This is utterly ridiculous. The 2GB plan is what their current Unlimited plan is set at price-wise. I do about 2.5GB per month on my phone and I literally use the data solely for email, VERY sparse Facebook/Twitter/Web usage (about 90 minutes of active usage per month tops), and podcast downloads (the bulk of my data usage).
I barely use the data plan and I'm still over that mark. If these numbers are true, and there is no grandfathering, then I will NOT be sticking with Verizon.
Warning: I'm going to spoil your fond remembrances of T2!
Terminator was much better than T2. Terminator had plenty of flaws. (For instance, what is the deal with frickin time travel being so popular? Time travel is such an overused, tired, totally lame plot helper. It's our era's deus ex machina.) But on the whole the story is just plain better. The reason to watch T2 is to enjoy the special effects and action scenes, not the plot. T2 pushes forward the idea that the villanous, evil, unstoppable terminator can be co-opted with the flip of a switch. Urgh. It's like nothing is related, nothing depends on anything else, there is no history. There isn't any reason or logic for anything. Suppose in T3 (which I have not seen), they did the same thing? Just like that, that shape shifting liquid metal terminator is on our side. Or, heck, let's do a brain transplant or implant on young Connor, make him join the terminators, and now Sarah has to undo the conversion. For T2, I understand Schwarzenegger forced them because he wanted to play a good guy, so I don't blame the writers for that part at least. That doesn't absolve them for wanting to do T2 in the first place.
And I found the sacrifices in T2 especially cheesy and obnoxious. They die for... ignorance! Yes, they bravely die to destroy the dangerous knowledge that leads to the creation of the terminators. Yep, that computer "genius" guy, after Sarah tries to murder him, joins her "cause" with astonishing rapidity, and bravely finishes the job by killing himself! The Terminator does likewise at the end. Never mind the logical difficulties and basic stupidities of such thinking.
Warning: I've rewatched T2 less than 2 years ago - I'm not viewing the movie in hindsight.
I think you're complaining about one of the main parts of the show that make it good. The whole POINT that they were emphasizing throughout that movie was that the Terminators aren't really *evil*. They simply have a job do to. Whatever command you feed them is what they're going to do. Tell them to go kill person A and their very reason for existence is to kill that person. Tell them to protect the same person and they serve that role in the same fashion. To some degree, that's a level of loyalty that is only possible from a machine, much as humanity is fighting them. To quote Sarah from the movie:
"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him. It would never shout at him or get drunk and hit him. Or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him."
To think that a machine can't be given a new objective is a bit naive. The theme is carried over in further Terminator franchise parts (though admittedly none of them reach the level of Terminator 2, which was the pinnacle of the series). In T3 the terminator protecting him states very non-chalantly that in the future he comes from John Connor is already dead - because HE killed him. Also later in the movie when his programming is corrupted the thing that John emphasizes in order to force him back in line is that he is about to fail his mission, which basically send him into a tizzy as failing his mission is absolutely incomprehensible.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles it carries the concept even further and basically shows the future where some of the humans in the future are distrusting John to some degree because he's utilizing the reprogrammed Terminators a bit too frequently. They, when their programming is turned around, offer a level of loyalty that the human counterparts can't match - they gossip while the terminators simply work towards their mission objective.
Sorry, but the original Terminator, much as I liked it, was simply a low budget 1980's horror flick. It was a good one, but that's the extent of it. Terminator 2 is what really took that franchise and made it into a classic. It dealt with issues for more complex, and basically made us question just who really are the bad guys, and if there really is such a thing.
To sum degree I think it's a bit unfair to cite characters dieing in the last installment of a 7-8 movie story arc as having any real significance. When you kill them the far along the characters are basically already spent. In the cases you cite too, those characters aren't really the main core. For real sacrifice in Harry Potter, they should have killed of Hermoine or Ron mid-series. THAT would have had a major effect.
My personal favorite of sacrifice was Terminator 2. They played that perfectly. Arnold's character was the weaker of the two terminators sent back, but they still managed to keep capturing that recurring theme from the first movie for BOTH terminators: these things are damned hard to kill. The T-800 kept getting up, even when you thought he was toast, it kept coming.
Then, after you were like "YES, the other Terminator is dead. He made it!", they STILL kill him off, but in a valiant and awesome way.
Rachel dieing in The Dark Knight was a pretty good example of a real sacrifice, then again, I am pretty sure that he was going to save her, and was simply lied to about who was where (a point they never really came back to, so you'll miss it if you don't listen carefully before it happens).
Slow to comprehend things huh?
You know, come to think of it, if you listen real closely during the end of The Empire Strikes Back, I believe that Darth Vader may actually be Luke's father. He kinda hints at it after he chops off Luke's hand.
Also, what's to stop western companies just bypassing China and doing the same thing wherever China goes?
Its already happening to some extent with things like firearms manufacturing. Due to some Clinton-era laws that still haven't come off the books, we can't generally import things like handguns from China. As a result, where are the cheaper imported guns coming from? The Phillipines (Rock Island Armory, Armscor, etc) and Brazil (Bersa, Taurus, Rossi, etc).
Solutions pop up where needed. If all the external sources of cheap labor dry up the market will go elsewhere. If need be we'll (slowly, and on a bumpy road) just return to mostly domestically manufactured goods. We have enough mineral resources and a low enough population density that we CAN support a manufacturing economy - just with a somewhat lowered standard of living compared to what we got used to in the last few decades.
It's not likely the "giving birth" part that they're after. So many doctors opt for cesarean delivery at the drop of the pen that the "experience" of childbirth (if there ever was such a thing) is largely unattainable by many women.
I think the more likely reason is simple: when adopting, people tend to prefer to adopt BABIES. The earlier you get a child into your life the stronger the mutual attachment. While adopting a child might be easy, adopting a BABY is sometimes rather difficult.
Combine that with a simple fact that an adopted child is not your genetic offspring. The entire evolutionary drive towards reproduction is to propagate your DNA. It should come at no surprise that there is a preference for a child of your own rather than someone else's. That's a cold hard fact that many don't like to admit, but it's a simple truth.
I'm not in any way saying that this should be a taxpayer (or insurance) funded operation. It is completely elective IMHO, but I also CAN see why she'd want to have it done, and if she can afford it, then more power to her.
now with AT&T and VZW both going to tiered data expect the peons to stop putting work email acccounts on their iphones unless the company picks up part of the tab
As odd as it sounds, the last few times a Verizon rep has visited us they've been pushing the idea of users supplying their own phones and us giving them access to email if the users let us lock them down and enforce various security policies on the phones.
Even as the person who would be doing thing it boggled my mind that ANYONE would be willing to go along with that. My work phone and my personal phone will be remaining separate (as well everyone else's for as long as I can convince them its a good idea).
I haven't been to church in quite a few years (but I had to endure service every single Sunday until I left for college), but IIRC prior to leaving Eden Adam and Eve were immortal, and so the whole "whither and die" thing certainly would have been a notch down from the original status.
The joke was likely referring to the comic book character Kitty Pride ("Shadowcat"), who not only can walk through walls, but can make things she's touching/holding phase through them as well. So she could take the gold through too.
I gave the tax returns as AN example of the type of thing I store on there that I specifically take the time to encrypt. I also use it for things like family photos, but I don't bother encrypting that sort of thing. I also symlinked the directory that I keep all my music files on so that that syncs over too - also not encrypted.
Since I've already got the Dropbox account (with upgraded storage space that I pay for), it's simpler to just use it.
No, baseball cards have a value that is reliant on their value is it relates to the object itself. A baseball card is worth something for what it is. Of course it's worth whatever people will pay for it - that's true not only for baseball cards but every other item for sale in any market, be it baseball cards, corn, wheat, or frozen concentrated orange juice.
Bitcoins have no intrinsic value to the item itself. It derives its worth not for what it *IS*, but by what you can exchange it for. It's still reliant on what people feel its worth, but the same thing is true for almost every other currency, including the US dollar. We've been off the gold-standard for ages. Money itself is only is worth as much faith as people put into it - hence inflation and fluctuating currency values vs other national currencies.
You can likely exchange either for goods and services, but again, that's true regardless of what we're talking about. I can likely find someone that would trade a boat for my car. That doesn't mean that cars are a currency though. Currencies have value explicitly and exclusively tied to their ability exchange them for something else.
I'm not sure I really see the point if he's trying to avoid the "the cloud". If you want to go the annoying self-hosted route there are certainly things like rsync, but to me that eliminates one of the primary uses of these type of services: an off-site copy of your data. A Dropbox account to me means that if my house burns down I don't lose 10 years worth of family photos and financial documents. No home-spun solution will do that unless you're co-locating off-site.
As has been suggested several times, if you're that concerned bout data privacy - sync over a True-crypt volume.
TrueCrypt would be fucking horrible. You'd waste 4 MB of your data plan every time you changed a bit in the file.
Not everyone is on a capped data plan, nor do they necessarily change the file contents very frequently. I keep things like scans of tax returns and such in such a volume. Those get updated (as you might guess) once per year.
Except the original statement in the article is probably true, where as there is no way that gas station makes more money in several years than MS does in any given second on interest alone. You seriously underestimate the amount of money they have sitting around.
Fortunately, this is a simple math problem.
365 days per year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour * 60 seconds per minute = 31,536,000 seconds per year
Microsoft's yearly revenue is between $65 and $70 billion. We'll take 2010's numbers of $66.7 billion. That equates to only $2,115 per second. The original statement was a 4 second span - we're still talking less than $10,000, which a big gas station can easily take in in a week or less.
Yet every console since the NES days has still had some way to pirate games. Back in the cartridge days you had to buy special hardware, but the reality is that pirates are resourceful. Heck I don't even think some of them are in it for the games/media anyways. Seems like many spend as much in order to pirate games as they could have on games themselves. I think to some degree its just an anti-authority streak and a desire to be able to say you've done it.
I will admit that I chipped both my Xbox and my Gamecube. The Xbox I used extensively - mostly for XBMC. Between the two though I have never actually played through a pirated game though. It was more about just messing around with those systems.
The article is worded incredibly poorly in order to try to force a point that doesn't make sense.
It compares the $4 billion per year Itanium revenue stating it's higher than AMD's combined $1.6 billion for Q1 2011. It makes absolutely no sense to compare one yearly revenue figure with another quarterly one.
If that be the case my corner gas station likely makes more money per year *than all of Microsoft combined* (between 3:01:31AM and 3:01:35AM on August 4).
To compare more accurately, AMD's 2010 revenue was $6.5 billion, which is indeed greater than Intel's Itanium revenue of $4 billion over that same period.
Not familiar with economics are you? Anything of value to *anyone else* is of some value to a good business man. Do you think the major stockholders in McDonalds actually eat that crap?
BitCoins are closer to baseball cards than money right now.
Baseball cards have individual value that varies depending on what card you're talking about. Condition plays a major role in the determination of that value, and in general the value lies in the item itself.
Bitcoins have none of that. In every facet imaginable, they are a currency. They have no intrinsic value outside of being able to exchange them for something else.
South Carolina. They're not going to go about as "soft on crime", but they're also not going to voluntarily associate themselves with anything that could be likened with outright lying or fraud. IE, they'll put out DUI checkpoints no problem, but they're not going to lie about their locations to try and corral people into them.
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This is utterly ridiculous. The 2GB plan is what their current Unlimited plan is set at price-wise. I do about 2.5GB per month on my phone and I literally use the data solely for email, VERY sparse Facebook/Twitter/Web usage (about 90 minutes of active usage per month tops), and podcast downloads (the bulk of my data usage).
I barely use the data plan and I'm still over that mark. If these numbers are true, and there is no grandfathering, then I will NOT be sticking with Verizon.
Sad as that case may be, realistically you can't drop a debate every time somebody trots out something like that. We'd never get anywhere.
Warning: I'm going to spoil your fond remembrances of T2!
Terminator was much better than T2. Terminator had plenty of flaws. (For instance, what is the deal with frickin time travel being so popular? Time travel is such an overused, tired, totally lame plot helper. It's our era's deus ex machina.) But on the whole the story is just plain better. The reason to watch T2 is to enjoy the special effects and action scenes, not the plot. T2 pushes forward the idea that the villanous, evil, unstoppable terminator can be co-opted with the flip of a switch. Urgh. It's like nothing is related, nothing depends on anything else, there is no history. There isn't any reason or logic for anything. Suppose in T3 (which I have not seen), they did the same thing? Just like that, that shape shifting liquid metal terminator is on our side. Or, heck, let's do a brain transplant or implant on young Connor, make him join the terminators, and now Sarah has to undo the conversion. For T2, I understand Schwarzenegger forced them because he wanted to play a good guy, so I don't blame the writers for that part at least. That doesn't absolve them for wanting to do T2 in the first place.
And I found the sacrifices in T2 especially cheesy and obnoxious. They die for ... ignorance! Yes, they bravely die to destroy the dangerous knowledge that leads to the creation of the terminators. Yep, that computer "genius" guy, after Sarah tries to murder him, joins her "cause" with astonishing rapidity, and bravely finishes the job by killing himself! The Terminator does likewise at the end. Never mind the logical difficulties and basic stupidities of such thinking.
Warning: I've rewatched T2 less than 2 years ago - I'm not viewing the movie in hindsight.
I think you're complaining about one of the main parts of the show that make it good. The whole POINT that they were emphasizing throughout that movie was that the Terminators aren't really *evil*. They simply have a job do to. Whatever command you feed them is what they're going to do. Tell them to go kill person A and their very reason for existence is to kill that person. Tell them to protect the same person and they serve that role in the same fashion. To some degree, that's a level of loyalty that is only possible from a machine, much as humanity is fighting them. To quote Sarah from the movie:
"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him. It would never shout at him or get drunk and hit him. Or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him."
To think that a machine can't be given a new objective is a bit naive. The theme is carried over in further Terminator franchise parts (though admittedly none of them reach the level of Terminator 2, which was the pinnacle of the series). In T3 the terminator protecting him states very non-chalantly that in the future he comes from John Connor is already dead - because HE killed him. Also later in the movie when his programming is corrupted the thing that John emphasizes in order to force him back in line is that he is about to fail his mission, which basically send him into a tizzy as failing his mission is absolutely incomprehensible.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles it carries the concept even further and basically shows the future where some of the humans in the future are distrusting John to some degree because he's utilizing the reprogrammed Terminators a bit too frequently. They, when their programming is turned around, offer a level of loyalty that the human counterparts can't match - they gossip while the terminators simply work towards their mission objective.
Sorry, but the original Terminator, much as I liked it, was simply a low budget 1980's horror flick. It was a good one, but that's the extent of it. Terminator 2 is what really took that franchise and made it into a classic. It dealt with issues for more complex, and basically made us question just who really are the bad guys, and if there really is such a thing.
To sum degree I think it's a bit unfair to cite characters dieing in the last installment of a 7-8 movie story arc as having any real significance. When you kill them the far along the characters are basically already spent. In the cases you cite too, those characters aren't really the main core. For real sacrifice in Harry Potter, they should have killed of Hermoine or Ron mid-series. THAT would have had a major effect.
My personal favorite of sacrifice was Terminator 2. They played that perfectly. Arnold's character was the weaker of the two terminators sent back, but they still managed to keep capturing that recurring theme from the first movie for BOTH terminators: these things are damned hard to kill. The T-800 kept getting up, even when you thought he was toast, it kept coming.
Then, after you were like "YES, the other Terminator is dead. He made it!", they STILL kill him off, but in a valiant and awesome way.
Rachel dieing in The Dark Knight was a pretty good example of a real sacrifice, then again, I am pretty sure that he was going to save her, and was simply lied to about who was where (a point they never really came back to, so you'll miss it if you don't listen carefully before it happens).
Slow to comprehend things huh?
You know, come to think of it, if you listen real closely during the end of The Empire Strikes Back, I believe that Darth Vader may actually be Luke's father. He kinda hints at it after he chops off Luke's hand.
Or X-Men. Yeah, probably X-Men.
Erm, Kitty Pride/Shadowcat is part of the X-Men . . .
Also, what's to stop western companies just bypassing China and doing the same thing wherever China goes?
Its already happening to some extent with things like firearms manufacturing. Due to some Clinton-era laws that still haven't come off the books, we can't generally import things like handguns from China. As a result, where are the cheaper imported guns coming from? The Phillipines (Rock Island Armory, Armscor, etc) and Brazil (Bersa, Taurus, Rossi, etc).
Solutions pop up where needed. If all the external sources of cheap labor dry up the market will go elsewhere. If need be we'll (slowly, and on a bumpy road) just return to mostly domestically manufactured goods. We have enough mineral resources and a low enough population density that we CAN support a manufacturing economy - just with a somewhat lowered standard of living compared to what we got used to in the last few decades.
It's not likely the "giving birth" part that they're after. So many doctors opt for cesarean delivery at the drop of the pen that the "experience" of childbirth (if there ever was such a thing) is largely unattainable by many women.
I think the more likely reason is simple: when adopting, people tend to prefer to adopt BABIES. The earlier you get a child into your life the stronger the mutual attachment. While adopting a child might be easy, adopting a BABY is sometimes rather difficult.
Combine that with a simple fact that an adopted child is not your genetic offspring. The entire evolutionary drive towards reproduction is to propagate your DNA. It should come at no surprise that there is a preference for a child of your own rather than someone else's. That's a cold hard fact that many don't like to admit, but it's a simple truth.
I'm not in any way saying that this should be a taxpayer (or insurance) funded operation. It is completely elective IMHO, but I also CAN see why she'd want to have it done, and if she can afford it, then more power to her.
A Gbit switch costs about as much as a 100 Mbit switch did a few years back, and moves 100x as much data in a unit of time as the 100 Mbit one.
Math fail there. a Gigabit switch moves 10x as much as a 100Mbit switch in a given time, not 100x.
now with AT&T and VZW both going to tiered data expect the peons to stop putting work email acccounts on their iphones unless the company picks up part of the tab
As odd as it sounds, the last few times a Verizon rep has visited us they've been pushing the idea of users supplying their own phones and us giving them access to email if the users let us lock them down and enforce various security policies on the phones.
Even as the person who would be doing thing it boggled my mind that ANYONE would be willing to go along with that. My work phone and my personal phone will be remaining separate (as well everyone else's for as long as I can convince them its a good idea).
I haven't been to church in quite a few years (but I had to endure service every single Sunday until I left for college), but IIRC prior to leaving Eden Adam and Eve were immortal, and so the whole "whither and die" thing certainly would have been a notch down from the original status.
Meh - to each his own. There's just something about Ellen Page that I like. I'd rather that version :).
The joke was likely referring to the comic book character Kitty Pride ("Shadowcat"), who not only can walk through walls, but can make things she's touching/holding phase through them as well. So she could take the gold through too.
I gave the tax returns as AN example of the type of thing I store on there that I specifically take the time to encrypt. I also use it for things like family photos, but I don't bother encrypting that sort of thing. I also symlinked the directory that I keep all my music files on so that that syncs over too - also not encrypted.
Since I've already got the Dropbox account (with upgraded storage space that I pay for), it's simpler to just use it.
No, baseball cards have a value that is reliant on their value is it relates to the object itself. A baseball card is worth something for what it is. Of course it's worth whatever people will pay for it - that's true not only for baseball cards but every other item for sale in any market, be it baseball cards, corn, wheat, or frozen concentrated orange juice.
Bitcoins have no intrinsic value to the item itself. It derives its worth not for what it *IS*, but by what you can exchange it for. It's still reliant on what people feel its worth, but the same thing is true for almost every other currency, including the US dollar. We've been off the gold-standard for ages. Money itself is only is worth as much faith as people put into it - hence inflation and fluctuating currency values vs other national currencies.
You can likely exchange either for goods and services, but again, that's true regardless of what we're talking about. I can likely find someone that would trade a boat for my car. That doesn't mean that cars are a currency though. Currencies have value explicitly and exclusively tied to their ability exchange them for something else.
I'm not sure I really see the point if he's trying to avoid the "the cloud". If you want to go the annoying self-hosted route there are certainly things like rsync, but to me that eliminates one of the primary uses of these type of services: an off-site copy of your data. A Dropbox account to me means that if my house burns down I don't lose 10 years worth of family photos and financial documents. No home-spun solution will do that unless you're co-locating off-site.
As has been suggested several times, if you're that concerned bout data privacy - sync over a True-crypt volume.
TrueCrypt would be fucking horrible. You'd waste 4 MB of your data plan every time you changed a bit in the file.
Not everyone is on a capped data plan, nor do they necessarily change the file contents very frequently. I keep things like scans of tax returns and such in such a volume. Those get updated (as you might guess) once per year.
Either that, or, to prevent excessive syncing just setup a cron job to run a "touch" on that file at an interval you're comfortable with.
Except the original statement in the article is probably true, where as there is no way that gas station makes more money in several years than MS does in any given second on interest alone. You seriously underestimate the amount of money they have sitting around.
Fortunately, this is a simple math problem.
365 days per year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour * 60 seconds per minute = 31,536,000 seconds per year
Microsoft's yearly revenue is between $65 and $70 billion. We'll take 2010's numbers of $66.7 billion. That equates to only $2,115 per second. The original statement was a 4 second span - we're still talking less than $10,000, which a big gas station can easily take in in a week or less.
My whole post about describing how baseball cards are NOT currency. Read closer next time . . . .
Yet every console since the NES days has still had some way to pirate games. Back in the cartridge days you had to buy special hardware, but the reality is that pirates are resourceful. Heck I don't even think some of them are in it for the games/media anyways. Seems like many spend as much in order to pirate games as they could have on games themselves. I think to some degree its just an anti-authority streak and a desire to be able to say you've done it.
I will admit that I chipped both my Xbox and my Gamecube. The Xbox I used extensively - mostly for XBMC. Between the two though I have never actually played through a pirated game though. It was more about just messing around with those systems.
The article is worded incredibly poorly in order to try to force a point that doesn't make sense.
It compares the $4 billion per year Itanium revenue stating it's higher than AMD's combined $1.6 billion for Q1 2011. It makes absolutely no sense to compare one yearly revenue figure with another quarterly one.
If that be the case my corner gas station likely makes more money per year *than all of Microsoft combined* (between 3:01:31AM and 3:01:35AM on August 4).
To compare more accurately, AMD's 2010 revenue was $6.5 billion, which is indeed greater than Intel's Itanium revenue of $4 billion over that same period.
Not familiar with economics are you? Anything of value to *anyone else* is of some value to a good business man. Do you think the major stockholders in McDonalds actually eat that crap?
BitCoins are closer to baseball cards than money right now.
Baseball cards have individual value that varies depending on what card you're talking about. Condition plays a major role in the determination of that value, and in general the value lies in the item itself.
Bitcoins have none of that. In every facet imaginable, they are a currency. They have no intrinsic value outside of being able to exchange them for something else.
South Carolina. They're not going to go about as "soft on crime", but they're also not going to voluntarily associate themselves with anything that could be likened with outright lying or fraud. IE, they'll put out DUI checkpoints no problem, but they're not going to lie about their locations to try and corral people into them.