I agree with the other post. There was a clear reason to the consumer why they should upgrade to Win95 from Win 3.1, while the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller. Sure, people can argue that there are all of these great underlying technologies with Vista (*cough*DRM*cough*) but the average person judges on the cover, and Vista looks like a retouched XP...Win95 was completely different from Win3.1.
Um...the point of #3 is to get enough/.ers up in arms to harass their (and other) lawmakers until they drop it. Do you there there were as many people on/. when the DMCA was passed compared to now? Sensenbrenner's BS idea of VEIL to protect video signals and this bill will have a much harder time because there are more people aware of it.
Try being in a resturant during a power-outage or the ordering computer is down, and there's no calculator in the building. That's when you see the resturant staff really struggling trying to figure out the bill and then making change. As my Dad keeps telling me, the fine art of making change without a computer telling what the change is disappeared a long time ago.
Worse than that is when the POS is working and the person still can't get the correct change out of the drawer. And the worst possible scenario is the POS working and the person screwing up, but this time the POS is hooked to an automatic change machine, and whoever's at the register just has to pull bills from the register.
Fundraising for episodes won't help bring Firefly back...20th Century Fox (or whatever Fox company owns the television rights to Firefly) has shown no interest in selling future production rights to the series. I see three requirements for the show to be brought back, and I don't see anyone other than Fox bringing it back:
1. The ability to bring production costs down. Way down. Why did Fox bring Family Guy back? I'm sure the production costs for two episodes (the equivalent to one full Firefly episode) are far below the $1 million price tag for a single episode of Firefly.
2. Firefly must attract a wider audience to get a better timeslot. Advertising rates for TV will vary based on the show, day of the week, and time slot. The show needs support from ad revenue, and the better the timeslot, the better the ad rates.
3. Willingness to admit (internally, between Fox execs) that they [Fox] made a mistake. It's fairly obvious that there is a lot of support for the show -- they thought it was fair to sell movie rights to a Firefly derivative; huge DVD sales of the series; rebroadcast rights to SciFi for the original series -- and they chose to ignore it. Bite the bullet, Fox, and it won't be all that bad. In time, you might even be forgiven.
I can't believe someone actually mentioned this...I started AR all the way back in kindergarten (one computer in the whole building, back in the labyrinth that was faculty/admin offices, where there was one 5 1/4" floppy for one, maybe a couple books at most) and it went all the way through 5th grade. By 1st or 2nd grade there was this whole prize/rewards system and I remember plowing my way through most of the list by the time I entered 5th grade. It was never forced upon the students, but highly encouraged. It's important to note that I wasn't your average kid at the time either; second-graders don't usually write and publish a four-page newsletter, and for five straight years at that.
Just thought I'd point out, defense would probably object on two of your latter points, the "sue the driver" question, and the "only willing to harass young children" question. Not that it would make any difference -- the point should've already been made by then -- but you'd never actually hear those questions get answered.
It would be ridiculous and a very poor PR move on the part of ISPs and, yes, Microsoft, to announce to the world that if people want their precious Internet, they will have to bow to them.
What Sony did and what the recording industry is doing consists of very poor PR moves (my local NBC affiliate, WRC, just ran the RIAA-sues-mother-of-11 story twice an hour during the 4, 5, and 6 PM newscasts...that's negative PR if I ever saw it) in which they expect their customers to take the kick in the stomach, but they still do that crap. ISPs will do the same thing if they believe they can convince enough of their customers to stay on board with excuses like "it's safer," "you'll get better service," etc.
I think it's their fault for advertising it when they know the postal service doesn't deliver it within a day (I don't believe the postal service guarantees or implies 1 day service.)
USPS's fastest shipping option is Express Mail, which is overnight to two-day service (depending on the origin and where you're sending it to) with a money-back guarantee. I haven't seen Netflix's advertising but if they note that proximity to a Netflix warehouse is the primary factor in delivery time, then there's no false advertising; I don't expect a package from Nevada to arrive in Northern Virginia after a package from New Jersey or Kentucky (Amazon and several other online sites have warehouses in these states).
I used to work interlibrary loans for a county public library system -- for those of you familiar with ILL, I came in about a year before the transition from the telnet-style text-based OCLC system for doing everything to a web-based system, ILLiad. I never, ever, remember anything other than a patron's name entering the OCLC system for the lending library (the library which the book was coming from) to see.
As many ILLs as we did in a year, I don't see how a title and a name could set off a red flag at the offices of our good friends at DHS. If the story is in fact true, I'd be more inclined to believe that there was a larger reason behind the incident; whether that reason is valid or not, I have no idea.
ILL is a great service, by the way. If your local library offers it, consider looking into it. It's an invaluable research tool if you can wait 2-4 weeks for a book to arrive, and it costs you nothing.
One problem with hosting is that some companies, especially those in the budget range, frown upon CPU-intensive processes. Movable Type, Six Apart's blog publishing system for servers, was known to be CPU-intensive until recently, and several hosts banned MT (along with message boards like YaBB). While there might be roughly equivalent uptime, you might be limited in your options -- the hosting company might only provide a crappy version of blog software, or disallow them entirely.
Finding out how much profit will be made once the operation has broken even will be interesting...while it'll probably be pretty high, I doubt they're going to be able to run as many flights as you suggest. Similar projects -- Acela and the Concorde -- were driven by business users. A spaceport in the middle of a desert is not going to attract people flying for business reasons. There might've been up to 38,000 people putting down a deposit, but are they likely to be repeat customers? I don't think so.
While it probably wasn't hugely scientific, Maximum PC in their January 2006 issue asked four people, ranging from the average joe to the audiophile, to listen to their favourite song and the favourite songs of the three other people at two encoding rates and uncompressed WAV (I don't recall the higher rate -- probably 320kbps -- but the lowest was a 192kbps VBR MP3). Some could pick out the differences, but for the most part, they couldn't tell. So, based on the "study," if Apple could shoot for 192kbps they'd satisfy most people's complaints about quality.
...and the merger between the Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group and UFJ Holdings Inc. overtakes Mizuho by $420m in assets. Note that Citigroup, before the merger, was still second to Mizuho, but only by $22m.
My girlfriend and I seem to hear the line of one of our favourite songs differently. Normally I'd say look at the liner notes, but no...it seems like almost every CD now contains no lyrics. And in this case, I can't find the lyrics to the song online. For movies, if you don't understand what's being said, you can turn on closed captioning. Granted, you can't republish the captions (i.e. the script) but they give you the words for reference. Since closed captioning is pointless for music, printed lyrics in the liner notes or available somewhere online are the equivalent. If I buy a CD and have, as the recording industry likes to argue, only a "license" to listen to the music in its original form, then why don't I have the right, according to some of these publishing agencies, to understand what the hell I'm listening to?
It doesn't work, at least outside the District, if you give it an address not within a mile of some transit system directly linking to Metro. For instance, my home address returns no results, but if I give the Trip Planner the city name, it then shows me the cross-streets of bus routes going to MetroBus or MetroRail stations.
Tracking people without a warrant might be illegal, but what's keeping people from doing it in the first place? If an ex-spouse wants to murder the other for cheating and they hide a GPS transmitter under the hood so they can find him/her, it's certainly illegal but the act has been committed anyway.
Besides, I'm sure that Congress [in its current membership] can find a way to maneuver around the courts and prevent such a device from being considered "tracking."
Why does BBC AMERICA carry advertisements when the BBC in the UK does not?
In the UK, the BBC is funded by British TV licensing fees. However, by law, the BBC is not allowed to use this money to fund channels outside the UK, and so BBC AMERICA is reliant on advertising sales. Without advertisements, we would not exist.
They (BBC America) wouldn't have to pay BBC UK for broadcast rights, but they would have to make enough money from running television ads, and if BBC America runs into financial trouble, BBC UK can't legally bail them out.
Channels that I'd like to get -- BBC America and Discovery Times -- are only available in my area through digital cable, an additional $45 (Comcast). The last time we bought a TV was in the 90's, and I think it was a 34" analog Sony (in the days before Sony the evil empire). $45 would literally buy a couple of channels I'd want.
a la Carte would kill said channels, especially BBC America. So perhaps, instead of full a la Carte, maybe allow customers to change 5% of their current lineup to other channels they don't subscribe to (except premium channels like HBO and Cinemax). For me that would be 4 channels (we probably get around 80) and that would be just enough to get what we don't currently get. And to keep it cost-effective, limit the times it can be changed -- once every six months, once a year. We have three or four Spanish channels in a household that speaks English and Japanese; I would gladly drop them at least to pick up English or Japanese-speaking channels.
And not something crappy like what AIM calls "voice chat." I'm talking something along the lines of TeamSpeak that uses low bandwidth, won't have issues with rather draconian firewalls, is free, and won't sound absolutely horrible in quality.
It hasn't been introduced in the House by anyone based on LoC's THOMAS and there's no trace of a bill on the House Judiciary Committee website (judiciary.house.gov). One witness refers to the act but I don't see it anywhere. Is it just me or is this some sort of crap that a legal team threw together and hasn't been introduced to the House yet?
EFF has the text of the proposed bill but nowhere in there does it mention who it is that's sponsoring it. Because it's dated for 11/03/05 it isn't in the LoC listing of bills. I want to know who the #$*@ is sponsoring this POS.
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I agree with the other post. There was a clear reason to the consumer why they should upgrade to Win95 from Win 3.1, while the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller. Sure, people can argue that there are all of these great underlying technologies with Vista (*cough*DRM*cough*) but the average person judges on the cover, and Vista looks like a retouched XP...Win95 was completely different from Win3.1.
"I'm about to go postal"
Just thought I'd point out that apparently the United States Postal Service frequently complains about the use of the phrase "going postal."
Regarding the actual content of your post, I'm actually surprised that it didn't go up more than 44% during that time period.
It's always been a problem for me with Firefox 1.5. They just have some f'd up IE-stylized CSS.
Um...the point of #3 is to get enough /.ers up in arms to harass their (and other) lawmakers until they drop it. Do you there there were as many people on /. when the DMCA was passed compared to now? Sensenbrenner's BS idea of VEIL to protect video signals and this bill will have a much harder time because there are more people aware of it.
Try being in a resturant during a power-outage or the ordering computer is down, and there's no calculator in the building. That's when you see the resturant staff really struggling trying to figure out the bill and then making change. As my Dad keeps telling me, the fine art of making change without a computer telling what the change is disappeared a long time ago.
Worse than that is when the POS is working and the person still can't get the correct change out of the drawer. And the worst possible scenario is the POS working and the person screwing up, but this time the POS is hooked to an automatic change machine, and whoever's at the register just has to pull bills from the register.
Is MS releasing more hotfixes and small non-SP patches than they did in the past? If it's a substantial change from before, that *might* explain why.
Of course, this assumes that Microsoft is rational.
Fundraising for episodes won't help bring Firefly back...20th Century Fox (or whatever Fox company owns the television rights to Firefly) has shown no interest in selling future production rights to the series. I see three requirements for the show to be brought back, and I don't see anyone other than Fox bringing it back:
1. The ability to bring production costs down. Way down. Why did Fox bring Family Guy back? I'm sure the production costs for two episodes (the equivalent to one full Firefly episode) are far below the $1 million price tag for a single episode of Firefly.
2. Firefly must attract a wider audience to get a better timeslot. Advertising rates for TV will vary based on the show, day of the week, and time slot. The show needs support from ad revenue, and the better the timeslot, the better the ad rates.
3. Willingness to admit (internally, between Fox execs) that they [Fox] made a mistake. It's fairly obvious that there is a lot of support for the show -- they thought it was fair to sell movie rights to a Firefly derivative; huge DVD sales of the series; rebroadcast rights to SciFi for the original series -- and they chose to ignore it. Bite the bullet, Fox, and it won't be all that bad. In time, you might even be forgiven.
I could actually see Howard Dean in place of Ballmer and Elison, if you remove the context.
I can't believe someone actually mentioned this...I started AR all the way back in kindergarten (one computer in the whole building, back in the labyrinth that was faculty/admin offices, where there was one 5 1/4" floppy for one, maybe a couple books at most) and it went all the way through 5th grade. By 1st or 2nd grade there was this whole prize/rewards system and I remember plowing my way through most of the list by the time I entered 5th grade. It was never forced upon the students, but highly encouraged. It's important to note that I wasn't your average kid at the time either; second-graders don't usually write and publish a four-page newsletter, and for five straight years at that.
Just thought I'd point out, defense would probably object on two of your latter points, the "sue the driver" question, and the "only willing to harass young children" question. Not that it would make any difference -- the point should've already been made by then -- but you'd never actually hear those questions get answered.
It would be ridiculous and a very poor PR move on the part of ISPs and, yes, Microsoft, to announce to the world that if people want their precious Internet, they will have to bow to them.
What Sony did and what the recording industry is doing consists of very poor PR moves (my local NBC affiliate, WRC, just ran the RIAA-sues-mother-of-11 story twice an hour during the 4, 5, and 6 PM newscasts...that's negative PR if I ever saw it) in which they expect their customers to take the kick in the stomach, but they still do that crap. ISPs will do the same thing if they believe they can convince enough of their customers to stay on board with excuses like "it's safer," "you'll get better service," etc.
I think it's their fault for advertising it when they know the postal service doesn't deliver it within a day (I don't believe the postal service guarantees or implies 1 day service.)
USPS's fastest shipping option is Express Mail, which is overnight to two-day service (depending on the origin and where you're sending it to) with a money-back guarantee. I haven't seen Netflix's advertising but if they note that proximity to a Netflix warehouse is the primary factor in delivery time, then there's no false advertising; I don't expect a package from Nevada to arrive in Northern Virginia after a package from New Jersey or Kentucky (Amazon and several other online sites have warehouses in these states).
I used to work interlibrary loans for a county public library system -- for those of you familiar with ILL, I came in about a year before the transition from the telnet-style text-based OCLC system for doing everything to a web-based system, ILLiad. I never, ever, remember anything other than a patron's name entering the OCLC system for the lending library (the library which the book was coming from) to see.
As many ILLs as we did in a year, I don't see how a title and a name could set off a red flag at the offices of our good friends at DHS. If the story is in fact true, I'd be more inclined to believe that there was a larger reason behind the incident; whether that reason is valid or not, I have no idea.
ILL is a great service, by the way. If your local library offers it, consider looking into it. It's an invaluable research tool if you can wait 2-4 weeks for a book to arrive, and it costs you nothing.
One problem with hosting is that some companies, especially those in the budget range, frown upon CPU-intensive processes. Movable Type, Six Apart's blog publishing system for servers, was known to be CPU-intensive until recently, and several hosts banned MT (along with message boards like YaBB). While there might be roughly equivalent uptime, you might be limited in your options -- the hosting company might only provide a crappy version of blog software, or disallow them entirely.
Finding out how much profit will be made once the operation has broken even will be interesting...while it'll probably be pretty high, I doubt they're going to be able to run as many flights as you suggest. Similar projects -- Acela and the Concorde -- were driven by business users. A spaceport in the middle of a desert is not going to attract people flying for business reasons. There might've been up to 38,000 people putting down a deposit, but are they likely to be repeat customers? I don't think so.
While it probably wasn't hugely scientific, Maximum PC in their January 2006 issue asked four people, ranging from the average joe to the audiophile, to listen to their favourite song and the favourite songs of the three other people at two encoding rates and uncompressed WAV (I don't recall the higher rate -- probably 320kbps -- but the lowest was a 192kbps VBR MP3). Some could pick out the differences, but for the most part, they couldn't tell. So, based on the "study," if Apple could shoot for 192kbps they'd satisfy most people's complaints about quality.
They are the second in the world. Take a look at this page:
http://www.thebanker.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/ 1699/Top_1000_World_Banks.html
Note that the date was July 2nd, 2004. Two weeks later...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5 4352-2004Jul16.html
...and the merger between the Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group and UFJ Holdings Inc. overtakes Mizuho by $420m in assets. Note that Citigroup, before the merger, was still second to Mizuho, but only by $22m.
My girlfriend and I seem to hear the line of one of our favourite songs differently. Normally I'd say look at the liner notes, but no...it seems like almost every CD now contains no lyrics. And in this case, I can't find the lyrics to the song online. For movies, if you don't understand what's being said, you can turn on closed captioning. Granted, you can't republish the captions (i.e. the script) but they give you the words for reference. Since closed captioning is pointless for music, printed lyrics in the liner notes or available somewhere online are the equivalent. If I buy a CD and have, as the recording industry likes to argue, only a "license" to listen to the music in its original form, then why don't I have the right, according to some of these publishing agencies, to understand what the hell I'm listening to?
It doesn't work, at least outside the District, if you give it an address not within a mile of some transit system directly linking to Metro. For instance, my home address returns no results, but if I give the Trip Planner the city name, it then shows me the cross-streets of bus routes going to MetroBus or MetroRail stations.
Tracking people without a warrant might be illegal, but what's keeping people from doing it in the first place? If an ex-spouse wants to murder the other for cheating and they hide a GPS transmitter under the hood so they can find him/her, it's certainly illegal but the act has been committed anyway.
Besides, I'm sure that Congress [in its current membership] can find a way to maneuver around the courts and prevent such a device from being considered "tracking."
Why does BBC AMERICA carry advertisements when the BBC in the UK does not? In the UK, the BBC is funded by British TV licensing fees. However, by law, the BBC is not allowed to use this money to fund channels outside the UK, and so BBC AMERICA is reliant on advertising sales. Without advertisements, we would not exist.
From http://bbcamerica.com/about/about.jsp
They (BBC America) wouldn't have to pay BBC UK for broadcast rights, but they would have to make enough money from running television ads, and if BBC America runs into financial trouble, BBC UK can't legally bail them out.
Channels that I'd like to get -- BBC America and Discovery Times -- are only available in my area through digital cable, an additional $45 (Comcast). The last time we bought a TV was in the 90's, and I think it was a 34" analog Sony (in the days before Sony the evil empire). $45 would literally buy a couple of channels I'd want.
a la Carte would kill said channels, especially BBC America. So perhaps, instead of full a la Carte, maybe allow customers to change 5% of their current lineup to other channels they don't subscribe to (except premium channels like HBO and Cinemax). For me that would be 4 channels (we probably get around 80) and that would be just enough to get what we don't currently get. And to keep it cost-effective, limit the times it can be changed -- once every six months, once a year. We have three or four Spanish channels in a household that speaks English and Japanese; I would gladly drop them at least to pick up English or Japanese-speaking channels.
And not something crappy like what AIM calls "voice chat." I'm talking something along the lines of TeamSpeak that uses low bandwidth, won't have issues with rather draconian firewalls, is free, and won't sound absolutely horrible in quality.
It hasn't been introduced in the House by anyone based on LoC's THOMAS and there's no trace of a bill on the House Judiciary Committee website (judiciary.house.gov). One witness refers to the act but I don't see it anywhere. Is it just me or is this some sort of crap that a legal team threw together and hasn't been introduced to the House yet?
EFF has the text of the proposed bill but nowhere in there does it mention who it is that's sponsoring it. Because it's dated for 11/03/05 it isn't in the LoC listing of bills. I want to know who the #$*@ is sponsoring this POS.