I'm pretty sure the original intent of IP protection was to allow a reasonable return on investment for the IP holder. I don't have a problem with that, however, what is reasonable? Big Pharma are making billions of dollars in profits. Do they really need as much protection? Monsanto is another example. IP protectionism is most certainly not providing the balance to which you are alluding. Fortunately, here in Australia, the pharma situation is a little better, despite the best efforts of US Big Pharma and the FTA.
Yes, going to a cinema is a different experience from watching it at home.
That it is. That feeling of pain as my wallet is relieved of $100. A lot of comments compare $10 for a DVD against $20 for a movie, but the missus and the kids get to watch that $10 DVD at no extra charge. Going to the movies is a very expensive proposition, even with a family ticket.
That's not accurate. The recent version of Gaim (2.0.0 beta 5) works fine with MSN on both Gentoo and Windows XP. There was a change to MSN that broke Gaim on Win32, but that was fixed pretty quickly.
As with many stories, there is more to this than meets the eye.
The NSW Teachers Federation, which is a fairly powerful union here, has been vigorously fighting any attempts to rate the teachers performance and that of their students. Report cards for students are virtually meaningless nowdays and they have fought tooth and nail to prevent the return of the old system. I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites, but as someone who went through the NSW system, I think having a rating site is a great idea. Many of the teachers are less than competent to be teaching our children.
I don't know if it will work on Vista (MS claims win95 onwards or NT4 onwards), but you may find BGInfo a handy tool for your laptop. It will publish your IP address and other system information on the desktop every time you boot. You can configure it to show just the information that you desire.
Every time x, y or z happens, all the do-gooders clamour for a new law/s to address it. Most of these stupid narrow things are already covered by a more general common sense law. The problem is that existing laws are not being enforced or enforced vigorously enough.
I believe that doesn't actually work. The addresses for Microsoft's update servers are hard coded elsewhere in the system. See this story for a brief overview.
DSL qualification distance is the distance by wire, not as the crow flies or by road. Other limiting factors are pair gains, RIMs (Remote Integrated Multiplexors) and line quality, although RIMs can usually be fitted with a mini-mux card (basically a mini DSLAM) to enable DSL to the clients on that RIM. Here in Australia, RIMs arent really deployed anymore, with CMUX-AU used instead. Some more info and pictures here.
Australia. I live out in a small lakeside hamlet and still have 1.5mb ADSL. Looks like 8mb is just around the corner (pardon the pun) too.
It is not a technical limitation that is preventing the adoption of broadband throught the US. If you have a township large enough to warrant a phone exchange, then you should be able to have ADSL throughout that town and this can easily be extended through mini-muxes. If you have a phone line and are more than 20 kms (~12 miles) away from the axe, then there are other options such as satellite (I know, it isn't for everyone). The problem would probably be one of cost and ROI. It's the same as if you privatised the mail system. The providers will cherry pick the more profitable metro areas to service and leave the less profitable rural areas.
We had this issue with the main telco here which was partly resolved by government preassure. What you need to do is get this issue onto the government's electoral radar. There was a lot of political heat applied and political capital gained here by ensuring as many people as possible could have access to broadband. There are still issues in some rural areas, but these are being looked at. Broadband and telephone services to the rural and bush areas where a huge deal when the government was trying to privatise Testra. Perhaps a thorough examination of this case will help to dispell some of the myths being spread around by the US telcos and isps.
Which is a great policy when they configure the whole fucking drive as a single partition. I'm sure that the great majority of users don't store important data on their PCs, but for those of us that must - databases, geodatabases and the like, this is a crap policy. Likewise, I'm sure that one gig of secure, backed up fileserver storage is plenty for most. I insist that every new PC I get has multiple partitions and if they don't then I do it myself. If the OS gets trashed by a virus,MS update, SMS or the like, at least I can get my work without having to restore a backup set.
... the "lite" version of Vista. I thought the install media was a DVD and about 3.5 gig. Actually, that could be interesting. Most of the corporate desktops that I have seen don't have DVD drives. Can you do a network deploy with it?
FWIW I've got Ubuntu 6.10 up and running fine on a Powermac G4 400mHz without issues (and looks a damn sight better than OS 9.2!) and also had it on an Athlon XP1800+ without drama. The Athlon now has FC6 on it and works fine.
In Australia, we get to pay $AUD39.95 or thereabouts for most new releases. I'm not prepared to pay that. For a very good, recent movie I am prepared to pay up to $AUD25, which is about the price that new release will be 6 months after release. For an average to good movie that I'd like to have in my collection, I'll pay $AUD10-$20. Anything for $5 or less is usuallly just a VHS transfer and not worth looking at.
However, any pirated movies that come my way, I do get a copy and review to see if I want to spend my hard earned money on an original. This is the point that a lot of people miss. Not everyone is prepared to pay top dollar for an unknown quality. With so many prepackaged, rehashed stories (and dare I say, plots), Joe Consumer needs a reviewing mechanisim to sort the wheat from the chaff. The pirates are probably actually driving increased sales of new movies, not costing the MPAA money. (NB Yes, I am aware that this anti-piracy campaign is about control, not money.)
... that surveys suck. When will people wake up that you cannot "survey" 2600 people and extrapolate that out as representative of the entire US population. This is such a small sample that it should be dismissed outright. What demographics did they survey? The fact that the survey was online and phone suggest immediately that the survey is skewed.
Here in Australia, I have seen Acer laptops on display in some stores with an AMD cpu and Ubuntu installed. Price was $899 IIRC. Didn't ask about a no OS option though.
I also had no problems getting in-warranty repairs on it here in Brisbane from Acer Australia. I find this pretty amazing. Everyone I know that has used Acer warranty (which is outsourced to Hi-Point in Sydney) has had nothing but problems and shoddy repairs. My friends BenQ (home user division of Acer) had his go back seven times and still wasn't fixed properly.
Perhaps the way to get these people is through IRS. It would seem a highly likely proposition that the people running these P&D schemes would not be paying tax. They would more than likely keep detailed records with a nice transactions trail from their brokers and banks as well. Should be a slam dunk if IRS gets in on the game.
Yes, just what we need. Yet another distraction from the task of driving. I wonder how many people will be killed because they were too busy reading their personalised billboard. Motorists need less distractions not more.
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I'm pretty sure the original intent of IP protection was to allow a reasonable return on investment for the IP holder. I don't have a problem with that, however, what is reasonable? Big Pharma are making billions of dollars in profits. Do they really need as much protection? Monsanto is another example. IP protectionism is most certainly not providing the balance to which you are alluding. Fortunately, here in Australia, the pharma situation is a little better, despite the best efforts of US Big Pharma and the FTA.
That's not accurate. The recent version of Gaim (2.0.0 beta 5) works fine with MSN on both Gentoo and Windows XP. There was a change to MSN that broke Gaim on Win32, but that was fixed pretty quickly.
As with many stories, there is more to this than meets the eye.
The NSW Teachers Federation, which is a fairly powerful union here, has been vigorously fighting any attempts to rate the teachers performance and that of their students. Report cards for students are virtually meaningless nowdays and they have fought tooth and nail to prevent the return of the old system. I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites, but as someone who went through the NSW system, I think having a rating site is a great idea. Many of the teachers are less than competent to be teaching our children.
I don't know if it will work on Vista (MS claims win95 onwards or NT4 onwards), but you may find BGInfo a handy tool for your laptop. It will publish your IP address and other system information on the desktop every time you boot. You can configure it to show just the information that you desire.
Every time x, y or z happens, all the do-gooders clamour for a new law/s to address it. Most of these stupid narrow things are already covered by a more general common sense law. The problem is that existing laws are not being enforced or enforced vigorously enough.
Too bad the grammar nazis are in too much of hurry to check their own posts.
I believe that doesn't actually work. The addresses for Microsoft's update servers are hard coded elsewhere in the system. See this story for a brief overview.
DSL qualification distance is the distance by wire, not as the crow flies or by road. Other limiting factors are pair gains, RIMs (Remote Integrated Multiplexors) and line quality, although RIMs can usually be fitted with a mini-mux card (basically a mini DSLAM) to enable DSL to the clients on that RIM. Here in Australia, RIMs arent really deployed anymore, with CMUX-AU used instead. Some more info and pictures here.
Australia. I live out in a small lakeside hamlet and still have 1.5mb ADSL. Looks like 8mb is just around the corner (pardon the pun) too.
It is not a technical limitation that is preventing the adoption of broadband throught the US. If you have a township large enough to warrant a phone exchange, then you should be able to have ADSL throughout that town and this can easily be extended through mini-muxes. If you have a phone line and are more than 20 kms (~12 miles) away from the axe, then there are other options such as satellite (I know, it isn't for everyone). The problem would probably be one of cost and ROI. It's the same as if you privatised the mail system. The providers will cherry pick the more profitable metro areas to service and leave the less profitable rural areas.
We had this issue with the main telco here which was partly resolved by government preassure. What you need to do is get this issue onto the government's electoral radar. There was a lot of political heat applied and political capital gained here by ensuring as many people as possible could have access to broadband. There are still issues in some rural areas, but these are being looked at. Broadband and telephone services to the rural and bush areas where a huge deal when the government was trying to privatise Testra. Perhaps a thorough examination of this case will help to dispell some of the myths being spread around by the US telcos and isps.
$2 per gallon? I remember when we had those prices about 15 years ago. It's $US3.49 per US gallon here in Australia.
Which is a great policy when they configure the whole fucking drive as a single partition. I'm sure that the great majority of users don't store important data on their PCs, but for those of us that must - databases, geodatabases and the like, this is a crap policy. Likewise, I'm sure that one gig of secure, backed up fileserver storage is plenty for most.
I insist that every new PC I get has multiple partitions and if they don't then I do it myself. If the OS gets trashed by a virus,MS update, SMS or the like, at least I can get my work without having to restore a backup set.
... the "lite" version of Vista. I thought the install media was a DVD and about 3.5 gig. Actually, that could be interesting. Most of the corporate desktops that I have seen don't have DVD drives. Can you do a network deploy with it?
FWIW I've got Ubuntu 6.10 up and running fine on a Powermac G4 400mHz without issues (and looks a damn sight better than OS 9.2!) and also had it on an Athlon XP1800+ without drama. The Athlon now has FC6 on it and works fine.
In Australia, we get to pay $AUD39.95 or thereabouts for most new releases. I'm not prepared to pay that. For a very good, recent movie I am prepared to pay up to $AUD25, which is about the price that new release will be 6 months after release. For an average to good movie that I'd like to have in my collection, I'll pay $AUD10-$20. Anything for $5 or less is usuallly just a VHS transfer and not worth looking at.
However, any pirated movies that come my way, I do get a copy and review to see if I want to spend my hard earned money on an original. This is the point that a lot of people miss. Not everyone is prepared to pay top dollar for an unknown quality. With so many prepackaged, rehashed stories (and dare I say, plots), Joe Consumer needs a reviewing mechanisim to sort the wheat from the chaff. The pirates are probably actually driving increased sales of new movies, not costing the MPAA money. (NB Yes, I am aware that this anti-piracy campaign is about control, not money.)
... that surveys suck. When will people wake up that you cannot "survey" 2600 people and extrapolate that out as representative of the entire US population. This is such a small sample that it should be dismissed outright. What demographics did they survey? The fact that the survey was online and phone suggest immediately that the survey is skewed.
Perhaps the way to get these people is through IRS. It would seem a highly likely proposition that the people running these P&D schemes would not be paying tax. They would more than likely keep detailed records with a nice transactions trail from their brokers and banks as well. Should be a slam dunk if IRS gets in on the game.
...does anyone hear the mathematicians scream?
Yes, I too thought that, but then what about all the other macs? Mac Mini for example.
As this device is running OSX and has many of the basic OSX apps, why not call it a macPhone in line with iMac, Mac Mini, PowerMac, MacBook et al.
Yes, just what we need. Yet another distraction from the task of driving. I wonder how many people will be killed because they were too busy reading their personalised billboard. Motorists need less distractions not more.