Excuse me, did I in any way state bad hardware = vista sucks? no. Perhaps vista's failure to properly identify that bad hardware might be an iaaue, but generally, unless you run tests from boot media issues like this are hard to find. Mac's bomb just the same from hardweare issues when it effects kernel level processes, so does Unix. In fact, in my post, I actualy blamed the hardware, giving Vista a leg up and taking fault away from it.
I do not support DRM, but, you can't blame it for system crashes. DRM is just an interpreter, and encryption layer. It either works or doesn't. It's not an application, driver, or process itself, it;s just a mathematic function that feeds data to other actual processes. It IS impossible for DRM, by it;s basic existence, to crash an application, let alone the kernel. Anything in user space memory by design is incapable of causing a BSOD. This is the basic definition of memory seperation. You clearly know nothing about system architecture, advanced memory management, OS design, or the OSI model, so maybe you should refrain from commenting here in/. It's only making George Bush look smart.
I'm not an Apple Fanboi. I'm a system architect, and I use 5 differnt OS on a regular basis. Apple has a lot of advantages, but it's not nearly a perfect OS. The problem is, everyone who hasn;t actually used one extensively, and hasn't taken the time to learn what those advantages are, loves to bash Apple at the slightest hint of a fracture in their facade.
In this case, it's clearly an issue of a device driver conflict. If the driver itself didn;t work, that would have been caught in testing. BTW: are you aware, that JUST in the english versions of Windows, there are aover 150 unique version of Windows that have to be tested against, multiply that by testing which has to be done on 15-20 different chipsets, and further with each of those systems having a slow and fats hard disk, and low and high memory, and you're talking about a testing process that is nearly 10,000 system configurations to test against. and that's but a SAMPLING of the complexity since we're not including application varition or system setting changes made by users. It is IMPOSSIBLE to test against all scenarios.
Limiting Apple's driver testing just under Vista, there's 7 versions, doubled for SP0 and SP1, doubled again for 32 and 64 bit. So that's 28 OS releases a user is likely under vista, just in the USA, to install iTunes 8 on. Now, this is a USB driver issue, if you had RTFA (not a DRM issue), so we take a large sampling of common USB chipsets used over the last 5 years, and the common mainboard chipsets in circulation and build a test base for that.... Oh wait, that's over a THOUSAND SYSTEM IMAGES, and this is JUST to tset the USB driver.... and that's on just a sampling (about 30) different hardware configurations. This testing would take WEEKS for a team to do, and just for one of a hundred application features...
Where's the blame here? It's basically on Microsoft for having a weak USB driver API that effects everyone. Apple can only be expected to reasonably test their application. I know a lot about their testing practices, including their closed non-disclosure beta processes, and I can assure you if the driver was directly at fault, it would not have worked with any of the vista versions, since they ALL use the same driver... This is a conflict issue, one that typically can't be tested for. Software has bugs, get over it.
First of all, there was a ton of I/O. Scrolling through large lists of album artwork, I was hearing the HDD churn, so I launched monitoring tools and started peaking in. IT8 uses much more RAM, and has dramatic I/O utilization, which is attempting to read from the drives and display on the screen in real time.
Defrag causes a lot of I/O, but it's large file reads with much less head movement, also, it has relatively limited CPU and ram use that coincides with that. Further, Vista defrags in the background, so large invasive defrags are not common under vista.
IT8 is not craching when CD ripping, it's crashing when iPods (not iPhones or touches) are docked or undocked. Other devices (printers, cameras, camcorders, and more) have caused similar issues in vista. In fact virtually everything USB based that doesn't use Microsoft's included driver is extremely buggy, and even if it works one day, a windows patch can cause failures, even if the driver wasn't changed in the process.
Hey bud, I'm a software tester for a disaster recovery company. Let me put this past you:
- 4 identical hardware machines - 4 exact copies of an ISO of Vista EE - all 4 machines side by side, I make the same click on the same screen on each one.
After installation is completed with exactly the same settings on all 4 machines, we install our corporate AV program, then allow the machines to download and install updates. Each of the 4 machines has exactly the same list of updates added in the same order.
All 4 machines are benchmarked prior to and after installation, using 2 different tools from boot CDs. All 4 machines benchmark the same (within less than a second on a multi-million CPU cycle run, and withing 5 seconds on an multi-hour RAM test. No machines exhibit RAM, disk, or CPU issues and are regularly burned in and tested both before and after installations.
of the 4 machines, 1 has a C: with 3.9GB used space. 1 has 4.7GB used, 1 has 5.2 GB used, and 1 has 8.2!
One machine boots Vista in less than 22 seconds, one takes longer than 2 minutes. others are inbetween. Hard drive I/O pattern tests are run and all 4 drives exhibit nearly identical characteristics and I/O patterns for randomized I/O read/write testing.
One machine has 860MB or RAM free out of 2GB, one has less thqan 200MB free out of 2GB. Others fall between.
When we blank the drives and repeat the tests, machines exhibit completely different results. Sometimes the slowest one to boot in one test wiull be the fastest one to boot in another. Swapping components from system to system was no impact on the performance of a machine.
We started doing this test a few years ago when I was setting up several exchange 2003 servers to be used in a classroom and noticed simalar wild divergence between system performance, install size, and more, even before service packs or patches were added. We have repeasted this test with every version of 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 servre, 2008 server, as well as older OS. Anything NT or previous, and installer seems to be very consistent. Anything 2000 or later, very inconsistent. The newer it is, the worse the installer inconsistancies.
We have also done this test by repeating installations on the same single machine over and over, and the installation size on that machine is just as inconsistent.
So, what's the deal? Why does the same installer batch file, which is basically a top down program that collects data based on pre-defined rules, and processes installation order based on documented, databased information, produce such inconsistancy?
As a result, we no longer test product on a single machine, but we bought 4 each of 5 different machines, and installed the OS seperately on each one, then burned images of it. We test each application agains all 20 OS images with the same OS on each one, then swap images for each OS service pack and each OS supported. This can mean teasting a single application against over 70 Windows versions, each on 20 machines. This is a test base run of 1400 installs. After this, we release internally, and install to roughly 100 machines. We purposely buy only 2 or 3 of each model from a manufacturer to deploy in the company, so we have dozens of different machines, and allow each user to basically maintain their own box the way they like, creating what in other companies would be an IT nightmare, but in this case it;s a benefit (and each user is an admin on some level, and completely capable of maintaining their own machine). We'll find a dozen bugs we didn't find running through the 1400 image test run. After release to the field, when roughly a thousand customers get a hold of it, we'll find more bugs...
You CAN NOT test for every hardware reviosion on every machine made, and every OS that could be on it. If you're asking Apple to do that,. you're expecting them to have access to over 10 million differing system images to test on. This is IMPOSSIBLE.
BSOD in Vista is either hardw3are level resource conflicts, or an actual memory fault.
I'm actually betting, based on the I/O is see in IT8 while it's building the thumbnail images, the massive background effort to create genius database info, and the high level of memory and disk I/O present in it's basic use that did not occur under IT7, that these machines were ALREADY FAULTY, but simply were not utilized enough to trigger these memory or hard disk faults.
The DRM is exactly the same btw. No changes. Besides, DRM is a user space application, and can not cause BSOD. It;s impossible for that to be the cause...
If you have not had vista BSOD, then all that means is your hardware is exceptionally well built and defect free, and that none of your components have resource conflicts with any others. My guess is your PC is OEM manufactured, likely by Dell, and is on the lower end of the spectrum (under $800 base system, that maybe you added a nice video card and some extra RAM to)
Vista may not BSOD on you, but I bet you have frequent application crashes... I don't typically go more than a few days without an application bombing out, my desktop refreshing from an explorer crash, my printer loosing connection, or an app just hanging and needing to be killed by task manager.
Sure, memory leaks may be a thing of the past, and generally when an app bombs, the machine stays up... My Mac has had those features for 6 years! When an app does bomb, I typically see in the logs that it;s a core driver or service at fault, and not even a file installed by the application.
occasionally? SMS transmission success rates are at best 95% reliable. Some report as much as 25% lost messages (though they typically get billed for every one regardless).
I can send a text from my phone to my wife's phone and back again. Messages will take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours to be recieved, sometiomes not even in the order they're transmitted, and at least 1 in 10 is lost.
for that matter, I've had voicemails not show up for 2-3 days before. I;ve left my wife a message multiple times, and when she gets how she didn't get it. We'll even call the voicemail system directly and it will say "no messages" then sometime that night it will mysteriously arrive.
I'm on AT&T and Sprint both (2 phones). She's on Verizon. The problems are similar on every network.
The only thing that's reliable is the e-mail service on my iPhone. I get notices there before I do in my outlook IMAP connection!
Almost every phone made since 2001 has over the air writable firmware. It is not beyond reaon to believe that firmware could be written to supprto both the existing system and an alternate method. Even if every phone cant' do this, I'm willing to bet every camera phone with a browser can, and close to half the rest out there. Even if we took only 60% of the traffic off the system, that should be enough time that the rest of the phones out their that can't switch will either fail out of use, or be replaced since you can do the whole "new every 2" thing.
My father got a letter from his provider telling him he had 3 months to get a new phone, and how to get one for free if he renered a contract, if not there were $29.99 models offerd. If hs didn't buy a new phone, he would stop getting calls, but would still be billed the remainder of his contract.
What did he do? he bought a $200 phone... Completely unnecessary, but it's what he wanted. His phone was 4 years old and the battery was dying out anyway. Most of the phones out there that could not be updated to switch off the paging chanels are that much if not older... Provided the phone companies offer a free or near free upgrade path to those who can't upgrade, I don't see how there's a problem. Phones are expected to have 3-4 yerar life spans. If you kept it longer, there's no guanrantee it will continue to function.
...And since every phone out there on Edge or G3, and most on CDMA, have the ability to have firmware updates over the air, why would it be so difficult to update the app so that SMS can use IP traffic instead of paging chanels when an IP connection is available? (I had a sprint phone in 1998 that could update over the air, and about every 6 months they'd flash the phone on me and change my features around)
They could lowly migrate everyone over, behind the schenes, to a version of SMS that can use either the digital network or the paging chanel, and allways tory to use the IP network if available. Users of SMS do not need to be aware of wether the text is going through the traditional SMS network or over an IP channel.
For the few phones that actually work on digital networks, but that don't have any IP capabiltiy, let them keepusing the paging chanels for a while, maybe a year or so after the application change begins. Then, send out a notice to everyone with a phone older than 4 years (pretty much the cuttoff for what phones did and did not have IP support or other digital communication chanels) and let them know that if they don't upgrade their old n busted handsets, they'll loose access to SMS. Give them a 6 month warning.
A very similar thing happened around here when the switched off analog cell service. My father had an el-cheapo cell phone and got a letter stating he had 6 months to buy a new one, which he could get FOR FREE by renewing his contract for 1 year, or for which several $29.99 phone options were available sans commitment. He bought a $200 new phone as a result of the letter because he wanted a cooler looking model with a camera and bluetooth, and was simply waiting for a good reason to switch. A nifty profit for the local telco. My grandfather, uncle, Aunt, and a few of their cousins all did very similar things...
It's not that they can't change it to eliminate the paging chanel bottleneck, it's that they don;t have a financial reason to do so. If the courts or congress ordered them to change the pricing on text, aven to somehting as simple as having a maximum $5 per month txt charge, for all TXT including PIX, etc, that might be enough incentive.
Here's the idea: for any calling plan you are on, you get X minutes, X text, and X MB. After that point, you pay per use charges. However, at any point where your per use charges combined with your bill would equal the price of a higher tier plan, and for that month, your new limits are that plan's limits, they can't bill you more than the cost of that plan, unless you further use enough to reach a point where per use charges begin to accrue against that plan's higher limits. Put a max $130 on base connectivity plans (including unlimted everything, including tethering), with a max $69.99 per additional line on a shared plan, and have all the teirs fall below that. Also, allow consumers to pre-set spending limits (maximum monthly bill), and send them e-mail notices each time they bump to a higher plan, and anytime they get within $20 of their monthly approved cap. Oh yea, any tier they paid for, the unused portion of that plan have to be carried over to the next month, ofsetting any overages there. Set the minimum base plan for "all features" at $49 and a base voice only plan at $19.
e-mail has been free on my last 4 service plans. When I first got sprint in 1998 I had to pay $10 a month to use the web browser in the phone, but I got e-mail sent to me free of charge. To respond I had to use a PC, or pay the $10 a month, but that changed in 2002 when I switched to Verizon where the built in browser was free (they tried to hide the fact that you could go anywhere other than Verizon's own web pages, but there was a way to type in any URL, and gmail supported that phone. I got email at one address, and sent from another, but the reply-to line was the phones address, so it wasn't confusing to people I e-mailed.
When my company moved us back to sprint in 2004 web access was free up to a point (bandwidth cap). It may have been because it was a Treo, but I only paid $49.99 for the plan, so I don;t think it was all that special. I'm with AT&T now, and web access from one of my phones is free, with limits. And my wife's Verizon phone, which will soon be AT&T as well, gives her limited free internet. On my iPhone plan, naturally it's included.
The last 7 phones I bought all had e-mail support, including one that only had a monochrome 5 line text readout. Sending from that phone wasn't possible, and it didn't support SMS at all, but it received e-mail for free just the same.
I expect very soon we'll be seeing congress "insisting" that data be treated as data on a phone, and voice as voice, not to mention requiring phone companies to lift the cost from the receiver of a message completely. In fact, I would not be surprised to soon see incoming calls mandated to be free as well.
Caller ID has been added to every major residential carried in the country. If you have a land line, and make a call, your caller ID information is tagged to the call and sent. You pay nothing for this.
When you get a call from someone who has caller ID tagging, it;s simply a signal that's part of the incoming call that your phone can detect. It doesn't matter if the intermediary companies connecting that call support caller ID or not, it;s data passed through their digital network. There's no real magic.
To SEE the caller ID, most carries charge between $5 and $7 a month, or bundle it with other less used features like call forwarding and 3 way calling for $10-15 a month. The funny thing is, if the caller had caller ID support with his phone company, and your phone company installed the infrastructure to support it, it actually costs them money NOT to send the signal to you, and nothing to send it.
You see, letting all the data come though is simple. Adding a caller ID tag to an outgoing call is really simple. DETECTING tat tag, and blocking it's transmissio0n has to be done to each line, to each call, individually, and is VASTLY more expensive than sending the data. Yet you pay to get it, and don't pay to have it blocked...
Charging for caller ID in the past was necessary, to finance the rollout of a system where most homes did not have compatible phones. Today, 15 years later, it's almost impossible to find a phone that doesn't have a caller ID readout, and every phone company has had the system long paid for, yet we still pay the same, if not more, each month, and now almost all of us pay for it.
It's long past time caller ID was mandated to be a feature of basic phone service, no different than basic cable has a mandated number of chanels and maximum price approved by congress.
Texting, on most phones today, can easily be bypassed, as nearly every phone was an accompanying e-mail account. Every single phone with SMS support has a basic internet connection available as well, and on most plans, limited use of that connection is free. e-mail comes to the phone in real time, same as SMS, and e-mail can be sent at will by using the buolt in min-browser to go to your provider's web page.
If I can send e-mail for free, a vastly more complex and flexible system, then why are people still texting? simple, they make it difficult to use e-mail on a phone... This is why Apple refused to allow PICT messaging on the iPhone and insisted that people use e-mail to send images. I predict TXT will shortly be replaced with a quality chat application as well...
Actually, with the presurization system efficiency, combined with the fact that it takes about 3 minutes to drop to a breathable height, it's really a non-issue. Even a blown out window, or complete loss of pressure is completely survivable, provided you don't get sucked out the hole in the first 0.3 seconds. Mythbusters did a bang up job proving that hole would not only have to be the size of a doorway, but also that significant explosive force needed to be added, increasing cabin pressure to several atmospheres beyond normal (the gases released in the explosion have to go somewhere).
Guns are not allowed on flights for the same reasons they're not allowed in most public and commercial buildings: They cause panic, and heighten anxiety. As it is, planes keep cabin preassure below normal on purpose, with the specific intent to calm passengers by slightly limiting oxygen intake. It's harmless to 99% of people, but is the main reason you're not supposed to get on a plane with a heart condition or if pregnant. The pressure system is completely capable of maintaining perfect pressure, preventing your ears from poping on take-off or landing. But to create a calmer atmosphere, they keep the pressure lower. Everything on an airplane is a measure of control, and 90% of it is completely pointless and has little or no safety impact. For most of the sheep in this country to make it 6-8 hours in a cramped space with strangers, we need to do everything possible to keep people from being nervous. Airline safety's purpose #1 is to convey this illusion above all else.
Whether he acused us or stated it as fact is irrelevent, the truth is, there's evedence supporting it and significant reason to believe it.
Second, US bombing alone has killed more than all the insugents combined, the bulk in 2003, but inlarge numbers in 2006 and 2007, and a continual trickle of US soldiers killing civilians. We've been on quite the "shoot first, talk second" routine over there quite a while, especially our approved non-military contractors tthat seem to like just shooting folks for fun, especially when no one is looking.
I did not state I trust Iraqi Insurgents. I stated that we've killed innocents there in mass numbers, FAR greater numbers and with less care for civilian life than Russia has in Georgia, so we simply have NO RIGHT TO CRITICIZE Russia. We're being hypocrits, and the world knows it, and we loose trust and respect (of which we have in sort enough supply already) for doing that. It's like telling a kid he did wrong for beating up a bully, then turning around and shooting a cop.
As for Russia, there are no "dictators" there anymore. They're not a communist nation, theyre a capatolist federated republic, and have a very similar architecture to Eoropean parliment, except they keep a relatively powerless firurehead in place. It's like England, but the figurehead is actually elected, and can be expelled from office equally. WE are more a dictatorship than they are at this point!!!
Putin is not trustworth, but he's PREDICTABLE, and further, his actions and that of his nation have limits, enforced by trade agreements, the need for critical component and food imports, and investment money that comes from outside their country. We have a lot to offer them that they need, and will have great difficulty and expense getting elsewhere. They have oil and ores we need, and thus we have reason to believe both sides will behave amicably towards each other. It's calle dforeign diplomacy. They ALLWAYS make the press think there's an issue because it gives them strength at the bargaining table. Check out Russia new feeds and you'll see we play the same fucking game on our end. US news media doesn't report on it, and Russian news media doesn't report their side either. It's called Propoganda, and it seems to be working on you...
I do NOT hate America, I simply distrust my own government. I do not distrust the army, I distrust their comander in chief, and man who my whole family has a higher IQ than. Do you think it's right that a man who would not meet the enterance requirements to any Ivy league college in this country is qualified to lead this country? Especially one easily swayed in opinion by those who we know to be corrupt within his party, those who have active litigation against them?
You are a blind, ignorant fool, and your government is running you over.
Yea, New Egg is nice for that. My outlook archive is a nice backup too, plus I typically keep the packing slip and I generally register the item (not allways).
I've been burned a few times by not having documentation to prove a part was under waranty when it failed. Not going to hapopen again!
I'm currently loving BestBuy for their extended waranties as well... In the last 6 years I've exchanged 4 printers, a laptop, a $600 stereo reveiver, a 32" LCD TV, 2 UPS units, and an iPod. All of these items have been replaced with one dramatically better than the original, and all I paid was the cost of a new waranty on the new device, usually a 3-5 year bonus... I've had at least $1700 in repairs done on stuff outside of manufacturer waranty as well. With limited exception, this has all actually been honest component failure. (TV and reciever got cooked by the Cable Company set top box, fed 12 volt AC out of the RCA ports!, ouch). I'm 1 repair away from getting a brand new fridge, 1 away from another free laptop, and the printer is having trouble picking up paper again so I'll be bringing it in for replacement as soon as the current model is no longer in stock (and I can be assured the latest model)...
The laptop will be the big one, it's a high end gaming machine that I got on a big sale for about $1300... Their closest "equivolent or better" machine in stock is a laptop costing over $2600... (only one with 5400RPM drive, dedicated graphics that match an x700, 2GB of RAM with support for 4GB, digital audio, DVI port, and a 64bit capable CPU)
I've paid all of about $800 in waranty costs to bestbuy over the last 7 years. I've gotten at least $4,000 in repairs or replacements back from that. I can't imagine what it will cost them if my house ever get hits by lightning!
I was my first nVidia purchase, been a loyal ATI fan for a long time. I would have gotten the 4870 from ATI instead, but I couldn't find one in stock and was in a rush to rebuild a machine after a power supply surged and cooked all my parts.
Also bought a PS with not only a 5 year waranty this time, but also a connected component guarantee. The best AVR in the world can't help you if the PS blows out, and board manufacturers don't cover electrical damage (usually the only reason a board fails...)
RAM, Vid, and RAID controller have lifetime waranties, all other parts 5 yrs except the board which is only 1... Most of the components include waranty support for overclocking too:D
You don't watch the news, do you. Putin admitted that US politicians in places of power encouraged their contry to invade. Although he didn't outright say "republicans" he's made no effort to hide that is was people withing Bush's ranks trying to help their candidate McCain. Russia would still have taken action, but much more likely it would have been a simple tactical strike, not an invasion.
Oh, and how do you think the world thinks of our actions in Iraq? Do you have ANY idea how many innocent Iraqi's have died in this fight? How many non-targetet bombs we've dropped when we could have used laser guided tacticle strikes? How much destruction we caused that was completely tactically unnecessary?...and then we move in with our own contractors and agents to rebuild, and cut off their own local people from having a chance at rebuilding their own country?...a lot of it on thier dollar! We're robbing them blind, torturing and killing their people, and all for a war that the international weapons investigators came ON TV 2 days before we attacked and screamed at us to let them finish their job, that they found NO evidence, and that a war was completely un called for?
Oh, and we're not struggling to beat him... McCain's party is bankrupt. Obama has millions, and he's winning in every electoral scenario across the board, and has been since the beginning. McCain has to win more than 70% of the contested states to have a change, with most of them leaning to Obama currently, though too close to call for sure. Even if McCain takes Vigina AND Florida, Obama still wins by more than a dozen electorals. His best scenario is that they'll be hand counting ballots in more then 4 states to determine if he has enough to win. On the other side of the coin, we're looking at Obama having a change at up to 400 electoral votes, with McCain only holding on to about 100+. A real landslide.
Most of McCains support is from republicans like my grandfather who vote republican "because they allways have and allways will" Take a look back 40 years an guess what, republicans stood for everything democrats today do, and republicans are against. They've swapped platforms, but the voters havene't noticed. Most democratic voters will tell you "we vote for the best candidate, we considdered the other guy and the issues carefully" where few republicans will admit the same.
When it comes debate time, Obama's numbers are going to slide dramatically. Traditionally, those who throw attacks in debates loose points in public favor. Obama is also a world class speaker and presenter and McCain is clearly not. This should further shift his ranks. Also remember, Obama is still playing clean. He's got a TON of dirt on McCain that he's CHOSING not to throw at him, and all McCain can do is lie. Lies like "Obama has PROMISED to increase taxes" and "Obama supports outsourcing your job overseas" which are blantant lies completely contrary to his platform he published more than a year ago. Obama has clearly defined goals, timelines, and stasks to accomplish published, hundreds of pages of detailed materials. McCains campaign platform is vague at best, undetails, and self contradictory in many places. We really have no idea what hes' going to do....and I can promise you, McCain WILL raise taxes, on all of us, not just the rich and big buinsess, which Obama is not raising taxes for, just closing loopholes that let them pay less than the rest of us, loopholes created by W.
The "minor" issues you bring up are not minor, and in fact, it's not really those issues that are of concern, but the actions the USA is making against russia that are prompting such talk. We're pulling the strings and pisseng THEM off. They can't trust OUR administration and that's the real issue.
Current activity included, Russia is actualy suffering a lot of negative press over this Georgia thing, and per Putin's admission, it's OUR fault!
They have not only been rather trustworthy over the last 15 years (more so than most of the world powers we deal with), but they're actually quite public about what pisses them off, and theiur actions are quite predictable. They have no military intent against us, but they do have thhings we want, and thus have power to negotiate, or threaten, equally.
Naturally, they will have leverage, and they will use it, any nation that didn't would be insane. We have similar leverage to apply in return, else we would not even be negotiating.
Control of the ISS??? First of all, we could really care less... It's a prop and symbol, not a real base for any significant research, and certainly not in the short term. Also, it's not just us an Russia involved here, it's about a dozen nations, and if we get cut off from access, none of them will really see the worth in continuing the venture either, nor will they continue to fund it. We have built most of the major components both already on the ISS and planned to be going up soon. Without those, the ISS is just as useless to Russia as it is to us if we're cut off, and all the other nations suffer as well. We and the other nations put up most of the funding for that fragile hunk of aluminum up there, and I don;t think Russia can afford to keep their cosmonauts alive in it without our help.
Besides, I really don't care if we loose access to it for 5-10 years if it means we can have our own fully functional and less expensive system working in that time. After that, we can do whatever we want. The most they can do is delay us from the inevitable, that's not a very big stick at the table...
Every year we try to keep the shuttle running postpones our replacement for it by 18-24 months... It;s simply too expensive, and something we're WILLING to saccrifice to get past.
Besides, it;s not like they'll have the ability to do anything they want with that station... Any illegitimate use of it, to put things in orbit we can't accept, or whatever the nuts think can happen, we already proved we can shoot anything out of orbit anytime we want. Russia does not yet have that capability...
Just because we don;t have access to a space shuttle does NOT mean we can't put what we want in orbit. Sure, Russia and others can do it cheaper (we've even had China launch rockets for our stuff in the past), but removing the space shuttle only prevents us from putting PEOPLE in space, nothing else...
Did Obama use government money to buy his house(other than his income from his salary as an employee of the government)? Did Tony Rezko receive special compensation or win a major bid from a government branch because of any action Obama directly took? Did Obama, or anyone under Obama's direct instruction appoint any of Tony's people to positions under his position's authority? NO on all counts. Yes Rezko's wife was apointed to office, Yes, Rezko did receive money from the government, but NONE of that was from any organization that Obama had any power over (he was either in LOWER office, a completely diferent branch of government, or not in office at all at the time!). It was all OTHER politicians making those decisions. Politicians that themselves benefited much more directly from Rezko's activity than Obama ever did... Those guys, yes, they may be guilty of treason, but not Obama.
Here's what I do know: Obama, while working for a law firm and before taking political office assisted Rezko's company in obtaining government funding (read: THE LAW FIRM represented Rezko, Obama did NOT work this case). Obama never served any legal function to rezko other than approxamately 5 hours of "advice" he'd given outside of any official legal activity, and he never collected fees for that advice. Obama, after Rezko was suspected (simply suspected, and before even convicted) of campaign finance corruption returned any connected donations he could trace and donated the rest to charity, and publically scorned Rezko for actions Obama had previously campainged that tougher laws should be imposed for. Obama used his own money to purchase some land from Rezko, above market price, with the intent to help fund his legal fees, but instead of giving or loaning him money, he purchased land, which lowered Rezko's land value, and which certainly would have to be repaid or purchased back from Obama in order to be of salable value. (it was a way of securing a legal loan to an old law friend). This is not illegal, and anyone would do the same for a family member or someone who helped their career in the past who was in trouble. Note that Rezko extended a job offer to Obama in his early legal persuits. Obama turned this down, and later took a job with a competing firm. At the time he turned Rezko down, Obama did not have a competing offer on the table... A prominent arab billionaire attended a party at Rezko's house. Being it was next door, Obama and his family also attended that party. One person (only one of more than a couple hundred guests) claims Obama toasted the Iraqi. A toast is generally witnesed by dozens, unless you count clicking your glass to his as a toast. Besides, he's an oil billionaire, you do NOT disrespect him, and this Iraqi is not a terrorist, but a member of OPEC, someone Obama likely would have extended similar courtesies to as president. In 2005, obama bought a piece of land. That piece closed on the same day as another piece bought by Rezko being sold by the same seller. Rezko paid full price, Obama paid much less than it was worth. It should however be noted that 1) Obama was a priminent legal and political figure, and bought a 1.6 million dolar piece of land, and his bid was the highest out of 3 bidders. Rezko bought a much lower priced neighboring lot, and was teid with another bidder, therefor the difference in pricing. Explanation? Few can aford a lot that price, but with the knowledge that a prominent figure was buying a neighboring lot, others who could afford the smaller lot were willing to over value it, as owning the house next door to someone who might run for president has significant value... Is this illegal? No coordination between the seller, Rezko, the realtors, or Obama are known, and any tampering with that sale would likely have been followed up by the loosing bidders as it was a valuable lot, and they were each wealthy enough to sue. Since no law suit, or even investigation into the sale occured, we can believe it was a genuine sale. Many have gone on record
Tanks in Georgia, yes... In clear response to Georgian actions against russion. This is what happens when 1) you piss off a sleeping giant, and 2) Republicans in the USA desperately need something to distract world attention, and successfully lobby to encourage russia to act more violenetly than it otherwise might have (Putin himself admitted that on public TV).
first, we should have been designing the replacement for the shuttle the day we approved building the first one, 5-10 years before we launched it. Honestly we were, but those other designs weren't NASA's designs, and corruption in government and a monopolistic stance on space travel by our government prevented any serios investment into that.
Next, when my tool is too expensive to use, or too inefficient, I rent a better one if I can't afford to buy it myself. In this case, "renting" space on Russias rockets is FAR cheaper than getting another tool at the moment. In fact, even if we paid 100% of Russia's costs for the rocket use, it would STILL be cheaper than trying to launch the shuttle again, and each launch gets more expensive and further delays when we'll be self sufficient. We can't BOTH run the shuttle and replace it. We MUST lean on the charity of others in order to again be self sufficient.
Can we trust russia? yes. The cold war is over. Russia and the US are not at odds against each other, we've been mostly partners in peace, working toward larger international goals. Clinton did a ton for our standing with Russia, and the Republicans, through their continual distrust and disrespect, threaten to disolve that. Russia is a great source of Oil, and if we play nice, continue to provide them food, access to technology and business, and treat their people with respect, then we can increase how much oil we get from them and decrease what we get from the middle east. Russia understands this, and also understands what that means in terms of wealth. We'll be trasferring trillions into their econeomy instead of into the middle east. A few rides on a rocket, that we're mostly paying for, gee, seems to be a fair compormise...
The differences between us and Russia, well, they're not the communist giant the used to be, or the "great oppressor". They're oficially defined as a Capitolist Federation. We're a Capitolist Federated Republic, not a democracy. They actually have a very similar structure of lower government, and a similar economy. In fact, they're closer to the governemt of most european countries, but with an elected leader in place of a monarchy. There's still corruption, but we're no saints in that department, and they're overcoming corruption faster since they're still experiencing change and are willing to change their governing laws. Think we'll see a new constituion anytime soon? Not...
1) Russia has been the butt of a long line of their former patriots stabbing them in the back. Sooner of later, the big bear wasn't going to take it any more. No, Georgia's actions were not unusually aggressive, for what Russia has long dealt with, but they were the ones that stepped on the stick and woke the bear, and got eaten becasue of it.
2) Don't believe for a second we didn't have more to do with that invasion than Russia itself did. Putin himself admitted our government pulled many strings and convinced them to press the attack. The US wants worldwide eyes drawn away from it, and wants to delude us, the American people, into believeing there is still a worldwide military threat we have to be prepared for. Sure, they may have acted first, but I think we both encouraged it to continue, and also encouraged other world news to react to is in the way it did.
Our government is far more corrupt than any of us really believe. We're pulling strings and playing dangerous games so that various segments of the monstrocity we created can continue their status quo. The only way to clean up government it to create regulation, oversight, and public open clarity for action. If we can sever the connection between business and politicians, we rid ourselves of the corruption.
Lobyists should only meet in open forum, with every word they speak published, as Obama suggests, and voluntarily will comply with in his own cabinet meeting notes. Donations from bunsinesses to governments need to be stopped, completely. Only individuals should be able to back a candidate, and with a maximum personal donation to boot (businesses don't vote, why should they have influence?) Government open bids should be reviewable, and contestable, by an independent oversight system, with any bids for non-national secret work (as determined by a court or oversight comittee, not by the people requesting it to be built) made public.
Elected officials need to be subject to strict oversight. They voluntarily offered to lead a government branch, and took the people's trust. If that trust is violated, then it weakens government, thus aiding our enemies (indirectly if not directly), and by that reasoning is treason, the only crime explicitly defined in the Constitution of the United States. The punishment for treason is death. Personally, I'd replace this with life imprisonment combined with the seisure by the government of all property of the convicted. I don't care if you had the money before you entered public service or not, it's the risk you take by accepting our trust. Not corrupt? no problem.
Oh, and what we did in Iraq? What Russia is doing hardly compares. 1st Iraq war was pinpoint, direct, and had few civilian casualties. Bush Jr's war? no comparrison. It's an attrocity in human rights, and a poor example of combat, besides the fact it was completely unjustified.
You seem to still think we're fighting the cold war, and also are delusional that we're winning it.
First of all, we don't need to hide the fact that we launch spy satellites, nor do we need a shuttle, let alone our own space station to launch them, they're sent up in ordinary rockets from the ground. Second, anything they don't like, they can very easily shoot down. We already proved this ourselves. Besides, short of terorist cell activity, there's not much to see that we can't already.
Next, we don't need massively expensive orbital missle defense. We have perfectly useful ground based missle defenses. Apparently you have not kept up with the latest publically anounced technology that surpassed the Patriot missle systems, let alone the ones they don't tell you about. The only nuts out there interested in starting mass war via orbital or sub-orbital bomardment are not governments themselves, and don't have the resources to built 1, let alone hundreds of missles, and even those nuts understand that to unleash that kind of fury will lead to the instant and worldwide destruction of their entire nation and people. You nuke us, raze your entire civilization, that's how cold war works... They're interested in spreading fear to convey a message, not getting their message erased from time.
Further, Russia has NO interest in nuking us. We are no threat to them, we need them, and in many ways they need us. (mostly for food, and we'd love access to their oil). They are one of the fastest growing econimies in the world, and have a good base of laws, moral understanding, and good will towards all of the earth, not just their own interests. They are not the mindless communist government of 30 years ago.
We CAN rely on russia, and have been for about 2 decades. I have no fear that they'll keep the space statioon going. Without access to our scientists, and our money, they can't keep it going on their own (cuz if they tried, Europe would bail out of the venture too). Besides, the ISS is about sciene, it has vitually no military value (it's both too limited, and too fragile to be a platform for offence or defence). Even the limited science we get from the ISS isn't really it's purpose, it's not a study of physics, it;s a study of humanity, cooperation, feasability of long term space operation, etc.
In 30-50 years, with continual funding, the ISS will be our base of operations to construct, in orbit, a larger craft containing the modular pieces of a similar, smaller station to orbit the moon. That will be a base point and escape station for a lunar ground based station. On the surface of the moon, we can build a large enough and safe enough living system that we can build, indoors in relative safey, the massive components necessary to make a run at mars, but more likely, we'll use it to build large autonomos craft first. Small shipments on re-usable craft to orbit here, large collective shipments to lunar obrit, small drops to lunar surface, and eventually, 100-150 years from now we're mining on the moon, and manufacturing large scale craft there.
The only way this planet is ever going to move forward, is if we move forward as a whole. International cooperation on massive scale projects like the ISS, global worming, international power systems development, and more provides huge financial incentives for continued cooperation in other ventures, and limits direct hostility between governments and peoples. When you start placing billion dollar losses on an issue if you go to war, wars happen less frequently. International arbitration works except in the most grevious cases, usually with small time dictators who have more money than sense.
There are radicals amoung us, individuals and small groups, operating outside of governments, or under the guize of misled religions, and these people are our only real threat. They will allways oppose government, and will kill people without question. International scale wars do nothing to disuade them or stop them, and typically do noth
Sure, they're just succeptable to static discharge, water, excess heat, beaing sat on in your pocket, falling out of your pocket, being eaten by the dog, being swiped by kids/friends, they won't play in set top boxes just full computers.
On the off hand, that scratchable disk should be copied, and put away somewhere,m and if you scratch the copy, you're only out 0.32 cents.
Superior form factor? OK, tiny is not necessarily a good thing. Think of having a collection of say 150 movies on various, proprietarily DRM'd USB keys. They dont't stack well, have limited space for labeling (tiny text), are easily lost under couches, fall out of pockets, get lost in your luggage, are are susceptible to heat, foul weater, static discharge, and water.
I can't think of much worse of a medium to put a movie on. I could imagine fumbling whole key chains of fobs looking for a movie, breaking the little rings off trying to disconnect one, loosing the caps everywhere (and having dogs, cats, and kids yarking all over after eating a cap), and more.
Since you can't watch the movie without the exact right key in a USB port, even copying them to a hard drive has no real benefit. Even if you could put 3-8 movies on a single thumb drive (assuming you can afford a 16GB stick) you're still talking about juggling dozens of these things....and they're a LOT more expensive to make than a blue-ray disk.
Nice post. Lets also stack the Freedom of Information Act nicely on that pile...
Also, where a goverment may be allowed to chage a "reasonble" fee for making copies available to the public, that fee is to cover their costs for making the copy. Others who make copies of their own will (and expense) can not be charged by the government, since the goverbnment is not providing the labor, ink, or paper.
Thanks for the update... I know I had an 8088 based system at one point, or maybe it was an 8086. I also forgot to mention the Amiga and the Adam, mixed somewhere in there back in history. I've been in IT too long... I actually used a card reader in college once!
I live in SC. I know 3 people who have gas heaters, and I'm one of em (in my apartment complex, I'm in the oldest building, and it has gas, the other 26 buildings all have electric).
A lot of older homes around here use gas, but all the new ones are on electric. Part of this is cost of the units, part of this is insurance, and part of it is access to gas lines (highly populated areas have easier access to gas, rural towns do not).
As for gas stoves, I completely agree, gas is THE way to cook. I was a chef in several restaurants when I was in college. However, I've discovered that with proper, quality, cookware, and a quality electric stove (not a cheap ass $400 electric like you find in rental homes, but a high grade $1000 stove), preferably flat top, I can do almost the same as I can on gas. I've also discovered this awesome technology called infra-red cooking. The elements under the grill plate heat hotter and more evenly than I was even capable of cooking with gas. Awesome for searing stakes, or for using as a large griddle plate, and it sits in the counter next to the stove and is vented in its own hood. You'll see a lot of folks on the food network using them. Get one installed if you can!
My gas bill, just in the last year, has seen a 30% increase in the price I pay for the gas for my water heater, which also provides my home heat in the winter as a boiler. Electricity has gone up only 4% in the same time frame.
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Excuse me, did I in any way state bad hardware = vista sucks? no. Perhaps vista's failure to properly identify that bad hardware might be an iaaue, but generally, unless you run tests from boot media issues like this are hard to find. Mac's bomb just the same from hardweare issues when it effects kernel level processes, so does Unix. In fact, in my post, I actualy blamed the hardware, giving Vista a leg up and taking fault away from it.
I do not support DRM, but, you can't blame it for system crashes. DRM is just an interpreter, and encryption layer. It either works or doesn't. It's not an application, driver, or process itself, it;s just a mathematic function that feeds data to other actual processes. It IS impossible for DRM, by it;s basic existence, to crash an application, let alone the kernel. Anything in user space memory by design is incapable of causing a BSOD. This is the basic definition of memory seperation. You clearly know nothing about system architecture, advanced memory management, OS design, or the OSI model, so maybe you should refrain from commenting here in /. It's only making George Bush look smart.
I'm not an Apple Fanboi. I'm a system architect, and I use 5 differnt OS on a regular basis. Apple has a lot of advantages, but it's not nearly a perfect OS. The problem is, everyone who hasn;t actually used one extensively, and hasn't taken the time to learn what those advantages are, loves to bash Apple at the slightest hint of a fracture in their facade.
In this case, it's clearly an issue of a device driver conflict. If the driver itself didn;t work, that would have been caught in testing. BTW: are you aware, that JUST in the english versions of Windows, there are aover 150 unique version of Windows that have to be tested against, multiply that by testing which has to be done on 15-20 different chipsets, and further with each of those systems having a slow and fats hard disk, and low and high memory, and you're talking about a testing process that is nearly 10,000 system configurations to test against. and that's but a SAMPLING of the complexity since we're not including application varition or system setting changes made by users. It is IMPOSSIBLE to test against all scenarios.
Limiting Apple's driver testing just under Vista, there's 7 versions, doubled for SP0 and SP1, doubled again for 32 and 64 bit. So that's 28 OS releases a user is likely under vista, just in the USA, to install iTunes 8 on. Now, this is a USB driver issue, if you had RTFA (not a DRM issue), so we take a large sampling of common USB chipsets used over the last 5 years, and the common mainboard chipsets in circulation and build a test base for that.... Oh wait, that's over a THOUSAND SYSTEM IMAGES, and this is JUST to tset the USB driver.... and that's on just a sampling (about 30) different hardware configurations. This testing would take WEEKS for a team to do, and just for one of a hundred application features...
Where's the blame here? It's basically on Microsoft for having a weak USB driver API that effects everyone. Apple can only be expected to reasonably test their application. I know a lot about their testing practices, including their closed non-disclosure beta processes, and I can assure you if the driver was directly at fault, it would not have worked with any of the vista versions, since they ALL use the same driver... This is a conflict issue, one that typically can't be tested for. Software has bugs, get over it.
First of all, there was a ton of I/O. Scrolling through large lists of album artwork, I was hearing the HDD churn, so I launched monitoring tools and started peaking in. IT8 uses much more RAM, and has dramatic I/O utilization, which is attempting to read from the drives and display on the screen in real time.
Defrag causes a lot of I/O, but it's large file reads with much less head movement, also, it has relatively limited CPU and ram use that coincides with that. Further, Vista defrags in the background, so large invasive defrags are not common under vista.
IT8 is not craching when CD ripping, it's crashing when iPods (not iPhones or touches) are docked or undocked. Other devices (printers, cameras, camcorders, and more) have caused similar issues in vista. In fact virtually everything USB based that doesn't use Microsoft's included driver is extremely buggy, and even if it works one day, a windows patch can cause failures, even if the driver wasn't changed in the process.
Hey bud, I'm a software tester for a disaster recovery company. Let me put this past you:
- 4 identical hardware machines
- 4 exact copies of an ISO of Vista EE
- all 4 machines side by side, I make the same click on the same screen on each one.
After installation is completed with exactly the same settings on all 4 machines, we install our corporate AV program, then allow the machines to download and install updates. Each of the 4 machines has exactly the same list of updates added in the same order.
All 4 machines are benchmarked prior to and after installation, using 2 different tools from boot CDs. All 4 machines benchmark the same (within less than a second on a multi-million CPU cycle run, and withing 5 seconds on an multi-hour RAM test. No machines exhibit RAM, disk, or CPU issues and are regularly burned in and tested both before and after installations.
of the 4 machines, 1 has a C: with 3.9GB used space. 1 has 4.7GB used, 1 has 5.2 GB used, and 1 has 8.2!
One machine boots Vista in less than 22 seconds, one takes longer than 2 minutes. others are inbetween. Hard drive I/O pattern tests are run and all 4 drives exhibit nearly identical characteristics and I/O patterns for randomized I/O read/write testing.
One machine has 860MB or RAM free out of 2GB, one has less thqan 200MB free out of 2GB. Others fall between.
When we blank the drives and repeat the tests, machines exhibit completely different results. Sometimes the slowest one to boot in one test wiull be the fastest one to boot in another. Swapping components from system to system was no impact on the performance of a machine.
We started doing this test a few years ago when I was setting up several exchange 2003 servers to be used in a classroom and noticed simalar wild divergence between system performance, install size, and more, even before service packs or patches were added. We have repeasted this test with every version of 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 servre, 2008 server, as well as older OS. Anything NT or previous, and installer seems to be very consistent. Anything 2000 or later, very inconsistent. The newer it is, the worse the installer inconsistancies.
We have also done this test by repeating installations on the same single machine over and over, and the installation size on that machine is just as inconsistent.
So, what's the deal? Why does the same installer batch file, which is basically a top down program that collects data based on pre-defined rules, and processes installation order based on documented, databased information, produce such inconsistancy?
As a result, we no longer test product on a single machine, but we bought 4 each of 5 different machines, and installed the OS seperately on each one, then burned images of it. We test each application agains all 20 OS images with the same OS on each one, then swap images for each OS service pack and each OS supported. This can mean teasting a single application against over 70 Windows versions, each on 20 machines. This is a test base run of 1400 installs. After this, we release internally, and install to roughly 100 machines. We purposely buy only 2 or 3 of each model from a manufacturer to deploy in the company, so we have dozens of different machines, and allow each user to basically maintain their own box the way they like, creating what in other companies would be an IT nightmare, but in this case it;s a benefit (and each user is an admin on some level, and completely capable of maintaining their own machine). We'll find a dozen bugs we didn't find running through the 1400 image test run. After release to the field, when roughly a thousand customers get a hold of it, we'll find more bugs...
You CAN NOT test for every hardware reviosion on every machine made, and every OS that could be on it. If you're asking Apple to do that,. you're expecting them to have access to over 10 million differing system images to test on. This is IMPOSSIBLE.
The fault is ENTIRELY microsofts. If the soft
BSOD in Vista is either hardw3are level resource conflicts, or an actual memory fault.
I'm actually betting, based on the I/O is see in IT8 while it's building the thumbnail images, the massive background effort to create genius database info, and the high level of memory and disk I/O present in it's basic use that did not occur under IT7, that these machines were ALREADY FAULTY, but simply were not utilized enough to trigger these memory or hard disk faults.
The DRM is exactly the same btw. No changes. Besides, DRM is a user space application, and can not cause BSOD. It;s impossible for that to be the cause...
If you have not had vista BSOD, then all that means is your hardware is exceptionally well built and defect free, and that none of your components have resource conflicts with any others. My guess is your PC is OEM manufactured, likely by Dell, and is on the lower end of the spectrum (under $800 base system, that maybe you added a nice video card and some extra RAM to)
Vista may not BSOD on you, but I bet you have frequent application crashes... I don't typically go more than a few days without an application bombing out, my desktop refreshing from an explorer crash, my printer loosing connection, or an app just hanging and needing to be killed by task manager.
Sure, memory leaks may be a thing of the past, and generally when an app bombs, the machine stays up... My Mac has had those features for 6 years! When an app does bomb, I typically see in the logs that it;s a core driver or service at fault, and not even a file installed by the application.
occasionally? SMS transmission success rates are at best 95% reliable. Some report as much as 25% lost messages (though they typically get billed for every one regardless).
I can send a text from my phone to my wife's phone and back again. Messages will take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours to be recieved, sometiomes not even in the order they're transmitted, and at least 1 in 10 is lost.
for that matter, I've had voicemails not show up for 2-3 days before. I;ve left my wife a message multiple times, and when she gets how she didn't get it. We'll even call the voicemail system directly and it will say "no messages" then sometime that night it will mysteriously arrive.
I'm on AT&T and Sprint both (2 phones). She's on Verizon. The problems are similar on every network.
The only thing that's reliable is the e-mail service on my iPhone. I get notices there before I do in my outlook IMAP connection!
Almost every phone made since 2001 has over the air writable firmware. It is not beyond reaon to believe that firmware could be written to supprto both the existing system and an alternate method. Even if every phone cant' do this, I'm willing to bet every camera phone with a browser can, and close to half the rest out there. Even if we took only 60% of the traffic off the system, that should be enough time that the rest of the phones out their that can't switch will either fail out of use, or be replaced since you can do the whole "new every 2" thing.
My father got a letter from his provider telling him he had 3 months to get a new phone, and how to get one for free if he renered a contract, if not there were $29.99 models offerd. If hs didn't buy a new phone, he would stop getting calls, but would still be billed the remainder of his contract.
What did he do? he bought a $200 phone... Completely unnecessary, but it's what he wanted. His phone was 4 years old and the battery was dying out anyway. Most of the phones out there that could not be updated to switch off the paging chanels are that much if not older... Provided the phone companies offer a free or near free upgrade path to those who can't upgrade, I don't see how there's a problem. Phones are expected to have 3-4 yerar life spans. If you kept it longer, there's no guanrantee it will continue to function.
...And since every phone out there on Edge or G3, and most on CDMA, have the ability to have firmware updates over the air, why would it be so difficult to update the app so that SMS can use IP traffic instead of paging chanels when an IP connection is available? (I had a sprint phone in 1998 that could update over the air, and about every 6 months they'd flash the phone on me and change my features around)
They could lowly migrate everyone over, behind the schenes, to a version of SMS that can use either the digital network or the paging chanel, and allways tory to use the IP network if available. Users of SMS do not need to be aware of wether the text is going through the traditional SMS network or over an IP channel.
For the few phones that actually work on digital networks, but that don't have any IP capabiltiy, let them keepusing the paging chanels for a while, maybe a year or so after the application change begins. Then, send out a notice to everyone with a phone older than 4 years (pretty much the cuttoff for what phones did and did not have IP support or other digital communication chanels) and let them know that if they don't upgrade their old n busted handsets, they'll loose access to SMS. Give them a 6 month warning.
A very similar thing happened around here when the switched off analog cell service. My father had an el-cheapo cell phone and got a letter stating he had 6 months to buy a new one, which he could get FOR FREE by renewing his contract for 1 year, or for which several $29.99 phone options were available sans commitment. He bought a $200 new phone as a result of the letter because he wanted a cooler looking model with a camera and bluetooth, and was simply waiting for a good reason to switch. A nifty profit for the local telco. My grandfather, uncle, Aunt, and a few of their cousins all did very similar things...
It's not that they can't change it to eliminate the paging chanel bottleneck, it's that they don;t have a financial reason to do so. If the courts or congress ordered them to change the pricing on text, aven to somehting as simple as having a maximum $5 per month txt charge, for all TXT including PIX, etc, that might be enough incentive.
Here's the idea: for any calling plan you are on, you get X minutes, X text, and X MB. After that point, you pay per use charges. However, at any point where your per use charges combined with your bill would equal the price of a higher tier plan, and for that month, your new limits are that plan's limits, they can't bill you more than the cost of that plan, unless you further use enough to reach a point where per use charges begin to accrue against that plan's higher limits. Put a max $130 on base connectivity plans (including unlimted everything, including tethering), with a max $69.99 per additional line on a shared plan, and have all the teirs fall below that. Also, allow consumers to pre-set spending limits (maximum monthly bill), and send them e-mail notices each time they bump to a higher plan, and anytime they get within $20 of their monthly approved cap. Oh yea, any tier they paid for, the unused portion of that plan have to be carried over to the next month, ofsetting any overages there. Set the minimum base plan for "all features" at $49 and a base voice only plan at $19.
e-mail has been free on my last 4 service plans. When I first got sprint in 1998 I had to pay $10 a month to use the web browser in the phone, but I got e-mail sent to me free of charge. To respond I had to use a PC, or pay the $10 a month, but that changed in 2002 when I switched to Verizon where the built in browser was free (they tried to hide the fact that you could go anywhere other than Verizon's own web pages, but there was a way to type in any URL, and gmail supported that phone. I got email at one address, and sent from another, but the reply-to line was the phones address, so it wasn't confusing to people I e-mailed.
When my company moved us back to sprint in 2004 web access was free up to a point (bandwidth cap). It may have been because it was a Treo, but I only paid $49.99 for the plan, so I don;t think it was all that special. I'm with AT&T now, and web access from one of my phones is free, with limits. And my wife's Verizon phone, which will soon be AT&T as well, gives her limited free internet. On my iPhone plan, naturally it's included.
The last 7 phones I bought all had e-mail support, including one that only had a monochrome 5 line text readout. Sending from that phone wasn't possible, and it didn't support SMS at all, but it received e-mail for free just the same.
I expect very soon we'll be seeing congress "insisting" that data be treated as data on a phone, and voice as voice, not to mention requiring phone companies to lift the cost from the receiver of a message completely. In fact, I would not be surprised to soon see incoming calls mandated to be free as well.
Think about this additional issue:
Caller ID has been added to every major residential carried in the country. If you have a land line, and make a call, your caller ID information is tagged to the call and sent. You pay nothing for this.
When you get a call from someone who has caller ID tagging, it;s simply a signal that's part of the incoming call that your phone can detect. It doesn't matter if the intermediary companies connecting that call support caller ID or not, it;s data passed through their digital network. There's no real magic.
To SEE the caller ID, most carries charge between $5 and $7 a month, or bundle it with other less used features like call forwarding and 3 way calling for $10-15 a month. The funny thing is, if the caller had caller ID support with his phone company, and your phone company installed the infrastructure to support it, it actually costs them money NOT to send the signal to you, and nothing to send it.
You see, letting all the data come though is simple. Adding a caller ID tag to an outgoing call is really simple. DETECTING tat tag, and blocking it's transmissio0n has to be done to each line, to each call, individually, and is VASTLY more expensive than sending the data. Yet you pay to get it, and don't pay to have it blocked...
Charging for caller ID in the past was necessary, to finance the rollout of a system where most homes did not have compatible phones. Today, 15 years later, it's almost impossible to find a phone that doesn't have a caller ID readout, and every phone company has had the system long paid for, yet we still pay the same, if not more, each month, and now almost all of us pay for it.
It's long past time caller ID was mandated to be a feature of basic phone service, no different than basic cable has a mandated number of chanels and maximum price approved by congress.
Texting, on most phones today, can easily be bypassed, as nearly every phone was an accompanying e-mail account. Every single phone with SMS support has a basic internet connection available as well, and on most plans, limited use of that connection is free. e-mail comes to the phone in real time, same as SMS, and e-mail can be sent at will by using the buolt in min-browser to go to your provider's web page.
If I can send e-mail for free, a vastly more complex and flexible system, then why are people still texting? simple, they make it difficult to use e-mail on a phone... This is why Apple refused to allow PICT messaging on the iPhone and insisted that people use e-mail to send images. I predict TXT will shortly be replaced with a quality chat application as well...
Actually, with the presurization system efficiency, combined with the fact that it takes about 3 minutes to drop to a breathable height, it's really a non-issue. Even a blown out window, or complete loss of pressure is completely survivable, provided you don't get sucked out the hole in the first 0.3 seconds. Mythbusters did a bang up job proving that hole would not only have to be the size of a doorway, but also that significant explosive force needed to be added, increasing cabin pressure to several atmospheres beyond normal (the gases released in the explosion have to go somewhere).
Guns are not allowed on flights for the same reasons they're not allowed in most public and commercial buildings: They cause panic, and heighten anxiety. As it is, planes keep cabin preassure below normal on purpose, with the specific intent to calm passengers by slightly limiting oxygen intake. It's harmless to 99% of people, but is the main reason you're not supposed to get on a plane with a heart condition or if pregnant. The pressure system is completely capable of maintaining perfect pressure, preventing your ears from poping on take-off or landing. But to create a calmer atmosphere, they keep the pressure lower. Everything on an airplane is a measure of control, and 90% of it is completely pointless and has little or no safety impact. For most of the sheep in this country to make it 6-8 hours in a cramped space with strangers, we need to do everything possible to keep people from being nervous. Airline safety's purpose #1 is to convey this illusion above all else.
Whether he acused us or stated it as fact is irrelevent, the truth is, there's evedence supporting it and significant reason to believe it.
Second, US bombing alone has killed more than all the insugents combined, the bulk in 2003, but inlarge numbers in 2006 and 2007, and a continual trickle of US soldiers killing civilians. We've been on quite the "shoot first, talk second" routine over there quite a while, especially our approved non-military contractors tthat seem to like just shooting folks for fun, especially when no one is looking.
I did not state I trust Iraqi Insurgents. I stated that we've killed innocents there in mass numbers, FAR greater numbers and with less care for civilian life than Russia has in Georgia, so we simply have NO RIGHT TO CRITICIZE Russia. We're being hypocrits, and the world knows it, and we loose trust and respect (of which we have in sort enough supply already) for doing that. It's like telling a kid he did wrong for beating up a bully, then turning around and shooting a cop.
As for Russia, there are no "dictators" there anymore. They're not a communist nation, theyre a capatolist federated republic, and have a very similar architecture to Eoropean parliment, except they keep a relatively powerless firurehead in place. It's like England, but the figurehead is actually elected, and can be expelled from office equally. WE are more a dictatorship than they are at this point!!!
Putin is not trustworth, but he's PREDICTABLE, and further, his actions and that of his nation have limits, enforced by trade agreements, the need for critical component and food imports, and investment money that comes from outside their country. We have a lot to offer them that they need, and will have great difficulty and expense getting elsewhere. They have oil and ores we need, and thus we have reason to believe both sides will behave amicably towards each other. It's calle dforeign diplomacy. They ALLWAYS make the press think there's an issue because it gives them strength at the bargaining table. Check out Russia new feeds and you'll see we play the same fucking game on our end. US news media doesn't report on it, and Russian news media doesn't report their side either. It's called Propoganda, and it seems to be working on you...
I do NOT hate America, I simply distrust my own government. I do not distrust the army, I distrust their comander in chief, and man who my whole family has a higher IQ than. Do you think it's right that a man who would not meet the enterance requirements to any Ivy league college in this country is qualified to lead this country? Especially one easily swayed in opinion by those who we know to be corrupt within his party, those who have active litigation against them?
You are a blind, ignorant fool, and your government is running you over.
Yea, New Egg is nice for that. My outlook archive is a nice backup too, plus I typically keep the packing slip and I generally register the item (not allways).
I've been burned a few times by not having documentation to prove a part was under waranty when it failed. Not going to hapopen again!
I'm currently loving BestBuy for their extended waranties as well... In the last 6 years I've exchanged 4 printers, a laptop, a $600 stereo reveiver, a 32" LCD TV, 2 UPS units, and an iPod. All of these items have been replaced with one dramatically better than the original, and all I paid was the cost of a new waranty on the new device, usually a 3-5 year bonus... I've had at least $1700 in repairs done on stuff outside of manufacturer waranty as well. With limited exception, this has all actually been honest component failure. (TV and reciever got cooked by the Cable Company set top box, fed 12 volt AC out of the RCA ports!, ouch). I'm 1 repair away from getting a brand new fridge, 1 away from another free laptop, and the printer is having trouble picking up paper again so I'll be bringing it in for replacement as soon as the current model is no longer in stock (and I can be assured the latest model)...
The laptop will be the big one, it's a high end gaming machine that I got on a big sale for about $1300... Their closest "equivolent or better" machine in stock is a laptop costing over $2600... (only one with 5400RPM drive, dedicated graphics that match an x700, 2GB of RAM with support for 4GB, digital audio, DVI port, and a 64bit capable CPU)
I've paid all of about $800 in waranty costs to bestbuy over the last 7 years. I've gotten at least $4,000 in repairs or replacements back from that. I can't imagine what it will cost them if my house ever get hits by lightning!
Ah sweet, that's what I've got, evga 8800GT :D
I was my first nVidia purchase, been a loyal ATI fan for a long time. I would have gotten the 4870 from ATI instead, but I couldn't find one in stock and was in a rush to rebuild a machine after a power supply surged and cooked all my parts.
Also bought a PS with not only a 5 year waranty this time, but also a connected component guarantee. The best AVR in the world can't help you if the PS blows out, and board manufacturers don't cover electrical damage (usually the only reason a board fails...)
RAM, Vid, and RAID controller have lifetime waranties, all other parts 5 yrs except the board which is only 1... Most of the components include waranty support for overclocking too :D
You don't watch the news, do you. Putin admitted that US politicians in places of power encouraged their contry to invade. Although he didn't outright say "republicans" he's made no effort to hide that is was people withing Bush's ranks trying to help their candidate McCain. Russia would still have taken action, but much more likely it would have been a simple tactical strike, not an invasion.
Oh, and how do you think the world thinks of our actions in Iraq? Do you have ANY idea how many innocent Iraqi's have died in this fight? How many non-targetet bombs we've dropped when we could have used laser guided tacticle strikes? How much destruction we caused that was completely tactically unnecessary? ...and then we move in with our own contractors and agents to rebuild, and cut off their own local people from having a chance at rebuilding their own country? ...a lot of it on thier dollar! We're robbing them blind, torturing and killing their people, and all for a war that the international weapons investigators came ON TV 2 days before we attacked and screamed at us to let them finish their job, that they found NO evidence, and that a war was completely un called for?
Oh, and we're not struggling to beat him... McCain's party is bankrupt. Obama has millions, and he's winning in every electoral scenario across the board, and has been since the beginning. McCain has to win more than 70% of the contested states to have a change, with most of them leaning to Obama currently, though too close to call for sure. Even if McCain takes Vigina AND Florida, Obama still wins by more than a dozen electorals. His best scenario is that they'll be hand counting ballots in more then 4 states to determine if he has enough to win. On the other side of the coin, we're looking at Obama having a change at up to 400 electoral votes, with McCain only holding on to about 100+. A real landslide.
Most of McCains support is from republicans like my grandfather who vote republican "because they allways have and allways will" Take a look back 40 years an guess what, republicans stood for everything democrats today do, and republicans are against. They've swapped platforms, but the voters havene't noticed. Most democratic voters will tell you "we vote for the best candidate, we considdered the other guy and the issues carefully" where few republicans will admit the same.
When it comes debate time, Obama's numbers are going to slide dramatically. Traditionally, those who throw attacks in debates loose points in public favor. Obama is also a world class speaker and presenter and McCain is clearly not. This should further shift his ranks. Also remember, Obama is still playing clean. He's got a TON of dirt on McCain that he's CHOSING not to throw at him, and all McCain can do is lie. Lies like "Obama has PROMISED to increase taxes" and "Obama supports outsourcing your job overseas" which are blantant lies completely contrary to his platform he published more than a year ago. Obama has clearly defined goals, timelines, and stasks to accomplish published, hundreds of pages of detailed materials. McCains campaign platform is vague at best, undetails, and self contradictory in many places. We really have no idea what hes' going to do. ...and I can promise you, McCain WILL raise taxes, on all of us, not just the rich and big buinsess, which Obama is not raising taxes for, just closing loopholes that let them pay less than the rest of us, loopholes created by W.
The "minor" issues you bring up are not minor, and in fact, it's not really those issues that are of concern, but the actions the USA is making against russia that are prompting such talk. We're pulling the strings and pisseng THEM off. They can't trust OUR administration and that's the real issue.
Current activity included, Russia is actualy suffering a lot of negative press over this Georgia thing, and per Putin's admission, it's OUR fault!
They have not only been rather trustworthy over the last 15 years (more so than most of the world powers we deal with), but they're actually quite public about what pisses them off, and theiur actions are quite predictable. They have no military intent against us, but they do have thhings we want, and thus have power to negotiate, or threaten, equally.
Naturally, they will have leverage, and they will use it, any nation that didn't would be insane. We have similar leverage to apply in return, else we would not even be negotiating.
Control of the ISS??? First of all, we could really care less... It's a prop and symbol, not a real base for any significant research, and certainly not in the short term. Also, it's not just us an Russia involved here, it's about a dozen nations, and if we get cut off from access, none of them will really see the worth in continuing the venture either, nor will they continue to fund it. We have built most of the major components both already on the ISS and planned to be going up soon. Without those, the ISS is just as useless to Russia as it is to us if we're cut off, and all the other nations suffer as well. We and the other nations put up most of the funding for that fragile hunk of aluminum up there, and I don;t think Russia can afford to keep their cosmonauts alive in it without our help.
Besides, I really don't care if we loose access to it for 5-10 years if it means we can have our own fully functional and less expensive system working in that time. After that, we can do whatever we want. The most they can do is delay us from the inevitable, that's not a very big stick at the table...
Every year we try to keep the shuttle running postpones our replacement for it by 18-24 months... It;s simply too expensive, and something we're WILLING to saccrifice to get past.
Besides, it;s not like they'll have the ability to do anything they want with that station... Any illegitimate use of it, to put things in orbit we can't accept, or whatever the nuts think can happen, we already proved we can shoot anything out of orbit anytime we want. Russia does not yet have that capability...
Just because we don;t have access to a space shuttle does NOT mean we can't put what we want in orbit. Sure, Russia and others can do it cheaper (we've even had China launch rockets for our stuff in the past), but removing the space shuttle only prevents us from putting PEOPLE in space, nothing else...
Did Obama use government money to buy his house(other than his income from his salary as an employee of the government)? Did Tony Rezko receive special compensation or win a major bid from a government branch because of any action Obama directly took? Did Obama, or anyone under Obama's direct instruction appoint any of Tony's people to positions under his position's authority? NO on all counts. Yes Rezko's wife was apointed to office, Yes, Rezko did receive money from the government, but NONE of that was from any organization that Obama had any power over (he was either in LOWER office, a completely diferent branch of government, or not in office at all at the time!). It was all OTHER politicians making those decisions. Politicians that themselves benefited much more directly from Rezko's activity than Obama ever did... Those guys, yes, they may be guilty of treason, but not Obama.
Here's what I do know: Obama, while working for a law firm and before taking political office assisted Rezko's company in obtaining government funding (read: THE LAW FIRM represented Rezko, Obama did NOT work this case). Obama never served any legal function to rezko other than approxamately 5 hours of "advice" he'd given outside of any official legal activity, and he never collected fees for that advice.
Obama, after Rezko was suspected (simply suspected, and before even convicted) of campaign finance corruption returned any connected donations he could trace and donated the rest to charity, and publically scorned Rezko for actions Obama had previously campainged that tougher laws should be imposed for.
Obama used his own money to purchase some land from Rezko, above market price, with the intent to help fund his legal fees, but instead of giving or loaning him money, he purchased land, which lowered Rezko's land value, and which certainly would have to be repaid or purchased back from Obama in order to be of salable value. (it was a way of securing a legal loan to an old law friend). This is not illegal, and anyone would do the same for a family member or someone who helped their career in the past who was in trouble.
Note that Rezko extended a job offer to Obama in his early legal persuits. Obama turned this down, and later took a job with a competing firm. At the time he turned Rezko down, Obama did not have a competing offer on the table...
A prominent arab billionaire attended a party at Rezko's house. Being it was next door, Obama and his family also attended that party. One person (only one of more than a couple hundred guests) claims Obama toasted the Iraqi. A toast is generally witnesed by dozens, unless you count clicking your glass to his as a toast. Besides, he's an oil billionaire, you do NOT disrespect him, and this Iraqi is not a terrorist, but a member of OPEC, someone Obama likely would have extended similar courtesies to as president.
In 2005, obama bought a piece of land. That piece closed on the same day as another piece bought by Rezko being sold by the same seller. Rezko paid full price, Obama paid much less than it was worth. It should however be noted that 1) Obama was a priminent legal and political figure, and bought a 1.6 million dolar piece of land, and his bid was the highest out of 3 bidders. Rezko bought a much lower priced neighboring lot, and was teid with another bidder, therefor the difference in pricing. Explanation? Few can aford a lot that price, but with the knowledge that a prominent figure was buying a neighboring lot, others who could afford the smaller lot were willing to over value it, as owning the house next door to someone who might run for president has significant value... Is this illegal? No coordination between the seller, Rezko, the realtors, or Obama are known, and any tampering with that sale would likely have been followed up by the loosing bidders as it was a valuable lot, and they were each wealthy enough to sue. Since no law suit, or even investigation into the sale occured, we can believe it was a genuine sale. Many have gone on record
Tanks in Georgia, yes... In clear response to Georgian actions against russion. This is what happens when 1) you piss off a sleeping giant, and 2) Republicans in the USA desperately need something to distract world attention, and successfully lobby to encourage russia to act more violenetly than it otherwise might have (Putin himself admitted that on public TV).
first, we should have been designing the replacement for the shuttle the day we approved building the first one, 5-10 years before we launched it. Honestly we were, but those other designs weren't NASA's designs, and corruption in government and a monopolistic stance on space travel by our government prevented any serios investment into that.
Next, when my tool is too expensive to use, or too inefficient, I rent a better one if I can't afford to buy it myself. In this case, "renting" space on Russias rockets is FAR cheaper than getting another tool at the moment. In fact, even if we paid 100% of Russia's costs for the rocket use, it would STILL be cheaper than trying to launch the shuttle again, and each launch gets more expensive and further delays when we'll be self sufficient. We can't BOTH run the shuttle and replace it. We MUST lean on the charity of others in order to again be self sufficient.
Can we trust russia? yes. The cold war is over. Russia and the US are not at odds against each other, we've been mostly partners in peace, working toward larger international goals. Clinton did a ton for our standing with Russia, and the Republicans, through their continual distrust and disrespect, threaten to disolve that. Russia is a great source of Oil, and if we play nice, continue to provide them food, access to technology and business, and treat their people with respect, then we can increase how much oil we get from them and decrease what we get from the middle east. Russia understands this, and also understands what that means in terms of wealth. We'll be trasferring trillions into their econeomy instead of into the middle east. A few rides on a rocket, that we're mostly paying for, gee, seems to be a fair compormise...
The differences between us and Russia, well, they're not the communist giant the used to be, or the "great oppressor". They're oficially defined as a Capitolist Federation. We're a Capitolist Federated Republic, not a democracy. They actually have a very similar structure of lower government, and a similar economy. In fact, they're closer to the governemt of most european countries, but with an elected leader in place of a monarchy. There's still corruption, but we're no saints in that department, and they're overcoming corruption faster since they're still experiencing change and are willing to change their governing laws. Think we'll see a new constituion anytime soon? Not...
2 comments on the Russia/Georgia thing:
1) Russia has been the butt of a long line of their former patriots stabbing them in the back. Sooner of later, the big bear wasn't going to take it any more. No, Georgia's actions were not unusually aggressive, for what Russia has long dealt with, but they were the ones that stepped on the stick and woke the bear, and got eaten becasue of it.
2) Don't believe for a second we didn't have more to do with that invasion than Russia itself did. Putin himself admitted our government pulled many strings and convinced them to press the attack. The US wants worldwide eyes drawn away from it, and wants to delude us, the American people, into believeing there is still a worldwide military threat we have to be prepared for. Sure, they may have acted first, but I think we both encouraged it to continue, and also encouraged other world news to react to is in the way it did.
Our government is far more corrupt than any of us really believe. We're pulling strings and playing dangerous games so that various segments of the monstrocity we created can continue their status quo. The only way to clean up government it to create regulation, oversight, and public open clarity for action. If we can sever the connection between business and politicians, we rid ourselves of the corruption.
Lobyists should only meet in open forum, with every word they speak published, as Obama suggests, and voluntarily will comply with in his own cabinet meeting notes. Donations from bunsinesses to governments need to be stopped, completely. Only individuals should be able to back a candidate, and with a maximum personal donation to boot (businesses don't vote, why should they have influence?) Government open bids should be reviewable, and contestable, by an independent oversight system, with any bids for non-national secret work (as determined by a court or oversight comittee, not by the people requesting it to be built) made public.
Elected officials need to be subject to strict oversight. They voluntarily offered to lead a government branch, and took the people's trust. If that trust is violated, then it weakens government, thus aiding our enemies (indirectly if not directly), and by that reasoning is treason, the only crime explicitly defined in the Constitution of the United States. The punishment for treason is death. Personally, I'd replace this with life imprisonment combined with the seisure by the government of all property of the convicted. I don't care if you had the money before you entered public service or not, it's the risk you take by accepting our trust. Not corrupt? no problem.
Oh, and what we did in Iraq? What Russia is doing hardly compares. 1st Iraq war was pinpoint, direct, and had few civilian casualties. Bush Jr's war? no comparrison. It's an attrocity in human rights, and a poor example of combat, besides the fact it was completely unjustified.
You seem to still think we're fighting the cold war, and also are delusional that we're winning it.
First of all, we don't need to hide the fact that we launch spy satellites, nor do we need a shuttle, let alone our own space station to launch them, they're sent up in ordinary rockets from the ground. Second, anything they don't like, they can very easily shoot down. We already proved this ourselves. Besides, short of terorist cell activity, there's not much to see that we can't already.
Next, we don't need massively expensive orbital missle defense. We have perfectly useful ground based missle defenses. Apparently you have not kept up with the latest publically anounced technology that surpassed the Patriot missle systems, let alone the ones they don't tell you about. The only nuts out there interested in starting mass war via orbital or sub-orbital bomardment are not governments themselves, and don't have the resources to built 1, let alone hundreds of missles, and even those nuts understand that to unleash that kind of fury will lead to the instant and worldwide destruction of their entire nation and people. You nuke us, raze your entire civilization, that's how cold war works... They're interested in spreading fear to convey a message, not getting their message erased from time.
Further, Russia has NO interest in nuking us. We are no threat to them, we need them, and in many ways they need us. (mostly for food, and we'd love access to their oil). They are one of the fastest growing econimies in the world, and have a good base of laws, moral understanding, and good will towards all of the earth, not just their own interests. They are not the mindless communist government of 30 years ago.
We CAN rely on russia, and have been for about 2 decades. I have no fear that they'll keep the space statioon going. Without access to our scientists, and our money, they can't keep it going on their own (cuz if they tried, Europe would bail out of the venture too). Besides, the ISS is about sciene, it has vitually no military value (it's both too limited, and too fragile to be a platform for offence or defence). Even the limited science we get from the ISS isn't really it's purpose, it's not a study of physics, it;s a study of humanity, cooperation, feasability of long term space operation, etc.
In 30-50 years, with continual funding, the ISS will be our base of operations to construct, in orbit, a larger craft containing the modular pieces of a similar, smaller station to orbit the moon. That will be a base point and escape station for a lunar ground based station. On the surface of the moon, we can build a large enough and safe enough living system that we can build, indoors in relative safey, the massive components necessary to make a run at mars, but more likely, we'll use it to build large autonomos craft first. Small shipments on re-usable craft to orbit here, large collective shipments to lunar obrit, small drops to lunar surface, and eventually, 100-150 years from now we're mining on the moon, and manufacturing large scale craft there.
The only way this planet is ever going to move forward, is if we move forward as a whole. International cooperation on massive scale projects like the ISS, global worming, international power systems development, and more provides huge financial incentives for continued cooperation in other ventures, and limits direct hostility between governments and peoples. When you start placing billion dollar losses on an issue if you go to war, wars happen less frequently. International arbitration works except in the most grevious cases, usually with small time dictators who have more money than sense.
There are radicals amoung us, individuals and small groups, operating outside of governments, or under the guize of misled religions, and these people are our only real threat. They will allways oppose government, and will kill people without question. International scale wars do nothing to disuade them or stop them, and typically do noth
Sure, they're just succeptable to static discharge, water, excess heat, beaing sat on in your pocket, falling out of your pocket, being eaten by the dog, being swiped by kids/friends, they won't play in set top boxes just full computers.
On the off hand, that scratchable disk should be copied, and put away somewhere,m and if you scratch the copy, you're only out 0.32 cents.
Superior form factor? OK, tiny is not necessarily a good thing. Think of having a collection of say 150 movies on various, proprietarily DRM'd USB keys. They dont't stack well, have limited space for labeling (tiny text), are easily lost under couches, fall out of pockets, get lost in your luggage, are are susceptible to heat, foul weater, static discharge, and water.
I can't think of much worse of a medium to put a movie on. I could imagine fumbling whole key chains of fobs looking for a movie, breaking the little rings off trying to disconnect one, loosing the caps everywhere (and having dogs, cats, and kids yarking all over after eating a cap), and more.
Since you can't watch the movie without the exact right key in a USB port, even copying them to a hard drive has no real benefit. Even if you could put 3-8 movies on a single thumb drive (assuming you can afford a 16GB stick) you're still talking about juggling dozens of these things. ...and they're a LOT more expensive to make than a blue-ray disk.
Nice post. Lets also stack the Freedom of Information Act nicely on that pile...
Also, where a goverment may be allowed to chage a "reasonble" fee for making copies available to the public, that fee is to cover their costs for making the copy. Others who make copies of their own will (and expense) can not be charged by the government, since the goverbnment is not providing the labor, ink, or paper.
Thanks for the update... I know I had an 8088 based system at one point, or maybe it was an 8086. I also forgot to mention the Amiga and the Adam, mixed somewhere in there back in history. I've been in IT too long... I actually used a card reader in college once!
I live in SC. I know 3 people who have gas heaters, and I'm one of em (in my apartment complex, I'm in the oldest building, and it has gas, the other 26 buildings all have electric).
A lot of older homes around here use gas, but all the new ones are on electric. Part of this is cost of the units, part of this is insurance, and part of it is access to gas lines (highly populated areas have easier access to gas, rural towns do not).
As for gas stoves, I completely agree, gas is THE way to cook. I was a chef in several restaurants when I was in college. However, I've discovered that with proper, quality, cookware, and a quality electric stove (not a cheap ass $400 electric like you find in rental homes, but a high grade $1000 stove), preferably flat top, I can do almost the same as I can on gas. I've also discovered this awesome technology called infra-red cooking. The elements under the grill plate heat hotter and more evenly than I was even capable of cooking with gas. Awesome for searing stakes, or for using as a large griddle plate, and it sits in the counter next to the stove and is vented in its own hood. You'll see a lot of folks on the food network using them. Get one installed if you can!
My gas bill, just in the last year, has seen a 30% increase in the price I pay for the gas for my water heater, which also provides my home heat in the winter as a boiler. Electricity has gone up only 4% in the same time frame.