fastest) service to the customer.
Since I'd be on the "customer" end of this equation, I'm a bit insulted.
The only thing they needed to do differently, was instead of scrambling to try to take it back, they should have said "happy news, we've provided early copies to some lucky pre-order customers."
Instead, they have the approach that implies these lucky customers have done something wrong.
I understand issues such as training and configuring sales and support centers, and anticipating call volume for a roll out, but I'm not on the merchant end of this particular equation, so I don't care.
I guess I can change hats though, because it is the answer to your question.
Support centers, at least the ones that are properly managed, need to be able to anticipate demand. If they have geared up for a launch event that's supposed to be 8 days in the future, and it's suddenly shifted, people might have to give up their vacations, telephone issues might be a problem, and desktop configuration may present a crisis.
That's the motivation on the producer's end to avoid the monumental fuckup of an early release. But, changing to the more comfortable hat, I'm on the consumer end. If the producer already screwed up and the product is in my hands, and I've paid for it, I really don't care at all if it presents a hardship for the vendor. I sure as hell don't want the merchant to call me and demand the product back, or for it to fail to activate (THAT would NOT be cool). And as far as support or customer service goes, I'd accept being told that I had a pre-release copy and that support wasn't 100% on-line if they responded with "best-effort."
But PCMall is WAY out of line for asking for the product back. They screwed up, so it should be their problem. I didn't notice anything in the article about how they were offering, oh, an IPOD or so in exchange for compliance with the "recall."
Not specifically because of this information, but I must say the timing was right, and it put them over the top.
For a whole long list of reasons, I bought a Canon EOS 20D instead of a Nikon D70. Something to know about this, is that I had been saving up for the Nikon, and when it came time to buy, I spent more and bought a Canon. No regrets at all.
That said, I'm not getting rid of my Nikon SLR bodies or my Nikon lenses (both Nikkor and aftermarket). But I think Nikon may have missed the boat on a couple of important points, and I suspect that Canon is going to dominate the Pro-sumer camera bracket, especially for the lenses, now.
Not that it has much to do with the politics of software, but this won't help them. Lots of photo geeks are *geeks*, and they are aware of this kind of stuff.
All that said, you have to sign a NDA to do Canon's API as well, but that's camera control and firmware, not RAW image processing.
This is bad timing, as pro-sumer digital SLR's have *just* reached a plateau of quality/price/performance. NOW is the first generation digital camera, as far as I'm concerned.
Ok. I just got through having someone explain a physics problem, where the setup was a stuffed animal hanging from the rear view mirror of a truck going off a cliff on a curved road, and you had to give the position and velocity of the truck based mainly on the position vector of the stuffed animal. (At least the physics prof from hell has a sense of humor.)
"and it comes on a lanyard to hang from your rearview mirror."
There can be some pretty significant forces there; are you sure you want something dense enough and heavy enough to break safety glass, and sharp enough to cut through a seatbelt, dangling there?
I was reading at quite an adult level between 7 and 10 years old. It was actually a problem for me in school, since my school at that time was geared for people that were semi-literate by comparison, and they didn't know what to do with me. I understood quite a lot of what I read, but I didn't really realize the significance of this until much later, when we were *expected* to have a high level of reading comprehension and critical analysis, I had already been there (and been repressed for it) for years.
I would read about Kissinger and Nixon and the politics of the war that was going on and understand it just fine. The only reason I understand it better today, is that I have access to more information. But I could read and understand the stuff already, at an age when most people are just beginning to learn to read well.
I believe the most important factors in the phenomenon were the focus on reading and writing I received from my mother, the fact that I had an unabridged dictionary and a well-indexed dictionary of quotations, piles of magazines and newspapers going back to the 1940s, plus shelves of books, mostly classics.
The only problem was, I had to discover Tolkien and Adams on my own, but that was no problem. They weren't exactly shoved in my face, but they somehow found their way to me, as did a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy that was plain garbage.
>How about outsourcing to The Principality of >Sealand?
You can't accommodate 500 people in Sealand, and you can't take control of it. A cruise ship on the other hand, affords a broad range of possibilities. It can also be motherf*cking expensive to operate. When's the last time you negotiated a contract for diesel fuel in TONS?
"If they'll cruise it through the Bahamas, I know lots of people who'd sign up!;)"
To get to the Bahamas from San Diego, they will either need to use the Canal (expensive and not without documentation issues), or round the horn (not as dangerous as in the 18th century, but still quite an adventure).
Easier than enforcement of laws where the criminals are armed with superior firepower. And when you do make the arrest, the person you imprison is more assured to be an educated, peaceable person. Exactly the kind of person the jailers prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example. I know several VW Beetle restorers who have gone from San Diego to Tijuana, bought complete VW interiors and powertrains from Beetle dealers in Mexico, restored their cars, and driven back. As long as you don't change the VIN on the pan, it's the same car. Even to California. Fortunately or unfortunately. (Unfortunately, you can't do certain beneficial things in CA, such as upgrading carb to FI. Fortunately, because you can do this and the results are pretty nice.)
So, if you keep the pan and build a car on it with all new parts, that's OK, but you can't buy the same car and bring it into the States.
>And then the "winners" of the show have to sell the
>car in order to pay the insane taxes they are
>hit with for getting something like that.
Do you know the specific rules on this?
They're getting a service performed on their old car, not getting a new car. I don't know how California works it, but there's no tax on mechanic services in most states. If your restoration has the same VIN, it's the same car.
"well there would only be a problem if the person calling didnt know it was voip AND the person in trouble ISNT the voip subscriber."
c edata/160700377
It's happened already. It's not just a hypothetical scenario. Of COURSE you have to deal with this case. It's not some kind of boundary case, it's COMMON, except for complete introverts who never allow anyone else in their home.
I'm not at all convinced that "a sticker stating 911 doesn't work" is an option, for reasons you obviously don't agree with. I don't think emergency service is something you should even be allowed to opt out of. Neighbor's house burning down? You can't call 911 for them from your phone? I'd hold you to some responsibility.
http://informationweek.networkingpipeline.com/voi
"Seriously, the point of tax is not to provide 'fairness'"
That's fine, but it wouldn't be a joke if it actually crossed the line where it abridged my right to expression. A tax could ultimately be such a suppression, if it goes far enough. And if this can stand as a precedent, what's next? The right to write taken away, to be granted only to those who can afford to pay a tax?
If my entire use of my audio equipment is to record and playback music that I have written, performed, and recorded, is it fair to ask me to pay this tax?
It's not a hypothetical question. I use my musical gear exclusively for music that I write, perform and record myself.
"look all they need to do is tell people when they sign up that voip has no 911 service. then if people accept that and use voip as their only means of telephone communication i dont see the problem."
The problem arises when the person who picks up the phone to dial the emergency number does not know that it's VOIP. And then you have a life-and-death situation. You can't make that situation go away with a EULA.
"Its obvious that stealing music is wrong"
It's not obvious to everyone. The line between "stealing" and "just listening" is pretty fuzzy actually. It can be quite difficult to explain to some people the difference between Radio, Television, Internet Radio, and P2P.
In fact, I'm not really sure I see the differences all that clearly myself.
If a GTK+ based graphical installer can work on your system, you are past the point of needing an installer, and what you need now is a configuration manager.
I don't know too many people who have ever really had installation problems per se. Configuring sound devices for multitrack recording, or configuring a voice modem to send and receieve faxes and run voice mail, or configuring 3D graphic support for games, or configuring a WiFi card, or a remote printer on a windows box via SMB, those things become complicated, and there's rarely anything fun/intuitive/easy available to help.
I still haven't heard an argument against dselect that makes any sense to me, a user who is happily using it.
"That's precisely what they did. The whole thing was authorized from top to bottom."
What's amusing is that the value assumption seems to be that the results could have been dismissed on the basis of authority, regardless of repeatability, falsifiability, documentation, testability, etc.
The ethical and bureaucratic considerations are a separate issue from the research goals and the scientific method.
"Debian's expenses are perhaps a few thousand per year for travel and miscellaneous and a few thousand more for hardware."
You have their books open on your desk, and I don't, so I'll just take your word for it.
> $15 for a CD is simply too much
If that turns out to be the case, then the revolution will be fought by the retailers, who are unable to sell the product at the margins required. They will demand lower wholesale prices, and will eventually refuse to stock the product.
The truth is, $15 for a CD *isn't* too much, and the market is bearing this price level just fine.
"We're trying to figure out how best to make the world a peaceful place.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on
President George W. Bush, speaking before a Tennessee High School.
I'm pretty sure he was trying to say "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.", but the very idea of saying "shame on me" is so abhorrent to this man at an unconscious level, that he could not utter the words.
>1. the product you want is available for purchase
>2. the price is more than you're willing to pay
>
>Therefore: You're going to get it illegally.
I saw nothing in his post that led me to that conclusion. Today, there are more legal ways to download music than illegal ones, it seems. If that title is available online, it's certainly for less than the $2.60 per track that was being asked for the CD.
I'm still not convinced that listening to music you didn't pay for is a crime. Distributing it without license from the copyright holder is usually a crime, but listening probably isn't, and should't be.
Who are the Britons?!
h e_ Holy_Grail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briton
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_t
"I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise."
It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000 number without understanding it in terms of their expenses. Is Debian a US corporation? A LLC? A NPO? What does $40,000 represent?
I'm sure you could find all kinds of businesses that don't keep $40,000 in a cash fund.
This reveals to me that the company is more interested in an arbitrary control than in getting the product into the consumer's hands.
It's a bit like a DJ starting a track, then stopping it, to say "oops...wrong song".
What's the customer supposed to think here? The only message I get is that some desire to have absolute control over a minor aspect of distribution is more important than providing the best (or fastest) service to the customer.
Since I'd be on the "customer" end of this equation, I'm a bit insulted.
The only thing they needed to do differently, was instead of scrambling to try to take it back, they should have said "happy news, we've provided early copies to some lucky pre-order customers."
Instead, they have the approach that implies these lucky customers have done something wrong.
I understand issues such as training and configuring sales and support centers, and anticipating call volume for a roll out, but I'm not on the merchant end of this particular equation, so I don't care.
I guess I can change hats though, because it is the answer to your question.
Support centers, at least the ones that are properly managed, need to be able to anticipate demand. If they have geared up for a launch event that's supposed to be 8 days in the future, and it's suddenly shifted, people might have to give up their vacations, telephone issues might be a problem, and desktop configuration may present a crisis.
That's the motivation on the producer's end to avoid the monumental fuckup of an early release. But, changing to the more comfortable hat, I'm on the consumer end. If the producer already screwed up and the product is in my hands, and I've paid for it, I really don't care at all if it presents a hardship for the vendor. I sure as hell don't want the merchant to call me and demand the product back, or for it to fail to activate (THAT would NOT be cool). And as far as support or customer service goes, I'd accept being told that I had a pre-release copy and that support wasn't 100% on-line if they responded with "best-effort."
But PCMall is WAY out of line for asking for the product back. They screwed up, so it should be their problem. I didn't notice anything in the article about how they were offering, oh, an IPOD or so in exchange for compliance with the "recall."
Not specifically because of this information, but I must say the timing was right, and it put them over the top.
For a whole long list of reasons, I bought a Canon EOS 20D instead of a Nikon D70. Something to know about this, is that I had been saving up for the Nikon, and when it came time to buy, I spent more and bought a Canon. No regrets at all.
That said, I'm not getting rid of my Nikon SLR bodies or my Nikon lenses (both Nikkor and aftermarket). But I think Nikon may have missed the boat on a couple of important points, and I suspect that Canon is going to dominate the Pro-sumer camera bracket, especially for the lenses, now.
Not that it has much to do with the politics of software, but this won't help them. Lots of photo geeks are *geeks*, and they are aware of this kind of stuff.
All that said, you have to sign a NDA to do Canon's API as well, but that's camera control and firmware, not RAW image processing.
This is bad timing, as pro-sumer digital SLR's have *just* reached a plateau of quality/price/performance. NOW is the first generation digital camera, as far as I'm concerned.
Ok. I just got through having someone explain a physics problem, where the setup was a stuffed animal hanging from the rear view mirror of a truck going off a cliff on a curved road, and you had to give the position and velocity of the truck based mainly on the position vector of the stuffed animal. (At least the physics prof from hell has a sense of humor.)
"and it comes on a lanyard to hang from your rearview mirror."
There can be some pretty significant forces there; are you sure you want something dense enough and heavy enough to break safety glass, and sharp enough to cut through a seatbelt, dangling there?
I was reading at quite an adult level between 7 and 10 years old. It was actually a problem for me in school, since my school at that time was geared for people that were semi-literate by comparison, and they didn't know what to do with me. I understood quite a lot of what I read, but I didn't really realize the significance of this until much later, when we were *expected* to have a high level of reading comprehension and critical analysis, I had already been there (and been repressed for it) for years.
I would read about Kissinger and Nixon and the politics of the war that was going on and understand it just fine. The only reason I understand it better today, is that I have access to more information. But I could read and understand the stuff already, at an age when most people are just beginning to learn to read well.
I believe the most important factors in the phenomenon were the focus on reading and writing I received from my mother, the fact that I had an unabridged dictionary and a well-indexed dictionary of quotations, piles of magazines and newspapers going back to the 1940s, plus shelves of books, mostly classics.
The only problem was, I had to discover Tolkien and Adams on my own, but that was no problem. They weren't exactly shoved in my face, but they somehow found their way to me, as did a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy that was plain garbage.
>How about outsourcing to The Principality of
>Sealand?
You can't accommodate 500 people in Sealand, and you can't take control of it. A cruise ship on the other hand, affords a broad range of possibilities. It can also be motherf*cking expensive to operate. When's the last time you negotiated a contract for diesel fuel in TONS?
"If they'll cruise it through the Bahamas, I know lots of people who'd sign up!
To get to the Bahamas from San Diego, they will either need to use the Canal (expensive and not without documentation issues), or round the horn (not as dangerous as in the 18th century, but still quite an adventure).
> Just how enforcable is this?
Easier than enforcement of laws where the criminals are armed with superior firepower. And when you do make the arrest, the person you imprison is more assured to be an educated, peaceable person. Exactly the kind of person the jailers prefer.
"You can still murder someone and then walk away in 2-4 years."
Interesting anecdote. Have you tried it?