They said 'digits', not 'characters', so it's generally safe to assume it's base 10. Either that, or somebody is an idiot. (which isn't that unlikely I suppose...)
Exactly the point I was thinking about. Yes, competition could drive down prices immensely, but that last mile isn't cheap, and if you aren't paying for your part of it, you're probably paying for somebody else's. Again, prices could go down a lot, but those last mile connections will cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than a single (well, a few) large pipe(s) to a datacenter, and that's really where the cost comes from. They don't really charge you for bandwidth, they charge you for the connection and bandwidth and service (well, some service) all in one price.
Um...I agree with you that lack of competition probably has a lot to do with it...but they don't just throw a datacenter at some random place. One of the key things they would look for is cheap bandwidth. Plus, when you're moving huge quantities of data, it's easier to get a good deal. It's like anything else.
I once had a girlfriend whose mother was a regional manager for a restaurant chain. She got hundreds of dollars of free food every month. Does that mean that, if there was more competition in the restaurant industry, we could all get hundreds of dollars of free food? No. When you have certain locations and deals and jobs, you get things cheaper. So to say that bandwidth to your home should be cheap because bandwidth to a datacenter is cheap is a pretty poor argument.
Yes. Or stand. Most people sleep for around 8 hours....and then plenty of people have jobs where they are unable to sit, so that's another 8 hours. For the last 5 hours - maybe they lie down, exercise, put in some overtime, do random jobs at home that involve standing or walking, maybe gardening (doesn't say they don't kneel)....plenty of ways you can not sit. I mean, how are you going to sit for 21 hours? Computer, TV, office job...and that's about it.
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
Therefore, I have the power and the right to create unrestricted anonymous waste disposal. It's a guaranteed right of mine and I may provide that service.
Yes, you may - if you open your own dump. And run your own trucks (depending on how you want to run this waste disposal business). And if it's legal under state laws (not a constitutional right, so states can limit it however they want). And it complies with federal environmental regulations (not sure how that's justified, but probably the commerce clause and "general welfare").
Drinking vodka makes me much more social and outgoing. It makes me less depressed usually. It makes it easier for me to focus. I generally code slightly better, and I'm _far_ better at writing essays - at least essays about myself. I can't write anything personal when I'm sober. But does that mean that I should take a couple shots every morning when I wake up?
Yea, isn't the whole point behind Chrome that Google needed to improve Javascript speed and browser efficiency? I mean, they certainly aren't making money off it. Gaining information, maybe, but if _that_ was the goal, why open source it? My bet is they finally decided that they'd get more for their money by launching their own browser rather than spending that money on Mozilla. But still, improving browser speed is nothing but good for Google.
My dad had to have one of these put on his car many years ago. One day it broke. After an hour or so on the phone, they finally told him that there's an exposed connector, and if you pull that connector off and short two wires together, the car will start just fine.
So easy, a drunk could do it!
Seriously, if you've ever "modified" a standard PC power supply so it'll turn on without a motherboard, you know how simple it is. It's exactly the same thing. And as far as I can tell, there's no way you can even tell it's been done, because the entire unit seems to be outside - in the part that's being disconnected.
Yes, if you cancel your contract you pay a fee - but you still keep the phone. If it was a lease, you could give back the phone and not pay the early cancellation fee. AT&T doesn't appear to give you that option. Also, as far as I can tell from that page, if you buy the phone with a two year contract and cancel it immediately, you pay $325. If you buy the phone with a contract, finish that contract, start a new contract and cancel that one immediately - you still pay $325.
Actually, no, you didn't pay for the phone, at least not all of it. You paid $200, and AT&T paid more to Apple as a subsidy.
If you cancel your contract (or if it ends), does AT&T get the phone back? No. Therefore, it is a sale, not a lease or rental, which means that you do in fact own the phone.
The question is not if the US military could defeat an armed mob. Of course they could. We have enough nukes to blow up the whole world. But how many troops, faced with a rioting American city, would be willing to kill citizens of their own country? I would bet that, if the uprising was large enough, very little of our military would be willing to act against it. Add in the fact that it would be a hell equal to what we are facing in Iraq, and how many hours it would take to get troops there in the first place, I think an uprising of a significant amount of people would be quite effective.
Is this study really about 19 year olds? I mean, I'll admit, I didn't RTFA, but I'm 20 and reading the summary gave me the impression that it was about people several years younger - maybe around 13. I mean, I still remember when nobody had the 'net. I was 8 when we first got dial-up. But my 13 year old cousin was 1 then. She certainly doesn't remember a time before the internet was common, and I doubt that she even remembers a time before broadband.
I remember when everybody had their own Geocities (or Tripod or my favorite, Angelfire). And that took some work. Even if it didn't require real coding, it still needed some creativity. Now everyone just plugs stuff into Facebook or Myspace. I remember when email was hotmail or netscape or AOL or Adelphia or Excite or Earthlink or whatever other company. Now 90% of the email accounts I deal with are gmail. The rest are ***.edu, and occasionally an ISP, but even that is pretty much only older people who have had it since before gmail existed.
I remember constantly switching search engines to whatever was giving the best results this year (or even month). Switching web hosts to whoever offered the best features at this moment. Switching email to whoever offered the most space. Switching IM clients, switching homepages, switching social networks...
I feel like, even though we may have been using the 'net for most of our lives and have some difficulty remembering the time before it, it was still something new. It was still something to be discovered. And it still took some work. For those who are even just a few years younger, they discovered it when it was not as interactive. There's less competition. People are more likely to just stick to the handful of sites their friends use, and leave the other 99.99% of the web unexplored.
3. Discontinuation of Google Wave, a product which despite relatively low adoption levels, is very powerful and useful for many users. It's basically as awesome as GMail, but for a more niche market.
I had a Wave account, used it fairly often, but still never figured out what the hell it was. Personally, I never started a Wave, and all the ones I was invited to were things that would be better done on Google Docs or Gmail. Or Google Groups. As far as I can tell, Wave was just a mashup of a bunch of Google's existing technologies. It was a bunch of random, different components thrown together poorly and lacking any real use. I'm glad they got rid of it. One less PITA for me. Now, if they had integrated it into Gmail or Google Docs, and just had an interface for people without gmail/docs accounts to login with just a wave account, that would be cool. But getting an email telling me that I need to go check another site just to see something that could have been included in the original email - that's just annoying.
Gods yes. My favorite example is Canterbury Tales - nothing but sex jokes and toilet humor. It just happens to be _very_ old sex jokes and toilet humor. Ugh. I never read anything even halfway decent in elementary school/highschool. Got one or two marginally tolerable books in college, but those are still mixed in with four hundred page books in which _absolutely nothing_ happens until the last 30 pages (i.e. White Noise) - though it's far more tolerable in college. But still, as far as I can tell, "classic" means only that it's old, not that it's good.
Compaq has been doing this since '98 at least. They'd install the recovery data to a separate partition, then charge $20 for a disc that simply boots that partition.
Eh, I'd say the lesson there is 'don't buy overpriced name-brand'. I mean, I'd never buy a Rolex watch. I see a counterfeit Rolex and all that tells me is 'this is what that expensive watch is actually worth, in terms of parts and labor'. But I'm not gonna buy the counterfeit either. Instead I'll buy a Casio or a Yes.
If there's a dramatically cheaper counterfeit of something available, that means you're probably being ripped off when you buy that item. Notice that it's mostly the overpriced luxury goods that get ripped off. And movies and such, but that's just because blank DVDs are dirt cheap compared to a DVD movie - again, you're getting ripped off when you pay $20 for a piece of plastic. Money too - worth $100, costs a couple cents.
Anyway, my point is that there only has to be a cheaper version if the original version is a colossal waste of money.
Yea, nobody will buy back the international editions, but when you're paying $20 instead of $100, it's still a better deal. Plus you can still sometimes sell them through friends, facebook, craigslist, etc.
As it currently stands, the author could change a few equations, and add a couple graphs, and call it a new edition.
Or they can just do nothing at all and call it a new edition. They can literally throw on a different cover and call it a different edition. I've seen quite a few "international editions" that don't have a single difference except the cover art. Sometimes it's not even different art, it just has "international edition, not for sale in the US" stamped on it in big red letters. And it's paperback instead of hardcover...which I highly prefer anyway.
If you require dailies, then yea, it's probably pretty expensive. But the last time I bought glasses it was $200 for the frame alone, and that was close to ten years ago. Meanwhile, one pack of contacts runs $20...so $40 for both eyes. One pack lasts me at least 6 months (I frequently wear them longer than recommended because it's usually well over a month before they start bothering me if I use decent solution). So figure $80 a year...that's $240 for three years. I don't recall the cost of getting the lenses for that pair of glasses (I was in middle school at the time), but I'd imagine the price difference is not going to be too great. Of course, you also have to buy solution for contacts, but that's $10 a year at the most. But then again, I also never had a pair of glasses for more than two years, and the contacts are a hell of a lot more comfortable and convenient. And contacts are great if you're at an age range where your eyes are changing frequently - since you reorder every few months anyway, you can get a new prescription whenever without having to throw out an extra couple hundred bucks for new glasses.
Dude, my router has been set to the default password for nearly a decade. That doesn't give my ISP the right to go in and fuck around with it however they want. Verizon acted no differently than a black-hat hacker in this case (ok, maybe a script kiddie...), and they should be treated accordingly.
I'm assuming that when AT&T gave the NSA access to all their lines, your response was 'if you don't use encryption, expect that everything you do is monitored'? I mean sure, that's good advice, but there's a huge difference between 'expect that hackers can get into it' and 'your ISP has a right to fuck with it however they want'
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They said 'digits', not 'characters', so it's generally safe to assume it's base 10. Either that, or somebody is an idiot. (which isn't that unlikely I suppose...)
The last mile is not cheap to maintain
Exactly the point I was thinking about. Yes, competition could drive down prices immensely, but that last mile isn't cheap, and if you aren't paying for your part of it, you're probably paying for somebody else's. Again, prices could go down a lot, but those last mile connections will cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than a single (well, a few) large pipe(s) to a datacenter, and that's really where the cost comes from. They don't really charge you for bandwidth, they charge you for the connection and bandwidth and service (well, some service) all in one price.
Um...I agree with you that lack of competition probably has a lot to do with it...but they don't just throw a datacenter at some random place. One of the key things they would look for is cheap bandwidth. Plus, when you're moving huge quantities of data, it's easier to get a good deal. It's like anything else.
I once had a girlfriend whose mother was a regional manager for a restaurant chain. She got hundreds of dollars of free food every month. Does that mean that, if there was more competition in the restaurant industry, we could all get hundreds of dollars of free food? No. When you have certain locations and deals and jobs, you get things cheaper. So to say that bandwidth to your home should be cheap because bandwidth to a datacenter is cheap is a pretty poor argument.
Yes. Or stand. Most people sleep for around 8 hours....and then plenty of people have jobs where they are unable to sit, so that's another 8 hours. For the last 5 hours - maybe they lie down, exercise, put in some overtime, do random jobs at home that involve standing or walking, maybe gardening (doesn't say they don't kneel)....plenty of ways you can not sit. I mean, how are you going to sit for 21 hours? Computer, TV, office job...and that's about it.
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
North Korea's twitter, but it's blocked as illegal information in South Korea.
Wouldn't it be easier just to make a better voting machine?
But that's not profitable unless the government is willing to pay extra for that. And clearly, they aren't.
Therefore, I have the power and the right to create unrestricted anonymous waste disposal. It's a guaranteed right of mine and I may provide that service.
Yes, you may - if you open your own dump. And run your own trucks (depending on how you want to run this waste disposal business). And if it's legal under state laws (not a constitutional right, so states can limit it however they want). And it complies with federal environmental regulations (not sure how that's justified, but probably the commerce clause and "general welfare").
Drinking vodka makes me much more social and outgoing. It makes me less depressed usually. It makes it easier for me to focus. I generally code slightly better, and I'm _far_ better at writing essays - at least essays about myself. I can't write anything personal when I'm sober. But does that mean that I should take a couple shots every morning when I wake up?
Yea, isn't the whole point behind Chrome that Google needed to improve Javascript speed and browser efficiency? I mean, they certainly aren't making money off it. Gaining information, maybe, but if _that_ was the goal, why open source it? My bet is they finally decided that they'd get more for their money by launching their own browser rather than spending that money on Mozilla. But still, improving browser speed is nothing but good for Google.
My dad had to have one of these put on his car many years ago. One day it broke. After an hour or so on the phone, they finally told him that there's an exposed connector, and if you pull that connector off and short two wires together, the car will start just fine.
So easy, a drunk could do it!
Seriously, if you've ever "modified" a standard PC power supply so it'll turn on without a motherboard, you know how simple it is. It's exactly the same thing. And as far as I can tell, there's no way you can even tell it's been done, because the entire unit seems to be outside - in the part that's being disconnected.
Yes, if you cancel your contract you pay a fee - but you still keep the phone. If it was a lease, you could give back the phone and not pay the early cancellation fee. AT&T doesn't appear to give you that option. Also, as far as I can tell from that page, if you buy the phone with a two year contract and cancel it immediately, you pay $325. If you buy the phone with a contract, finish that contract, start a new contract and cancel that one immediately - you still pay $325.
Actually, no, you didn't pay for the phone, at least not all of it. You paid $200, and AT&T paid more to Apple as a subsidy.
If you cancel your contract (or if it ends), does AT&T get the phone back? No. Therefore, it is a sale, not a lease or rental, which means that you do in fact own the phone.
The question is not if the US military could defeat an armed mob. Of course they could. We have enough nukes to blow up the whole world. But how many troops, faced with a rioting American city, would be willing to kill citizens of their own country? I would bet that, if the uprising was large enough, very little of our military would be willing to act against it. Add in the fact that it would be a hell equal to what we are facing in Iraq, and how many hours it would take to get troops there in the first place, I think an uprising of a significant amount of people would be quite effective.
Is this study really about 19 year olds? I mean, I'll admit, I didn't RTFA, but I'm 20 and reading the summary gave me the impression that it was about people several years younger - maybe around 13. I mean, I still remember when nobody had the 'net. I was 8 when we first got dial-up. But my 13 year old cousin was 1 then. She certainly doesn't remember a time before the internet was common, and I doubt that she even remembers a time before broadband.
I remember when everybody had their own Geocities (or Tripod or my favorite, Angelfire). And that took some work. Even if it didn't require real coding, it still needed some creativity. Now everyone just plugs stuff into Facebook or Myspace. I remember when email was hotmail or netscape or AOL or Adelphia or Excite or Earthlink or whatever other company. Now 90% of the email accounts I deal with are gmail. The rest are ***.edu, and occasionally an ISP, but even that is pretty much only older people who have had it since before gmail existed.
I remember constantly switching search engines to whatever was giving the best results this year (or even month). Switching web hosts to whoever offered the best features at this moment. Switching email to whoever offered the most space. Switching IM clients, switching homepages, switching social networks...
I feel like, even though we may have been using the 'net for most of our lives and have some difficulty remembering the time before it, it was still something new. It was still something to be discovered. And it still took some work. For those who are even just a few years younger, they discovered it when it was not as interactive. There's less competition. People are more likely to just stick to the handful of sites their friends use, and leave the other 99.99% of the web unexplored.
3. Discontinuation of Google Wave, a product which despite relatively low adoption levels, is very powerful and useful for many users. It's basically as awesome as GMail, but for a more niche market.
I had a Wave account, used it fairly often, but still never figured out what the hell it was. Personally, I never started a Wave, and all the ones I was invited to were things that would be better done on Google Docs or Gmail. Or Google Groups. As far as I can tell, Wave was just a mashup of a bunch of Google's existing technologies. It was a bunch of random, different components thrown together poorly and lacking any real use. I'm glad they got rid of it. One less PITA for me. Now, if they had integrated it into Gmail or Google Docs, and just had an interface for people without gmail/docs accounts to login with just a wave account, that would be cool. But getting an email telling me that I need to go check another site just to see something that could have been included in the original email - that's just annoying.
Gods yes. My favorite example is Canterbury Tales - nothing but sex jokes and toilet humor. It just happens to be _very_ old sex jokes and toilet humor. Ugh. I never read anything even halfway decent in elementary school/highschool. Got one or two marginally tolerable books in college, but those are still mixed in with four hundred page books in which _absolutely nothing_ happens until the last 30 pages (i.e. White Noise) - though it's far more tolerable in college. But still, as far as I can tell, "classic" means only that it's old, not that it's good.
Right, because it would totally be possible for someone in the USA to live on a couple cents an hour like they pay in the overseas sweatshops...
Compaq has been doing this since '98 at least. They'd install the recovery data to a separate partition, then charge $20 for a disc that simply boots that partition.
Eh, I'd say the lesson there is 'don't buy overpriced name-brand'. I mean, I'd never buy a Rolex watch. I see a counterfeit Rolex and all that tells me is 'this is what that expensive watch is actually worth, in terms of parts and labor'. But I'm not gonna buy the counterfeit either. Instead I'll buy a Casio or a Yes.
If there's a dramatically cheaper counterfeit of something available, that means you're probably being ripped off when you buy that item. Notice that it's mostly the overpriced luxury goods that get ripped off. And movies and such, but that's just because blank DVDs are dirt cheap compared to a DVD movie - again, you're getting ripped off when you pay $20 for a piece of plastic. Money too - worth $100, costs a couple cents.
Anyway, my point is that there only has to be a cheaper version if the original version is a colossal waste of money.
Yea, nobody will buy back the international editions, but when you're paying $20 instead of $100, it's still a better deal. Plus you can still sometimes sell them through friends, facebook, craigslist, etc.
As it currently stands, the author could change a few equations, and add a couple graphs, and call it a new edition.
Or they can just do nothing at all and call it a new edition. They can literally throw on a different cover and call it a different edition. I've seen quite a few "international editions" that don't have a single difference except the cover art. Sometimes it's not even different art, it just has "international edition, not for sale in the US" stamped on it in big red letters. And it's paperback instead of hardcover...which I highly prefer anyway.
If you require dailies, then yea, it's probably pretty expensive. But the last time I bought glasses it was $200 for the frame alone, and that was close to ten years ago. Meanwhile, one pack of contacts runs $20...so $40 for both eyes. One pack lasts me at least 6 months (I frequently wear them longer than recommended because it's usually well over a month before they start bothering me if I use decent solution). So figure $80 a year...that's $240 for three years. I don't recall the cost of getting the lenses for that pair of glasses (I was in middle school at the time), but I'd imagine the price difference is not going to be too great. Of course, you also have to buy solution for contacts, but that's $10 a year at the most. But then again, I also never had a pair of glasses for more than two years, and the contacts are a hell of a lot more comfortable and convenient. And contacts are great if you're at an age range where your eyes are changing frequently - since you reorder every few months anyway, you can get a new prescription whenever without having to throw out an extra couple hundred bucks for new glasses.
Dude, my router has been set to the default password for nearly a decade. That doesn't give my ISP the right to go in and fuck around with it however they want. Verizon acted no differently than a black-hat hacker in this case (ok, maybe a script kiddie...), and they should be treated accordingly.
I'm assuming that when AT&T gave the NSA access to all their lines, your response was 'if you don't use encryption, expect that everything you do is monitored'? I mean sure, that's good advice, but there's a huge difference between 'expect that hackers can get into it' and 'your ISP has a right to fuck with it however they want'