Sorry I watch more interesting output from Bollywood India, where the quality of movie story is great. And I dont bother with anything North American that is DRM protected. Protection to me is a message that the production is so bad that they have to protect it with DRM in order to prevent you from seeing enough to know that it is not worth paying for the balance. In other words, the show was so bad that we were delighted that we had DRM, and a bunch of suckers paid to see it.
Your country is moving to an oligopoly, where the large organizations will run the country, and run your lives. The USA democratic beliefs of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, will be historical dreams that are to be ignored. Forget your constitution, it only gets in the way of the wealthy companies
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.
We know that the biblical calendar changed multiple times. At one time, each full moon was considered a year, So living 960 years with 37 new moons every three years, calculates to about 77 of our counting. At some time the calendar switched to counting rainy season to rainy season (spring and fall). If you lived to 129 (60 today), you were the exception.
Now longevity is expecting an average livespan to 80 and beyond. Would I want to expire when my life's love does?
Or...it was given but never looked at because the USPTO is buried with applications that they can't possibly devote the required resources to properly vet.
I guess the government is in cahoots with the lawyers who need to make big bucks fighting patents. As long as the lawyers give a kickback to the parties in power (known as a political donation), no additional staff or clarifications will be required of the patent office.
In a way, since the USA is not even in reactive mode (forget proactive), it will take patent offices in other countries to dictate whether a patent is legitimate.
I think we see this use so prevalently because it’s quick and cheap. Most business-calculation type stuff revolves around taking tables of numbers, doing calculations, and producing other tables of numbers / graphs. Excel gives you most of that right out of the box. Throw in a little VBA and you can do in an hour what would take a month to do properly.
Even I’ll admit to using spreadsheets from time to time for things that really deserved a proper app.
To me, a proper application is one that works to produce correct results, is easy to maintain, and also one for which the customer is happy. If it takes too long to execute, then it is not a proper app, and falls into your description category.
The RIAA wants to be treated as patent holders. Every music release is a patent, and forget copyrights. Just look at the patent laws now, and think about letting the RIAA take hold of the net. They will certainly make it illegal for any composer to post his music on the net, without RIAA dues. (Sounds almost like the RIAA is a Union house).
My 21 inch monitor is a NEC. Resolution par excellence and most certainly better than 5 millisecond update time. Only negative aspect of the monitor is the weight. You need a strong desk, not one of those pressed wood Ikea models.
Are you describing the minister from British Columbia who wants the internet non-privacy bill so that later, google, microsoft, and every other ISP or email server can sell your personal information?
i believe they will give quit a few buildings to directors at an exorbitant costs,allowing the directors to sell at a loss, take a tax write-off but still earn millions.
The idea of taxing wealth is akin to warehouse charges for holding inventory. The banks already invest your wealth, and give you a pittance for storage costs.
But instead of taxing consumption, fjnd a way to protect the pensioner or the man at the bottom of the income ladder. Taxing revenue, if a fair way to evaluate deductions would be ok, but from what I read here, there are too many loopholes in the corporate income tax structures, and the IRS as well, needs some overhaul.
Every manufacturing organization (APPLE, LENOVA, IBM, Microsoft, HP, etc) will not return to the USA as long as there are powerful unions to cause strikes and similar harm.
The salaries would become an issue, as it did with the auto industry, until bailouts occurred.
One has to live with reason, and not be demanding unreasonable compensation. (What is reasonable anyway??)
What you are saying is that costs were an important part of the decision, and that other aspects such as technology, risks, etc. were reviewed objectively via a comparison matrix.
Great news. Our Canadian Government did the same with a ship building contract. The favourite supplier lost to a lower cost competitor.
I am a small business owner. I sell software and solutions. If I have to pay myself or my workers the 150k per year, I will be out of business because of pricing. There is a salary range for every job description.
A programmer in Montreal Quebec finishing college can expect a salary range between 40k to 60k. If he is a business analyst with some programming skills, add 20k to the upper level.
If he progresses to management where he has 6 or 7 teams reporting to him, and he has some project management experience / skills, he is worth another 25k.
If he is a real good PMP, with great business skills (MBA or non MBA), add another 20k for the upper level.
Those salaries tend to top out at 125k. It is not realistic for a programmer or engineer, without business or project management skills to expect the upper salaries. Sorry. If you want that, invest in the market, and most of all, in industrial real-estate, as land and building values usually go up with time.
In Montreal, if you are bilingual (French / English), you can add $5k to your income level.
The idea that there is a constant and steady progression is a false idea. You do top out, even as a small business man. The importance is to be happy.
Things will improve when the USA and other countries start to legislate that 50% of every product must be developed domestically. Offshore gets limited to a max of 50%, not the 90% of the benefit.
I suppose the individual who complained about the computer location and asking the person to move had a reason. Was the porn watcher in the children's section of the library, or the under 14 areas, where most students congregate to do homework assignments.
The person watching the porn is in his rights, but he should not be doing it in plain view where the norms of society find porn offensive
I promote encryption as I would like to protect myself from identity theft. I recommend encyption for others. For the identity theft reason, and as a former IT Analyst in banking (20years), who knows about protecting confidential data, I make no use of PAYPAL (I have certain negative views about this organization), nor do I do any online banking or online purchasing with my "cards in my wallet". If I must purchase something, I will load up my second credit card (which has a $100 limit and is reserved for online purchases), with the extra amount I need. I do this by going to the ATM of my local bank branch and adding the amount immediately prior to making the purchase. (My bank cards are used only where the retailer uses readers that support "smart card"
I know that you can probably get my phone number, date of birth, driver license, and home address via the web. Because I want to keep some other critical information unavailable (social security number, etc. I will send this information out when I need to, encrypted. Fraud is rampant when there is very high unemployment and encryption protects me and my family.
I also do not trust any business system (blogsite, store, banking or government) that does not encrypt my non public information. Am I alone with these views? I am not paranoic.
By the way, if you are a victim of identity theft, you are a victim for life, as some where someone has a copy of all your information and sometime in the future, it will be used for some fraud.
Do my actions make me a semi-semi-semi terrorist suspect?
Copyrights are there to give the author protection and revenue. However, if he has been dead for years, and the old copyright duration (17 years or more) has elapse, then is it fair to have that work in the public domain? I think so.
Here is another quirk. If my granddaughter has a birthday, and we video record it, but while we were doing it, the background music was a copyrighted melody on a DVD which we had playing for the partiy, and we recorded only had a few seconds of play, we have violated the copyright, as we did not have permission to have that background music at the party. And if we upload it to youtube for the scattered family and friends, what then? We can and will get a take-down notice, or be fined for violating the copyright.
For better or worse, the movie industry is leaving the USA for India (Bollywood). They have a billion population in India alone, who will watch movies, Bollywood arose because they can produce quality products at reasonable cost, and have wider distribution. Hollywood and the recording industry is fighting for survival, as are the text book industry.
I would like to setup a website where authors could post their e-books, and where they avoid the publisher's large overheads. The same site could serve for music artists, where at least there will be positive commission, as opposed to some artists whose publisher's distribution charges exceed the authors revenues. Copyrights are there to protect publishers, movie studios, RIAA, etc. Gee, when I was 4 or 5, we had a stable in the back of the house, where the milkman kept the horse, and he delivered milk in bottles. He is gone, the local newspaper is almost gone, good radio shows are gone, and video stores are about gone. Copyrights is not going to keep these businesses alive. Time to move on. ACTA, SOPA PIPA, you are going to possibly win on paper, but not in practice. Technology makes you obsolete.
How right you are. In November, a teenager was texting and driving, and because she was looking at the cell, the car mounted the sidewalk and killed a mother and a 3 year old child in a stroller. The mother and child were in front of the school, waiting for the five year old brother.
Driver was not injured. The law here is that the car must be parked in order to text. You are not allowed to text if you are stopped and in the queue waiting for a traffic light to turn green. -- Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Where I live, these laws are in force. And the statistics show a drop in accidents due to one hand and one eye driving. Bluetooth earphone and both hands and eyes available for driving is fine,
The ripoff as you call it is done by your own companies. Canada sells its energy at wholesale, probably around 2 cents per kw hour, and that fee includes the infrastructure, salaries and the attributable expenses. The other 19 cents are charges from your companies, and from Senior management with million dollar salaries and tens of millions of dollars of bonuses.
We in Montreal Quebec are lucky with our electric costs. Our Hydro company has a deal with any home owner that implements dual energy heating. When the weather drops to around 0F or -12C, the non electric heating is supposed to kick in, relieving the demand from the grid. At that low temperature, electricity is at 12 cents per kwh. Above the -12C, electricity is at 4cents.
My own home is single electric energy, (no other furnace but electric heating). My costs are 7cents per kwh.
I guess I pay more, but it is very clean, efficient, and quiet. So at 21cents, New Yorkers are being ripped off.
Re student loans. Leave the USA, take up residency elsewhere (Europe, Canada, Latin America) and do studies there. If you like it, remain there and become citizens. No country today is vastly superior to another, and no country has exclusivity on superb universities.
In Quebec Canada, the resident who is a student has fees that are between two to three thousand a year. The fees are increasing from the bottom level by about $300/year to have them at the $3500 level in a few years. (The increase is to really cover the real cost of university education).
Why do you need to pay $10k per year? Is it for the tennis courts?
Her demand is not ridiculous. I bet her background is in technology in a QA area, and she wants to make sure that she survives, should battery voltage drop, or if she should climbs stairs and find the pacemaker does not compensate for her temporary increased pulse rate. I know nothing about pacemakers, it could be they are really dumb devices with only a pump controlled by an analog timer. (The doctor adjusts the timer to match the patient's former natural pulserate).
Just as Kodak is hitting the fence and has asked for Chapter 11 protection, the new technology is going to do the same to the motion picture industry. New technology and competition from Bolywood (India), is forcing changes to the way the USA entertainment industry is being run. Bolywood will definitely replace Holywood. Will Bolywood embrace new technology? I think they already have. Their market in India alone is 1 billion people. They can produce films more quickly and at much more competitive costs.
We cannot afford to spend $70.00 for a family of 4 to see a Holywood film. Tickets are $40.00 to $50.00 and refreshments are the rest.
Great Bolywood films are being shown in local theatres at half that cost, and the theaters are packed. The USA entertainment industry is going to have to concentrate on TV shows, and leave the major length stories to the worlds studios to produce. Our local theatre has a Sunday special ($2.00 per ticket, $2.00 per popcorn $2.00 for soda pop). Family of 4 sees a new release "movie" for between $20.00 to $25.00, factoring in refreshments.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry
I watch more interesting output from Bollywood India, where the quality of movie story is great. And I dont bother with anything North American that is DRM protected. Protection to me is a message that the production is so bad that they have to protect it with DRM in order to prevent you from seeing enough to know that it is not worth paying for the balance. In other words, the show was so bad that we were delighted that we had DRM, and a bunch of suckers paid to see it.
Your country is moving to an oligopoly, where the large organizations will run the country, and run your lives. The USA democratic beliefs of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, will be historical dreams that are to be ignored. Forget your constitution, it only gets in the way of the wealthy companies
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.
We know that the biblical calendar changed multiple times. At one time, each full moon was considered a year, So living 960 years with 37 new moons every three years, calculates to about 77 of our counting. At some time the calendar switched to counting rainy season to rainy season (spring and fall). If you lived to 129 (60 today), you were the exception.
Now longevity is expecting an average livespan to 80 and beyond. Would I want to expire when my life's love does?
Or...it was given but never looked at because the USPTO is buried with applications that they can't possibly devote the required resources to properly vet.
I guess the government is in cahoots with the lawyers who need to make big bucks fighting patents. As long as the lawyers give a kickback to the parties in power (known as a political donation), no additional staff or clarifications will be required of the patent office.
In a way, since the USA is not even in reactive mode (forget proactive), it will take patent offices in other countries to dictate whether a patent is legitimate.
I think we see this use so prevalently because it’s quick and cheap. Most business-calculation type stuff revolves around taking tables of numbers, doing calculations, and producing other tables of numbers / graphs. Excel gives you most of that right out of the box. Throw in a little VBA and you can do in an hour what would take a month to do properly.
Even I’ll admit to using spreadsheets from time to time for things that really deserved a proper app.
To me, a proper application is one that works to produce correct results, is easy to maintain, and also one for which the customer is happy. If it takes too long to execute, then it is not a proper app, and falls into your description category.
The RIAA wants to be treated as patent holders. Every music release is a patent, and forget copyrights. Just look at the patent laws now, and think about letting the RIAA take hold of the net. They will certainly make it illegal for any composer to post his music on the net, without RIAA dues. (Sounds almost like the RIAA is a Union house).
My 21 inch monitor is a NEC. Resolution par excellence and most certainly better than 5 millisecond update time. Only negative aspect of the monitor is the weight. You need a strong desk, not one of those pressed wood Ikea models.
Are you describing the minister from British Columbia who wants the internet non-privacy bill so that later, google, microsoft, and every other ISP or email server can sell your personal information?
Conservatives
i believe they will give quit a few buildings to directors at an exorbitant costs,allowing the directors to sell at a loss, take a tax write-off but still earn millions.
The idea of taxing wealth is akin to warehouse charges for holding inventory. The banks already invest your wealth, and give you a pittance for storage costs.
But instead of taxing consumption, fjnd a way to protect the pensioner or the man at the bottom of the income ladder. Taxing revenue, if a fair way to evaluate deductions would be ok, but from what I read here, there are too many loopholes in the corporate income tax structures, and the IRS as well, needs some overhaul.
Every manufacturing organization (APPLE, LENOVA, IBM, Microsoft, HP, etc) will not return to the USA as long as there are powerful unions to cause strikes and similar harm.
The salaries would become an issue, as it did with the auto industry, until bailouts occurred.
One has to live with reason, and not be demanding unreasonable compensation. (What is reasonable anyway??)
Typical stupid justice system. Never get on the bad side of a angry divorcee.
What you are saying is that costs were an important part of the decision, and that other aspects such as technology, risks, etc. were reviewed objectively via a comparison matrix.
Great news. Our Canadian Government did the same with a ship building contract. The favourite supplier lost to a lower cost competitor.
I am a small business owner. I sell software and solutions. If I have to pay myself or my workers the 150k per year, I will be out of business because of pricing.
There is a salary range for every job description.
A programmer in Montreal Quebec finishing college can expect a salary range between 40k to 60k. If he is a business analyst with some programming skills, add 20k to the upper level.
If he progresses to management where he has 6 or 7 teams reporting to him, and he has some project management experience / skills, he is worth another 25k.
If he is a real good PMP, with great business skills (MBA or non MBA), add another 20k for the upper level.
Those salaries tend to top out at 125k. It is not realistic for a programmer or engineer, without business or project management skills to expect the upper salaries. Sorry. If you want that, invest in the market, and most of all, in industrial real-estate, as land and building values usually go up with time.
In Montreal, if you are bilingual (French / English), you can add $5k to your income level.
The idea that there is a constant and steady progression is a false idea. You do top out, even as a small business man. The importance is to be happy.
Things will improve when the USA and other countries start to legislate that 50% of every product must be developed domestically. Offshore gets limited to a max of 50%, not the 90% of the benefit.
I suppose the individual who complained about the computer location and asking the person to move had a reason. Was the porn watcher in the children's section of the library, or the under 14 areas, where most students congregate to do homework assignments.
The person watching the porn is in his rights, but he should not be doing it in plain view where the norms of society find porn offensive
My Goodness, would you expect them to investigate the hand that feeds them?
I promote encryption as I would like to protect myself from identity theft. I recommend encyption for others. For the identity theft reason, and as a former IT Analyst in banking (20years), who knows about protecting confidential data, I make no use of PAYPAL (I have certain negative views about this organization), nor do I do any online banking or online purchasing with my "cards in my wallet". If I must purchase something, I will load up my second credit card (which has a $100 limit and is reserved for online purchases), with the extra amount I need. I do this by going to the ATM of my local bank branch and adding the amount immediately prior to making the purchase. (My bank cards are used only where the retailer uses readers that support "smart card"
I know that you can probably get my phone number, date of birth, driver license, and home address via the web. Because I want to keep some other critical information unavailable (social security number, etc. I will send this information out when I need to, encrypted. Fraud is rampant when there is very high unemployment and encryption protects me and my family.
I also do not trust any business system (blogsite, store, banking or government) that does not encrypt my non public information. Am I alone with these views? I am not paranoic.
By the way, if you are a victim of identity theft, you are a victim for life, as some where someone has a copy of all your information and sometime in the future, it will be used for some fraud.
Do my actions make me a semi-semi-semi terrorist suspect?
Copyrights are there to give the author protection and revenue. However, if he has been dead for years, and the old copyright duration (17 years or more) has elapse, then is it fair to have that work in the public domain? I think so.
Here is another quirk. If my granddaughter has a birthday, and we video record it, but while we were doing it, the background music was a copyrighted melody on a DVD which we had playing for the partiy, and we recorded only had a few seconds of play, we have violated the copyright, as we did not have permission to have that background music at the party. And if we upload it to youtube for the scattered family and friends, what then? We can and will get a take-down notice, or be fined for violating the copyright.
For better or worse, the movie industry is leaving the USA for India (Bollywood). They have a billion population in India alone, who will watch movies, Bollywood arose because they can produce quality products at reasonable cost, and have wider distribution. Hollywood and the recording industry is fighting for survival, as are the text book industry.
I would like to setup a website where authors could post their e-books, and where they avoid the publisher's large overheads. The same site could serve for music artists, where at least there will be positive commission, as opposed to some artists whose publisher's distribution charges exceed the authors revenues. Copyrights are there to protect publishers, movie studios, RIAA, etc. Gee, when I was 4 or 5, we had a stable in the back of the house, where the milkman kept the horse, and he delivered milk in bottles. He is gone, the local newspaper is almost gone, good radio shows are gone, and video stores are about gone. Copyrights is not going to keep these businesses alive. Time to move on. ACTA, SOPA PIPA, you are going to possibly win on paper, but not in practice. Technology makes you obsolete.
How right you are. In November, a teenager was texting and driving, and because she was looking at the cell, the car mounted the sidewalk and killed a mother and a 3 year old child in a stroller. The mother and child were in front of the school, waiting for the five year old brother.
Driver was not injured. The law here is that the car must be parked in order to text. You are not allowed to text if you are stopped and in the queue waiting for a traffic light to turn green.
--
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Where I live, these laws are in force. And the statistics show a drop in accidents due to one hand and one eye driving. Bluetooth earphone and both hands and eyes available for driving is fine,
The ripoff as you call it is done by your own companies. Canada sells its energy at wholesale, probably around 2 cents per kw hour, and that fee includes the infrastructure, salaries and the attributable expenses. The other 19 cents are charges from your companies, and from Senior management with million dollar salaries and tens of millions of dollars of bonuses.
We in Montreal Quebec are lucky with our electric costs. Our Hydro company has a deal with any home owner that implements dual energy heating. When the weather drops to around 0F or -12C, the non electric heating is supposed to kick in, relieving the demand from the grid. At that low temperature, electricity is at 12 cents per kwh. Above the -12C, electricity is at 4cents.
My own home is single electric energy, (no other furnace but electric heating). My costs are 7cents per kwh.
I guess I pay more, but it is very clean, efficient, and quiet. So at 21cents, New Yorkers are being ripped off.
Re student loans. Leave the USA, take up residency elsewhere (Europe, Canada, Latin America) and do studies there. If you like it, remain there and become citizens. No country today is vastly superior to another, and no country has exclusivity on superb universities.
In Quebec Canada, the resident who is a student has fees that are between two to three thousand a year. The fees are increasing from the bottom level by about $300/year to have them at the $3500 level in a few years. (The increase is to really cover the real cost of university education).
Why do you need to pay $10k per year? Is it for the tennis courts?
Her demand is not ridiculous. I bet her background is in technology in a QA area, and she wants to make sure that she survives, should battery voltage drop, or if she should climbs stairs and find the pacemaker does not compensate for her temporary increased pulse rate. I know nothing about pacemakers, it could be they are really dumb devices with only a pump controlled by an analog timer. (The doctor adjusts the timer to match the patient's former natural pulserate).
Just as Kodak is hitting the fence and has asked for Chapter 11 protection, the new technology is going to do the same to the motion picture industry.
New technology and competition from Bolywood (India), is forcing changes to the way the USA entertainment industry is being run. Bolywood will definitely replace Holywood. Will Bolywood embrace new technology? I think they already have. Their market in India alone is 1 billion people. They can produce films more quickly and at much more competitive costs.
We cannot afford to spend $70.00 for a family of 4 to see a Holywood film. Tickets are $40.00 to $50.00 and refreshments are the rest.
Great Bolywood films are being shown in local theatres at half that cost, and the theaters are packed. The USA entertainment industry is going to have to concentrate on TV shows, and leave the major length stories to the worlds studios to produce.
Our local theatre has a Sunday special ($2.00 per ticket, $2.00 per popcorn $2.00 for soda pop). Family of 4 sees a new release "movie" for between $20.00 to $25.00, factoring in refreshments.