I am currently a Verizon customer. I am switching phone companies once I am no longer their bitch (contract is up in a year or so).
I guess you don't pay attention to all the cellphone postings here at Slashdot because if you did, you would know about how Verizon cripples their phones and is maybe the most customer unfriendly of all the US carriers. I've been with T-Mobile for almost 2 years now and I have no complaints at all. Since I travel outside of the US a few times a year, it's great to know that my cellphone will work overseas since T-Mobile uses GSM. T-Mobile's customer service is probably the best of all the US carriers. The few times I've had to call them, the customer service was great.
I've posted on this before. Why do so many people have this fantasy that paper ballots can't be rigged? Ukraine uses paper ballots and the presidential election in November 2004 was widely considered to be rigged. I was in Ukraine just after the vote and I have no doubt at all that it was rigged.
Color me confused: according to IMDB, King Kong had an estimated budget of $207 million, but had already brought in $520 million worldwide by the 26th of January. How is that a failure?
It's a failure because it didn't make that $520 million in the USA alone. Given Peter Jackson's success with LOTR, I think the studio expectations were very unrealistic. Certainly the movie made money and had the director been someone with lower box office expectations, say Ridley Scott (who I happen to think is a very good director), it would have been considered a smash. Basically, Hollywood set it up so that unless _King Kong_ started approaching the money _Titanic_ brought in, it was going to be considered a failure. I am just cynical enough to think that this might be part of a plan by Hollywood to bring Jackson down to earth a little bit by making a successful movie appear like a failure so he can't command unlimited budget and control in the future. "Gee Mr. Jackson, we'd like to give you $300 million for your next film, but you know we lost our shirts on _King Kong_..."
As for the NFL/EA thing, I think that's lame too -- the difference is that the NFL, for some reason, is allowed a monopoly (perhaps people think it's a natural monopoly?) and no one complains about it. Sports franchises may be different. Who knows?
Technically, only baseball is exempt from anti-trust laws because Congress granted it an exemption a long time ago. I think it was in the 1920s, but don't quote me on that. The NFL is not, per se, a monopoly and there is nothing to bar a new league from starting. In fact, here is a brief history of competing leagues in major sports leagues:
Major League Baseball National League founded 1876 a few competing leagues played in the late 1800s, but none lasted. American League founded 1901, accepted as part of Major League Baseball after a few years Federal League - 1914-15 - folded and that is it.
National Football League: All American Football Conference played 1946-49 - 3 teams merged into NFL and the rest of the league folded American Football League played 1960-69. Complete merger with NFL. World Football League - 1974-75 - folded United States Football League - 1983-85 - folded XFL (considered by most to be a minor league) - 2001 - folded
The NBA and NHL both had competing leagues in the 1970s that both leagues partially merged with. I think there may have been another pro basketball league competing with the NBA at one time, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Outside of baseball which is allowed by law to be a monopoly, the other sports leagues have been open to competition. The problem is that it costs a lot to run a league and the odds of a new league being a success are very low. Several minor leagues have folded in various sports in the past decade, even though their costs are much lower than professional leagues. For example, the International Hockey League folded in 2001, but in the 1990s it became the premier league for minor league hockey. They expanded too quickly and by 2001 they were forced to fold, with a few of their franchises being accepted into the old American Hockey League, which is now the highest league for minor league hockey.
I wish I had mod points to mod this up. What the original poster and others fail to understand is that this is where Scalia is coming from. Scalia basically believes that if it is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, it's not there. Previous Supreme Courts said, yes, the right to privacy is NOT explicitly stated in the Constitution, but it is implied. Scalia doesn't believe you "imply" things. It's either there or it isn't to him.
I'm not asking the original poster to agree with this point of view, just to realize that Scalia does have a rational argument. If you feel that rights can be implied, that's your business and previous Supreme Courts believed that too, but it doesn't mean that Scalia has no rational basis for what he believes.
To be honest with you, I have always wondered if it was even possible to make a call from a cell phone while in the air on an airplane, but I would prefer to have evidence from a site other than some crackpot "The US government deliberately caused 9/11!" website.
Frankly, I think _House Of Flying Daggers_ will be spectacular in Blu-Ray. It was a pretty good regular DVD too, even if it suffered from the "It's a dern foreign film" phobia that effects so many Americans.
I know that _The Matrix_ will definitely be released on HD-DVD, but I'm not sure if it will come out on Blu-Ray too or not. The HD-DVD version, in theory, will be available around the end of the month.
I disagree with indoor plumbing because technology goes against my religious beliefs.
Interestingly enough, it would appear that using technology to be on the internet somehow does not go against your religious beliefs.
I assume that your post is a bit of hyperbole and not meant to be taken as 100% factual. It reminds me of something my brother told me. Before a law was passed in the USA to limit telemarketing calls, my brother told me that he got a call from a lawn care service. He had no interest in the service nor did he have the extra money to pay for it each month, so he told the caller that using a lawn care service went against the Bible because "that's not how the Lord wants things done". The caller was shocked and had no idea how to respond to that, so he told my brother just to be sure to water his lawn regularly and it would probably be OK. I love that story.
As far as the mystery conductor goes, that sounds like a bit of an urban legend to me. The great conductor Fritz Reiner was quoted as saying that around 1950 records began to sound like music. This was because of the use of magnetic tape, which proved to be a vastly superior way to record sound over the old direct to disc laquer method. Plus, recording to tape allowed for editing and splicing. When you recorded straight to laquer discs and you botched a take, you had to start all over again and it was expensive to keep cutting those discs. There was some really remarkable work being done by some of the engineers in the 1950s at RCA and Mercury and the sessions they recorded are so good that they are starting to be released on SACD now.
Leopold Stokowski was praised as being one of the few conductors in the early days of the LP (this would be the early 1950's) who understood that recordings and concert performances were not the same thing. Stokowksi understood the technology and used it to his advantage. He often suggested "enhancements" to the sound by the engineers (ie. boosting the bass frequencies) that while they didn't really and truly reflect what was played by the orchestra nonetheless led to wonderful recordings that still sound good today.
The downside is that a lot of great conductors lived in the "pre-vinyl" days and all we have is low fidelity recordings that give hints of their genius. Serge Koussevitzky was one such conductor. Arturo Toscanini lived just long enough to see the LP era and record under it, but the majority of his recordings are from the low fidelity era where there was no magnetic tape. However, these guys are still known precisely because they left recordings behind. In the case of this mystery American conductor who refused to be recorded, probably he's just a footnote in the history pages as a result.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard the old "it's warmer on vinyl" crap before. Any rational person knows that there are huge disadvantages to vinyl - surface noise, dynamic range limitation and the inability to support frequencies above something like 17000 Hz.
I hear that argument all the time - "I'm not going to buy it until I've heard it." I have 2 replies to that. 1) You CAN hear it most of the time at Amazon, iTunes, etc. Granted, there are some CDs that don't have samples at Amazon, but most of the non-classical ones have samples. Anything still in print will almost certainly have a sample. 2) Frankly, I've lost count of how many times I bought DVDs or audio CDs just based on something I read, having never seen or heard the item in question before the purchase. Sometimes you get garbage. I bought the DVD of _Duece Bigelow: Male Gigolo_ on a friend's recommendation and while I would not say it was terrible, I would say that it most definitely was NOT worth what I paid for it at the time (about $30 in the days of unfriendly DVD prices) and it most certainly was NOT even close to being "the funniest movie EVER!!!" as my friend insisted. Then again, I once bought Oasis' CD _What's The Story Morning Glory_ based on something I read and I became a big fan of the group. I think about how much I have enjoyed their music over the years and realize that had I not taken a chance, I would have missed out on all of that.
Sometimes when you take a chance, it really pays off big time and those are the moments you remember and treasure. Sometimes you waste your money. That's all part of life. If you must hear before you buy, usually you can find a legal way to hear a sample (Amazon, iTunes, etc.).
The first Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, which was recognized by most of the world as fraudulent, used such a pen and paper system. Pen and paper does not ensure that elections can't be rigged and I am amazed at how many people seem to think that is exactly what it does.
Yes, we all know the parent is an idiot. I have been to Ukraine a number of times and while I have never bothered to go on the Chernobyl tour (too expensive), I do know that there are STILL areas of Ukraine and Belarus (Belarus arguably took the worst of the accident) that are dead zones near Chernobyl. There are some crazy old Ukrainians who have moved back into areas that are supposed to be abandoned and are officially considered uninhabitable by the Ukrainian government, believe it or not. Most people know that it is crazy to eat mushrooms and berries from these areas, but it has been alleged that some foodstuffs are illegally harvested from these areas and sold in certain markets. I think they've been alleged to be illegally imported into Russia. I remember 2 years ago when I was in Kiev and I talked to a local guy who told me that he liked to fish but he wouldn't keep or eat anything he caught in the Dniper River in Kiev because of Chernobyl. Kiev is (I think) about 100 miles south of Chernobyl and I can tell you that he is not the only person in Kiev who is afraid to eat anything that comes out of the Dniper.
I paid $35 in Tijuana for my Rolex Submariner watch in January of 1997. It STILL works, although I have to change the battery every couple of years. Of course, mine is a (cough! cough!) "replica" of a true Rolex (hence the need for a battery), but I have to tell you that at 35 bucks, it is honestly one of the best watches I have ever owned.
I'm usually the first guy to back the idea of "reeling in the judges", but not for this. Do you know how many names were on the email list? That would have a lot to do with whether the city was being reasonable or not in saying the boy could copy them by hand. Suppose you want a copy of the book _War and Peace_, which I understand is quite a big book. Suppose further that I tell you that you may not buy a copy nor may you be given one by anybody. Further, you may not photocopy or use any type of video capturing device to record the pages. However, you may copy the entire thing by hand if you wish. Is that reasonable? The judge decided that the city had no grounds to not comply with the request and their offer to allow hand copying wasn't reasonable, so they can reimburse the boy's attorney for wasting everyone's time. If there's one thing judges don't like, that is having their time wasted. If the tax payers don't like footing the bill for this then maybe they need to elect people to the city government who will have better sense than to fight something that they can't win. I have news for you - governments do this kind of thing all the time because they have attorneys on their payroll and they can afford delaying tactics and endless appeals because normal people probably don't have enough time and money to fight them forever. Big corporations do the same thing. The judge in this case obviously felt that they only way to send a message to the city that what they did wasn't cool was to make them pay pro bono attorney fees.
I wanted to point out that "region free" mode will prevent some American DVDs from playing. Hollywood got angry a few years ago that people in Europe and other parts of the world could buy and play our DVDs on region free machines, so they put a nasty little trick in to prevent that. I have forgotten what they call it. Here is a simplified version of how DVD players normally work in region free mode:
Normal DVD talks to DVD player: My region is region 1. What region are you? DVD player: I'm region 0. That means region free. I can play you. Normal DVD: Go ahead and play me.
However, with some American DVDs, the conversation goes like this: DVD talks to DVD player: My region is region 2. What region are you? DVD player: I'm region 0. That means region free. I can play you. DVD: I lied! I'm really region 1. Since you can play me as a region 2 disc but I am supposed to be sold only in region 1, that means you are region free. I won't play on you.
I don't remember the studios that do this except for Paramount, but for these discs, it is necessary to switch the DVD player back to region 1 to play the discs.
Well, if she's any good, she might make a decent living at it. I have a suspicion that based on her attitude she's probably not as good as she thinks she is. My best friend from college is an attorney and has been one for about 17 years. I learned from him that everyone who is an attorney does not make the big bucks, but he does do pretty well from his private practice. However, I know one of his law school buddies and I suspect that this guy might make $50,000 a year - if he's lucky. I have learned that people from Ms. Abdala's generation have hugely inflated opinions of themselves and often find reality to be very humbling and difficult to deal with.
I have forgotten the link, but some woman with a serious chip on her shoulder has decided that _Ender's Game_ is an apology for Hitler. Although I think 99.99% of the people who have read the book would not agree, she has twisted everything she could into proving her hypothesis. She has also alleged that Card does not write his own books. The problem is that Card is not politically correct and holds some opinions that are not well liked by some people, particularly about homosexuals. Card is also very religious, which makes him a threat to some people. I think much of the criticism against him has to do with people who are threatened by his politics, so they attack his writing. Politically, he is pretty close to former Senator Zell Miller - both claim to be Democrats, but are big fans of the current president.
The problem is that SonyBMG Music and all of the large music conglomerates have the following business plan:
We MUST UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES sell EVERY CD we make for a minimium of $16.
DVDs took off because Hollywood realized they could make a lot of money in volume if the cost was lower. When DVDs first hit, they were routinely selling for $30-40 each. They got smart and realized that if they sold them cheaper, they could sell a LOT of them and make more money than if they sold fewer at a higher cost.
The music industry simply will not accept the idea of selling more at a lower price. They have been very consistent in their demands that they would rather not sell it to you at all than sell it to you cheaper and they aren't willing to make more money in volume by selling more at a lower cost. If they can't rip you off, they don't want your money. As long as this is the way they want to do business, it will lead to things like the Sony rootkit. This attitude makes them view every consumer as an enemy and they must stop copying to protect their $16+ price point. So the rootkit really is about an insane business model that mandates a fixed price that is too high for the marketplace and that justifies all steps necessary to protect that model.
The Olympics themselves wanted the change to allow professionals and it really had little if anything to do with the fact that the Soviet Union and other communist countries flaunted the rules and sent bogus "amateurs" to the Olympics every year. It's all about the money with the IOC. It always has been. The Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996 took it to the logical conclusion and was very open about how it was all about the money. The IOC flipped out about how "commercial" the games were and required Sydney and Athens to be more discrete. They are still commercial, just not as blunt. I don't know about Sydney, but Atlanta turned a modest profit on those games. Rumor had it that Athens lost money.
The NHL players are in the Olympics because of money. The Soviet Union is gone. The days of phoney amateurs are gone. Nobody wants to see Russian college kids play American college kids in hockey. Nobody wants to buy ads for that. Nobody wants to see it on TV. Same with Olympic basketball. Having NBA players in the Olympics was welcomed by everyone because they realized that only by playing against the best could they improve their play. The USA is no longer a guaranteed lock on a basketball gold and the calibre of play in the European leagues is much much higher now than say 10 years ago as a result of this.
I'm not anti-USPS, but they aren't really as good as "the other carriers". Remember folks, Priority Mail is NOT guaranteed. It is "best attempt". I sent myself a package once from Los Angeles to my east coast home by Priority Mail. It took about 10 days to get to me. Just last week I received a package by Priority Mail and it took a full week to get to me. Most of the time, yes, Priority Mail works as advertised, but not always. They don't refund any money when they screw around and take 7-10 days to ship your package to you instead of 3. USPS's tracking sucks. You can see when you shipped it and when it got delivered, but you can't see anything in between. With other carriers, you can find out where your package is during transit.
I will say this for the USPS. I have never lost a package with them. I once shipped a package by UPS and after it was picked up, it became lost and no one had any idea where it was. The shipping store I used got me a full refund, but I was just amazed that will all of UPS's tracking that they had no idea at all where my package was after the driver picked it up. It never made it any further than in their system than the pickup and it was never found again.
Anonymous Coward, you are sort of right. In the case of _Enterprise_, as soon as word got out that fans were going to try to fund it, Paramount began to hint that it wouldn't allow this. Granted there never was enough money to pay for it and may never have been, but there was at least one big contribution and when it looked like there was an outside chance it might succeed, Paramount publicly stated that under no circumstances would they allow this to happen and _Enterprise_ was finished no matter what, case closed. _Enterprise_ was finished because it was more important to Paramount to kill off the show than to let in continue, even if it would make money. I have no idea why, but that is how they felt. Then again, I don't have a real high opinion of Paramount anyway.
In the case of _Firefly_, I am still unconvinced that the show has as many fans as its supporters want to think. The sad truth is that while many people truly love the show, there just aren't enough of them. There probably really weren't enough fans to save _Enterprise_ either, even if Paramount had not put an end to that.
I wish I could rate your post at 100 instead of being 5 because you are dead on. What it means is that any time a patent is incovenient to Uncle Sam, the Patent Office will rethink it. Let's not fool ourselves folks. This decision will in no way restore sanity to the US Patent Office.
The US Patent Office loves patents. Think about it. The more they approve, the more money they get. If Uncle Sam is addicted to anything it's not Crackberry, it's MONEY. The easier patents are to get, the more people apply for them. The more who apply, the more money USPO makes, the more employees they have, the more they can justify hiring more managers to manage more employees and so on. The USPO has no reason at all to favor a sane patent system. It would reduce their income.
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I am currently a Verizon customer. I am switching phone companies once I am no longer their bitch (contract is up in a year or so).
I guess you don't pay attention to all the cellphone postings here at Slashdot because if you did, you would know about how Verizon cripples their phones and is maybe the most customer unfriendly of all the US carriers. I've been with T-Mobile for almost 2 years now and I have no complaints at all. Since I travel outside of the US a few times a year, it's great to know that my cellphone will work overseas since T-Mobile uses GSM. T-Mobile's customer service is probably the best of all the US carriers. The few times I've had to call them, the customer service was great.
I've posted on this before. Why do so many people have this fantasy that paper ballots can't be rigged? Ukraine uses paper ballots and the presidential election in November 2004 was widely considered to be rigged. I was in Ukraine just after the vote and I have no doubt at all that it was rigged.
Color me confused: according to IMDB, King Kong had an estimated budget of $207 million, but had already brought in $520 million worldwide by the 26th of January. How is that a failure?
..."
It's a failure because it didn't make that $520 million in the USA alone. Given Peter Jackson's success with LOTR, I think the studio expectations were very unrealistic. Certainly the movie made money and had the director been someone with lower box office expectations, say Ridley Scott (who I happen to think is a very good director), it would have been considered a smash. Basically, Hollywood set it up so that unless _King Kong_ started approaching the money _Titanic_ brought in, it was going to be considered a failure. I am just cynical enough to think that this might be part of a plan by Hollywood to bring Jackson down to earth a little bit by making a successful movie appear like a failure so he can't command unlimited budget and control in the future. "Gee Mr. Jackson, we'd like to give you $300 million for your next film, but you know we lost our shirts on _King Kong_
Do you know how that compares to OOo's multilingual support?
OOo certainly works fine to mix Cyrillic and Western (Latin-based) languages in Unicode. I use it for that all the time.
As for the NFL/EA thing, I think that's lame too -- the difference is that the NFL, for some reason, is allowed a monopoly (perhaps people think it's a natural monopoly?) and no one complains about it. Sports franchises may be different. Who knows?
Technically, only baseball is exempt from anti-trust laws because Congress granted it an exemption a long time ago. I think it was in the 1920s, but don't quote me on that. The NFL is not, per se, a monopoly and there is nothing to bar a new league from starting. In fact, here is a brief history of competing leagues in major sports leagues:
Major League Baseball
National League founded 1876
a few competing leagues played in the late 1800s, but none lasted.
American League founded 1901, accepted as part of Major League Baseball after a few years
Federal League - 1914-15 - folded
and that is it.
National Football League:
All American Football Conference played 1946-49 - 3 teams merged into NFL and the rest of the league folded
American Football League played 1960-69. Complete merger with NFL.
World Football League - 1974-75 - folded
United States Football League - 1983-85 - folded
XFL (considered by most to be a minor league) - 2001 - folded
The NBA and NHL both had competing leagues in the 1970s that both leagues partially merged with. I think there may have been another pro basketball league competing with the NBA at one time, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Outside of baseball which is allowed by law to be a monopoly, the other sports leagues have been open to competition. The problem is that it costs a lot to run a league and the odds of a new league being a success are very low. Several minor leagues have folded in various sports in the past decade, even though their costs are much lower than professional leagues. For example, the International Hockey League folded in 2001, but in the 1990s it became the premier league for minor league hockey. They expanded too quickly and by 2001 they were forced to fold, with a few of their franchises being accepted into the old American Hockey League, which is now the highest league for minor league hockey.
I wish I had mod points to mod this up. What the original poster and others fail to understand is that this is where Scalia is coming from. Scalia basically believes that if it is not explicitly stated in the Constitution, it's not there. Previous Supreme Courts said, yes, the right to privacy is NOT explicitly stated in the Constitution, but it is implied. Scalia doesn't believe you "imply" things. It's either there or it isn't to him.
I'm not asking the original poster to agree with this point of view, just to realize that Scalia does have a rational argument. If you feel that rights can be implied, that's your business and previous Supreme Courts believed that too, but it doesn't mean that Scalia has no rational basis for what he believes.
To be honest with you, I have always wondered if it was even possible to make a call from a cell phone while in the air on an airplane, but I would prefer to have evidence from a site other than some crackpot "The US government deliberately caused 9/11!" website.
Frankly, I think _House Of Flying Daggers_ will be spectacular in Blu-Ray. It was a pretty good regular DVD too, even if it suffered from the "It's a dern foreign film" phobia that effects so many Americans.
I know that _The Matrix_ will definitely be released on HD-DVD, but I'm not sure if it will come out on Blu-Ray too or not. The HD-DVD version, in theory, will be available around the end of the month.
I disagree with indoor plumbing because technology goes against my religious beliefs.
Interestingly enough, it would appear that using technology to be on the internet somehow does not go against your religious beliefs.
I assume that your post is a bit of hyperbole and not meant to be taken as 100% factual. It reminds me of something my brother told me. Before a law was passed in the USA to limit telemarketing calls, my brother told me that he got a call from a lawn care service. He had no interest in the service nor did he have the extra money to pay for it each month, so he told the caller that using a lawn care service went against the Bible because "that's not how the Lord wants things done". The caller was shocked and had no idea how to respond to that, so he told my brother just to be sure to water his lawn regularly and it would probably be OK. I love that story.
As far as the mystery conductor goes, that sounds like a bit of an urban legend to me. The great conductor Fritz Reiner was quoted as saying that around 1950 records began to sound like music. This was because of the use of magnetic tape, which proved to be a vastly superior way to record sound over the old direct to disc laquer method. Plus, recording to tape allowed for editing and splicing. When you recorded straight to laquer discs and you botched a take, you had to start all over again and it was expensive to keep cutting those discs. There was some really remarkable work being done by some of the engineers in the 1950s at RCA and Mercury and the sessions they recorded are so good that they are starting to be released on SACD now.
Leopold Stokowski was praised as being one of the few conductors in the early days of the LP (this would be the early 1950's) who understood that recordings and concert performances were not the same thing. Stokowksi understood the technology and used it to his advantage. He often suggested "enhancements" to the sound by the engineers (ie. boosting the bass frequencies) that while they didn't really and truly reflect what was played by the orchestra nonetheless led to wonderful recordings that still sound good today.
The downside is that a lot of great conductors lived in the "pre-vinyl" days and all we have is low fidelity recordings that give hints of their genius. Serge Koussevitzky was one such conductor. Arturo Toscanini lived just long enough to see the LP era and record under it, but the majority of his recordings are from the low fidelity era where there was no magnetic tape. However, these guys are still known precisely because they left recordings behind. In the case of this mystery American conductor who refused to be recorded, probably he's just a footnote in the history pages as a result.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard the old "it's warmer on vinyl" crap before. Any rational person knows that there are huge disadvantages to vinyl - surface noise, dynamic range limitation and the inability to support frequencies above something like 17000 Hz.
I hear that argument all the time - "I'm not going to buy it until I've heard it." I have 2 replies to that.
1) You CAN hear it most of the time at Amazon, iTunes, etc. Granted, there are some CDs that don't have samples at Amazon, but most of the non-classical ones have samples. Anything still in print will almost certainly have a sample.
2) Frankly, I've lost count of how many times I bought DVDs or audio CDs just based on something I read, having never seen or heard the item in question before the purchase. Sometimes you get garbage. I bought the DVD of _Duece Bigelow: Male Gigolo_ on a friend's recommendation and while I would not say it was terrible, I would say that it most definitely was NOT worth what I paid for it at the time (about $30 in the days of unfriendly DVD prices) and it most certainly was NOT even close to being "the funniest movie EVER!!!" as my friend insisted. Then again, I once bought Oasis' CD _What's The Story Morning Glory_ based on something I read and I became a big fan of the group. I think about how much I have enjoyed their music over the years and realize that had I not taken a chance, I would have missed out on all of that.
Sometimes when you take a chance, it really pays off big time and those are the moments you remember and treasure. Sometimes you waste your money. That's all part of life. If you must hear before you buy, usually you can find a legal way to hear a sample (Amazon, iTunes, etc.).
The first Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, which was recognized by most of the world as fraudulent, used such a pen and paper system. Pen and paper does not ensure that elections can't be rigged and I am amazed at how many people seem to think that is exactly what it does.
Yes, we all know the parent is an idiot. I have been to Ukraine a number of times and while I have never bothered to go on the Chernobyl tour (too expensive), I do know that there are STILL areas of Ukraine and Belarus (Belarus arguably took the worst of the accident) that are dead zones near Chernobyl. There are some crazy old Ukrainians who have moved back into areas that are supposed to be abandoned and are officially considered uninhabitable by the Ukrainian government, believe it or not. Most people know that it is crazy to eat mushrooms and berries from these areas, but it has been alleged that some foodstuffs are illegally harvested from these areas and sold in certain markets. I think they've been alleged to be illegally imported into Russia. I remember 2 years ago when I was in Kiev and I talked to a local guy who told me that he liked to fish but he wouldn't keep or eat anything he caught in the Dniper River in Kiev because of Chernobyl. Kiev is (I think) about 100 miles south of Chernobyl and I can tell you that he is not the only person in Kiev who is afraid to eat anything that comes out of the Dniper.
I paid $35 in Tijuana for my Rolex Submariner watch in January of 1997. It STILL works, although I have to change the battery every couple of years. Of course, mine is a (cough! cough!) "replica" of a true Rolex (hence the need for a battery), but I have to tell you that at 35 bucks, it is honestly one of the best watches I have ever owned.
I'm usually the first guy to back the idea of "reeling in the judges", but not for this. Do you know how many names were on the email list? That would have a lot to do with whether the city was being reasonable or not in saying the boy could copy them by hand. Suppose you want a copy of the book _War and Peace_, which I understand is quite a big book. Suppose further that I tell you that you may not buy a copy nor may you be given one by anybody. Further, you may not photocopy or use any type of video capturing device to record the pages. However, you may copy the entire thing by hand if you wish. Is that reasonable? The judge decided that the city had no grounds to not comply with the request and their offer to allow hand copying wasn't reasonable, so they can reimburse the boy's attorney for wasting everyone's time. If there's one thing judges don't like, that is having their time wasted. If the tax payers don't like footing the bill for this then maybe they need to elect people to the city government who will have better sense than to fight something that they can't win. I have news for you - governments do this kind of thing all the time because they have attorneys on their payroll and they can afford delaying tactics and endless appeals because normal people probably don't have enough time and money to fight them forever. Big corporations do the same thing. The judge in this case obviously felt that they only way to send a message to the city that what they did wasn't cool was to make them pay pro bono attorney fees.
I wanted to point out that "region free" mode will prevent some American DVDs from playing. Hollywood got angry a few years ago that people in Europe and other parts of the world could buy and play our DVDs on region free machines, so they put a nasty little trick in to prevent that. I have forgotten what they call it. Here is a simplified version of how DVD players normally work in region free mode:
Normal DVD talks to DVD player: My region is region 1. What region are you?
DVD player: I'm region 0. That means region free. I can play you.
Normal DVD: Go ahead and play me.
However, with some American DVDs, the conversation goes like this:
DVD talks to DVD player: My region is region 2. What region are you?
DVD player: I'm region 0. That means region free. I can play you.
DVD: I lied! I'm really region 1. Since you can play me as a region 2 disc but I am supposed to be sold only in region 1, that means you are region free. I won't play on you.
I don't remember the studios that do this except for Paramount, but for these discs, it is necessary to switch the DVD player back to region 1 to play the discs.
Well, if she's any good, she might make a decent living at it. I have a suspicion that based on her attitude she's probably not as good as she thinks she is. My best friend from college is an attorney and has been one for about 17 years. I learned from him that everyone who is an attorney does not make the big bucks, but he does do pretty well from his private practice. However, I know one of his law school buddies and I suspect that this guy might make $50,000 a year - if he's lucky. I have learned that people from Ms. Abdala's generation have hugely inflated opinions of themselves and often find reality to be very humbling and difficult to deal with.
Is "PingYing" a mistaken attempt to say "pinyin"?
I have forgotten the link, but some woman with a serious chip on her shoulder has decided that _Ender's Game_ is an apology for Hitler. Although I think 99.99% of the people who have read the book would not agree, she has twisted everything she could into proving her hypothesis. She has also alleged that Card does not write his own books.
The problem is that Card is not politically correct and holds some opinions that are not well liked by some people, particularly about homosexuals. Card is also very religious, which makes him a threat to some people. I think much of the criticism against him has to do with people who are threatened by his politics, so they attack his writing. Politically, he is pretty close to former Senator Zell Miller - both claim to be Democrats, but are big fans of the current president.
The problem is that SonyBMG Music and all of the large music conglomerates have the following business plan:
We MUST UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES sell EVERY CD we make for a minimium of $16.
DVDs took off because Hollywood realized they could make a lot of money in volume if the cost was lower. When DVDs first hit, they were routinely selling for $30-40 each. They got smart and realized that if they sold them cheaper, they could sell a LOT of them and make more money than if they sold fewer at a higher cost.
The music industry simply will not accept the idea of selling more at a lower price. They have been very consistent in their demands that they would rather not sell it to you at all than sell it to you cheaper and they aren't willing to make more money in volume by selling more at a lower cost. If they can't rip you off, they don't want your money. As long as this is the way they want to do business, it will lead to things like the Sony rootkit. This attitude makes them view every consumer as an enemy and they must stop copying to protect their $16+ price point. So the rootkit really is about an insane business model that mandates a fixed price that is too high for the marketplace and that justifies all steps necessary to protect that model.
The Olympics themselves wanted the change to allow professionals and it really had little if anything to do with the fact that the Soviet Union and other communist countries flaunted the rules and sent bogus "amateurs" to the Olympics every year. It's all about the money with the IOC. It always has been. The Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996 took it to the logical conclusion and was very open about how it was all about the money. The IOC flipped out about how "commercial" the games were and required Sydney and Athens to be more discrete. They are still commercial, just not as blunt. I don't know about Sydney, but Atlanta turned a modest profit on those games. Rumor had it that Athens lost money.
The NHL players are in the Olympics because of money. The Soviet Union is gone. The days of phoney amateurs are gone. Nobody wants to see Russian college kids play American college kids in hockey. Nobody wants to buy ads for that. Nobody wants to see it on TV. Same with Olympic basketball. Having NBA players in the Olympics was welcomed by everyone because they realized that only by playing against the best could they improve their play. The USA is no longer a guaranteed lock on a basketball gold and the calibre of play in the European leagues is much much higher now than say 10 years ago as a result of this.
I'm not anti-USPS, but they aren't really as good as "the other carriers". Remember folks, Priority Mail is NOT guaranteed. It is "best attempt". I sent myself a package once from Los Angeles to my east coast home by Priority Mail. It took about 10 days to get to me. Just last week I received a package by Priority Mail and it took a full week to get to me. Most of the time, yes, Priority Mail works as advertised, but not always. They don't refund any money when they screw around and take 7-10 days to ship your package to you instead of 3. USPS's tracking sucks. You can see when you shipped it and when it got delivered, but you can't see anything in between. With other carriers, you can find out where your package is during transit.
I will say this for the USPS. I have never lost a package with them. I once shipped a package by UPS and after it was picked up, it became lost and no one had any idea where it was. The shipping store I used got me a full refund, but I was just amazed that will all of UPS's tracking that they had no idea at all where my package was after the driver picked it up. It never made it any further than in their system than the pickup and it was never found again.
And besides, why should we care since all of us here use either Linux or BSD?
To quote from Monty Python:
Not exactly all of us.
Anonymous Coward, you are sort of right. In the case of _Enterprise_, as soon as word got out that fans were going to try to fund it, Paramount began to hint that it wouldn't allow this. Granted there never was enough money to pay for it and may never have been, but there was at least one big contribution and when it looked like there was an outside chance it might succeed, Paramount publicly stated that under no circumstances would they allow this to happen and _Enterprise_ was finished no matter what, case closed. _Enterprise_ was finished because it was more important to Paramount to kill off the show than to let in continue, even if it would make money. I have no idea why, but that is how they felt. Then again, I don't have a real high opinion of Paramount anyway.
In the case of _Firefly_, I am still unconvinced that the show has as many fans as its supporters want to think. The sad truth is that while many people truly love the show, there just aren't enough of them. There probably really weren't enough fans to save _Enterprise_ either, even if Paramount had not put an end to that.
I wish I could rate your post at 100 instead of being 5 because you are dead on. What it means is that any time a patent is incovenient to Uncle Sam, the Patent Office will rethink it. Let's not fool ourselves folks. This decision will in no way restore sanity to the US Patent Office.
The US Patent Office loves patents. Think about it. The more they approve, the more money they get. If Uncle Sam is addicted to anything it's not Crackberry, it's MONEY. The easier patents are to get, the more people apply for them. The more who apply, the more money USPO makes, the more employees they have, the more they can justify hiring more managers to manage more employees and so on. The USPO has no reason at all to favor a sane patent system. It would reduce their income.