Way to quote only the part of the article that supports your argument. Here's the rest of the blurb:
Brian McCartney sez, "Just a note, the piece was not publicly paid for, it was a gift from SBC Communcations. Not that it matters, it's still totally bogus." Too right -- the public are still paying for this, not just in upkeep, but in the tax-break to SBC, in the maintenance of the object, in the policing to stop photogs, and most of all in the cost to the public nature of its space that comes from having an unphotographable object splatted right in the middle of an otherwise very nice park.
And, as another poster pointed out, regardless of who paid for it and how, it's now owned by the public.
Not only that, but you apparently didn't bother to read the article linked to by the source you quoted.
From the article: The sculpture is made possible by a gift from the SBC Corporation.
The article makes no mention of SBC paying for the actual sculpture. It makes reference to a "gift" which could have been the land (since it's called SBC Plaza) or a monetary donation which the city then used to pay for the sculpture.
Grow up. Interesting choice of words, because these children will grow up. What will they have learned?
They are making sure kids at school are in fact at school.
Wrong. They already have a mechanism for making sure kids at school are in fact at school. They verify the fact visually.
What they now have is a system for making sure the RFID tags at school are in fact, at school.
I think the only argument that can be made is that the RFID tags are more efficient, because attendance doesn't have to be taken. On the other hand, I suspect it's less accurate, as students can easily carry each other's RFID cards. And, I'm not sure it is more efficient, because how long really does it take a teacher with a seating chart to take attendance? 30 seconds?
We are looking at 2 bucks a gallon in the midwest.
Bleh. The last time I visited the midwest I paid $1.699 and loved it. $2/gallon is nothing. Since I moved out of the midwest, I've paid less than $2/gallon once. It was $1.999.
Seriously folks, if that was the case, wouldn't you expect the OIL prices to go DOWN?
Maybe eventually, once they've got control of it and OPEC no longer has a virtual monopoly. Of course, that's assuming the oil company isn't just going to take part in their monopoly and profit off of us. We've already shown we're willing to pay. Baa.
But oil prices going down are largely irrelevant to what's going on. It works like this:
American taxpayer money goes in.
Bush oil buddies get profit out.
If it helps, think of it like a hugely inefficient theft and money laundering scheme.
Consider that Iraq owes several countries billions of dollars because of loans Saddam took out. There's the feel good story that we're "forgiving" the debt, but really the deal is Iraq gives up it's economic sovereignity and control of it's natural resources and we give up a tiny $4 billion. Yay us. (Taxpayers paid that $4 billion and we're still paying many more billions for the war, but it's the corporations who get access to the oil.)
So now there's a nation which can vote (yay?) for a leader who really has no choice but to do what the foreign oil companies want him to do. Oh, and if they want to eat, they get to work for those oil companies.
Gee, I can see how we liberated them and how it's not about oil.
To boldly go where no one has gone before... er, as long as we can do it at a profit and can't be sued.
I think potential lawsuits are an important motivating factor. If they have accepted safety standards and follow those standards, they limit their liability.
I think they're saying the power supply is homocidal rather than suicidal.
From the first page of the article (which is all I got to read):
The Power Supply (PSU)
Three little words, but loaded with such destructive potential. Faulty power supplies are by far and away the most common source of computer mortality. In our reader survey, power issues accounted for over 30% of all dead-PC tales, and after working in a computer store for a few years I'm surprised it wasn't actually higher. We saw system after system come into the store for service with the immortal words "it just won't turn on" or "smoke came out of the back... Will it be ok?"
Here's a typical tale of bright lights, big balls of smoke;
"...The customer came in saying that the PC wouldn't start at all. Of course I suspected the PSU, but had to test it anyway. Plugged in the unit and pushed the power button and was illuminated by a flash of light. The PSU had indeed failed, and now had also blown a MOSFET on the system board and scorched the 512mb stick of PC3200 RAM..."
That the power supply is the most dangerous of PC components should come as no surprise. After all, its responsibility is to filter the massive wall voltage into the bite-sized 12V, 5V and 3.3V DC allocations that modern PCs need.
Sometimes I'll get something in exchange: money, beer, their old equipment, whatever. I don't ask short of making it clear that I'm always in the market for any equipment they don't want.
If someone becomes a "problem", I don't charge them more, but I make it clear they're a problem. I explain to them what they aren't to do if they want me to help them again.
For instance, I install Firefox on every Windows machine I support and rename the icon "Internet". I explain what it is, it's for and that they should only use IE if their school, bank, whatever doesn't work in Firefox, and then only for that purpose.
If I get a call that their computer is "slow" and I get there and it's full of spyware and I find out they've been using IE exclusively, that's it. I fix their problem and explain why it happened. Usually I don't get another call for that problem. If I do, I tell them I can't help them and they need to take it somewhere.
I prefer this to charging them money. Anyone who can't follow my instructions is likely not to understand problems well enough to understand when I've fixed something and when I've made a mistake. So I go there, fix everything right, a month later, they have the same problem (because of something they did) and expect me to fix it because it's the same problem they already paid me to fix.
I don't see any reason to get into that situation with family or friends. I'm not, after all, concerned with money. I'm concerned with my time.
I pay a ridiculous price for cable right now. I watch several shows on a semi-regular basis, and record That 70's Show and Battlestar Galactica weekly. My wife watches a little bit more. My daughter watches lots of children shows. I feel I get my money's worth. If I were a single guy, I wouldn't have cable (and when I was, I didn't).
A Netflix type system might work, but there are some shows I would probably like to own. Netflix doesn't allow for that, unless you rent it first, and then pay more money to buy it somewhere else. I think I'd rather just purchase it outright for a fee more than Netflix and less than (Netflix + DVD).
I'd like to see something like iTunes or allofmp3.com for film. Let me download not only the shows I want, but the individual episodes. How wonderful would it be to never see another clipshow again because no one would buy it? Even better if they give me the option to purchase on DVD, and to specify the encryption rate, et cetera. I can watch what I want, when I want, commercial free. I can burn it to DVD, play it over the network to my laptop, or whatever.
I would probably save money at $3-5 an episode. Especially since my daughter has no qualms about watching the same episode of one of her shows 3 or 4 hundred times.
But when you take it all into account, even if it cost slightly more it would be okay, because I could watch when, where, and how I wanted to watch. I would save boatloads of time not watching or fast forwarding through commercials. And the quality would be improved, because if it wasn't, bad episodes wouldn't sell.
When Fox 29 (now Fox 9, I believe) couldn't show their advertisers that people watched syndicated The Simpsons episodes, they ran advertisements encouraging younger viewers to become Neilsen families if given the opportunity and to vote for The Simpsons. It worked, and syndicated episodes stayed on their air.
Apparently in MN only old people are Nielsen families.
Of course, they were smart enough to realize that people were actually watching and just not being recorded, and it was at a local level. The data on Enterprise is probably more accurate because it's taken from a wider sample.
We had better test these ideas on a safe asteroid instead of waiting for the day when an asteroid aimed at earth actually arrives.
I have a differing opinion on what constitutes a safe asteroid. A mistake on this asteroid could potentially be just as devistating as a mistake on one destined to collide with us.
I'd rather poke a few asteroids that don't come within 22,600 miles of Earth.
I've seen what I imagine is the opposite end of the spectrum. Perfectly good and usable computers that would have been readily accepted, were sat on.
My former employer upgraded their entire corporation office (hundreds of computers), but kept the 486s they replaced as long as I worked there. They could have gotten a small, but reasonable, price for all of them. I offered to buy a few myself.
I never really understood why they held on to them, although the rumor I heard is that it was an accounting issue. The original cost of the 486s was much higher than their current value. By not selling them, their assets appeared higher and they didn't have to show the loss. So it was (in theory, and possibly in fact) better for their stock price to waste the room in their warehouse and take an actual loss (as the 486s depreciated away to nothing) than to sell them for a loss on paper.
Does one decision to moderate my post -1 Troll have any relation to whether or not what I said was factual and accurate?
If so, given my current karma rating of "Good" for my commenting history, perhaps I understand it correctly after all?
42464. (a) On and after January 1, 2005 a covered electronic waste recycling fee is hereby imposed upon the first sale in the state of a covered electronic device to a consumer by a retailer. (b) A retailer that sells a covered electronic device to a consumer shall collect the fee imposed under subdivision (a) for each covered electronic device sold by the retailer in the following amounts:
(1) Six dollars ($6) for each covered electronic device with a screen size of greater than 4 inches measured diagonally but less than 15 inches measured diagonally. (2) Eight dollars ($8) for each covered electronic device with a screen size greater than or equal to 15 inches but less than 35 inches measured diagonally. (3) Ten dollars ($10) for each covered electronic device with a screen size greater than or equal to 35 inches measured diagonally.
If I understand the moderation system correctly, Funny points don't count towards Karma, and some moderators consider that unfair, so instead use one of the other modifiers.
One of the moderators obviously has an ironic sense of humor since he moderated your question "Informative".:)
From TFA:
Campus police referred the case to the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office, which has charged the teen with breach of computer information, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail.
What's the difference between that and say, holding the teacher at gunpoint to get the answers? In both cases he's doing more than cheating on a test. He's committing a crime to cheat on the test. He's being charged with the crime, not cheating on a test.
At least my complaints are designed to be productive and effect change. Your complaint seems designed to tell people to shut up and maintain a forcefed status quo.
DRM does upset me "that much", and my solution is simply to not provide any funding to companies who have anything to do with it. I also talk about it with people who will listen. ("Complain", if you will.)
Your "solution" won't work. First, the potential legal ramifications are no better than for downloading the file illegally in the first place. Second, the file quality won't be as good. Third, and most important, you're trying to correct a symptom, rather than the problem.
To specify the problem: We have a right to use and copy this information for our own use as we see fit and this right has been taken away from us by dubious means. An end run has been made around my rights for no reason and I have a problem with it.
If you don't want to hear that, okay, but do me a favor and stop trying to invalidate my point of view by implying that I only complain because I "always find something to complain about".
The iPod is obviously a vastly superior mp3 player, because that is what it was designed to do. However, a PDA is a better solution for some people, myself included.
Here's why:
I already own the PDA. I use it for all the typical uses (calendar, contacts, birthdays, games, reading news and documents, et cetera). A $50 SD card is a much more economical solution for me than a $399.99 iPod. An iPod would just be one more (expensive) thing I would have to carry around. Other, cheaper, mp3 players might not have the cost issue, but would still be one more thing to carry around.
I don't need more than a 1GB of portable music. When I'm in the mood for a different set of music, all I need are CONFIG_MMC, CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK, and a Perl script.
Battery life, as many iPod fans here have mentioned, has never been an issue for me. I've never had to stop listening due to low battery. RealOne Player for PalmOS actually takes battery life into account and shuts off the display when the Palm is only being used as an mp3 player.
Slashdot Mirror
Way to quote only the part of the article that supports your argument. Here's the rest of the blurb:
Brian McCartney sez, "Just a note, the piece was not publicly paid for, it was a gift from SBC Communcations. Not that it matters, it's still totally bogus." Too right -- the public are still paying for this, not just in upkeep, but in the tax-break to SBC, in the maintenance of the object, in the policing to stop photogs, and most of all in the cost to the public nature of its space that comes from having an unphotographable object splatted right in the middle of an otherwise very nice park.
And, as another poster pointed out, regardless of who paid for it and how, it's now owned by the public.
Not only that, but you apparently didn't bother to read the article linked to by the source you quoted.
Here it is: http://www.millenniumpark.org/sbcplaza.htm
From the article:
The sculpture is made possible by a gift from the SBC Corporation.
The article makes no mention of SBC paying for the actual sculpture. It makes reference to a "gift" which could have been the land (since it's called SBC Plaza) or a monetary donation which the city then used to pay for the sculpture.
Boy, have I got a wikipedia article to show you.
Grow up. Interesting choice of words, because these children will grow up. What will they have learned?
They are making sure kids at school are in fact at school.
Wrong. They already have a mechanism for making sure kids at school are in fact at school. They verify the fact visually.
What they now have is a system for making sure the RFID tags at school are in fact, at school.
I think the only argument that can be made is that the RFID tags are more efficient, because attendance doesn't have to be taken. On the other hand, I suspect it's less accurate, as students can easily carry each other's RFID cards. And, I'm not sure it is more efficient, because how long really does it take a teacher with a seating chart to take attendance? 30 seconds?
We are looking at 2 bucks a gallon in the midwest.
Bleh. The last time I visited the midwest I paid $1.699 and loved it. $2/gallon is nothing. Since I moved out of the midwest, I've paid less than $2/gallon once. It was $1.999.
Seriously folks, if that was the case, wouldn't you expect the OIL prices to go DOWN?
Maybe eventually, once they've got control of it and OPEC no longer has a virtual monopoly. Of course, that's assuming the oil company isn't just going to take part in their monopoly and profit off of us. We've already shown we're willing to pay. Baa.
But oil prices going down are largely irrelevant to what's going on. It works like this:
American taxpayer money goes in.
Bush oil buddies get profit out.
If it helps, think of it like a hugely inefficient theft and money laundering scheme.
Consider that Iraq owes several countries billions of dollars because of loans Saddam took out. There's the feel good story that we're "forgiving" the debt, but really the deal is Iraq gives up it's economic sovereignity and control of it's natural resources and we give up a tiny $4 billion. Yay us. (Taxpayers paid that $4 billion and we're still paying many more billions for the war, but it's the corporations who get access to the oil.)
So now there's a nation which can vote (yay?) for a leader who really has no choice but to do what the foreign oil companies want him to do. Oh, and if they want to eat, they get to work for those oil companies.
Gee, I can see how we liberated them and how it's not about oil.
To boldly go where no one has gone before... er, as long as we can do it at a profit and can't be sued.
I think potential lawsuits are an important motivating factor. If they have accepted safety standards and follow those standards, they limit their liability.
I once had a drive bay frame come loose (it was hooked on, but probably had screws that I took off at some point and never replaced) during a move.
The frame (with harddrive attached) snapped a couple PCI cards and scratched the living hell out of the motherboard.
I think they're saying the power supply is homocidal rather than suicidal.
From the first page of the article (which is all I got to read):
The Power Supply (PSU)
Three little words, but loaded with such destructive potential. Faulty power supplies are by far and away the most common source of computer mortality. In our reader survey, power issues accounted for over 30% of all dead-PC tales, and after working in a computer store for a few years I'm surprised it wasn't actually higher. We saw system after system come into the store for service with the immortal words "it just won't turn on" or "smoke came out of the back... Will it be ok?"
Here's a typical tale of bright lights, big balls of smoke;
"...The customer came in saying that the PC wouldn't start at all. Of course I suspected the PSU, but had to test it anyway. Plugged in the unit and pushed the power button and was illuminated by a flash of light. The PSU had indeed failed, and now had also blown a MOSFET on the system board and scorched the 512mb stick of PC3200 RAM..."
That the power supply is the most dangerous of PC components should come as no surprise. After all, its responsibility is to filter the massive wall voltage into the bite-sized 12V, 5V and 3.3V DC allocations that modern PCs need.
Get a what now?
I've always done it for free.
Sometimes I'll get something in exchange: money, beer, their old equipment, whatever. I don't ask short of making it clear that I'm always in the market for any equipment they don't want.
If someone becomes a "problem", I don't charge them more, but I make it clear they're a problem. I explain to them what they aren't to do if they want me to help them again.
For instance, I install Firefox on every Windows machine I support and rename the icon "Internet". I explain what it is, it's for and that they should only use IE if their school, bank, whatever doesn't work in Firefox, and then only for that purpose.
If I get a call that their computer is "slow" and I get there and it's full of spyware and I find out they've been using IE exclusively, that's it. I fix their problem and explain why it happened. Usually I don't get another call for that problem. If I do, I tell them I can't help them and they need to take it somewhere.
I prefer this to charging them money. Anyone who can't follow my instructions is likely not to understand problems well enough to understand when I've fixed something and when I've made a mistake. So I go there, fix everything right, a month later, they have the same problem (because of something they did) and expect me to fix it because it's the same problem they already paid me to fix.
I don't see any reason to get into that situation with family or friends. I'm not, after all, concerned with money. I'm concerned with my time.
...on the price and on how it is done.
I pay a ridiculous price for cable right now. I watch several shows on a semi-regular basis, and record That 70's Show and Battlestar Galactica weekly. My wife watches a little bit more. My daughter watches lots of children shows. I feel I get my money's worth. If I were a single guy, I wouldn't have cable (and when I was, I didn't).
A Netflix type system might work, but there are some shows I would probably like to own. Netflix doesn't allow for that, unless you rent it first, and then pay more money to buy it somewhere else. I think I'd rather just purchase it outright for a fee more than Netflix and less than (Netflix + DVD).
I'd like to see something like iTunes or allofmp3.com for film. Let me download not only the shows I want, but the individual episodes. How wonderful would it be to never see another clipshow again because no one would buy it? Even better if they give me the option to purchase on DVD, and to specify the encryption rate, et cetera. I can watch what I want, when I want, commercial free. I can burn it to DVD, play it over the network to my laptop, or whatever.
I would probably save money at $3-5 an episode. Especially since my daughter has no qualms about watching the same episode of one of her shows 3 or 4 hundred times.
But when you take it all into account, even if it cost slightly more it would be okay, because I could watch when, where, and how I wanted to watch. I would save boatloads of time not watching or fast forwarding through commercials. And the quality would be improved, because if it wasn't, bad episodes wouldn't sell.
When Fox 29 (now Fox 9, I believe) couldn't show their advertisers that people watched syndicated The Simpsons episodes, they ran advertisements encouraging younger viewers to become Neilsen families if given the opportunity and to vote for The Simpsons. It worked, and syndicated episodes stayed on their air.
Apparently in MN only old people are Nielsen families.
Of course, they were smart enough to realize that people were actually watching and just not being recorded, and it was at a local level. The data on Enterprise is probably more accurate because it's taken from a wider sample.
Strangely enough, I feel much better about it than I would if it was April 1st, 2029.
I can just see it now. "Remember how we told you 24 years ago that the asteroid wouldn't hit earth? APRIL FOOLS!"
My friend, I think you need to familiarize yourself with this highly credible source and learn the truth about NASA and the ruling elite! ;)
We don't have to move the asteroid 22,600 miles. We only have to change it's vector a fraction of a degree and wait.
I wonder about space junk. I wonder if this thing will take some with it.
We had better test these ideas on a safe asteroid instead of waiting for the day when an asteroid aimed at earth actually arrives.
I have a differing opinion on what constitutes a safe asteroid. A mistake on this asteroid could potentially be just as devistating as a mistake on one destined to collide with us.
I'd rather poke a few asteroids that don't come within 22,600 miles of Earth.
I've seen what I imagine is the opposite end of the spectrum. Perfectly good and usable computers that would have been readily accepted, were sat on.
My former employer upgraded their entire corporation office (hundreds of computers), but kept the 486s they replaced as long as I worked there. They could have gotten a small, but reasonable, price for all of them. I offered to buy a few myself.
I never really understood why they held on to them, although the rumor I heard is that it was an accounting issue. The original cost of the 486s was much higher than their current value. By not selling them, their assets appeared higher and they didn't have to show the loss. So it was (in theory, and possibly in fact) better for their stock price to waste the room in their warehouse and take an actual loss (as the 486s depreciated away to nothing) than to sell them for a loss on paper.
Does one decision to moderate my post -1 Troll have any relation to whether or not what I said was factual and accurate? If so, given my current karma rating of "Good" for my commenting history, perhaps I understand it correctly after all?
Article 3. Covered Electronic Waste Recycling Fee
42464. (a) On and after January 1, 2005 a covered electronic waste recycling fee is hereby imposed upon the first sale in the state of a covered electronic device to a consumer by a retailer. (b) A retailer that sells a covered electronic device to a consumer shall collect the fee imposed under subdivision (a) for each covered electronic device sold by the retailer in the following amounts:
(1) Six dollars ($6) for each covered electronic device with a screen size of greater than 4 inches measured diagonally but less than 15 inches measured diagonally.
(2) Eight dollars ($8) for each covered electronic device with a screen size greater than or equal to 15 inches but less than 35 inches measured diagonally.
(3) Ten dollars ($10) for each covered electronic device with a screen size greater than or equal to 35 inches measured diagonally.
If I understand the moderation system correctly, Funny points don't count towards Karma, and some moderators consider that unfair, so instead use one of the other modifiers.
:)
One of the moderators obviously has an ironic sense of humor since he moderated your question "Informative".
Crap. Now I have to change my password.
From TFA:
Campus police referred the case to the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office, which has charged the teen with breach of computer information, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail.
What's the difference between that and say, holding the teacher at gunpoint to get the answers? In both cases he's doing more than cheating on a test. He's committing a crime to cheat on the test. He's being charged with the crime, not cheating on a test.
At least my complaints are designed to be productive and effect change. Your complaint seems designed to tell people to shut up and maintain a forcefed status quo.
DRM does upset me "that much", and my solution is simply to not provide any funding to companies who have anything to do with it. I also talk about it with people who will listen. ("Complain", if you will.)
Your "solution" won't work. First, the potential legal ramifications are no better than for downloading the file illegally in the first place. Second, the file quality won't be as good. Third, and most important, you're trying to correct a symptom, rather than the problem.
To specify the problem: We have a right to use and copy this information for our own use as we see fit and this right has been taken away from us by dubious means. An end run has been made around my rights for no reason and I have a problem with it.
If you don't want to hear that, okay, but do me a favor and stop trying to invalidate my point of view by implying that I only complain because I "always find something to complain about".
How cruel is it to make them want to reproduce without being able to?
Boy are you in the right place.
The iPod is obviously a vastly superior mp3 player, because that is what it was designed to do. However, a PDA is a better solution for some people, myself included.
Here's why:
I already own the PDA. I use it for all the typical uses (calendar, contacts, birthdays, games, reading news and documents, et cetera). A $50 SD card is a much more economical solution for me than a $399.99 iPod. An iPod would just be one more (expensive) thing I would have to carry around. Other, cheaper, mp3 players might not have the cost issue, but would still be one more thing to carry around.
I don't need more than a 1GB of portable music. When I'm in the mood for a different set of music, all I need are CONFIG_MMC, CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK, and a Perl script.
Battery life, as many iPod fans here have mentioned, has never been an issue for me. I've never had to stop listening due to low battery. RealOne Player for PalmOS actually takes battery life into account and shuts off the display when the Palm is only being used as an mp3 player.