To date, Toyota, Honda, and the rest of them have never sold a replacement hybrid battery for non collision related reasons. You can order one from the parts department, sure, but no one ever has.
Depending on the manufacturer, hybrid batteries are covered by warranty for 8-10 years. And so far, not one hybrid on the road has worn out its battery. There have been some corrosion problems on a few connectors, which can be misdiagnosed as a bad battery, but those connectors are easily cleaned.
Battery life on hybrids is significantly extended by the on board computer's careful management. They are never allowed to fully charge or fully discharge; charge rates and discharge rates are carefully managed. Not the same as the battery in your cell phone or laptop.
An actual fuel sipper, like a Honda Insight, Geo Metro XFI, or VW [Golf|Jetta|New Beetle] TDI
Hate to break it to you, but two of those cars haven't been sold for several years, and the other one is a diesel. Comparing economy of a diesel car to that of a gas car is like comparing a special olympian to Mike Phelps.
It's easy to get 40 MPG when you have a 17:1 compression ratio. Unfortunately those engines cost twice as much to build, and not many Americans are willing to pay the price premium, even if they are willing to accept a diesel.
Oh, please! Meet the Aveo, 27 city / 34 highway, just as economical as anyone else's compact. In fact, only three cars sold in America get better mileage on regular unleaded (not including hybrids). Base price $12,625, and available with all the fancy amenities you so desire.
many people respond to this by creating a new steam account for every game they buy. They can then sell the account to someone else.
It's not perfect. Resale of used games is really the only serious problem with digital distribution.
However, a copy of WoW purchased online and downloaded can be easily transferred, and re-downloaded by the new owner. It just depends on how easy the publisher wants to make it to resell. Games which come in boxes now have activation codes, with limited installs. They could easily be restricted further; pairing copies of a disc to a console, computer, OS install, or online account, or simply having single-use activation keys.
The inability to resell and trade games is not an inherent aspect of digital distribution. It is an arbitrary restriction placed on the games by the publishers. However, we should be able to use lawyers and our government(s) to force the removal of these restrictions. In many places it is already illegal to disallow reselling of a product; these laws are simply not being enforced on publishers.
Winner take-all-vote distribution is disgusting. If I live in a state that goes 49% for party X, and 51% for party Y, you can't even argue that giving 100% of our states votes to party Y makes the least bit of sense.
The most bothersome part for me, is that if Washington where I live goes 60% Dem, like usual, Indiana can completely cancel us out with a 51% vote... there's no reason for us to try and get out the vote here or try and make our 60% into 70 or 80%.
Our extra margin of victory means nothing. I have to move to Indiana if I want my voice to count.
You're a bit off here. It is NOT a requirement that an engine survive a bird ingestion, only that it shut down safely, i.e. without any of the fans coming apart. And engines do tend to take some significant damage when they ingest birds.
To make things worse, the tests are done assuming a 4 lb. bird, but Canada Geese like the ones involved in the recent incident average 7-14 lbs.
And the tests aren't actually done with chickens anymore. They use a block of gelatin now; much easier to clean up.
also find it hard to believe that the spammers have not figured this out. It's not like they are stupid. They try very hard to deliver their payloads. It would be trivial to update their software to retry messages that receive those codes.
Most spam-sending agents are very simple, and don't even bother looking at the SMTP error codes. Which is pretty sensible, given that most of what they get is probably 550 for bad addresses in their lists. Why even bother spending the time parsing these errors - there's going to be a whole lot of them, and it's mostly trash because your mailing list is mostly trash.
But lets say a spammer does make a spambot that looks for 451 errors and properly tries again later. Many sites recommend a greylist delay of 1 hour, but many others recommend a super short one of 1 minute or less. The spambot will have to figure out what to do - it could simply hammer the mail server until the message is accepted, which would have the added bonus of simultaneously DDOSing every mail server that implements greylisting. It would also tie up the spambot, though, attempting to resend messages to what might actually be a mail server that's not greylisting, but isn't accepting any mail at all right now. This stuff works on high volume, you don't want to slow down your rapid-fire spamming with all these retries. So they'd probably rather queue up retries to go out after their initial batch is done.
That means they have to keep track of all this crap. Spambots use randomized From: addresses, but most greylisting implementations use the unique triplet of from address, to address, and senderIP to distinguish connections. If you just try and run the send again, you get a different random From:, and you're a new customer to the greylist again. So you have to start remembering the addresses used for every single mail until the error parsing is done, and then you have to store all the info for the retries somewhere. As you pointed out
Keeping track of thousands and thousands of IP addresses in a grey list to determine which one can communicate at what point is resource intensive.
You increase the size and complexity of your spambot, you increase the chance of it getting noticed. A spambot that the user notices is an uninstalled spambot. And that doesn't just mean less spam that you can send, that means your botnet just got smaller. You never want that. You want to protect the botnet at all costs. After all, it's not your spam, it's your client's spam, and there's no need to risk your botnet in order to get 1% more messages out for your client.
TFA says it affected SD customers only, but didn't mention if it was limited to only digital or only analog customers. However, looking at their Tuscon channel lineups, it appears that the porn is only offered on their digital packages nowdays. I don't know much about the innards of a cable system, but it seems like that would make it difficult for a regular analog-tier customer to "accidentally" recieve porn.
In all seriousness, if you're doing it right, all the trees, wines, and cheeses are related somehow. And you can always pare it down more. Maybe wines are db machines, red wines are MS SQL, white wines are Oracle. (I wouldn't want to work at that hypothetical company, I don't think)
If you just assign names randomly, you're doing it wrong. The point is for the themes to have some simple pattern behind them. Working with "real" objects for your naming patterns means you can always find ways to properly categorize them. Knowing that Oak is a tree should tell you/something/ about the server's function. Or if all your servers are trees, knowing that it's a deciduous fruit bearing tree should help you narrow it down.
The client is not the only material that is at stake here. Blizzard's actual product is the whole thing, server and client, end-to-end. They sell an online service, not a piece of software. You can't buy the WoW client, it's not sold. Blizzard only sells subscriptions to use their servers. It is this use of their servers, of their services, which they are trying to protect/restrict. The actual game client is only part of the issue.
Glider does not bypass protection mechanisms granting you the ability to access copyrighted work without a license.
That depends on if you are considering the World of Warcraft client installed on the user's PC as the copyrighted work in question, then you might be correct.
If you consider WoW, the online game/service as the copyrighted work, however, and the WoW client (or more specifically, Warden) as the protection mechanism, though, things turn around rather quickly.
WoW as a whole is the product that Blizzard is selling. They do NOT sell a standalone client - they license you a client when you sign up for their online service. It is this distinction that makes this case so much different from many others.
To sum up, again. Warden is designed to control access to a protected work. Specifically to limit access to the uses permitted by Blizzard's WoW ToS. Glider intentionally circumvents this. Specifically, every time WoW is patched and Glider is yet again blocked, Glider is patched to get around it. This is clearly criminal under the DMCA, no fancy lawyering needed to make it seem so.
In the old days this would have been a simple civil case, where Blizzard sued MDY for damages, and drove them into bankruptcy, while playing a never ending cat and mouse game with blocking glider. Now, thanks to the DMCA, it's a criminal matter and MDY's CEO is personally responsible.
Much more minor circumventions (i.e. using deCSS to play your lawfully purchased DVD's or stripping DRM out of songs purchased from the internet) also run afoul of this law, and are criminal acts.
This is a totally legitimate application of the law, doing what it was written to do. The only way out of this mess is to repeal or rewrite the DMCA. "Accessing copyrighted work without a licence" is not the only application of the DMCA - it is in fact written quite broadly. Bypassing anything that "controls access" is completely illegal in the USA.
Ah, but that's the thing. World of Warcraft isn't just another piece of software. It's a subscription based online service, that just happens to have a specific, vendor provided client. What is being called a EULA (both here and in WoW's installer), is actually more like what we know as the ToS.
The terms of service spell out the exact ways in which you agree to use their service. Contracts for subscription services aren't on nearly the kind of shaky legal ground that shrinkwrap EULA's are.
Looking at WoW as a subscription service, and the WoW client software as an "access control device" for that service puts Blizzard on very solid legal ground. It also makes these precedents significantly less applicable to ordinary software hacking, and ordinary shrinkwrap EULAs.
The Call of Duty example you set would not apply - they're different situations. You don't subscribe to Call of Duty, you don't even play on company servers, you play on servers set up by volunteer players. And you don't have to agree to any Terms of Service to use another player's server.
In my experience with consumer grade broadband, it's not a very slight slowdown.
Qwest, which I am currently on, has no such targeted throttling that I can see. However, the peak-hour slowdown is readily apparent. On my "5M/896k" line,I can download around 500kbps for about 2/3 of the day. But during peak hours, it drags way, way down. around 8 PM, things can slow down to around 100kbps - I've seen it go as low as 50 on particularly bad days.
My point here is that "downloads slowed down fractionally" doesn't really express the full impact of the throttling that typically is imposed. Neither does "Bandwidth getting tight" fully express the level that residential ISP's oversell. If my ISP were to throttle P2P when all available bandwidth was being consumed, using the typical method of restricting P2P to using only the "leftover bandwidth", it would mean stopping it completely during peak times, and then still having congestion.
We've discussed before here on Slashdot how P2P gets targeted, even though streaming video is the real bandwidth hog, and one that ISP's can't throttle or block without massive consumer outrage. The massive peak-time crunches illustrate this - P2P isn't something that just shows up at peak time, it's something most people run overnight or 24/7. P2P only takes up about 20% of the bandwidth; throttling it is far from the cure-all ISP's seem to portray it as.
When I was delivering pizza, we used to do this for credit card orders. We (the delivery drivers, at the door) would take a rubbing of the customers credit card on the receipt paper. It works perfectly on that slippery thermal paper that cheap receipt printers and CC machines use.
We started doing it to protect ourselves against chargebacks. A handful of customers had taken to challenging charges on a regular basis. With our CSR's taking credit card numbers over the phone, including billing zip and CVV2 number, and the drivers presenting a receipt to be signed at the door, we still had no recourse - Even though we had a signature and an address. Visa/MC doesn't let retailers disallow anyone paying with a card for any reason, even if you have a history of fraud reports from that person or CC number. It's due to some language in their standard merchant contract (this also spells out that you can't require minimum purchases or surcharges for using cards, but many smaller outfits do anyway, flying under the radar). National and regional management wouldn't let us simply blacklist the customers entirely.
An imprint or a machine swipe was all the CC processor would accept as proof. In the end it was a headache for drivers and managers, and an annoyance for customers. Only a small few customers were actually concerned about the imprint being used for fraud, most simply resented having to get their card out a second time. But in the end, it let us stay in business and protect ourselves.
Hanford Site in Washington State... It is a secure location that is... in the process of enviornmental remediation.
Guessing you're not a Washington resident, or else you'd know that this "environmental remediation" is only progressing at all due to the WA state Department of Ecology suing the federal government over it. And that its current rate, it will be hundreds of years before the waste *we know about* has been cleaned up. Time during which shit continues to leak, and spread.
Generally speaking, the whole place is considered an absolute disaster by Washingtonians.
This sample was not weapons ready. If it were, it would have been used in a weapon and not left behind.
You obviously didn't read TFA. 99.96% purity. The article can only guess at why it didn't make it into a bomb. From the article:
"But the puzzling thing is, why didn't this plutonium make it into the bomb?" In 1944, the Americans were working flat out to develop a nuclear capability - it's strange that any first large batch of plutonium-239 should be stored and not used, he says.'
They go on to postulate that it was because the safe it was being stored in became contaminated, so the whole shebang got tossed.
what is the issue people have with Vista making use of the memory you have?
Because XP made use of the memory MOST people had. If you had a machine with 512MB of ram, and ran a few programs, it would happily use all of it, and be perfectly responsive.
This is something Vista apologists seem to have forgotten: XP was responsive under most workloads on 512MB of RAM. And yes, it would use most or all of it.
Vista on 512MB is an unusable disaster. It is constantly swapping under a typical destop workload. Vista needs 2GB of ram to be responsive, for most people.
Upgrading to 2GB of ram in a new system is trivial and inexpensive. But, there are a ton of consumer-grade machines out there, already in service running XP. Coppermine P3's, T-bird Athlons, they've got enough CPU power to upgrade to Vista, the only thing holding them back is RAM. Machines built with SDRAM, that just can't be upgraded to handle Vista, because the motherboards just don't support that much ram. Oh sure, they can meet the minimum requirements, but the machine is going to run like crap on that amount of ram.
And I really do think people need to get off XP - an XP install in the hands of a typical computer user is just another zombie PC waiting to happen. I would much rather the unwashed masses be using Vista - it's slightly more secure! But to paint Vista's gigantic memory footprint as a good thing? Please.
Vista's substandard performance on machines with under 2G of ram cannot be blamed on all this caching, which by all accounts gets out of your way if you need the ram. Vista isn't doing anything that OSX and the premiere Linux distros aren't managing to do on much less ram. Vista is just too damn big, and for no apparent reason. Whether Vista has less unused RAM than XP on your 4 gig machine is certainly not the issue here.
If you're an asshole, you better be really good at it, because you're going to run out of suckers really quick.
Going to have to disagree with you there. In any industry, there's always enough turnover and reorganizations to ensure a fresh supply of suckers, and a good portion of those suckers are just too nice to rebel against the assholes.
By the time the cooperative nice guys have recognized and managed to exclude the asshole, the asshole has already gotten a great deal of benefit out of the situation. The asshole can then ride it out until the next reorg or next batch of new hires. If they manage to exhaust the supply of suckers at the entire organization, it's time to lobby for a better job at a related company, now that you've got all this experience and resume padding.
The problem being that, hybrids aside, 10-20 year old cars get better gas mileage than more recent models, for the most part. Average new car fuel economy in the American market peaked in 1988, 21 years ago, right around the industry-wide adoption of sequential electronic fuel injection. Ever since then, cars have been getting bigger, heavier, and more powerful, with no major advances in engine efficiency.
The only way this will actually improve our nation's fuel consumption is if it's targeted towards 20-30 year old cars, with old low compression engines and sloppy carburetors. Cars that predate lightweight unibody construction and electronic engine management. You can't hardly sell one on the used market, and the most a scrap yard will give you is $2-300 based on the weight. The $2500-$4500 quoted in the summary is more than enough to make someone with a 1980 Delta 88 trade it for a 1990's era sedan. And still have some cash left over.
Oh really? I mean, Chrysler is a bit behind, but all accounts are that their R&D department has been entirely shut down since Daimler bought them, moved their products in a "large" direction, and then sold them off. For the most part I'd say the big 3's fuel economy is perfectly average.
Compact:
- Big 3 -
Chevrolet Aveo 27/34
Ford Focus 24/35
Dodge Caliber 24/30
-Foreign-
Honda Fit 28/35
Toyota Corolla 27/35
Kia Rio 27/33
Hyundai Accent 27/33
Nissan Versa 27/33
Mazda 3 24/32
Suzuki SX4 23/31
Volkswagen Rabbit 21/30 Midsize/family
- Big 3 -
Chevy Malibu 22/33
Ford Fusion 20/29
Dodge Avenger 21/30
- Foreign -
Honda Accord 22/31
Toyota Camry 21/31
Kia Optima 22/32
Hyundai Sonata 22/32
Nissan Altima 23/32
Mazda 6 21/30
Volkswagen Passat 19/29
All numbers from fueleconomy.gov, models chosen in the most economical configuration available. Midsize cars based on comparably sized 4 doors with a standard 4cyl but an available V-6.
The overlap problems are only an issue if you're at the edge of range of your AP. The only time it causes any problem at all is when your signal is weak enough to appear corrupted by the stronger next-door signal, triggering a bunch of resent packets. If you're building a wireless network to cover a large area, and you want to use a minimum number of APs, channel overlap is something that you need to seriously worry about. In those situations, you'll have users on the outside edge of the range of 2 overlapping networks.
However, in a typical home environment, unless your house is super huge, you are going to be close enough to the AP at all times to prevent these kinds of issues. Everyone else in the neighborhood is also equally close to their own APs, and so you're not going to cause any problems with them, either. All 11 channels are perfectly useful, and switching to an empty channel will improve your situation dramatically by reducing the number of collisions.
Reducing collisions is also probably the best reason to use G instead of B, even though few people will max out their B networks directly. The faster you clear the channel, the less likely a collision is. Most of the latency problems PC gamers have with wireless networks can be traced back to overcrowded wireless channels running at 11mbps with collisions happening left and right.
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To date, Toyota, Honda, and the rest of them have never sold a replacement hybrid battery for non collision related reasons. You can order one from the parts department, sure, but no one ever has.
Depending on the manufacturer, hybrid batteries are covered by warranty for 8-10 years. And so far, not one hybrid on the road has worn out its battery.
There have been some corrosion problems on a few connectors, which can be misdiagnosed as a bad battery, but those connectors are easily cleaned.
Battery life on hybrids is significantly extended by the on board computer's careful management. They are never allowed to fully charge or fully discharge; charge rates and discharge rates are carefully managed. Not the same as the battery in your cell phone or laptop.
An actual fuel sipper, like a Honda Insight, Geo Metro XFI, or VW [Golf|Jetta|New Beetle] TDI
Hate to break it to you, but two of those cars haven't been sold for several years, and the other one is a diesel. Comparing economy of a diesel car to that of a gas car is like comparing a special olympian to Mike Phelps.
It's easy to get 40 MPG when you have a 17:1 compression ratio. Unfortunately those engines cost twice as much to build, and not many Americans are willing to pay the price premium, even if they are willing to accept a diesel.
Oh, please! GM doesn't make a gas-sipper.
Oh, please! Meet the Aveo, 27 city / 34 highway, just as economical as anyone else's compact. In fact, only three cars sold in America get better mileage on regular unleaded (not including hybrids). Base price $12,625, and available with all the fancy amenities you so desire.
many people respond to this by creating a new steam account for every game they buy. They can then sell the account to someone else.
It's not perfect. Resale of used games is really the only serious problem with digital distribution.
However, a copy of WoW purchased online and downloaded can be easily transferred, and re-downloaded by the new owner. It just depends on how easy the publisher wants to make it to resell. Games which come in boxes now have activation codes, with limited installs. They could easily be restricted further; pairing copies of a disc to a console, computer, OS install, or online account, or simply having single-use activation keys.
The inability to resell and trade games is not an inherent aspect of digital distribution. It is an arbitrary restriction placed on the games by the publishers. However, we should be able to use lawyers and our government(s) to force the removal of these restrictions. In many places it is already illegal to disallow reselling of a product; these laws are simply not being enforced on publishers.
At the point where I can download a DRM-less installer
You can't buy DRM-free physical discs anymore, either. The DRM is there whichever way you get it.
Winner take-all-vote distribution is disgusting. If I live in a state that goes 49% for party X, and 51% for party Y, you can't even argue that giving 100% of our states votes to party Y makes the least bit of sense.
The most bothersome part for me, is that if Washington where I live goes 60% Dem, like usual, Indiana can completely cancel us out with a 51% vote... there's no reason for us to try and get out the vote here or try and make our 60% into 70 or 80%.
Our extra margin of victory means nothing. I have to move to Indiana if I want my voice to count.
Cars were my first assumption, but what kind of car dealership has fiber runs?
I'm sure the service department has some massive NAS for their service manuals, but fiber?
They must be dealing in something else. That, or there's more IT in selling cars than I know about.
Bird bones are not the concern; they're hollow, lightweight, and brittle. It's the weighty mass of muscle that causes the damage.
You're a bit off here. It is NOT a requirement that an engine survive a bird ingestion, only that it shut down safely, i.e. without any of the fans coming apart. And engines do tend to take some significant damage when they ingest birds.
To make things worse, the tests are done assuming a 4 lb. bird, but Canada Geese like the ones involved in the recent incident average 7-14 lbs.
And the tests aren't actually done with chickens anymore. They use a block of gelatin now; much easier to clean up.
also find it hard to believe that the spammers have not figured this out. It's not like they are stupid. They try very hard to deliver their payloads. It would be trivial to update their software to retry messages that receive those codes.
Most spam-sending agents are very simple, and don't even bother looking at the SMTP error codes. Which is pretty sensible, given that most of what they get is probably 550 for bad addresses in their lists. Why even bother spending the time parsing these errors - there's going to be a whole lot of them, and it's mostly trash because your mailing list is mostly trash.
But lets say a spammer does make a spambot that looks for 451 errors and properly tries again later. Many sites recommend a greylist delay of 1 hour, but many others recommend a super short one of 1 minute or less. The spambot will have to figure out what to do - it could simply hammer the mail server until the message is accepted, which would have the added bonus of simultaneously DDOSing every mail server that implements greylisting. It would also tie up the spambot, though, attempting to resend messages to what might actually be a mail server that's not greylisting, but isn't accepting any mail at all right now. This stuff works on high volume, you don't want to slow down your rapid-fire spamming with all these retries. So they'd probably rather queue up retries to go out after their initial batch is done.
That means they have to keep track of all this crap. Spambots use randomized From: addresses, but most greylisting implementations use the unique triplet of from address, to address, and senderIP to distinguish connections. If you just try and run the send again, you get a different random From:, and you're a new customer to the greylist again. So you have to start remembering the addresses used for every single mail until the error parsing is done, and then you have to store all the info for the retries somewhere. As you pointed out
Keeping track of thousands and thousands of IP addresses in a grey list to determine which one can communicate at what point is resource intensive.
You increase the size and complexity of your spambot, you increase the chance of it getting noticed. A spambot that the user notices is an uninstalled spambot. And that doesn't just mean less spam that you can send, that means your botnet just got smaller. You never want that. You want to protect the botnet at all costs. After all, it's not your spam, it's your client's spam, and there's no need to risk your botnet in order to get 1% more messages out for your client.
TFA says it affected SD customers only, but didn't mention if it was limited to only digital or only analog customers. However, looking at their Tuscon channel lineups, it appears that the porn is only offered on their digital packages nowdays. I don't know much about the innards of a cable system, but it seems like that would make it difficult for a regular analog-tier customer to "accidentally" recieve porn.
In all seriousness, if you're doing it right, all the trees, wines, and cheeses are related somehow. And you can always pare it down more. Maybe wines are db machines, red wines are MS SQL, white wines are Oracle. (I wouldn't want to work at that hypothetical company, I don't think)
If you just assign names randomly, you're doing it wrong. The point is for the themes to have some simple pattern behind them. Working with "real" objects for your naming patterns means you can always find ways to properly categorize them. /something/ about the server's function. Or if all your servers are trees, knowing that it's a deciduous fruit bearing tree should help you narrow it down.
Knowing that Oak is a tree should tell you
The client is not the only material that is at stake here. Blizzard's actual product is the whole thing, server and client, end-to-end. They sell an online service, not a piece of software. You can't buy the WoW client, it's not sold. Blizzard only sells subscriptions to use their servers. It is this use of their servers, of their services, which they are trying to protect/restrict. The actual game client is only part of the issue.
Glider does not bypass protection mechanisms granting you the ability to access copyrighted work without a license.
That depends on if you are considering the World of Warcraft client installed on the user's PC as the copyrighted work in question, then you might be correct.
If you consider WoW, the online game/service as the copyrighted work, however, and the WoW client (or more specifically, Warden) as the protection mechanism, though, things turn around rather quickly.
WoW as a whole is the product that Blizzard is selling. They do NOT sell a standalone client - they license you a client when you sign up for their online service. It is this distinction that makes this case so much different from many others.
To sum up, again. Warden is designed to control access to a protected work. Specifically to limit access to the uses permitted by Blizzard's WoW ToS. Glider intentionally circumvents this. Specifically, every time WoW is patched and Glider is yet again blocked, Glider is patched to get around it. This is clearly criminal under the DMCA, no fancy lawyering needed to make it seem so.
In the old days this would have been a simple civil case, where Blizzard sued MDY for damages, and drove them into bankruptcy, while playing a never ending cat and mouse game with blocking glider. Now, thanks to the DMCA, it's a criminal matter and MDY's CEO is personally responsible.
Much more minor circumventions (i.e. using deCSS to play your lawfully purchased DVD's or stripping DRM out of songs purchased from the internet) also run afoul of this law, and are criminal acts.
This is a totally legitimate application of the law, doing what it was written to do. The only way out of this mess is to repeal or rewrite the DMCA. "Accessing copyrighted work without a licence" is not the only application of the DMCA - it is in fact written quite broadly. Bypassing anything that "controls access" is completely illegal in the USA.
Ah, but that's the thing. World of Warcraft isn't just another piece of software. It's a subscription based online service, that just happens to have a specific, vendor provided client. What is being called a EULA (both here and in WoW's installer), is actually more like what we know as the ToS.
The terms of service spell out the exact ways in which you agree to use their service. Contracts for subscription services aren't on nearly the kind of shaky legal ground that shrinkwrap EULA's are.
Looking at WoW as a subscription service, and the WoW client software as an "access control device" for that service puts Blizzard on very solid legal ground. It also makes these precedents significantly less applicable to ordinary software hacking, and ordinary shrinkwrap EULAs.
The Call of Duty example you set would not apply - they're different situations. You don't subscribe to Call of Duty, you don't even play on company servers, you play on servers set up by volunteer players. And you don't have to agree to any Terms of Service to use another player's server.
In my experience with consumer grade broadband, it's not a very slight slowdown.
Qwest, which I am currently on, has no such targeted throttling that I can see. However, the peak-hour slowdown is readily apparent. On my "5M/896k" line,I can download around 500kbps for about 2/3 of the day. But during peak hours, it drags way, way down. around 8 PM, things can slow down to around 100kbps - I've seen it go as low as 50 on particularly bad days.
My point here is that "downloads slowed down fractionally" doesn't really express the full impact of the throttling that typically is imposed. Neither does "Bandwidth getting tight" fully express the level that residential ISP's oversell. If my ISP were to throttle P2P when all available bandwidth was being consumed, using the typical method of restricting P2P to using only the "leftover bandwidth", it would mean stopping it completely during peak times, and then still having congestion.
We've discussed before here on Slashdot how P2P gets targeted, even though streaming video is the real bandwidth hog, and one that ISP's can't throttle or block without massive consumer outrage. The massive peak-time crunches illustrate this - P2P isn't something that just shows up at peak time, it's something most people run overnight or 24/7. P2P only takes up about 20% of the bandwidth; throttling it is far from the cure-all ISP's seem to portray it as.
Would you be willing to go to an interview w/o reimbursement, for a temporary 6-9 month job?
At this point? Sure.
I'm unemployed, not like I have anything better to do with my day.
When I was delivering pizza, we used to do this for credit card orders. We (the delivery drivers, at the door) would take a rubbing of the customers credit card on the receipt paper. It works perfectly on that slippery thermal paper that cheap receipt printers and CC machines use.
We started doing it to protect ourselves against chargebacks. A handful of customers had taken to challenging charges on a regular basis. With our CSR's taking credit card numbers over the phone, including billing zip and CVV2 number, and the drivers presenting a receipt to be signed at the door, we still had no recourse - Even though we had a signature and an address.
Visa/MC doesn't let retailers disallow anyone paying with a card for any reason, even if you have a history of fraud reports from that person or CC number. It's due to some language in their standard merchant contract (this also spells out that you can't require minimum purchases or surcharges for using cards, but many smaller outfits do anyway, flying under the radar). National and regional management wouldn't let us simply blacklist the customers entirely.
An imprint or a machine swipe was all the CC processor would accept as proof. In the end it was a headache for drivers and managers, and an annoyance for customers. Only a small few customers were actually concerned about the imprint being used for fraud, most simply resented having to get their card out a second time. But in the end, it let us stay in business and protect ourselves.
Hanford Site in Washington State... It is a secure location that is ... in the process of enviornmental remediation.
Guessing you're not a Washington resident, or else you'd know that this "environmental remediation" is only progressing at all due to the WA state Department of Ecology suing the federal government over it. And that its current rate, it will be hundreds of years before the waste *we know about* has been cleaned up. Time during which shit continues to leak, and spread.
Generally speaking, the whole place is considered an absolute disaster by Washingtonians.
This sample was not weapons ready. If it were, it would have been used in a weapon and not left behind.
You obviously didn't read TFA. 99.96% purity. The article can only guess at why it didn't make it into a bomb. From the article:
"But the puzzling thing is, why didn't this plutonium make it into the bomb?" In 1944, the Americans were working flat out to develop a nuclear capability - it's strange that any first large batch of plutonium-239 should be stored and not used, he says.'
They go on to postulate that it was because the safe it was being stored in became contaminated, so the whole shebang got tossed.
what is the issue people have with Vista making use of the memory you have?
Because XP made use of the memory MOST people had. If you had a machine with 512MB of ram, and ran a few programs, it would happily use all of it, and be perfectly responsive.
This is something Vista apologists seem to have forgotten: XP was responsive under most workloads on 512MB of RAM. And yes, it would use most or all of it.
Vista on 512MB is an unusable disaster. It is constantly swapping under a typical destop workload. Vista needs 2GB of ram to be responsive, for most people.
Upgrading to 2GB of ram in a new system is trivial and inexpensive. But, there are a ton of consumer-grade machines out there, already in service running XP. Coppermine P3's, T-bird Athlons, they've got enough CPU power to upgrade to Vista, the only thing holding them back is RAM. Machines built with SDRAM, that just can't be upgraded to handle Vista, because the motherboards just don't support that much ram. Oh sure, they can meet the minimum requirements, but the machine is going to run like crap on that amount of ram.
And I really do think people need to get off XP - an XP install in the hands of a typical computer user is just another zombie PC waiting to happen. I would much rather the unwashed masses be using Vista - it's slightly more secure! But to paint Vista's gigantic memory footprint as a good thing? Please.
Vista's substandard performance on machines with under 2G of ram cannot be blamed on all this caching, which by all accounts gets out of your way if you need the ram. Vista isn't doing anything that OSX and the premiere Linux distros aren't managing to do on much less ram. Vista is just too damn big, and for no apparent reason. Whether Vista has less unused RAM than XP on your 4 gig machine is certainly not the issue here.
If you're an asshole, you better be really good at it, because you're going to run out of suckers really quick.
Going to have to disagree with you there. In any industry, there's always enough turnover and reorganizations to ensure a fresh supply of suckers, and a good portion of those suckers are just too nice to rebel against the assholes.
By the time the cooperative nice guys have recognized and managed to exclude the asshole, the asshole has already gotten a great deal of benefit out of the situation. The asshole can then ride it out until the next reorg or next batch of new hires. If they manage to exhaust the supply of suckers at the entire organization, it's time to lobby for a better job at a related company, now that you've got all this experience and resume padding.
The problem being that, hybrids aside, 10-20 year old cars get better gas mileage than more recent models, for the most part. Average new car fuel economy in the American market peaked in 1988, 21 years ago, right around the industry-wide adoption of sequential electronic fuel injection. Ever since then, cars have been getting bigger, heavier, and more powerful, with no major advances in engine efficiency.
The only way this will actually improve our nation's fuel consumption is if it's targeted towards 20-30 year old cars, with old low compression engines and sloppy carburetors. Cars that predate lightweight unibody construction and electronic engine management. You can't hardly sell one on the used market, and the most a scrap yard will give you is $2-300 based on the weight. The $2500-$4500 quoted in the summary is more than enough to make someone with a 1980 Delta 88 trade it for a 1990's era sedan. And still have some cash left over.
Oh really? I mean, Chrysler is a bit behind, but all accounts are that their R&D department has been entirely shut down since Daimler bought them, moved their products in a "large" direction, and then sold them off. For the most part I'd say the big 3's fuel economy is perfectly average.
Compact:
- Big 3 -
Chevrolet Aveo 27/34
Ford Focus 24/35
Dodge Caliber 24/30
-Foreign-
Honda Fit 28/35
Toyota Corolla 27/35
Kia Rio 27/33
Hyundai Accent 27/33
Nissan Versa 27/33
Mazda 3 24/32
Suzuki SX4 23/31
Volkswagen Rabbit 21/30
Midsize/family
- Big 3 -
Chevy Malibu 22/33
Ford Fusion 20/29
Dodge Avenger 21/30
- Foreign -
Honda Accord 22/31
Toyota Camry 21/31
Kia Optima 22/32
Hyundai Sonata 22/32
Nissan Altima 23/32
Mazda 6 21/30
Volkswagen Passat 19/29
All numbers from fueleconomy.gov, models chosen in the most economical configuration available. Midsize cars based on comparably sized 4 doors with a standard 4cyl but an available V-6.
The overlap problems are only an issue if you're at the edge of range of your AP. The only time it causes any problem at all is when your signal is weak enough to appear corrupted by the stronger next-door signal, triggering a bunch of resent packets. If you're building a wireless network to cover a large area, and you want to use a minimum number of APs, channel overlap is something that you need to seriously worry about. In those situations, you'll have users on the outside edge of the range of 2 overlapping networks.
However, in a typical home environment, unless your house is super huge, you are going to be close enough to the AP at all times to prevent these kinds of issues. Everyone else in the neighborhood is also equally close to their own APs, and so you're not going to cause any problems with them, either. All 11 channels are perfectly useful, and switching to an empty channel will improve your situation dramatically by reducing the number of collisions.
Reducing collisions is also probably the best reason to use G instead of B, even though few people will max out their B networks directly. The faster you clear the channel, the less likely a collision is. Most of the latency problems PC gamers have with wireless networks can be traced back to overcrowded wireless channels running at 11mbps with collisions happening left and right.
It's like 10base2 all over again!
No influence on their hiring, however it does have an influence on their prospective hires. Particularly those from out of state.