Transactor magazine proved that you could invoke the "save-with-replace" bug just by scratching (deleting) files and rewriting them, which completely avoids @. The probability is much less but it could still happen.
Transactor actually found the bug and corrected the ROM. I don't know if Commodore ever adopted it, but any modern Commodore user can burn new ROMs that are free of the bug, if he so chooses.
Owners of vehicles are, in most jurisdictions, jointly and severally liable for the injuries caused by the negligent operation of their vehicles.
It might be that GM assumes liability for you, but since they provide $1 million of coverage, that implies to me that dollar $1,000,001 comes out of your pocket, not theirs.
Nice out-of-context headline. Yes, this is happening at certain Canadian airports (YVR, YOW, YUL, YYZ) but only in Canadian Customs areas (e.g. international arrivals). This posting makes it sound like it's everywhere.
It's primarily intended to help bust smuggling efforts by airport employees.
So people on trains shouldn't be able to access the Internet either?
(Yes, some trains have WiFi but the train I was on last week from Philadelphia to New York had really painful WiFi. I had much better connectivity on T-Mobile.)
The solution is really simple: high penalties. Here in Saskatchewan, where I live, it's about a $120 fine if you get caught using your phone while driving (handsfree use is fine but you are not allowed to touch more than one button to initiate or answer calls). Frankly, the fine should be higher. Teens would be scared to death if they could get a three-month driving suspension and a $500 fine if they got caught texting while driving, and I suspect most adults would be too. It's a behaviour so easy to avoid that the penalty is not a problem for lawful people.
Voice is best for some communications; text is best for others. What exactly is the point of this debate?
The simpler something is, the better SMS works. The more complex it is, the more likely a short telephone conversation is going to help the problem better than a multi-minute SMS exchange.
This is sort of like arguing that trucks are better than cars - cars are more fun to drive and more manoeuvrable but just try fitting that queen bed in the back to take it across town.
In Canada, we've typically taken US change at par - the coins are the same size and roughly the same weight. If you don't want them, spend them the next time you spend change - people will take them.
Given that Canadian dollars are worth the same as US, more or less (more right now), it makes sense for Americans to take Canadian change without worrying about it, especially in border regions.
I tend to keep all the US change I get and take it back to the US on my trips, but people would take it here without problem.
The US can't unilaterally increase oil prices unless it military destroys oil production capacity, which seems a little self-defeating. The only way it could act, practically speaking, is to increase taxes on fossil fuels. That money wouldn't go to the oil industry - it would go wherever government wanted it to go; research into better energy sources, road construction, income tax reductions, whatever Americans decide is most important.
As for laws, you're right and I have no easy solution for this. The lobby groups in the US have a lot of power and it would take a huge undertaking by the average American to yell louder than the special interest groups do.
I don't mean to imply that I support high taxes carte blanche... I don't. However, I do have to point out that there are countries with high taxes and yet high standards of living, peace and very good levels of procedural justice. Countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark come to mind.
I think this idea that government is inherently evil and can't do anything productive is rather sad. Perhaps it's true in the US, which would be more of a commentary on the flaws of American democracy than on government in general, but there are countries where governments are, by American standards, very interventionists and yet there are high levels of happiness among the nation's population, along with a high standard of living and high levels of individual freedom.
This rigid debate about the evils of tax increases in the US reminds me of what we went through here in Saskatchewan in the mid-1990s. The economy here was terrible. We were in debt up to our eyeballs as a province and international banks were telling us that we were not far from being in a position where acquiring loans to finance future debt was going to be a difficult proposition. Our credit rating had been downgraded significantly. The government of the day severely reduced spending and significantly increased taxes. Roads got neglected, schools got overcrowded, and in general, it really sucked to be here for awhile. But do you know what happened? The provincial debt got significantly reduced. That permitted a gradual reduction of taxes. That allowed the economy to improve - slowly at first, very quickly later - and now we are one of the two strongest provinces in Canada economically, with very reasonable levels of debt a fraction of what it once was, and with a real hope of being retired completely in a few years.
Fix the US political system so that political actors act for the benefit of the nation and its citizens instead of special interest groups, and think with a mind toward the future. This petty bickering and inflexibility are not only increasingly making the US a laughingstock in the international scene, they are seriously damaging the US's ability to have a strong economy. Yes, that may mean a few years of significantly higher taxes, but the dividends in the long run would be huge.
Americans don't have to pay what they pay either - there are taxes in US fuel prices, just not as many as in some countries. The cheapest fuel is not in the US.
Some countries actually subsidize fuel for their citizens. I think that's a dumb choice, but it's their choice.
An interesting side effect of higher fuel taxes in Canada and especially in Europe is that vehicles tend to be smaller and more fuel efficient. That allows for denser parking (since vehicles don't take up as much space) and easier visibility for drivers on the roads, not to mention making our limited supplies of oil last longer.
I use GoPhone on a Canadian iPhone and it works fine. I buy 200 MB of data when I need data for a US trip. I understand that AT&T iPhones may not work on GoPhone (because AT&T prevents it from working) but non-AT&T ones (e.g. unlocked ones sourced from Apple, or officially unlocked by foreign providers) seem to work fine. So it can be done.
The solution is to not sell unlimited bandwidth. If AT&T sold data in packages by amounts, people would use that amount. If they went over, they'd pay more. They could raise their package to a higher allotment for a higher cost.
This would do two things:
1. AT&T would generate more revenue which would let them develop better cellular infrastructure to meet demand. 2. (And more importantly in the short term) It would discourage consumption. Lower consumption equals higher levels of service for those who choose to pay. If consumption is far below what the network can handle, a rate reduction will increase demand. If consumption is too high, a rate increase will reduce it (or supply extra funds for network improvement, if demand remains high).
Cellular never was unlimited at its beginning. We paid for blocks of minutes. As technology improved and supply of airtime increased, airtime prices went down. Unlimited airtime didn't appear for years after networks began.
Unlimited usage services are great if that usage doesn't harm other users. This is often true. Landline capacity is so high that local calls rarely interfered with others who wanted to make calls. There was no need to reduce call length. Long distance bandwidth, on the other hand, was relatively scarce (it wasn't uncommon to be unable to make long distance calls on Mother's Day or Christmas due to the trunks being full) so long distance rates discouraged people from calling unless they had the need. That also kept call length down which freed up the resource.
I'm not saying data needs to be expensive... it's just not practical for it to be unlimited, that's all; not, at least, until there's enough LTE and other technologies deployed so that everyone can use the technology and not be greatly affecting other users.
As a final point, some might argue that competitors are managing their bandwidth better. That might be true, and if so, people will be motivated to change providers. This will do as much to solve the problem as anything.
The cellular companies let us down in a way, letting us taste this cheap bandwidth and now we want to stream video and audio over it, download huge files, and access network content like we're at home no matter where we are. The airwaves can't handle it. It's time for a paradigm shift.
(I live in Canada, but we have similar problems. This isn't unique to AT&T.)
Whether it's obscene or not, it's a 9.9% reduction in EBITDA since 2010 (.464/.422 - 1). It's very significant.
If it continues then changes will definitely occur.
One has to remember that the wireless business is a pretty high-risk business. It is very capital-intensive and customer demands are quickly increasing (it wasn't long ago that 2G was more than good enough; now we want multiple megabits per second and we want it now).
That's something people forget about analog technologies.
A few years ago I still had an analog bag phone in my car (I had a digital phone too but I had the analog phone on another network because I knew it would have better coverage and, well, I'm a geek and I though it was cool to have a bag phone that still worked and had active service). One day, in rural Saskatchewan, out on some remote highway where my digital phone didn't work, my wife called me. My bag phone rang. I answered. The call was badly staticky but I could understand her, and she could understand me, and we could have a conversation. On the coverage map, there wasn't even any coverage there but an analog phone could sometimes work well enough that you could still use it.
This aspect of analog isn't always good - the static and noise of analog TV is pretty annoying, and I love getting beautiful HD ATSC signals now - but if you had bad signal, noisy analog was always better than the unusable signal you'd get using a digital technology.
It's the same with photography to some degree. A scratched negative can be salvaged, but a corrupted digital file is probably not usable at all.
I like digital technologies fine, but the point about a worn VHS tape being annoying as compared to a worn DVD being unusable is a completely valid one.
I miss one thing about it: it was easy to record something and then let someone else watch it. Oh, you missed Television Show last night? Here's the tape. (Tapes were also cheap so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't get the tape back.)
Of course, you can do this today but it's significantly more work to do it. I actually picked up a cheap DVD recorder so that I can dump content onto DVD painlessly, but unfortunately it won't turn HD video downconverted into 480i into anamorphic format so that you can still watch it as widescreen content. It's less work to go get the HD torrent, but I have a little better technical knowledge than the average person.
Automatic tracking and automatic tuning became universal in VCRs after a few years and helped a lot.
I bought my first VCR in about 1990 - I know, late adopter - and it had both of these features. It even had a "cable eye" that would let it control cable boxes (and it still works on modern digital cable boxes, although the highest channel number it will take is 199).
Once we got automatic tracking on VHS VCRs - which if I recall became common in the late 1980s - this problem substantially disappeared. You could still manually track automatic-tracking VCRs if you knew how, and once in awhile it was helpful to avoid video or audio distortion.
The consistent issue I saw was that of the three recording speeds - SP, LP (doubled recording time) and EP (tripled recording time), few VCRs supported LP well. Video usually disappeared during fast forward and rewind tape scanning, when it wouldn't using the other two speeds. Also, most "modern" VCRs won't record at LP speed although they will play it back. Still, it was not very commonly used.
I'm not against using analog technology (I still do my photography with film after all) but it's relatively easy to get around the my-computer-died problem. My digital music is on a server with RAID-1 disks for redundancy, and is backed up nightly to both a local external hard disk and a remote plug computer (at a family member's house). I'll never lose much, if anything, if I have a catastrophe unless it takes my family member's house out too. (3 km between us, so possible, but unlikely.)
I buy my music on CDs and rip them though - that way I have a pressed original, too, and I can determine the ripping. That lets me have both FLAC and MP3 rips, and I have the original CDs to play if I want.
Indeed I made a typo, but the iPhone is more than the sum of its parts. It's not just what it does... it's how it does it and how easy it is to use.
In any event, the market has spoken. The market doesn't always make the best decisions, but Apple is giving people what they want and other companies aren't succeeding as much in that regard. Apple's profitability says it all.
I don't see why any consumer would care. Here's how economics works: companies come up with products and services and people buy them, or don't buy them. People are buying iPhones at Apple's price, which means that people perceive that there is value in them.
Frankly, the fact that there are significantly cheaper options out there and yet Apple still manages to do so well speaks volumes as to how happy their customers are.
People joke about Apple "fanbois" and there is some truth behind the derision, but consider it this way: wouldn't you love to be running a company where customers actually love your products and evangelize them? What other companies in the world - companies who sell *any* product or service - have that kind of loyalty? I'm sure there must be some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. (I love my local pizza place, but their prices are similar to the competition's and they don't exactly lead the world in pizza profits.)
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OK is modems. READY. is Commodore :)
Naah, the 1337 would just do this for speed and memory conservation:
0 forx=.to30:?"hello world":next
Transactor magazine proved that you could invoke the "save-with-replace" bug just by scratching (deleting) files and rewriting them, which completely avoids @. The probability is much less but it could still happen.
Transactor actually found the bug and corrected the ROM. I don't know if Commodore ever adopted it, but any modern Commodore user can burn new ROMs that are free of the bug, if he so chooses.
Why didn't the police just fingerprint the steering wheel? Running from an accident is a crime.
Owners of vehicles are, in most jurisdictions, jointly and severally liable for the injuries caused by the negligent operation of their vehicles.
It might be that GM assumes liability for you, but since they provide $1 million of coverage, that implies to me that dollar $1,000,001 comes out of your pocket, not theirs.
Many ISPs will give you a static IP for a reasonable monthly charge.
Some do it by default, like mine.
Nice out-of-context headline. Yes, this is happening at certain Canadian airports (YVR, YOW, YUL, YYZ) but only in Canadian Customs areas (e.g. international arrivals). This posting makes it sound like it's everywhere.
It's primarily intended to help bust smuggling efforts by airport employees.
So people on trains shouldn't be able to access the Internet either?
(Yes, some trains have WiFi but the train I was on last week from Philadelphia to New York had really painful WiFi. I had much better connectivity on T-Mobile.)
The solution is really simple: high penalties. Here in Saskatchewan, where I live, it's about a $120 fine if you get caught using your phone while driving (handsfree use is fine but you are not allowed to touch more than one button to initiate or answer calls). Frankly, the fine should be higher. Teens would be scared to death if they could get a three-month driving suspension and a $500 fine if they got caught texting while driving, and I suspect most adults would be too. It's a behaviour so easy to avoid that the penalty is not a problem for lawful people.
Voice is best for some communications; text is best for others. What exactly is the point of this debate?
The simpler something is, the better SMS works. The more complex it is, the more likely a short telephone conversation is going to help the problem better than a multi-minute SMS exchange.
This is sort of like arguing that trucks are better than cars - cars are more fun to drive and more manoeuvrable but just try fitting that queen bed in the back to take it across town.
In Canada, we've typically taken US change at par - the coins are the same size and roughly the same weight. If you don't want them, spend them the next time you spend change - people will take them.
Given that Canadian dollars are worth the same as US, more or less (more right now), it makes sense for Americans to take Canadian change without worrying about it, especially in border regions.
I tend to keep all the US change I get and take it back to the US on my trips, but people would take it here without problem.
And ironically, your Canadian penny was worth 1.01 US cents.
The US can't unilaterally increase oil prices unless it military destroys oil production capacity, which seems a little self-defeating. The only way it could act, practically speaking, is to increase taxes on fossil fuels. That money wouldn't go to the oil industry - it would go wherever government wanted it to go; research into better energy sources, road construction, income tax reductions, whatever Americans decide is most important.
As for laws, you're right and I have no easy solution for this. The lobby groups in the US have a lot of power and it would take a huge undertaking by the average American to yell louder than the special interest groups do.
I don't mean to imply that I support high taxes carte blanche... I don't. However, I do have to point out that there are countries with high taxes and yet high standards of living, peace and very good levels of procedural justice. Countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark come to mind.
I think this idea that government is inherently evil and can't do anything productive is rather sad. Perhaps it's true in the US, which would be more of a commentary on the flaws of American democracy than on government in general, but there are countries where governments are, by American standards, very interventionists and yet there are high levels of happiness among the nation's population, along with a high standard of living and high levels of individual freedom.
This rigid debate about the evils of tax increases in the US reminds me of what we went through here in Saskatchewan in the mid-1990s. The economy here was terrible. We were in debt up to our eyeballs as a province and international banks were telling us that we were not far from being in a position where acquiring loans to finance future debt was going to be a difficult proposition. Our credit rating had been downgraded significantly. The government of the day severely reduced spending and significantly increased taxes. Roads got neglected, schools got overcrowded, and in general, it really sucked to be here for awhile. But do you know what happened? The provincial debt got significantly reduced. That permitted a gradual reduction of taxes. That allowed the economy to improve - slowly at first, very quickly later - and now we are one of the two strongest provinces in Canada economically, with very reasonable levels of debt a fraction of what it once was, and with a real hope of being retired completely in a few years.
Fix the US political system so that political actors act for the benefit of the nation and its citizens instead of special interest groups, and think with a mind toward the future. This petty bickering and inflexibility are not only increasingly making the US a laughingstock in the international scene, they are seriously damaging the US's ability to have a strong economy. Yes, that may mean a few years of significantly higher taxes, but the dividends in the long run would be huge.
Americans don't have to pay what they pay either - there are taxes in US fuel prices, just not as many as in some countries. The cheapest fuel is not in the US.
Some countries actually subsidize fuel for their citizens. I think that's a dumb choice, but it's their choice.
An interesting side effect of higher fuel taxes in Canada and especially in Europe is that vehicles tend to be smaller and more fuel efficient. That allows for denser parking (since vehicles don't take up as much space) and easier visibility for drivers on the roads, not to mention making our limited supplies of oil last longer.
I use GoPhone on a Canadian iPhone and it works fine. I buy 200 MB of data when I need data for a US trip. I understand that AT&T iPhones may not work on GoPhone (because AT&T prevents it from working) but non-AT&T ones (e.g. unlocked ones sourced from Apple, or officially unlocked by foreign providers) seem to work fine. So it can be done.
You're right, but you won't like the implication.
The solution is to not sell unlimited bandwidth. If AT&T sold data in packages by amounts, people would use that amount. If they went over, they'd pay more. They could raise their package to a higher allotment for a higher cost.
This would do two things:
1. AT&T would generate more revenue which would let them develop better cellular infrastructure to meet demand.
2. (And more importantly in the short term) It would discourage consumption. Lower consumption equals higher levels of service for those who choose to pay. If consumption is far below what the network can handle, a rate reduction will increase demand. If consumption is too high, a rate increase will reduce it (or supply extra funds for network improvement, if demand remains high).
Cellular never was unlimited at its beginning. We paid for blocks of minutes. As technology improved and supply of airtime increased, airtime prices went down. Unlimited airtime didn't appear for years after networks began.
Unlimited usage services are great if that usage doesn't harm other users. This is often true. Landline capacity is so high that local calls rarely interfered with others who wanted to make calls. There was no need to reduce call length. Long distance bandwidth, on the other hand, was relatively scarce (it wasn't uncommon to be unable to make long distance calls on Mother's Day or Christmas due to the trunks being full) so long distance rates discouraged people from calling unless they had the need. That also kept call length down which freed up the resource.
I'm not saying data needs to be expensive... it's just not practical for it to be unlimited, that's all; not, at least, until there's enough LTE and other technologies deployed so that everyone can use the technology and not be greatly affecting other users.
As a final point, some might argue that competitors are managing their bandwidth better. That might be true, and if so, people will be motivated to change providers. This will do as much to solve the problem as anything.
The cellular companies let us down in a way, letting us taste this cheap bandwidth and now we want to stream video and audio over it, download huge files, and access network content like we're at home no matter where we are. The airwaves can't handle it. It's time for a paradigm shift.
(I live in Canada, but we have similar problems. This isn't unique to AT&T.)
Whether it's obscene or not, it's a 9.9% reduction in EBITDA since 2010 (.464/.422 - 1). It's very significant.
If it continues then changes will definitely occur.
One has to remember that the wireless business is a pretty high-risk business. It is very capital-intensive and customer demands are quickly increasing (it wasn't long ago that 2G was more than good enough; now we want multiple megabits per second and we want it now).
That's something people forget about analog technologies.
A few years ago I still had an analog bag phone in my car (I had a digital phone too but I had the analog phone on another network because I knew it would have better coverage and, well, I'm a geek and I though it was cool to have a bag phone that still worked and had active service). One day, in rural Saskatchewan, out on some remote highway where my digital phone didn't work, my wife called me. My bag phone rang. I answered. The call was badly staticky but I could understand her, and she could understand me, and we could have a conversation. On the coverage map, there wasn't even any coverage there but an analog phone could sometimes work well enough that you could still use it.
This aspect of analog isn't always good - the static and noise of analog TV is pretty annoying, and I love getting beautiful HD ATSC signals now - but if you had bad signal, noisy analog was always better than the unusable signal you'd get using a digital technology.
It's the same with photography to some degree. A scratched negative can be salvaged, but a corrupted digital file is probably not usable at all.
I like digital technologies fine, but the point about a worn VHS tape being annoying as compared to a worn DVD being unusable is a completely valid one.
I miss one thing about it: it was easy to record something and then let someone else watch it. Oh, you missed Television Show last night? Here's the tape. (Tapes were also cheap so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't get the tape back.)
Of course, you can do this today but it's significantly more work to do it. I actually picked up a cheap DVD recorder so that I can dump content onto DVD painlessly, but unfortunately it won't turn HD video downconverted into 480i into anamorphic format so that you can still watch it as widescreen content. It's less work to go get the HD torrent, but I have a little better technical knowledge than the average person.
Automatic tracking and automatic tuning became universal in VCRs after a few years and helped a lot.
I bought my first VCR in about 1990 - I know, late adopter - and it had both of these features. It even had a "cable eye" that would let it control cable boxes (and it still works on modern digital cable boxes, although the highest channel number it will take is 199).
Once we got automatic tracking on VHS VCRs - which if I recall became common in the late 1980s - this problem substantially disappeared. You could still manually track automatic-tracking VCRs if you knew how, and once in awhile it was helpful to avoid video or audio distortion.
The consistent issue I saw was that of the three recording speeds - SP, LP (doubled recording time) and EP (tripled recording time), few VCRs supported LP well. Video usually disappeared during fast forward and rewind tape scanning, when it wouldn't using the other two speeds. Also, most "modern" VCRs won't record at LP speed although they will play it back. Still, it was not very commonly used.
I'm not against using analog technology (I still do my photography with film after all) but it's relatively easy to get around the my-computer-died problem. My digital music is on a server with RAID-1 disks for redundancy, and is backed up nightly to both a local external hard disk and a remote plug computer (at a family member's house). I'll never lose much, if anything, if I have a catastrophe unless it takes my family member's house out too. (3 km between us, so possible, but unlikely.)
I buy my music on CDs and rip them though - that way I have a pressed original, too, and I can determine the ripping. That lets me have both FLAC and MP3 rips, and I have the original CDs to play if I want.
I don't know what they call them in the US, but in Canada, what you call a "news agent" is a newsstand.
Indeed I made a typo, but the iPhone is more than the sum of its parts. It's not just what it does... it's how it does it and how easy it is to use.
In any event, the market has spoken. The market doesn't always make the best decisions, but Apple is giving people what they want and other companies aren't succeeding as much in that regard. Apple's profitability says it all.
I don't see why any consumer would care. Here's how economics works: companies come up with products and services and people buy them, or don't buy them. People are buying iPhones at Apple's price, which means that people perceive that there is value in them.
Frankly, the fact that there are significantly cheaper options out there and yet Apple still manages to do so well speaks volumes as to how happy their customers are.
People joke about Apple "fanbois" and there is some truth behind the derision, but consider it this way: wouldn't you love to be running a company where customers actually love your products and evangelize them? What other companies in the world - companies who sell *any* product or service - have that kind of loyalty? I'm sure there must be some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. (I love my local pizza place, but their prices are similar to the competition's and they don't exactly lead the world in pizza profits.)