You're talking about the old way, where only the destination country cared and then only for those that cared at all. Some places never bothered to look.
In the new way, the US looks at you on exit whether or not the destination cares. If you fail the tests, you are detained and cannot leave.
This is a radical departure from the way we've handled our borders. It's much more typical of communist countries such as East Germany, the old Soviet Union, North Korea, etc. Free countries don't interrogate their people like this.
I'm in. I will now delete my Tivo season pass and saved episodes of Robot Chicken, a Sony TV program. And that's going to hurt because I like that show.
I use Sony MDR-71 headphones with my non-Sony DAP. It was nearly time to order my third consecutive pair of the things -as with any Sony product, they wear out and have to be replaced every so often. But this time I will order Shure or Etymotics instead.
I have a spool of Sony CD-Rs. Haven't decided if they should go into a microwave or just be donated to a church or something.
Dunno about everybody else but most of the girls I meet in chatrooms and online games are guys playing as girls. Some of the rest are Dateline plants trolling for men, but that's not my thing.
Anyway, what's the Second Life slang for guys playing as girls? Gurlz or something?
Many actual Real Life(TM) girls play as male game characters so they won't get hit on or bothered.
I play mail and female characters in SL. The guy character gets left alone except by sex workers who want to sell him their wares. He's much like the real me and fairly boring to game with.
The girl character, who is not at all like me, has an incredibly active social thing going on and has accumulated dozens of friends without even trying. She's fun to play because she's so different from me. But she does get hit on all the time just because she appears to be female. It's common for complete strangers to walk up and make all sorts of rather forward comments.
My guy character gets none of that.
I have a new appreciation for some of the hassle girls go through.
At various times, I have had a free LJ account, a paid account, and now a Plus account. The paid one gave me no advantage over free, so no surprise I stopped paying for it.
I and most of my 15 or so LJ friends have moved to the "Plus" account with paid ads inserted into our journals. We like the enhanced features.
Most importantly, we have all gotten so used to the adsense model and similar advertising placement that we simply don't "see" the ads any more. Ignoring the LJ ads is no harder than ignoring any other ad on any other site.
All you need to make a bakery a success is have the aroma of fresh bread wafting through the neighborhood.
If you really want to be like a bakery in France, you want to be on a side street with no good parking, have an unmarked door and perhaps no sign outside, and you want to be open only three or four hours a day. If customers can't find you, of if the bread is all sold out, that's their loss.
But honestly, most neighborhoods in France already have at least one bakery. They're about as common as convenience stores in the US. So why do they need to bring in nuclear physics to figure out where to open another one? Why not just ask a baker? They've been opening bakeries since humans figured out how to cook.
I carry a gasoline credit card with a $500 limit. When I first got the card, my credit score went down just for having a new credit line. Then it went down again the first month because an account (the new one) showed a balance increase. Well of course! Anything more than zero is an increase.
So that first month, it went to like $90 and I paid it off in full. Second month, gas prices went up and I used more gas, so it went to $120 something, and I paid that off. Credit score went down due to another balance increase. Sure, it went up by maybe 30 bucks. Still nowhere near the limit.
Between opening the account and two months of honest, legal, normal usage that never came close to maxing it out, I lost nearly 20 points of credit score.
Some months after that, I bought a car. My lowered scored made the loan interest rate slightly higher, so that's one way I have been financially affected simply for using the gas card.
The new car also needed auto insurance. I got a letter from my insurance company informing me that they're happy to insure my new toy, but I'll be paying more than most people because I show a big new credit line (the auto loan) that's maxed out.
Well of course! The loan company isn't going to give me a credit line larger than the price of the car! The auto loan credit line is exactly what the car cost, after rebates and down payment all that stuff. Of course that one is maxed out. Duh.
So, because of the gas card that I used with restraint, I got dinged. Because I took out a car loan, as anyone might do, I have to pay more for insurance. As I see it, I'm managing my credit within reason. But my score looks like crap now.
My employer DOES look at credit scores at least annually, as well as conducting background checks annually, so I know they're going to pick up on this. Probably won't get me fired but it will get noticed and I still haven't done anything like max out a card or not pay a bill or any of a hundred other things that get people into trouble.
Small note: the development of Velcro had nothing to do with the space program. It was invented in 1948 -ten years before NASA was formed- by a Swiss engineer named Georges de Mestral.
Velcro may have been used by NASA but it was not their idea.
Tang wasn't invented by NASA either. It was merely a poorly selling breakfast drink. However it did gain popularity thanks to NASA.
* Set up a post box in Japan (there's companies providing such services) then forward it to your overseas address. Expensive, even more of a hassle, and only worth it if you're doing some kind of regular trading.
Can you suggest one or more of these forwarding companies?
Maximum PC -back when it was still called boot- had a horrible spoof of Daikatana where they joked about "Ron Jomero" releasing a pizza restaurant sim called Daikatana just to say he actually shipped something called Daikatana. Wish I could find that spoof now, cause it's the same thing all over again.
If 3DR HAS to ship the game, they'll likely just roll out something with that name and cash the check. I hope not because it's one game company I actually care about. ROTT, DN3D, Shadow Warrior, and more have given me tons of fun over the years.
Well I have used 120-volt AC fans in my case for one reason: no load on the PSU.
I had several 80mm AC fans wired to run totally independantly of the system so cooling would continue if the system power failed and also to remove the "heat soak" effect when the system powers down.
The wiring was always thick IEC power cord-type and covered in anti-abrasion sleeves just in case. Never had a problem with it.
Those fans are not in use now because I upgraded to a better PSU that can handle a ton of load and has an extra fan of it's own and I also slightly modded my Antec case to allow better airflow. My goals have changed too: I am totally into hard drive cooling and not worried so much about the CPU.
Japanese consumers are already used to paying more for items than people elsewhere are willing to pay.
For example, a common audio CD that sells for $15 in the US might sell for north of $30 there. Groceries, housing, basic everyday things generally cost more. Tokyo isn't continously voted the most expensive city on Earth for nothing.
That does not mean people anywhere else want to pay the same thing.
There's also a strong nationalism side. Sony IS Japan. The hometown team. Asking Japanese people if they're gonna buy a PS3 is like asking Americans if they're gonna buy hot dogs for any random summer holiday.
Yeah, but are they going to buy the Gwaltney chicken dogs that cost a dollar a pack or the better ones that cost three or four times as much? Didn't ask that.
Finally, many Japanese are really into the lastest trendy gadgets -helped by companies coming out with something new new new every 30 seconds- regardless of price. They don't care what it costs.
I would not get to excited about the company promising anything.
It's all well and good for IBM to say that IBM won't require XYZ but that would not apply to parts they sell off in the future. One minute you work for IBM, the next you work for Lenovo or Hitachi or somebody else who have made no such promises to anyone.
For that matter, it's all well and good for a C*O to stand up and proclaim such things but people change their minds, get replaced, etc, and corporate policies have a way of swinging 180 degrees without notice. Ultimately all they care about are profits and the shareholders and if the shareholders want employee DNA, they're gonna get it.
Heck I can see IBM or other companies weaseling out of even having to talk about it. All they have to do is claim DNA collection/use is an HR issue and say that they value employee privacy and won't discuss HR issues. That neatly hides the issue behind a veil of "protecting worker privacy" all the while violating that same privacy with DNA collection. Amazing.
This is silly. The phone can employ all the secure tricks it wants, 128, 256, 1024 bit keys, exotic custom stuff, etc. Makes no difference.
If somebody wants to know what you are saying, they just bug the handset. They have to really want to listen pretty badly and come up with a way to get the phone long enough to mod it, but it can be done, has been done, and been used against assorted targets around the world.
As long as people have to speak into the phone and hear sound from the earpiece, there will be plain old bugs in phones.
It makes no difference which crypto is used, how many bits in the key, whether it's triple encoded into some exotic format or who knows what.
Anyone who wants to know what you are saying badly enough will simply bug the handset and capture the voice going in and the sound coming out. Ye olde analogue hole.
This sort of bugging has already been done with existing mobile phones so this new variant of handset is unlikely to present any challenge at all.
"Congress shall make no law" doesn't say anything about the Senate, Presidential Executive Orders, or other methods. Only that Congress can't do it.
So there's the out Gonzales would want. All he needs is an executive order. Done.
Think this is bullshit? Ah, but this is the SAME sort of thinking behind the idea that "freedom OF religion" is not the same as "freedom FROM religion" -if they can play words games with the wording of one thing, there's nothing to stop them from playing again.
What comes after Blue Ray? One or possibly two more disc formats. And by then, you will be able to stream anything you want same as some of us can do now with on-demand cable TV or IPTV.
HD DVD and Blu-Ray (Blurry) are the last big shot the movie companies have to sell you "all new!" physical media versions of the same movies they've been selling since VHS went big in the early 1980's. You have the VHS, now own the DVD. Have the DVD, now own it again on HD. We promise, Back To The Future 3 will be better this time, HD making ALL the difference. Honest!
Yeah, sure. Sony's interest in this is mostly for the license fees they hope to make off every BD player and disc. They don't care what ends up on the format as long as they get paid royalties for it.
There will always be a market for people who still want that satisfaction of owning physical media but who knows if in 10-15 we aren't following the Vivid model where you download and burn your own disc and perhaps pop it into a disc case that you print yourself. Combine iTunes-style pricing, a color inkjet printer with a cheap burner and anyone can have an instant movie collection. Many of us do that now but imagine it boiled down to a $100 standalone device plugged into broadband. No distributors needed, no video stores, no giant bins of DVDs at Walmart, everyone who wants Shrek 9 can get one on release day, and no more out-of-print movies for those who want something else. That's the part I am hopeful about.
But what comes after we all have 1080P? There are super high-def formats beyond that but once you hit HD, it becomes harder to produce a product that looks significantly better without spending government bribery slush accounts worth of money to do it.
Geeky point: the Minidisc is actually older than you might have realized. It was first announced by Sony in 1991, making it closer to 15 years old rather than 10.
Another note is that other companies DID make plenty of MD devices but most of them were sold only in Japan.
That's not a good representation of demand. On day one, there will always be super fans who will pay nearly anything to get a console. That's all well and good except for two things:
1) The extra money doesn't get back to Sony so they shouldn't be thinking about how much MORE it will sell for on eBay.
2) eBay sales to day-one super fans are not enough to matter. Sony needs to put this machine in lots and lots and lots of homes.
Would you like a prize? Have one. Indeed, cell signals have been used to track objects, like aircraft.
In particular, a US F-117 Stealth fighter was shot down over Bosnia. The shooters could not track the plane on radar -because it's stealth, you know- so they looked instead at the changing signal patterns of the cell system as the plane flew over.
They didn't look for the plane so much as the "signal hole" it made as it moved through the sky. They simply aimed some missles at the "hole" and scored a hit. It was the first F117 downed by enemy fire.
Very creative. Everydamnbody in the world who's likely to be F117 targets took lots and lots of notes.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about the old way, where only the destination country cared and then only for those that cared at all. Some places never bothered to look.
In the new way, the US looks at you on exit whether or not the destination cares. If you fail the tests, you are detained and cannot leave.
This is a radical departure from the way we've handled our borders. It's much more typical of communist countries such as East Germany, the old Soviet Union, North Korea, etc. Free countries don't interrogate their people like this.
I'm in. I will now delete my Tivo season pass and saved episodes of Robot Chicken, a Sony TV program. And that's going to hurt because I like that show.
I use Sony MDR-71 headphones with my non-Sony DAP. It was nearly time to order my third consecutive pair of the things -as with any Sony product, they wear out and have to be replaced every so often. But this time I will order Shure or Etymotics instead.
I have a spool of Sony CD-Rs. Haven't decided if they should go into a microwave or just be donated to a church or something.
His thing was element 115. So no. No cookie.
Yes, I play MAIL characters. SUE ME. DUH. Been typing in SL too much. My mind is gone. LOL OMG
Dunno about everybody else but most of the girls I meet in chatrooms and online games are guys playing as girls. Some of the rest are Dateline plants trolling for men, but that's not my thing.
Anyway, what's the Second Life slang for guys playing as girls? Gurlz or something?
Many actual Real Life(TM) girls play as male game characters so they won't get hit on or bothered.
I play mail and female characters in SL. The guy character gets left alone except by sex workers who want to sell him their wares. He's much like the real me and fairly boring to game with.
The girl character, who is not at all like me, has an incredibly active social thing going on and has accumulated dozens of friends without even trying. She's fun to play because she's so different from me. But she does get hit on all the time just because she appears to be female. It's common for complete strangers to walk up and make all sorts of rather forward comments.
My guy character gets none of that.
I have a new appreciation for some of the hassle girls go through.
At various times, I have had a free LJ account, a paid account, and now a Plus account. The paid one gave me no advantage over free, so no surprise I stopped paying for it.
I and most of my 15 or so LJ friends have moved to the "Plus" account with paid ads inserted into our journals. We like the enhanced features.
Most importantly, we have all gotten so used to the adsense model and similar advertising placement that we simply don't "see" the ads any more. Ignoring the LJ ads is no harder than ignoring any other ad on any other site.
We just don't see the ads.
All you need to make a bakery a success is have the aroma of fresh bread wafting through the neighborhood.
If you really want to be like a bakery in France, you want to be on a side street with no good parking, have an unmarked door and perhaps no sign outside, and you want to be open only three or four hours a day. If customers can't find you, of if the bread is all sold out, that's their loss.
But honestly, most neighborhoods in France already have at least one bakery. They're about as common as convenience stores in the US. So why do they need to bring in nuclear physics to figure out where to open another one? Why not just ask a baker? They've been opening bakeries since humans figured out how to cook.
the raspy over-modulated voice from the camera starts saying things like
Jay-walking is not permitted! Illegal! Illegal! Illegal! Illegal! Law broken! Law broken! EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE!!!
Not that I am terribly afraid of a plumber's helper stuck on a rolling dustbi advhndsjfhn
+++ NO CARRIER
You over simplify.
I carry a gasoline credit card with a $500 limit. When I first got the card, my credit score went down just for having a new credit line. Then it went down again the first month because an account (the new one) showed a balance increase. Well of course! Anything more than zero is an increase.
So that first month, it went to like $90 and I paid it off in full. Second month, gas prices went up and I used more gas, so it went to $120 something, and I paid that off. Credit score went down due to another balance increase. Sure, it went up by maybe 30 bucks. Still nowhere near the limit.
Between opening the account and two months of honest, legal, normal usage that never came close to maxing it out, I lost nearly 20 points of credit score.
Some months after that, I bought a car. My lowered scored made the loan interest rate slightly higher, so that's one way I have been financially affected simply for using the gas card.
The new car also needed auto insurance. I got a letter from my insurance company informing me that they're happy to insure my new toy, but I'll be paying more than most people because I show a big new credit line (the auto loan) that's maxed out.
Well of course! The loan company isn't going to give me a credit line larger than the price of the car! The auto loan credit line is exactly what the car cost, after rebates and down payment all that stuff. Of course that one is maxed out. Duh.
So, because of the gas card that I used with restraint, I got dinged. Because I took out a car loan, as anyone might do, I have to pay more for insurance. As I see it, I'm managing my credit within reason. But my score looks like crap now.
My employer DOES look at credit scores at least annually, as well as conducting background checks annually, so I know they're going to pick up on this. Probably won't get me fired but it will get noticed and I still haven't done anything like max out a card or not pay a bill or any of a hundred other things that get people into trouble.
I thought holographic disc storage had been done years ago, or at least last year.
It's possibly due for commercialization in 2006. (call me when I can order one for cheap) But the concept and product demos have already been done.
Small note: the development of Velcro had nothing to do with the space program. It was invented in 1948 -ten years before NASA was formed- by a Swiss engineer named Georges de Mestral.
Velcro may have been used by NASA but it was not their idea.
Tang wasn't invented by NASA either. It was merely a poorly selling breakfast drink. However it did gain popularity thanks to NASA.
* Set up a post box in Japan (there's companies providing such services) then forward it to your overseas address. Expensive, even more of a hassle, and only worth it if you're doing some kind of regular trading.
Can you suggest one or more of these forwarding companies?
They might need an even bigger data center if they want to run Vista. And two data centers if they want to run it quickly.
Maximum PC -back when it was still called boot- had a horrible spoof of Daikatana where they joked about "Ron Jomero" releasing a pizza restaurant sim called Daikatana just to say he actually shipped something called Daikatana. Wish I could find that spoof now, cause it's the same thing all over again.
If 3DR HAS to ship the game, they'll likely just roll out something with that name and cash the check. I hope not because it's one game company I actually care about. ROTT, DN3D, Shadow Warrior, and more have given me tons of fun over the years.
Well I have used 120-volt AC fans in my case for one reason: no load on the PSU.
I had several 80mm AC fans wired to run totally independantly of the system so cooling would continue if the system power failed and also to remove the "heat soak" effect when the system powers down.
The wiring was always thick IEC power cord-type and covered in anti-abrasion sleeves just in case. Never had a problem with it.
Those fans are not in use now because I upgraded to a better PSU that can handle a ton of load and has an extra fan of it's own and I also slightly modded my Antec case to allow better airflow. My goals have changed too: I am totally into hard drive cooling and not worried so much about the CPU.
Japanese consumers are already used to paying more for items than people elsewhere are willing to pay.
For example, a common audio CD that sells for $15 in the US might sell for north of $30 there. Groceries, housing, basic everyday things generally cost more. Tokyo isn't continously voted the most expensive city on Earth for nothing.
That does not mean people anywhere else want to pay the same thing.
There's also a strong nationalism side. Sony IS Japan. The hometown team. Asking Japanese people if they're gonna buy a PS3 is like asking Americans if they're gonna buy hot dogs for any random summer holiday.
Yeah, but are they going to buy the Gwaltney chicken dogs that cost a dollar a pack or the better ones that cost three or four times as much? Didn't ask that.
Finally, many Japanese are really into the lastest trendy gadgets -helped by companies coming out with something new new new every 30 seconds- regardless of price. They don't care what it costs.
I would not get to excited about the company promising anything.
It's all well and good for IBM to say that IBM won't require XYZ but that would not apply to parts they sell off in the future. One minute you work for IBM, the next you work for Lenovo or Hitachi or somebody else who have made no such promises to anyone.
For that matter, it's all well and good for a C*O to stand up and proclaim such things but people change their minds, get replaced, etc, and corporate policies have a way of swinging 180 degrees without notice. Ultimately all they care about are profits and the shareholders and if the shareholders want employee DNA, they're gonna get it.
Heck I can see IBM or other companies weaseling out of even having to talk about it. All they have to do is claim DNA collection/use is an HR issue and say that they value employee privacy and won't discuss HR issues. That neatly hides the issue behind a veil of "protecting worker privacy" all the while violating that same privacy with DNA collection. Amazing.
This is silly. The phone can employ all the secure tricks it wants, 128, 256, 1024 bit keys, exotic custom stuff, etc. Makes no difference.
If somebody wants to know what you are saying, they just bug the handset. They have to really want to listen pretty badly and come up with a way to get the phone long enough to mod it, but it can be done, has been done, and been used against assorted targets around the world.
As long as people have to speak into the phone and hear sound from the earpiece, there will be plain old bugs in phones.
It makes no difference which crypto is used, how many bits in the key, whether it's triple encoded into some exotic format or who knows what.
Anyone who wants to know what you are saying badly enough will simply bug the handset and capture the voice going in and the sound coming out. Ye olde analogue hole.
This sort of bugging has already been done with existing mobile phones so this new variant of handset is unlikely to present any challenge at all.
There IS a way out of this.
"Congress shall make no law" doesn't say anything about the Senate, Presidential Executive Orders, or other methods. Only that Congress can't do it.
So there's the out Gonzales would want. All he needs is an executive order. Done.
Think this is bullshit? Ah, but this is the SAME sort of thinking behind the idea that "freedom OF religion" is not the same as "freedom FROM religion" -if they can play words games with the wording of one thing, there's nothing to stop them from playing again.
What comes after Blue Ray? One or possibly two more disc formats. And by then, you will be able to stream anything you want same as some of us can do now with on-demand cable TV or IPTV.
HD DVD and Blu-Ray (Blurry) are the last big shot the movie companies have to sell you "all new!" physical media versions of the same movies they've been selling since VHS went big in the early 1980's. You have the VHS, now own the DVD. Have the DVD, now own it again on HD. We promise, Back To The Future 3 will be better this time, HD making ALL the difference. Honest!
Yeah, sure. Sony's interest in this is mostly for the license fees they hope to make off every BD player and disc. They don't care what ends up on the format as long as they get paid royalties for it.
There will always be a market for people who still want that satisfaction of owning physical media but who knows if in 10-15 we aren't following the Vivid model where you download and burn your own disc and perhaps pop it into a disc case that you print yourself. Combine iTunes-style pricing, a color inkjet printer with a cheap burner and anyone can have an instant movie collection. Many of us do that now but imagine it boiled down to a $100 standalone device plugged into broadband. No distributors needed, no video stores, no giant bins of DVDs at Walmart, everyone who wants Shrek 9 can get one on release day, and no more out-of-print movies for those who want something else. That's the part I am hopeful about.
But what comes after we all have 1080P? There are super high-def formats beyond that but once you hit HD, it becomes harder to produce a product that looks significantly better without spending government bribery slush accounts worth of money to do it.
Geeky point: the Minidisc is actually older than you might have realized. It was first announced by Sony in 1991, making it closer to 15 years old rather than 10.
Another note is that other companies DID make plenty of MD devices but most of them were sold only in Japan.
That's not a good representation of demand. On day one, there will always be super fans who will pay nearly anything to get a console. That's all well and good except for two things:
1) The extra money doesn't get back to Sony so they shouldn't be thinking about how much MORE it will sell for on eBay.
2) eBay sales to day-one super fans are not enough to matter. Sony needs to put this machine in lots and lots and lots of homes.
Would you like a prize? Have one. Indeed, cell signals have been used to track objects, like aircraft.
In particular, a US F-117 Stealth fighter was shot down over Bosnia. The shooters could not track the plane on radar -because it's stealth, you know- so they looked instead at the changing signal patterns of the cell system as the plane flew over.
They didn't look for the plane so much as the "signal hole" it made as it moved through the sky. They simply aimed some missles at the "hole" and scored a hit. It was the first F117 downed by enemy fire.
Very creative. Everydamnbody in the world who's likely to be F117 targets took lots and lots of notes.
If you don't need them, bring them to the comic store so they have something to give away to somebody else!
They gotta pay for these "free" (non-returnable, non-refundable) books so the more actual free ones they have, the less they have to spend.