I've got a recent Nokia phone, and I've been surprised by how fast it sucks power when Bluetooth is turned on (and if you don't want to use Bluetooth, you need a stupid Nokia-proprietary connector headset instead of a standard 2.5mm jack, and there are various other Nokia annoyances, as opposed to Motorola annoyances.)
But USB chargers really win, at least if you're a computer person (which the article's author's mom might not be.) I picked up a car charger thats a 12v-to-USB adapter with a USB-to-Nokia cable, so I can use the same cable with my laptop as well as in my car, and if I'm on business travel, I've always got the laptop with me so all I need is the cable.
My mom has limited vision, and while she has good hand dexterity, she couldn't read the little menus on her previous cell phone to know which button to push. We got her a Jitterbug last year, and she's been using it a lot. The screen's pretty big and bright, and instead of using the space to display lots of tiny menus for lots of useless features, it's big numbers with minimal menus (like "Bob - Dial?".) Sometimes you need to scroll through a few more choices than other phones, but they're all Yes/No, and you can voicedial or just call the operator to get connected if you don't want to dial. It's not the *same* kind of simplicity as the iPhone (:-), but it's really good.
It's designed for older people with varying limitations - one model has number-pad buttons and yes/no, while the other just has three fat buttons for operator/towtruck/911. They're both a bit clunky, because they're designed for people who care more about making it easy to push the big buttons than about having the phone be really small. I don't know how the battery life is - my mom hasn't had problems with it, so I suspect standby time is pretty good, but she doesn't talk on the phone much. One advantage of a larger phone is that there's room for a larger battery.
It might or might not be the right phone for your mom - does she want a phone that's small, or is clunky ok? Does she want GSM so she can use it anywhere in the world, or is having one US-only carrier ok? Does she want a "simple" phone because it's harder to use fancier phones, or does she really just want a *cheap* phone that works ok and can ignore menu items she doesn't use? There are lots of choices for cheap - getting a used unlocked GSM phone may be a good choice, or getting whatever rate plan is the best price for the amount of calling she'll do and includes a zero-price phone.
Apparently Big Bird isn't identical in all the Sesame Street franchises - the version from Spain had "a tall, pinkish female bird called Gallina Caponata". But if you're looking for a Grand Canary, and you've got a big telescope, he's probably what you needed...
One alternative is to keep the ferryboat service. Another is to spend less than 1/10 the cost of the bridge to fund a free door-to-door helicopter taxi service for the next decade or two.
Another alternative (if they want the money) is to give all 8000 residents $40,000 each - it might feel embarassingly like welfare, but it would cause a lot more economic development for the community because people would spend the money on things that were more useful than the bridge. Even if they gave it to the city council to spend instead of the residents, they'd probably find more useful things to spend it on - better school buildings or a Monorail or road repair or whatever. You'd probably get stuck with a new city hall edifice like most of the new-development towns around here in California. But even if it all went to construction, more of the money would stay around Ketchikan, because it would be more within the capabilities of the local construction industry, as opposed to a bridge which is more of a specialized mega-engineering project that would be mostly non-local suppliers.
Sure, I'd like to see Ted Stevens get the boot as much as anybody, and the Republicans are definitely hypocritical about aggressive protectionism while claiming to support free trade.
But the bridge isn't a "bridge to nowhere". It's a bridge to the island with the Ketchikan Airport. Sure, almost nobody lives on the island, but the reason for building it wasn't just to spend $300M to benefit the few people who do or to make it easier to go fishing there or give lots of pork to Teddy's friends in the construction business. It's so the 8000 people who live in Ketchikan don't have to take a ferry-boat across the river to get to the airport, which can take half an hour and cost $6 and occasionally gets delayed by weather (but so do the airplanes.) And the bridge needs to be that expensive not only because it's Alaska but because it needs to be tall enough for shipping to get through, and a drawbridge simply wouldn't do.
Of course, for a small fraction of that $300M, the Feds could fund a free helicopter taxi service to get people across even faster, but it's so obvious that that's a subsidy, and it's easy to cancel, even if you've built some sort of Helicopter Trust Fund to stash the money in. When you've nailed down the pork by building it into a bridge, other people can't walk off with it and give it to their own buddies.
These anti-fear drugs are for dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder - they're for *after* you've had something bad happen. They're useful for getting soldiers to be able to return to battle, or at least to civilian life. For successful suicide bombers, that's not an issue, and the drugs aren't going to help with the problem of failing to get your 72 virgins in the afterlife either. The traditional drug for this sort of thing was hashish... or built-in testosterone.
There are some people who become suicide bombers because they're angry about their family getting killed or something, and in those cases perhaps the drugs can be useful. But for ideologically motivated bombers, PTSD isn't an issue. I had a former boss who'd been considering volunteering as a kamikaze pilot during WWII, when he was a college student - fortunately one of his professors talked him out of it. It wasn't a trauma thing, just a gung-ho serve-your-emperor Pat Tillman kind of thing.
"Not storing content" means "stuck with television". Boring. It's been done, and it won't make you CEO of Plant Earth, because Rupert Murdoch is already in line ahead of you, using it to reinvent politics as well as lowest-common-denominator TV. And people will still get Tivo, even if you've got Video-On-Demand. And they'll share their bookmark files for TV programs, and you'll need to start harassing them for providing content recommendations without paying licenses.
"Not storing content" also means "diskless workstations", but everybody usually decides those are boring also and puts disk drives on their workstations. (Of course, a major reason for that is laptops and portability - the last time I worked in a Real Office on a software development project, it was quite nice to have a diskless workstation on my desk, because it was dead silent, and as the system administrator I'd made sure we had enough disk space on the server up in the lab.)
Scaling issues are always changing - some components get faster, so others become the bottleneck, then they get faster. A decade or so ago I was beta-testing DSL, with a 384kbps SDSL connection at home (too far from the telco for 768) and a 1.1 Mbps in my lab. Most of the web back then was either on smaller web servers that had T1 lines or larger servers with T3 access but lots of clients connected to them. I never could saturate the lab connection; the home connection was faster than most web servers out there, but if I downloaded a really large file such as a Netscape distribution I could keep things running long enough for TCP Slowstart to ramp up to fill my 384kbps before the download is over. But otherwise it was difficult to fill up the 384, other than by starting a lot of downloads at once, and TCP Slowstart had a lot to do with that.
BitTorrent has changed the relationships a bit, but servers in general are a lot faster - not only is there larger content available, and more of it, but most servers are in data centers where they have fast shared Ethernet pipes, and they have faster disks and lots of their content cached in RAM, so their shared disk performance can outrun my (1.5Mbps) DSL, even if it can't outrun my disks. There's larger content available - my DSL is faster, but files are *much* larger, with single-CD Linux distros being a rarity and 100 MB video podcasts being common, so TCP Slowstart no longer throttles my average download speeds. And BitTorrent means that if I want popular Linux distros or jam band FLACs, server performance is no longer a bottleneck (especially for recently released distros, since popularity means more people uploading their side of the connection.)
The restaurant owners are the ones making the money - that's why they have the band there instead of more tables. They might or might not be paying the band (some bands just get tips, some play for free just for the fun of having an audience, whether it's an open mike or scheduled gig.) Even if they're paying the band, they're the ones who have the money.
ASCAP represents Composers and Performers - their business model is collecting from venues, not collecting from some people they represent to pay other people they represent. You're suggesting that their business model should be collecting from the musicians - (insert standard broke musician jokes here) that's not as productive an idea....
Friends of mine are musicians who often play at coffee shops or other small gigs, and I play at local jam sessions and occasional performances. Some of them are professionals who get paid by the venue or at least get tips; others are happy to have a place that lets us play and occasionally has an audience. (My lifetime earnings as a professional musician are about $25 plus beer, and that's more than made up for by the local jam sessions where we're expected to buy food to cover the restaurant letting us use their space on dead Monday nights.) And people who play traditional music are even *happier* to get a place that lets us play to audiences than rock&rollers are.
Bars make enough money selling drinks to pay bands actual cash and even make a profit. Coffee shops often don't - restaurants in general are economically marginal businesses, and tend to fail almost as fast as software companies but without the venture capitalists pumping big bucks into them. One of my favorite local venues was a bakery/coffeeshop that had live music almost every night - they didn't have an ASCAP license, so we were expected to play traditional or other non-licensed music. They were much more successful as a venue for musicians than as a bakery; I'm surprised their last couple of locations rented to them, given their history of falling behind on rent and getting evicted.
I used to work at a grocery store chain (technically doing engineering.) At most of the stores, there were two sets of music - the Muzak out front that was played for the customers, and then the boom boxes the employees played in back. There was probably an ASCAP or BMI license for the music in front, and nobody ever asked questions about the music in back, except maybe to get the volume turned down if the customers could hear it.
Venues aren't always the ones that pay ASCAP. Aside from the ones that just don't bother paying, or the places that stick to traditional music where it doesn't apply (e.g. Irish bars, contradances), there are some edge cases where the musician ends up paying. One example is square dance callers, who are essentially specialized DJs - sometimes a dance hall or square dance club will have an ASCAP or BMI license, but sometimes the caller will have his own (since they often perform at a variety of locations, and dances are often played in rented halls, school gyms, etc. that aren't regularly set up as music venues.) The licensing for that is usually a lot cheaper than a restaurant or bar's license, at least if you don't call more than N dances per year. I don't know if other DJs have similar restrictions?
There are a lot of people who like to play traditional music, which isn't covered by copyright - sure, rock&roll is good for jamming, but so are a lot of the country-music roots (old-timey, etc.), Irish, English, other ethnic traditions... Blues is somewhat borderline for copyright - some of it's new enough to be covered, some of it's old enough not to be, but it's great for jamming. And there are people who like to get up and perform in front of an audience, whether they get paid or not - coffeeshop venues are often good for that.
Here in the Silicon Valley area, there are a number of coffeeshops, bars, etc. that have music jam nights or open mikes or scheduled performers. The jam sessions usually expect you to buy food in return for jam space; the scheduled performers usually get tips and drinks or (less often) paid. The place I'll be tonight usually gets about half its eat-in business on Monday nights from our old-timey jam session (plus people taking out pizza.) Hopefully they do better on other nights....
The point of having mobile service is so you can be mobile - but if you spend a lot of time at work or at home, you do want your mobile phone to work there so other people can just call you instead of having to guess which phone to call you on.
AT&T Wireless aka Cingular has been putting a lot of money into expanding their network in the last couple of years, both before and after the merger. There are cities where they're the best coverage available, and there are still cities where they suck rocks, or cities where they've got good coverage in most of the city but not at your house or office or favorite coffeeshop. Their website has a Coverage Map that shows fairly fine-grained detail about coverage.
What really sucked for a while was their treatment of AT&T Wireless customers after they bought AT&T Wireless. I'm not unbiased here - as a stockholder, I was happy that they paid far above market price for the leftovers of AT&T Wireless, but as a consumer I was annoyed that they kept getting my bills wrong (usually by forgetting how many minutes a month I had on my contract and charging me for lots of overage.) I didn't have any trouble with signal coverage, but my brother-in-law had trouble in parts of LA.
As far as network speed goes, EDGE was blazingly fast when it came out:-) 1xRTT is similar speed, maybe a bit faster, but the big difference is how heavily loaded your cell site is for either network, because the average performance of either standard is a lot lower than the peak. EVDO is faster than EDGE; HSDPA is faster than EVDO. EVDOrevA is faster than EVDO and maybe faster than HSDPA; HSUPA is faster than HSDPA and EVDOrevA, and after that each side will have yet another version, though they may not be using the "Generation" marketing propaganda names for it.
EDGE is slower than my DSL at home, but the iPhone's screen is smaller than my PC. For watching videos, that probably matters, but for most other things it doesn't. I'm not into watching videos on small screens, but then I'm not the iPhone's target customer either, so I may not be a good judge of that. (I've got an iPod with video, but basically only use it for music.)
USB Wireless parts aren't exactly expensive - maybe a Wireless-N or a version with a fancy antenna still costs over $50, but most of the wireless-g parts are under $50, especially if they're on sale. And if you try to ask the average Fry's employee about obscure Linux kernel compatibility questions, they might feel bad about not knowing (unlike a typical retail consumer products store employee, who won't feel bad about not knowing...) but they're not going to know.
But maybe they'll let you try it out in the store anyway.
You're describing things that are in some current mainframes, but they're not all part of classic mainframe design. (I haven't dealt with mainframes since the bit-slice days, so I'm not up on current designs - I'd be really interested in somebody's description of how the hardware works now.)
Multiple CPUs? Not traditionally. There were multiple processors, but usually one CPU and a bunch of I/O processors (also called channel processors.) The channel processors were similar to the kinds of RAID processors you'd plug into your PCI bus, or network cards (back when you used separate network cards that tried to be intelligent and off-load work from the CPU, as opposed to having them built into the motherboard.)
Multiple access mechanisms? Traditionally you had terminals controlled by a 3745 or similar front-end processor, which was channel-attached to the mainframe, and maybe a network protocol. SNA was ugly and hierarchical, basically letting each mainframe think that it was the only computer in the world and the computer at the other end was some peripheral device - and the protocols that preceded it, like bisync, were either uglier or dumber or both. (To give it some slack, it was made to run on terminal controllers that were about as bright as digital watches...)
Error detection and correction? Mostly that was a database function, and some of the database protocols gave you really good rewind capability, but traditionally you weren't rewinding the CPU, you were rolling back the database and restarting the batch process.
Multiprogramming and parallelism? Not particularly on a user level. The system did let you have multiple users running at the same time, and gave you some fairly fine-grained control over who got what fraction of the resources, but it was a lot clunkier than something like Unix timesharing.
These were some mean nasty ugly machines:-) They did some things very well - lots of scalability, really good control over batch processing. CICS was good at handling lots of terminals that were running fill-out-the-forms transactions on databases, but it was an ugly environment if you wanted to do anything else. The mainframes I dealt with in the early 1980s were about 10 MIPS, so 10 times the speed of a VAX 11/780. It was easy to handle 500 users, while my VAX got really doggy when you put 50 users on it, especially if they were trying to run raw-mode applications like emacs as opposed to cooked-mode.
Sure, they're not big PCs, and they may be running proprietary OS's - but the really high availability machines aren't designed like classic IBM mainframes either. They were really specialized designs with multiple everything, hot-swappable hardware, and the ability to keep track of what parts weren't working and move work off of them. If Sequoia's the same thing I'm remembering from the early 90s, it's mainly a multiple-processor Unix box - I forget if it ran on Intel or Motorola chips back then, and while the parts were hot-swappable, they didn't have the "run every job on three processors and compare the outputs in fine-grained hardware" kind of fault tolerance.
There's a story about a Tandem service call after the 1989 earthquake - the customer said the machine had fallen over on its front, and they wanted Tandem to turn it rightside up again. It was still *running* just fine, though they couldn't reach the tape drive and front panel switches, but they thought there was enough risk that something might get damaged when they picked it up again that they wanted Tandem to be there.
I'm disappointed to see that the paper doesn't discuss evolution over time of the conversational roles. There were hardly even any reference papers from before about 1999, so it's unlikely that any of them used pre-1997 data, even though it's all there.
Back in the early 1980s, I used to read all of Usenet. It's changed a bit since then:-) (It helped to have a gimongous laser printer in the basement that could do double-sided 4-up printing, though I think by the time we got that I'd stopped reading a few newsgroups like net.singles. Dead trees were a lot faster than 1200 baud.) In the late 80s I was running it on a leftover machine with a 32 Mbps hard drive. I wasn't reading much of Usenet by the mid-90s, but it still had active discussions in a few newsgroups.
And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.
When I'm running a Unix system, it's generally X/BSD/Mozilla/Linux of some sort. Yes, most of the C-based tools have been compiled with gcc.
But the environment I'm actually running as a user isn't the classic GNU's Not Unix set of user interfaces, with emulations of command-line tools that have longer-named options to manage the feature creep. I'm usually using X Windows, with one of several graphical window managers, and when I'm running a shell, it's usually bash (because ksh usually isn't installed), but I'm spending most of that time in vi and Mail, which are BSD tools, not GNU. And Mozilla's open source covered by GPL, but isn't a FSF project, though sometimes I'll be using Konqueror, which appears to have a rather varied licensing history.
Some years I've run emacs as my primary editor, and I still use emacs-mode in my shell just to keep the finger memory working, but back when I was using it regularly I was usually on SunOS:-)
There *were* C compilers before GCC, and they weren't part of expensive toolchains - you did need a Unix(tm) license to run some of them, but the output didn't have a public virus attached. I'm not saying this to diss the gcc - it was a really valuable tool, and because it was open source it was much easier to port it for other platforms (whether you did that yourself or paid Cygnus to do it), and it was the basis for the compilers for many of the Unix machines of the time.
Leave aside questions like whether "voting licenses" are constitutional, they're mainly a defense against low-volume ways of rigging elections. There are much more effective methods.
One of the big tricks used in Ohio in 2004 was that electronic voting machines are complex and temperamental, and if you don't ship quite enough parts to a precinct then they won't have as many voting machines working, so if you manage the demographics appropriately you can skew the vote. I think the documentary I saw was from Cincinnati, but it might have been Columbus. The urban mostly black precincts were averaging 1 to 2 hour lines to get in and vote because there weren't enough working voting machines if they could open at all, and the white suburban precincts didn't seem to have this problem. It was a rainy day, and most of the lines were outside because the polling places were jammed full, and many of the voters left because they had to go to work. Precinct workers (including the poll workers, the partisan observers, and at least one city council person) kept calling in to their election support departments and not getting responses, or getting promises but not getting parts. You'll remember that the Secretary of State for Ohio had promised to deliver the election for Bush...
With Cuba, it's personal (plus sugar lobby...)
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No OLPCs for Cuba, Ever
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The Cuba embargo is mostly around because fanatics in Florida take it very personally, and there are enough votes in Florida that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are willing to mess with it. Eventually Castro's going to die, and that might change things.
But Cuba's main agricultural product, besides tobacco, is sugar, and the US has had high tariffs on sugar for a long time. Not only does that prop up US sugar producers (mainly Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida_) by keeping the US sugar price far higher than the world average, but the High-Fructose Corn Syrup lobby likes high sugar prices because they can put their dreck into our soda, while the rest of the world gets to have Coke with real sugar in it. So the Archer Daniels Midland gang also don't want free trade with Cuba.
I'd recommend that next time you're in Canada, you get some Cuban cigars, except for the problem that they put carcinogenic flammable tobacco products in the things....
Yeah, I miss album covers, which had room for the artwork and lyrics and sometimes general silliness, and because I'm old enough to remember that, I'm old enough that reading glasses are helpful with the small print on CD covers these days:-) And booklets with the lyrics are usually a bit clunky to fit inside the jewel case, and as you say they're often left off as well.
On the other hand, the web not only gives the band a way to tell you about themselves, it provides room for them to provide lyrics and other material about their music. One friend of mine has an album of sea chanteys and similar music, some traditional, some her own. The CD has 3-4 pages of text - she's got the lyrics for the songs she wrote herself, and says that for the traditional tunes you can get them off her website, "or make them up yourself, because you're supposed to do that with traditional music."
Most of the music I buy is also from local bands (or self-employed gypsies), or at most small indy labels that probably aren't counted by the big music-industry conglomerates or handled by the big distributors. Bands and individuals can sell CDs directly on the web without going through the big commercial channels - it's not just selling downloadable tracks.
Also, it's gotten to be much easier for performers to put together their own CDs, and for small music producers to build garage studios for when performers do want professional production help. That means that you no longer need a record label to front the cost of production, and bands that don't need a label to fund tours and can do their own promotion don't need to be in hock to a label to do that, although sometimes it can be a good deal depending on what kinds of business skills the band members have.
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But USB chargers really win, at least if you're a computer person (which the article's author's mom might not be.) I picked up a car charger thats a 12v-to-USB adapter with a USB-to-Nokia cable, so I can use the same cable with my laptop as well as in my car, and if I'm on business travel, I've always got the laptop with me so all I need is the cable.
It's designed for older people with varying limitations - one model has number-pad buttons and yes/no, while the other just has three fat buttons for operator/towtruck/911. They're both a bit clunky, because they're designed for people who care more about making it easy to push the big buttons than about having the phone be really small. I don't know how the battery life is - my mom hasn't had problems with it, so I suspect standby time is pretty good, but she doesn't talk on the phone much. One advantage of a larger phone is that there's room for a larger battery.
It might or might not be the right phone for your mom - does she want a phone that's small, or is clunky ok? Does she want GSM so she can use it anywhere in the world, or is having one US-only carrier ok? Does she want a "simple" phone because it's harder to use fancier phones, or does she really just want a *cheap* phone that works ok and can ignore menu items she doesn't use? There are lots of choices for cheap - getting a used unlocked GSM phone may be a good choice, or getting whatever rate plan is the best price for the amount of calling she'll do and includes a zero-price phone.
Apparently Big Bird isn't identical in all the Sesame Street franchises - the version from Spain had "a tall, pinkish female bird called Gallina Caponata". But if you're looking for a Grand Canary, and you've got a big telescope, he's probably what you needed...
Another alternative (if they want the money) is to give all 8000 residents $40,000 each - it might feel embarassingly like welfare, but it would cause a lot more economic development for the community because people would spend the money on things that were more useful than the bridge. Even if they gave it to the city council to spend instead of the residents, they'd probably find more useful things to spend it on - better school buildings or a Monorail or road repair or whatever. You'd probably get stuck with a new city hall edifice like most of the new-development towns around here in California. But even if it all went to construction, more of the money would stay around Ketchikan, because it would be more within the capabilities of the local construction industry, as opposed to a bridge which is more of a specialized mega-engineering project that would be mostly non-local suppliers.
But the bridge isn't a "bridge to nowhere". It's a bridge to the island with the Ketchikan Airport. Sure, almost nobody lives on the island, but the reason for building it wasn't just to spend $300M to benefit the few people who do or to make it easier to go fishing there or give lots of pork to Teddy's friends in the construction business. It's so the 8000 people who live in Ketchikan don't have to take a ferry-boat across the river to get to the airport, which can take half an hour and cost $6 and occasionally gets delayed by weather (but so do the airplanes.) And the bridge needs to be that expensive not only because it's Alaska but because it needs to be tall enough for shipping to get through, and a drawbridge simply wouldn't do.
Of course, for a small fraction of that $300M, the Feds could fund a free helicopter taxi service to get people across even faster, but it's so obvious that that's a subsidy, and it's easy to cancel, even if you've built some sort of Helicopter Trust Fund to stash the money in. When you've nailed down the pork by building it into a bridge, other people can't walk off with it and give it to their own buddies.
There are some people who become suicide bombers because they're angry about their family getting killed or something, and in those cases perhaps the drugs can be useful. But for ideologically motivated bombers, PTSD isn't an issue. I had a former boss who'd been considering volunteering as a kamikaze pilot during WWII, when he was a college student - fortunately one of his professors talked him out of it. It wasn't a trauma thing, just a gung-ho serve-your-emperor Pat Tillman kind of thing.
"Not storing content" also means "diskless workstations", but everybody usually decides those are boring also and puts disk drives on their workstations. (Of course, a major reason for that is laptops and portability - the last time I worked in a Real Office on a software development project, it was quite nice to have a diskless workstation on my desk, because it was dead silent, and as the system administrator I'd made sure we had enough disk space on the server up in the lab.)
(In Soviet Russia, Television Reinvents You!)
BitTorrent has changed the relationships a bit, but servers in general are a lot faster - not only is there larger content available, and more of it, but most servers are in data centers where they have fast shared Ethernet pipes, and they have faster disks and lots of their content cached in RAM, so their shared disk performance can outrun my (1.5Mbps) DSL, even if it can't outrun my disks. There's larger content available - my DSL is faster, but files are *much* larger, with single-CD Linux distros being a rarity and 100 MB video podcasts being common, so TCP Slowstart no longer throttles my average download speeds. And BitTorrent means that if I want popular Linux distros or jam band FLACs, server performance is no longer a bottleneck (especially for recently released distros, since popularity means more people uploading their side of the connection.)
ASCAP represents Composers and Performers - their business model is collecting from venues, not collecting from some people they represent to pay other people they represent. You're suggesting that their business model should be collecting from the musicians - (insert standard broke musician jokes here) that's not as productive an idea....
Bars make enough money selling drinks to pay bands actual cash and even make a profit. Coffee shops often don't - restaurants in general are economically marginal businesses, and tend to fail almost as fast as software companies but without the venture capitalists pumping big bucks into them. One of my favorite local venues was a bakery/coffeeshop that had live music almost every night - they didn't have an ASCAP license, so we were expected to play traditional or other non-licensed music. They were much more successful as a venue for musicians than as a bakery; I'm surprised their last couple of locations rented to them, given their history of falling behind on rent and getting evicted.
I used to work at a grocery store chain (technically doing engineering.) At most of the stores, there were two sets of music - the Muzak out front that was played for the customers, and then the boom boxes the employees played in back. There was probably an ASCAP or BMI license for the music in front, and nobody ever asked questions about the music in back, except maybe to get the volume turned down if the customers could hear it.
And good for them. Too many bands have had their work ripped off by record labels.
Venues aren't always the ones that pay ASCAP. Aside from the ones that just don't bother paying, or the places that stick to traditional music where it doesn't apply (e.g. Irish bars, contradances), there are some edge cases where the musician ends up paying. One example is square dance callers, who are essentially specialized DJs - sometimes a dance hall or square dance club will have an ASCAP or BMI license, but sometimes the caller will have his own (since they often perform at a variety of locations, and dances are often played in rented halls, school gyms, etc. that aren't regularly set up as music venues.) The licensing for that is usually a lot cheaper than a restaurant or bar's license, at least if you don't call more than N dances per year. I don't know if other DJs have similar restrictions?
Here in the Silicon Valley area, there are a number of coffeeshops, bars, etc. that have music jam nights or open mikes or scheduled performers. The jam sessions usually expect you to buy food in return for jam space; the scheduled performers usually get tips and drinks or (less often) paid. The place I'll be tonight usually gets about half its eat-in business on Monday nights from our old-timey jam session (plus people taking out pizza.) Hopefully they do better on other nights....
AT&T Wireless aka Cingular has been putting a lot of money into expanding their network in the last couple of years, both before and after the merger. There are cities where they're the best coverage available, and there are still cities where they suck rocks, or cities where they've got good coverage in most of the city but not at your house or office or favorite coffeeshop. Their website has a Coverage Map that shows fairly fine-grained detail about coverage.
What really sucked for a while was their treatment of AT&T Wireless customers after they bought AT&T Wireless. I'm not unbiased here - as a stockholder, I was happy that they paid far above market price for the leftovers of AT&T Wireless, but as a consumer I was annoyed that they kept getting my bills wrong (usually by forgetting how many minutes a month I had on my contract and charging me for lots of overage.) I didn't have any trouble with signal coverage, but my brother-in-law had trouble in parts of LA.
As far as network speed goes, EDGE was blazingly fast when it came out
EDGE is slower than my DSL at home, but the iPhone's screen is smaller than my PC. For watching videos, that probably matters, but for most other things it doesn't. I'm not into watching videos on small screens, but then I'm not the iPhone's target customer either, so I may not be a good judge of that. (I've got an iPod with video, but basically only use it for music.)
But maybe they'll let you try it out in the store anyway.
Multiple CPUs? Not traditionally. There were multiple processors, but usually one CPU and a bunch of I/O processors (also called channel processors.) The channel processors were similar to the kinds of RAID processors you'd plug into your PCI bus, or network cards (back when you used separate network cards that tried to be intelligent and off-load work from the CPU, as opposed to having them built into the motherboard.)
Multiple access mechanisms? Traditionally you had terminals controlled by a 3745 or similar front-end processor, which was channel-attached to the mainframe, and maybe a network protocol. SNA was ugly and hierarchical, basically letting each mainframe think that it was the only computer in the world and the computer at the other end was some peripheral device - and the protocols that preceded it, like bisync, were either uglier or dumber or both. (To give it some slack, it was made to run on terminal controllers that were about as bright as digital watches...)
Error detection and correction? Mostly that was a database function, and some of the database protocols gave you really good rewind capability, but traditionally you weren't rewinding the CPU, you were rolling back the database and restarting the batch process.
Multiprogramming and parallelism? Not particularly on a user level. The system did let you have multiple users running at the same time, and gave you some fairly fine-grained control over who got what fraction of the resources, but it was a lot clunkier than something like Unix timesharing.
These were some mean nasty ugly machines
There's a story about a Tandem service call after the 1989 earthquake - the customer said the machine had fallen over on its front, and they wanted Tandem to turn it rightside up again. It was still *running* just fine, though they couldn't reach the tape drive and front panel switches, but they thought there was enough risk that something might get damaged when they picked it up again that they wanted Tandem to be there.
Back in the early 1980s, I used to read all of Usenet. It's changed a bit since then
And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.
But the environment I'm actually running as a user isn't the classic GNU's Not Unix set of user interfaces, with emulations of command-line tools that have longer-named options to manage the feature creep. I'm usually using X Windows, with one of several graphical window managers, and when I'm running a shell, it's usually bash (because ksh usually isn't installed), but I'm spending most of that time in vi and Mail, which are BSD tools, not GNU. And Mozilla's open source covered by GPL, but isn't a FSF project, though sometimes I'll be using Konqueror, which appears to have a rather varied licensing history.
Some years I've run emacs as my primary editor, and I still use emacs-mode in my shell just to keep the finger memory working, but back when I was using it regularly I was usually on SunOS
There *were* C compilers before GCC, and they weren't part of expensive toolchains - you did need a Unix(tm) license to run some of them, but the output didn't have a public virus attached. I'm not saying this to diss the gcc - it was a really valuable tool, and because it was open source it was much easier to port it for other platforms (whether you did that yourself or paid Cygnus to do it), and it was the basis for the compilers for many of the Unix machines of the time.
One of the big tricks used in Ohio in 2004 was that electronic voting machines are complex and temperamental, and if you don't ship quite enough parts to a precinct then they won't have as many voting machines working, so if you manage the demographics appropriately you can skew the vote. I think the documentary I saw was from Cincinnati, but it might have been Columbus. The urban mostly black precincts were averaging 1 to 2 hour lines to get in and vote because there weren't enough working voting machines if they could open at all, and the white suburban precincts didn't seem to have this problem. It was a rainy day, and most of the lines were outside because the polling places were jammed full, and many of the voters left because they had to go to work. Precinct workers (including the poll workers, the partisan observers, and at least one city council person) kept calling in to their election support departments and not getting responses, or getting promises but not getting parts. You'll remember that the Secretary of State for Ohio had promised to deliver the election for Bush...
But Cuba's main agricultural product, besides tobacco, is sugar, and the US has had high tariffs on sugar for a long time. Not only does that prop up US sugar producers (mainly Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida_) by keeping the US sugar price far higher than the world average, but the High-Fructose Corn Syrup lobby likes high sugar prices because they can put their dreck into our soda, while the rest of the world gets to have Coke with real sugar in it. So the Archer Daniels Midland gang also don't want free trade with Cuba.
I'd recommend that next time you're in Canada, you get some Cuban cigars, except for the problem that they put carcinogenic flammable tobacco products in the things....
On the other hand, the web not only gives the band a way to tell you about themselves, it provides room for them to provide lyrics and other material about their music. One friend of mine has an album of sea chanteys and similar music, some traditional, some her own. The CD has 3-4 pages of text - she's got the lyrics for the songs she wrote herself, and says that for the traditional tunes you can get them off her website, "or make them up yourself, because you're supposed to do that with traditional music."
Also, it's gotten to be much easier for performers to put together their own CDs, and for small music producers to build garage studios for when performers do want professional production help. That means that you no longer need a record label to front the cost of production, and bands that don't need a label to fund tours and can do their own promotion don't need to be in hock to a label to do that, although sometimes it can be a good deal depending on what kinds of business skills the band members have.