I have no actual knowledge of how BART is managed. My comments were more focused towards your assertion that, "Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities." As noted, this is not always the case and I wold argue that even beyond your concessions of defense, border control, etc.
Lets put some information out there about CALPers. You make it sound as if everyone starts there and stays 5 years and retires. The average CalPERS retiree worked for 19.93 years. By dividing the average annual pension for a CalPERS participant in 2012, $30,456, by the average years of service, 19.93. The result, $1,528, is the amount the average CalPERS retiree accrued in annual pension benefits for each year they worked during their careers. I am not saying that this isnt generous by today's horrible standard of retirement planning for the middle class, but neither is it "better than Greece" with people abusing the system.
As for government run entities, "there have been many empirical studies examining the efficiency of government bureaucracies versus business in a variety of areas, including refuse collection, electrical utilities, public transportation, water supply systems, and hospital administration. The findings have been mixed. Some studies of electric utilities have found that publicly owned ones were more efficient and charged lower prices than privately owned utilities. Several other studies found the opposite, and yet others found no significant differences. Studies of other services produced similar kinds of mixed results. Charles Goodsell is a professor of Public Administration and Public Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has spent much of his life studying bureaucracy. After examining these efficiency studies, he concluded: “In short, there is much evidence that is ambivalent. The assumption that business always does better than government is not upheld. When you add up all these study results, the basis for the mantra that business is always better evaporates.”
Even if you disagree with the debates about internet access being a "human right" (http://www.wired.com/2011/06/internet-a-human-right/), it is hard to feel guilty over companies who have exploited their near monopoly conditions by gouging consumers with their "right to recoup investment and make a reasonable return" when that return tends to be at 97% profit margin (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-high-s_b_6642210.html).
My daughter brought her laptop home for the holidays and was complaining that it has been very slow and unable to connect to the internet for the past few weeks. I booted and found this crap installed and tried for about 4 hours to remove this crap before discussing installing Ubuntu. I copied her documents off and installed Ubuntu and she has been happily working for the past week with no issues whatsoever.
Not THE solution for everyone, but she mainly uses it for research and online social networking so there were no "linux killer" applications that I had to consider with her. The printer she has will work fine with Ubuntu. Total time to copy documents, install, and then configure the installation like she wanted was 2 hours.
This is EXACTLY the problem. The "justices" do not know the subject matter they are making rulings about. They may know the law, which is their subject matter expertise, but by not consulting an expert in the subject they are trying to base an opinon about, their opinion holds about as much weight (or should) as the IANAL comments on this forum.
I am all for her right to come in and report on activities. However, if she is filming the process, which I might add the promoters are paying for in order to make money, isn't this the same as the girl filming 20 seconds of a movie. Didn't that same girl get arrested for that filming? Why wasn't this reporter arrested?
The line here is very gray and blurry...what constitutes a "reporter". If the media company is going to use the film to make money, that would seem to violate the rights of the event promoters.
Just my 2 cents...for whatever they are worth.
I have been an Audible customer for just about as long as the service has been available. I have never had an "approved" player because the list of supported players was horrible at first and then because I just got used to my player and like the way it operates. I have always just downloaded the book in the audible manager software and then converted it to standard MP3 with Goldwave.
Fast forward several years. A few months ago I had some issues getting a book to download properly. It would download but always start about 40 minutes into the book. I called customer support and was asked to "upgrade" to the newest Audible download manager. You guessed it...the new software would no longer allow Goldwave to convert the files. I searhed the web for the old software and re-installed it. I also sent a note to Audible letting them know that, should the old sofware quit working, I would no longer be a customer.
Many of these corporate software upgrades appear to be limiting our use of the products we have purchased from those same corporations. Total crap!
Sexton
As I understand the article, a chip on EVERY consumer DVD would be need in order to stem the tide of the "$400 million dollars in losses". My main question is this, wouldn't it cost more than $400 million to put a chip, along with the equipment needed in stores to use the chip, on every DVD in every retail outlet?
Just my 2 cents.
I am sitting here in my office at a large (20000+ employer) company using my Win2K machine and wondering the same thing! We just made the jump from NT 2 years ago and have no plans of upgrading until Win2k is EOL...if then. I have no plans on upgrading my home XP machine except that I may upgrade hardware. If they EOL the software will it still activate?
Sexton
Same with my mother. She lives 800 miles away and I was always having to "fix" her computer. About a year ago I loaded Ubuntu and she has been working without problems since then. Mostly what she does is email, web, and some word processing. The only real issue we have had was when she went out and bought a cheap ink jet printer from Sams that would not work with Ubuntu. That about sums up my experience as well...other than some printer and wireless driver issues, Ubuntu is ready for the most desktops. And, if Dell, HP, etc would pre-install, that should take care of the driver problems and give more hardware vendors incentive to create linux drivers.
Art Sexton
I have a small business where I use MLS data to provide websites for real estate agents. I had been using Google maps to display the homes, along with properties nearby, on a map. This seems to infringe on this patent:
The summary is here
Now, I am interested in the court case about obvious inventions. Prior to this, the MLS data existed as did maps....I do not see were, as technology improved, this would not be an obvious combination.
Sexton
Well, speed at on the 6th floor, which is the longest run is about 4.5 Mbps, which is very acceptable as it is only going out to the internet via a T1 which is 1.5 Mbps. The lines are all on the same side of the transformers but the couplers are on the line side of the meters. I used 9 couplers to feed 54 condos, ver y conservative, to ensure distribution of the signal through the building. I could have tried less but this appeard to be the best way to work with the number of meter banks that we had.
Sexton
We just finished installing a BPL installation at a condo complex where we own several units. Management wanted to install broadband in every room. My first test was with wireless but because of the construction of the building, concrete and rebar walls between each unit and between floors, this did not work. That left either running ethernet thought the building, running through the phone lines, or running through the exising coax lines. After some estimates and additional testing, we decided on a T1 with BPL to distribute the signal to every room. No changes needed in each unit and the signal is available at every outlet. It was IMHO, a very good application for BPL.
I assume you are speaking of the U.S. by that statement. In that case, they really do not need to learn who is boss in "this Democracy", but rather who is boss in this "Representative Republic". And, from they way they are buying the representatives, it appears that they already know who is boss.:)
This question can be expanded to a lot of hardware. Companies just do not want to write drivers for Linux because the market share is not there. If Linux on the desktop is ever going to become a reality, then it is going to have to support binary drivers. If in the future there is enough market share for Linux to pressure companies for open source drivers, then that will be a different story. In the meantime, either support binary drivers or fall behind when the other OS's come out with more eye candy in their drivers.
Just my 2 cents.
Sexton
Yes, catch 22 here. He couldn't do the comparison without the list and...well, you get the idea.
Had the officials been innocent, they should have given him the list with a signed agreement that it would be destroyed after a comparison was made. Their fight just leads me to think that he was correct in his original assertion that the list was misused.
In this case, as I read it, the kid was trying to get the list in order to compare it to a list that a public official was using for his newsletter. In other words, he wanted to make the comparison in order to see if that public official had made his own electronic copy of the list. Now, while I am concerned as well about the possibility of spammers getting copies of email addresses from the government, I also see the intent here and think that some common sense should be used regarding the intent of his request. Then again, the Mayor's stance on the whole issue does lend some credence to the original theory that the list was misused in the first plance.
Just my 2 cents.
Art Sexton
My wife is in the Real Estate industry and I am in the Banking industry. Both have, in recent years, been the target of legal action for price fixing, which, as I understand it is fixing the price of a product or service in agreement with another individual or business, which is illegal. The general rule provides that a vendor may not in combination with another vendor agree to set a certain price thereby creating a fixed price within a certain market.
The original article appears to be down, of course, but the summary sounds a lot like price fixing to me.
You are somewhat correct...and I would agree with you in saying that the modding of the boxes should not be illegal. However, they also put gigs of pirated games on the drive after modding and that makes it difficult for me to support their position.
Easy way to address the problem now...
on
The ESRB Gets An 'F'
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Just install one of those kiddie mosquito noise generators http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/3 0/0021211&tid=126&tid=14> around the couters that sell AO only games.
I work for a bank and we have about 250 ATM machines ranging in age from 1997 to 2004 and guess what...they all still run on OS2. It is a pain finding motherboards for these things and, yes, they need ISA cards but it is the case that even with upgrades for ADA (Disabilities Act) etc, which meant adding extra cards (ISA), they all are running OS2 and there are very few issues.
It does not appear that they are going after the spammer. From what I can see they actually go after the product being advertised! So, if spammer.com sends out email for cheapmortgages.com, it seems that they are hitting cheapmortgages.com with complaints. Taking away the incentive to hire the spammers. By doing this, it really doesnt matter if the spam is spoofed or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no actual knowledge of how BART is managed. My comments were more focused towards your assertion that, "Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities." As noted, this is not always the case and I wold argue that even beyond your concessions of defense, border control, etc.
Lets put some information out there about CALPers. You make it sound as if everyone starts there and stays 5 years and retires. The average CalPERS retiree worked for 19.93 years. By dividing the average annual pension for a CalPERS participant in 2012, $30,456, by the average years of service, 19.93. The result, $1,528, is the amount the average CalPERS retiree accrued in annual pension benefits for each year they worked during their careers. I am not saying that this isnt generous by today's horrible standard of retirement planning for the middle class, but neither is it "better than Greece" with people abusing the system. As for government run entities, "there have been many empirical studies examining the efficiency of government bureaucracies versus business in a variety of areas, including refuse collection, electrical utilities, public transportation, water supply systems, and hospital administration. The findings have been mixed. Some studies of electric utilities have found that publicly owned ones were more efficient and charged lower prices than privately owned utilities. Several other studies found the opposite, and yet others found no significant differences. Studies of other services produced similar kinds of mixed results. Charles Goodsell is a professor of Public Administration and Public Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has spent much of his life studying bureaucracy. After examining these efficiency studies, he concluded: “In short, there is much evidence that is ambivalent. The assumption that business always does better than government is not upheld. When you add up all these study results, the basis for the mantra that business is always better evaporates.”
Even if you disagree with the debates about internet access being a "human right" (http://www.wired.com/2011/06/internet-a-human-right/), it is hard to feel guilty over companies who have exploited their near monopoly conditions by gouging consumers with their "right to recoup investment and make a reasonable return" when that return tends to be at 97% profit margin (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cables-high-s_b_6642210.html).
My daughter brought her laptop home for the holidays and was complaining that it has been very slow and unable to connect to the internet for the past few weeks. I booted and found this crap installed and tried for about 4 hours to remove this crap before discussing installing Ubuntu. I copied her documents off and installed Ubuntu and she has been happily working for the past week with no issues whatsoever. Not THE solution for everyone, but she mainly uses it for research and online social networking so there were no "linux killer" applications that I had to consider with her. The printer she has will work fine with Ubuntu. Total time to copy documents, install, and then configure the installation like she wanted was 2 hours.
That would be ADD 1 TO WS-BAD-KARMA GIVING WS-MOD-PARENT. You should have run that one through the compiler before posting....
This is EXACTLY the problem. The "justices" do not know the subject matter they are making rulings about. They may know the law, which is their subject matter expertise, but by not consulting an expert in the subject they are trying to base an opinon about, their opinion holds about as much weight (or should) as the IANAL comments on this forum.
Just my 2 cents.
I am all for her right to come in and report on activities. However, if she is filming the process, which I might add the promoters are paying for in order to make money, isn't this the same as the girl filming 20 seconds of a movie. Didn't that same girl get arrested for that filming? Why wasn't this reporter arrested? The line here is very gray and blurry...what constitutes a "reporter". If the media company is going to use the film to make money, that would seem to violate the rights of the event promoters. Just my 2 cents...for whatever they are worth.
I have been an Audible customer for just about as long as the service has been available. I have never had an "approved" player because the list of supported players was horrible at first and then because I just got used to my player and like the way it operates. I have always just downloaded the book in the audible manager software and then converted it to standard MP3 with Goldwave. Fast forward several years. A few months ago I had some issues getting a book to download properly. It would download but always start about 40 minutes into the book. I called customer support and was asked to "upgrade" to the newest Audible download manager. You guessed it...the new software would no longer allow Goldwave to convert the files. I searhed the web for the old software and re-installed it. I also sent a note to Audible letting them know that, should the old sofware quit working, I would no longer be a customer. Many of these corporate software upgrades appear to be limiting our use of the products we have purchased from those same corporations. Total crap! Sexton
As I understand the article, a chip on EVERY consumer DVD would be need in order to stem the tide of the "$400 million dollars in losses". My main question is this, wouldn't it cost more than $400 million to put a chip, along with the equipment needed in stores to use the chip, on every DVD in every retail outlet? Just my 2 cents.
I am sitting here in my office at a large (20000+ employer) company using my Win2K machine and wondering the same thing! We just made the jump from NT 2 years ago and have no plans of upgrading until Win2k is EOL...if then. I have no plans on upgrading my home XP machine except that I may upgrade hardware. If they EOL the software will it still activate? Sexton
Same with my mother. She lives 800 miles away and I was always having to "fix" her computer. About a year ago I loaded Ubuntu and she has been working without problems since then. Mostly what she does is email, web, and some word processing. The only real issue we have had was when she went out and bought a cheap ink jet printer from Sams that would not work with Ubuntu. That about sums up my experience as well...other than some printer and wireless driver issues, Ubuntu is ready for the most desktops. And, if Dell, HP, etc would pre-install, that should take care of the driver problems and give more hardware vendors incentive to create linux drivers. Art Sexton
Is it just me or does $232.87 PER LINE of code sound a bit expensive for development costs?
Patent http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5032989.PN.&OS=PN/50329 89&RS=PN/5032989
Summary
http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_i d=2031
I have a small business where I use MLS data to provide websites for real estate agents. I had been using Google maps to display the homes, along with properties nearby, on a map. This seems to infringe on this patent: The summary is here Now, I am interested in the court case about obvious inventions. Prior to this, the MLS data existed as did maps....I do not see were, as technology improved, this would not be an obvious combination. Sexton
Well, speed at on the 6th floor, which is the longest run is about 4.5 Mbps, which is very acceptable as it is only going out to the internet via a T1 which is 1.5 Mbps. The lines are all on the same side of the transformers but the couplers are on the line side of the meters. I used 9 couplers to feed 54 condos, ver y conservative, to ensure distribution of the signal through the building. I could have tried less but this appeard to be the best way to work with the number of meter banks that we had. Sexton
We just finished installing a BPL installation at a condo complex where we own several units. Management wanted to install broadband in every room. My first test was with wireless but because of the construction of the building, concrete and rebar walls between each unit and between floors, this did not work. That left either running ethernet thought the building, running through the phone lines, or running through the exising coax lines. After some estimates and additional testing, we decided on a T1 with BPL to distribute the signal to every room. No changes needed in each unit and the signal is available at every outlet. It was IMHO, a very good application for BPL.
I assume you are speaking of the U.S. by that statement. In that case, they really do not need to learn who is boss in "this Democracy", but rather who is boss in this "Representative Republic". And, from they way they are buying the representatives, it appears that they already know who is boss. :)
This question can be expanded to a lot of hardware. Companies just do not want to write drivers for Linux because the market share is not there. If Linux on the desktop is ever going to become a reality, then it is going to have to support binary drivers. If in the future there is enough market share for Linux to pressure companies for open source drivers, then that will be a different story. In the meantime, either support binary drivers or fall behind when the other OS's come out with more eye candy in their drivers. Just my 2 cents. Sexton
Yes, catch 22 here. He couldn't do the comparison without the list and...well, you get the idea. Had the officials been innocent, they should have given him the list with a signed agreement that it would be destroyed after a comparison was made. Their fight just leads me to think that he was correct in his original assertion that the list was misused.
In this case, as I read it, the kid was trying to get the list in order to compare it to a list that a public official was using for his newsletter. In other words, he wanted to make the comparison in order to see if that public official had made his own electronic copy of the list. Now, while I am concerned as well about the possibility of spammers getting copies of email addresses from the government, I also see the intent here and think that some common sense should be used regarding the intent of his request. Then again, the Mayor's stance on the whole issue does lend some credence to the original theory that the list was misused in the first plance. Just my 2 cents. Art Sexton
My wife is in the Real Estate industry and I am in the Banking industry. Both have, in recent years, been the target of legal action for price fixing, which, as I understand it is fixing the price of a product or service in agreement with another individual or business, which is illegal. The general rule provides that a vendor may not in combination with another vendor agree to set a certain price thereby creating a fixed price within a certain market. The original article appears to be down, of course, but the summary sounds a lot like price fixing to me.
You are somewhat correct...and I would agree with you in saying that the modding of the boxes should not be illegal. However, they also put gigs of pirated games on the drive after modding and that makes it difficult for me to support their position.
Just install one of those kiddie mosquito noise generators http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/3 0/0021211&tid=126&tid=14> around the couters that sell AO only games.
I work for a bank and we have about 250 ATM machines ranging in age from 1997 to 2004 and guess what...they all still run on OS2. It is a pain finding motherboards for these things and, yes, they need ISA cards but it is the case that even with upgrades for ADA (Disabilities Act) etc, which meant adding extra cards (ISA), they all are running OS2 and there are very few issues.
It does not appear that they are going after the spammer. From what I can see they actually go after the product being advertised! So, if spammer.com sends out email for cheapmortgages.com, it seems that they are hitting cheapmortgages.com with complaints. Taking away the incentive to hire the spammers. By doing this, it really doesnt matter if the spam is spoofed or not.