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I can only agree with the fact that I would have showed up aswell if I actually had gotten any sort of information that this was happening, despite the fact that my workload is of the chart this weekend.
A very possible reason for many is that we live in something that does not look like the bad countries the people see on tv whereas there must not be reason to criticize.
I could by my hand to heart say that we probably have the lowest level on competence on any media in Europe due to the fact that not even they take there work more serious than creating a freaking article series about how good the persecute the family of anybody who's remotley newsworthy or has good enough advice too give in the bedroom. I mean, do any of the international correspondents even write their own articles anymore or have they not just been buying fotage and standardframe from some other newschannel/agerncy?
There's a very good reason why journalist in sweden have the lowest trust of any occupational group! |
I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about how terrible RosettaStone is. I got it as a gift from the in-laws, and I know they got it legitimately. I installed it, and it was ok, but I didn't have the time since I was finishing grad school.
A few OS and hardware upgrades later, I go to install it again since I had time and it would be fun. However their licensing scheme says I can't. I call and talk to the company, give them all the proof I have, but still no. If I don't have a receipt I can't use it. I never had the receipt because it was a gift, and now I have a box of expensive software I can't use.
Getting around their licensing would be trivial, however they rather treat me like crap. |
This is a pretty big assumption.
Similar to a fence or even a lock on a door, DRM exists largely to keep honest people honest.
Right now, the legal battles you see being waged are in an attempt to "hold the lines." Media companies aren't stupid... they are aware that they still have a firm hold on their primary markets... but they need to protect themselves from loosing more ground due to changes in the environment.
If the consumer got their way, the video would be delivered in an open-sourced, high-quality video file. That'd be the ultimate in convenience. And many would indeed buy it...
...but that percentage of people (however large/small) that sit on the edge of inability to do more than the bare minimum may now find it more convenient to copy the file easily vs. paying even the most modest fee for the file themselves.
Whether or not that percentage is negligible to the desired profit margins of the media companies isn't the point... it's that it exists and media companies have legitimate reason to make the decisions they are making. I mean, look at them... they are making bank. They know what they are doing and they happily accept the evil stereotype while they cleanse their souls at the bank. |
i don't even need to read the study to know it is not correct. the answers are too easy, i don't need a fucking study to figure it out. first of all, the people who go out to movies as a night out will not be affected by piracy. secondly, a movie that did not get a dvd screener released will also not be affected by piracy. if i really want to see a movie, im not going to sit at home and watch it on shitty TS or CAM. i'll go to the movies. so this leaves only the movies that do get released on screener. i have seen some big budget movies that this happened to and i am sure there are many who stayed home to watch that instead. it really depends on what kind of movie too. if it's a young teens movie or a movie that are a visual experience like transformers, then piracy can never hurt it because people need to go to theaters to see it. this leaves the movies that piracy really does hurt. most of the screener's i've seen are from indie movies. about 80% of indies are released on screener way too early. |
So you're sure that by "Service" they mean the web interface. What makes you so sure?
(1) How could I (technically) transfer porn and infinging torrents... via a web-interface for the administration of a router? I just don't get it. Seems pretty nigh impossible to me. If it's not possible to watch porn by using the administrative web-interface, why prohibit it?
(2) Since I don't curently have a Linksys router (and after this, sure won't buy one), I can't see the agreement. Could you please cite the binding definition of "Service"?
(3) They reserve the right to monitor my internet-usage? None of that is any of their business. Not even bandwidth used, let alone anything more detailed than that. |
And yes the cloud software is optional, but is required for any sort of advanced configuration/settings access from the looks of it. I've already understood that and I've known about this issue for 20min now. You have a point, it isn't required to use it, but it is to its full potential . I don't like it, but I wouldn't mind simply not using the cloud service, but if I want advanced access that isn't an option. |
Well to be fair this is in fact the 3rd company to realize the low end hacker market.
I love it... hell my dad still runs an old P4 box (I also do have an old P4 box as a server) and it's old as hell. The notion that I could build a competent media server for my Dad out of a small board, some legos and my superhero sysadmin skills, is fucking awesome.
Honestly I thought the raspberri pi a way underpowered. I have numerous pentium 4 boxes sitting in my basement gathering dust and I have considered making a nice little array of them but they would cost more in power than they are worth in cash.
This is fucking awesome. Now I can build a cheap as hell box for my parents out of legos and awesome... they will be able to surf the web via an xbox control mod, on their TV and watch all the high def content that I accumulate as a matter of course. |
nah man, we support our own. we know our own. i personally don't pirate stuff from indie devs, coz the indie community is awesome, so i pay the full price, sometimes even more. but the big conglomerates? i think they can live without 99 cents in revenue. |
For those of you getting a case of the onions: whenever Wall-E is mentioned I always post [this story from Metafilter]( from years ago, about how one girl reacted to the teaser trailer -- and what it led to. |
I read down through most of the comments about this, and I keep seeing this idea that anonymity assures "honesty." In reference to criticism though, I have to wonder one, what is meant by "honesty" here, and two, is this such a good thing?
It seems to me that "honesty" in criticism is often confused/associated with bluntness and negativity. While the truth can be offensive, I would say that it doesn't have to be, nor should it ever be in reference to criticism , especially when I stop to think about the reason for the criticism.
I, a consumer, invest via time or money in a product from someone else, to whom the criticism is addressed. As the consumer I have the right to an opinion about said product and the right to share that opinion in the form of criticism with the producer as well as anyone else who is affected by said product, with the sole purpose of making the product better. Also, the producer has the right to consider or ignore your feedback.
So if a critics true intentions are for the betterment of the product and therefore the greater satisfaction of all of the consumers, then this idea of blunt honesty is not the way to go, that is if the criticism is to actually be considered.
So you have to ask yourself, what about my criticism makes me want to remain anonymous? If you are providing constructive feedback, you should have nothing to worry about.
Also, why would you want to use a fake name? I guarantee you that the only comments serious businesses or online content creators listen to are those that are well thought out, constructive, and overall positive in nature. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time. |
Question for a power utility company. Tell me if I'm wrong about this but... power supply must always be above demand. Demand is always changing, you can relatively predict it but you cannot exactly predict it. This means that since supply always have to be higher, you will be producing more power then you need at all time. Anything produced higher than demand is waste, but you can't just store this waste so it gets released as waste.
Since renewable power like this cannot be 100% predicted, it cannot be relied upon fully to give out it's max output. You can't just "throw more coal" onto the fires per se if demand starts to outweigh supply. Especially if they can't predict what the stadium will be needing, either. So now you get the stadium adding extra power to the system at irregular intervals, since it's dependent on the stadiums demand and weather factors.
My question is how much does this actually help the system as a whole? Adding power to the system sounds good and we can sleep better about it, but if it's not being utilized it's essentially wasted (because it cannot be stored). How does a power company predict it's use? I'm assuming that if their peak power output is, for example, 500kw, you can't just add 500kw less of coal into your furnaces? |
Nice post, I'm not overly familiar with Composting toilets, but I will look into them in the future.
One idea I've been kicking around for a while, is using a non-aqueous system in place of water to deal with human excreta. Functionally it would be almost identical, you still use a toilet, flush and it goes merrily on its way, the only difference being the fluid you use to transport the waste is not water. Personally I think a light oil, or maybe a ketone-lipid solution would be novel, for the sake of discussion call it 50% Acetone 50% random unsaturated fatty acids; The solution would dissolve most compounds, not waste/require water, and would kill most organisms instantly by the osmotic imbalance I think. Granted testing is required and you would have to deal with acetone evaporation, but it seems to me, that it would ideal to have sterile fecal matter to deal with, rather than microbe rich in the event you had a leak of the sewage out into the environment. The specific composition of the fluid would be dictated by cost and efficiency but again it was just a thought, that to my knowledge no one has examined. |
Social pressure to donate
You could probably get more people to donate to stuff like cancer research if you could display a person's One Today profile points:
>Your One Today profile also includes information based on your usage of One Today, such as which projects you've donated to.
Being able to scan someone to view their points might create social pressure to donate to good causes.
Karma and points systems can affect motivation, and may be the sole source of motivation for some people to do something charitable.
Combine competition with cooperation
People by nature are very status-conscious, self-interested, and competitive. Either you launch a system that allows people to satisfy their ego by spending money on the purchasing charity points, or you let people continue to flaunt their wealth through expensive cloths, cars, jewelry, paintings etc.. Vanity isn’t going away. |
A lot of 3d printers out there are open-source hardware and don't technically require you to buy any components. (Well, not buy any pre-made components, you can shamble it together yourself out of simple off-the-shelf components.) |
i'm just going to point out that manufacturing of ANY kind of firearm without a permit is a federal offense and under at least the us patriot act without an ATF permit, so even if you have a cnc mill. ya might wanna hold off on makin those guns kids
p.s. it's late and I'm pretty mortified at my grammar and punctuation, but not enough to go back to fix it |
No, it's orthogonal to what you should do. The direction a stock is trending right now is essentially meaningless, so basing a decision on that alone is a glorified coinflip, no matter which way you line them up. What you really want to buy/sell on is your prediction of the future: if the stock is about to go down, you sell; if it's about to go up, you buy.
Why do I say that the current trend alone is meaningless? Because there are at least three equally-valid meanings for a simple trend. The trend can just be starting, it can be in full swing, or it can be ending. If it's starting or continuing, you want to take the naive solution (sell for a downard trend), and if it's ending, you want the opposite. Figuring out which applies, however, means predicting the future. And it's made more complicated when you add in a delay before the order is completed and/or brokerage fees.
In coloquial use, however, "is dropping" implies a trend in full swing, not one that's ending (compare "has dropped"). The theoretical best move, thus, is to sell now, then rebuy as the price bottoms out. Buying during the trend means you're spending more than you need to and losing value on anything you already had. Which could be really unfortunate if the price never does recover to present levels. |
This is why 3D printing is going to change the world
I notice you (intentionally?) did not say for the better. You imply it could be worse. It will be interesting to watch it play out. Take the 3D gun issue. Everyone seems gung-ho about "Yay! Screw government control!" Fine. But it is quite possible it could lead to an increase in violence, death, and fear, including the family and friends of people commenting here with glee about screwing the government.
There are two sides to government control. Democratic government is our collective (public) servant but we give it authority over ourselves as individuals, and we bind ourselves to this tradeoff to achieve a free society. The classic example is the right to swing your arms ends at somebody else's face. So we all agree to limit our right to arm-swinging and we enforce this by electing a government to write down that rule and enforce it with force. Take away that solution and you now get more swinging arms contacting more faces, including yours. You are net less free.
So will this "change the world" be for better or worse? I'm not sure. On the one hand it is very clear to me that democratic government is the reason we've been so prosperous and relatively safe in the Western World because it is a superrational
On the other hand, increased information can, in principle, help to counteract the Prisoner's Dilemma. If we were all omniscient, we could know who would cooperate or defect and act accordingly, including all being superrational and impose the same solutions (enforced restrictions) that democratic government offers but on ourselves. But we are not omniscient and not all superrational, and it only takes one to start the race to the bottom.
I suspect we'll see and arms race of information vs misinformation. Ultimately, what I see surviving out the other end is still democratic government but the expanded use of transparent information to keep that government in check. We will use that government to impose restrictions on misinformation and public uses of it to eliminate the "might makes right" scenario (where "might" here would be in the exploitation of misinformation to take advantage of others). I suspect this will happen because this is the mathematical optimal solution so eventually competing societies (either geographically or temporally) will tend towards societies with these restrictions as those ones will prosper more in the competition. |
Didn't downvote. I own and shoot and live in rural NEK VT. I think linking to the torrent is wise and I support it.
Having said all that, the right for individuals to own is not as cut and dried as that and you must be aware it isn't that cut and dried. The argument doesn't become settled because you said it is.
It's very odd to me that strict constructionists, who demand literal interpretation of, and strict adherence to, enthusiastically know nothing of the modern war on drugs being accomplished through a flat-out comical interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Wickard v. Filburn, Raich v. Ashcroft)
In short, because growing weed on your own property means you don't have to buy it on the black market, you have an effect on the interstate commerce of weed and therefore fall under the purview of Congress and their duty to regulate interstate commerce, a position which could be used to justify Federal involvement in anything at all. A position so stupid, SCoTUS Scalia once quipped that he "used to laugh at Wickard v. Filburn."
Until he used it as the reason for voting against Angela Raich.
And a review of your comment history, despite being chock full o Constitution subject matter and the limits of federal power, reveals that decision hadn't caused you much distress. |
A six hour road trip equates to a 2 hour flight
No, it does not. Not even close. For example, flying from Sacramento to Seattle is an hour and forty-five minute flight. Unless you were motoring at 123 mph without stops, you would not cover the same distance. In fact, in this scenario, obeying the posted speed limit of 65, it would take you 11 hours 20 minutes to reach Seattle. |
I was curious so I did some research and math.
Tesla claims at highway speed (65mph), 70 degrees F ambient temp and the A/C off that the Model S will get 255 miles of range. Let's put a little buffer in so that you don't end up pushing the car into a charging station and call it 240 miles. [Tesla FAQ](
Google maps puts the fastest NY to LA route at 2,790 miles [Google Maps](
So some quick division tells us you'll need right about 11 stations minimum to make the trip. I suspect this number should be closer to 15-20 for safety margin. But we'll work with 12 just for fun. According to [Fortune]( says they're building 20 this summer
If you can maintain an average of 65mph the whole way (which is next to impossible, especially when we consider that city sections and the higher speeds needed to make up for them will hurt our efficiency) it would take approximately 42 hours of driving to make the trip. Drop our average speed to 55 for a little realism and we get a little over 50 hours.
Charging times are a little vague, but it looks like 30 minutes of charging time will get you 200 miles, so we'll call it 45 minutes to get the 250 our theoretical Tesla is capable of. So, 12 charges takes around 9 hours, bringing our total travel time to just shy of 60 hours. Assuming you use charging time to eat/sleep/evacuate.
Mildly interesting side note, you would save around $250.00 versus driving a car that gets 40mpg. Although the fact that a Tesla runs the better part of $100K negates this a little bit. |
What I took away from this
BMW has created an electric car that still relies on on the old model of having rapid charging stations for any real range.
They exchanged the added range, weight and cost of large batteries for performance numbers and a lower price point.
The cars appeal is for folks that already drive (non-tesla) electric cars, but have the money to afford the refinement of BMW.
There's a divide forming in the electric car market.
Drivers who want to drive their electric cars like normal cars with the range of a gasoline engine
Drivers who make short trips around town
Right now Tesla's one of the few, (if the only) electric car makers doing the former. Fisker tried and failed. Ideally once the charging infrastructure and charging speed is improved, the devide will disappear, but we've been saying this for close to a decade |
but carriers have since upped the prices of service to compensate having originally given you a "discount". In fact, if you wanted to buy it off contract (which is more than $599) and you're with AT&T or Verizon, you'd still be paying the same rate as those who were given a "discount". |
This article reads as an attack piece/opinion article more so than any type of car review. It's obvious that the writter has a bias towards the Tesla and essentially, "fuck any other electric car that can't come close".
The main tone of this article is the writer being upset over BMW's perception of being another "apologist" entry into the EV arena. Personally, I disagree with the authors point of view.
Where Tesla has a very specific audience (wealthy, early adopters of technology), BMW is aiming to bring EV's to the general public in a way that will make people comfortable with the technology.
The i3 has less than half the mileage of the Tesla. Of course, it's also half the cost.
BMW is offering a gas engine? Of course. Not everyone lives off the blessed routes by Tesla that has "high speed" (still much longer than a traditional fill-up) chargers, so for people who live in more rural areas, this gives them the option to still maintain high gas mileage while not running the risk of being stranded.
A likewise article I would expect in the same tone towards Tesla would have been that Telsa took the approach of, "Fuck you it's an Electric Car. It's going to be expensive and you're going to have to adjust your driving routes/style. Don't like it? Get something else."
Obviously smarter marketing people than the author of this article at BMW have done the research on how they'll best be able to move units of this car and what options should be required/optional. If anything, I expect great things since the previous generation EV options (Volt/Leaf) entered the market with little to no previous market data to make their decisions from.
I'm tired of this culture we live in where people feel there's only ONE CHOICE to be made and it's the choice THEY feel is best. Don't just shit all over companies who offer alternatives to what you think EVERYONE should own.
To each their own. Some people love the Leaf because it works for them, others drive a Volt. Some people feel that any form of EV just isn't for them, and that's their choice to make as well. |
The BMW i3 is not supposed to compete with the Tesla Model S. Comparing them because they are both electric is like comparing a smart car to a toyota camry because they both have gas engines.
The i3 is an urban mobility car. It's not designed for road trips. It's not designed to hold lots of cargo. It's designed to help you commute from one end of town to the other- basically a street legal golf cart. The US still doesn't quite grasp the concept of this type of car because we take road trips rather than high speed trains and as a result need a car that can pull double duty as a commuter and a comfortable long distance traveler. |
What a useless interview. The two cars are in a completely different price range. Add on top of that that you're paying quite a bit for the BMW logo, and the price difference becomes even more obvious. |
I don't think any conclusions can be drawn until both cars are 5 years old. Residual value will decide whether tesla become a respected brand
Edit: it seems difficult to get an unbiased opinion on the web on this matter. What worries me is that the battery wont last. Im not clued up on the tech but its taken a very long time for the car industry to get to the level of reliability it has. |
Yes the BMW "only" has a range of 160km.
That's a great range. Roughly 100 miles. My car's max range is like 200 miles and I fill up once a week or so. Acceleration is good as well. Its a nice little electric car, agreed. Maybe a more stylish version of the Leaf.
Still less attractive than the Volt, but a much better price than the Tesla. Also the Volt doesn't have the douchebag BMW image associated with it and it comes with the gas motor that's optional in the BMW. |
This might be long. Here are my two cents:
A lot of the pro (or at least not-anti) BMW i3 comments on this thread are making a lot of comparisons to the Tesla Model S and how "of course" a $40k car can't compete with an $80k. I'm going to make the argument that you can compare the BMW i3 to the Tesla and how the i3 is a piece of shit that's doomed to fail (and it breaks my heart because I love EVs and BMW).
I'll organize my statements into 3 main categories:
Market (what people think about when buying cars, and how EVs are unique)
Performance (both in traditional speed, but also performance in design and some other practical areas like features, range, etc)
Cost
Market
A common misconception with electric cars is that both their cost and usability should be compared to comparable ICE vehicles. This is a really poor way of both discussing EVs and deciding to purchase or lease an EV. A well-equipped Nissan Leaf is still a $35k car, regardless of incentives. The only reason why it's priced so high is because Nissan is assuming buyers/lessees will take that $7500 or $10000 into consideration when doing the math for affordability. So, the Leaf is not meant to compete with a $35k car like a Mercedes C class or BMW 3 series (lower end models of course). Nissan is letting the government front the cost/risk of EV tech while they get their shit together and innovate to make EVs viable. In the same way, the i3 can't compete in the $45k-$50k car segment either. Even up against BMWs own 335i (similarly priced), the i3 is a joke of a car. It's uglier, slower, limited in range, and untested. If you drive a 335i, and are brand loyal, the i3 is still an extremely risky investment. So, then, what niche/market does the i3 fill? In terms of affordability, there are literally every other EV on the market with the exception of the Model S that is cheaper. If someone is going to invest in EV, and they can't afford a high-end BMW 3 series sedan, they are going to opt for the leaf, focus EV, (god forbid) Mitsubishi, etc...and maybe even a Volt. In my experience, the average early EV adopter is in their late 20s-early late 40s, tech-conscious, economical, not frivolous, and middle-income (40-60k, single). In my experience, the average $45k-$50k BMW driver is late 20s-early 40s, tech-conscious, has money to burn, frivolous, and middle-to upper-middle income (60-120k, single). If you have the first type of person who's driving a $25k prius, sees the new, cool EV come out, you'll see them trading in their prius or second car to be an early adopter. What will you see the second group doing? I highly doubt they will be ditching their 300 hp Bimmer for an 80 mile range Leaf or Focus. Maybe add it as a second/third car if they really feel like it, but I doubt there were many trade-ins. So, my argument is, what type of person is going to purchase a $43.7k? (and it's probably going to be more like $50k when equipped with options...$43,700 start price...BMW options...yeah, okay, $50k, maybe $48k. Mega/Giga/Tera? Not much information is out, but with the exception of the auto-parking, the trim levels sound like the Leaf/Focus) It's going to be someone who is interested in the BMW brand, already has 2 cars, and has a lot of disposable income (sounds kind of like a Tesla driver to me). If I'm not in that segment, the pros of the i3 verses what's out there already can definitely not warrant the 10-25k increase in price. So, what niche and market is the i3 really going to fill? I personally don't think there is one.
Performance
The i3 is no doubt a high-tech, interesting EV vehicle. It has a lot of cool features, looks okay, utilizes lightweight and green materials, and has a battery. The problem is that the i3 goes the same range as EVs that cost in that aforementioned $10-20k less range and BMWs main argument for performance is its blistering fast 7.2 second 0-60 acceleration. When I was watching the keynote yesterday, I almost shot chocolate milk out of my nose when they started talking about "Ultimate Driving Machine". 7.2 seconds to 60? For 2014 standards, this is pathetically slow, unless you're racing a Leaf (lol). Point is, nobody who can afford $45-50k on a car is going to be impressed by a 7.2 second 0-60 time. Most people who can afford $45-50k for a car have already driven 335i's, Nissan 370zs, etc etc. The i3's acceleration performance sucks compared to ICE cars, and that's the problem. BMW is making excuses to make a shitty electric car when there are already plenty of shitty electric cars. Everything I've read about the i3 in terms of specs (for example the 7.2kw onboard charger) is basically on par with an optioned-out Leaf.
Cost
This is where I'm going to wrap up. A nicely optioned i3 is surely going to cost in the high $40k range, I would put my money on $49k when all is said and done. This is almost $15k more than a nicely optioned Leaf SV and even more than the more budget oriented models. The i3 performance is better, but barely better. With the range extender, you have a glorified Volt. The pricing segment that BMW is tackling here is where I'm baffled. Let's talk some math here. As I previously stated, the average person can't afford a $45-50k car, regardless of ICE or EV. When you can afford a frivolous purchase such as a $45-50k car, you are entering a realm of personal finance that is much much much different than what the average Altima/Prius drive is in. That means that the difference between a $50k car and $80k car either in cash purchase or financed for someone who can actually afford the $50k option, is much less burdensome than the difference between a $13k car and a $21k car who can actually afford a $13k car. (I say "can actually afford" in these examples because there are most definitely people who buy $13k and $50k cars who simply can't afford it, and I don't care about them in my analogy) For the sake of simplifying the math, for all calculations, assume a decent interest rate of 3%, 0 down (just to keep the numbers round) and a 4 year finance term, as well as a $10k incentive (for the two EVs in this example) for these hypothetical car drivers living in California. The $50k i3 would come in at ~$900 a month and the $80k Tesla would come in at about ~$1550 a month. That's a $650 difference, a substantial amount to most of us Reddit peons, but...it isn't that much for someone who can afford a $50k car in the first place. Hold that thought. Now, the $13k car, let's say...Nissan Versa would come in at $290 a month. The $21k car, let's say...Nissan Altima would come in at $465 a month. That's a $175 difference. Hey, that's not that much! Actually, it is. It's a shitload for someone who can only afford $290 a month for an economical car to get to and from their low paying job. Let's do some more math. Remember that guy who could afford a $50k i3 in the first place? Let's say he makes $120k a year and takes home $7k a month. After rent, utilities, savings, etc., he's down to $4000 a month. $900 for a car is about 23% of what he's got left. $1550 is about 39%. Let's look at someone in the market for a low-end eco car. This driver in the segment of economical vehicle is probably in the $30k a year range for salary. That's about $1900 take home a month. Even if they live in a cheap area, after rent and utilities, savings, etc, $900 could be left. The Versa would require about 32% of what he's got left and the Altima would require about 52% of his leftover income. The net % increase between the Versa and Altima is the same as the i3 versus Tesla Model S, but the ability to spend more disposable income on shit like EVs is easier for someone who can even break into the higher than $40k car market (this is a special place as people who can actually afford it are stretching less of their disposable income to get what they want. It's not linear). Yeah, all of this is speculation, but based off of real markets and concepts. People who make little tend to stretch more when budgeting for things like cars and people who make enough to not care that much (and can rationalize a $50k car purchase) are affected less by the same proportional increase in expense as the comparative lower-income person. Here's the conclusion: The i3 does not have an obvious market it will appeal to based off of its performance as an EV/car and it's cost. There are almost equal options for performance in the EV car segment (Leaf/Focus) that cost far less, and there is a car that costs significantly more, but is still within easy reach for many people who will be able to afford the i3 in the first place (Model S). The Tesla performs like a $70k car, and has 3 times the range of anything else out there in the mainstream. |
It's interesting how things are changing, but the author is charmingly naive about how modern aircraft get developed and purchased by foreign countries.
It's nothing like spending a day wandering car lots choosing the best car for cheapest - unless you're buying late in a program or used, you have to commit to an order years in advance, wait for the host nation to build the first few and work out the bugs, wait further years for your planes, and the entire time the project might go completely off the rails and end up massively late/overbudget/cancelled ( cough F-35). Or your own situation changes in the meantime - you get bad economic problems and can't afford the order anymore, or you pull an Iran (a place that was getting F-14s delivered and within a year had become an enemy state).
On top of that, there's a huge amount of politics involving which restricted technologies Country A will sell Country B (the US kicked even close ally Japan in the face , behind-the-scenes horse-trading deals that make one plane cheaper than another ("if you also give us an equipment contract with your national telecom company, we'll cut you a deal if you buy our fighters"), and even which manufacturer [bribes the right people]( |
Let's be honest, there are definitely people that will pay for things they like but there are also a lot of people that will take for free with no intention of paying for it ever.
Lets be honest, most people will pay for things if you offer them at a reasonable price how they would like it. You could google "Kevin Spacey on netflix" if you want to hear it from someone in the industry of producing content.
"we have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn. Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price — and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it." Kevin Spacey
DRM has nothing to do with piracy, if you think so you are ignorant, it has everything to do with content delivery. I purchase media I enjoy after I pirate it. I never open it up. I pirate it so I can have unfettered access to the data, which I have now payed for. This allows me to store it in a NAS and stream it to a HTPC/device. DRM doesn't allow that to happen. Look at CCI copy once. ruined my DVR system as every single channel was labeled copy-once and I couldnt stream it from my DVRPC to any of my HTPC even though I had payed for the content.
So I pirated the shows, because it was a superior service it had nothing to do with the price, this went on for about two years. As I easily can afford the ripoff that is cable. I have as of two months ago cut cable as it provides me with no value, in fact paying for content legally has done nothing but provide an inferior service to me. I would gladly pay for their content if they would allow me to consume how I wanted, and not in their asinine ways. |
The final nail in the coffin!
To make sure any software gets completely obliterated from history, let Microsoft buy it.
Not so |
Years ago, I was working through college at a pizza joint. One day we got a new assistant manager, some broad who used to run a group of stores. First impression? She decided the oven should "spin the other way" for no reason other than to put her stamp on procedure. A few days of that chicanery and she'd wised up, but I can 'see' the footprint of that kind of mentality in the sequels & iterations of my favorite media. |
This wont load on my phone. |
LM7805 can regulate down from as high as 35V but I can't think of any other common power sources in this range other than batteries or vehicle 12V.
More importantly, that LM7805 is gonna burn and either just break or catch something on fire. There's clearly not enough heat sinking to deal with the 15W power dissipation at 30V/500mA and I'm not even sure it will safely handle car charging at 12V/500mA. If you follow the suggestions in the comments to fool your phone into enabling high current charging, then this thing will blow for sure. |
If it were a private system, then I could coordinate with whatever company I want, and if they leave my trash barrels rolling in the streets, I can leave and go to another company, something I can't do today.
No, you couldn't, because of physics.
It's simply not cost-effective to have multiple garbage collectors following the same routes, due to fuel, cargo, and staff costs. Even if the trash bins were literally teleporters that teleported the trash away there would still be the higher initial distribution costs handing out the bins. What would happen is that either one company would stick to limited routes, make much more money, and drive out the competitors that way or the garbage companies would collude (more likely) to split the market. Either way you're left with no competition, a "de facto" monopoly. |
It's simply not cost-effective to have multiple garbage collectors following the same routes, due to fuel, cargo, and staff costs.
Completely false. It works for mail delivery, septic trucks, fuel trucks, landscaping, pretty much any other system that the Government hasn't taken over. On top of that, my town already has multiple vehicles following the same route, one for trash and one for recycling.
>What would happen is that either one company would stick to limited routes, make much more money, and drive out the competitors that way or the garbage companies would collude (more likely) to split the market
And then all it takes is one company to break the collusion.
> |
So... I realize you're just using the trash thing as an example, but I actually have experience in that area, and... they're not at all the same. I'm not trying to get into an argument, but I just thought I'd share my personal experience on the differences between privately and publicly owned trash collection.
First, no offense intended, but your comment about it being impossible to avoid a de facto monopoly in trash collection is wrong. If such a system exists anywhere, then it is not impossible, and such a system exists in my hometown. The competition among my uncle's company (who I worked for in the summers) and rival services was incredibly fierce, and the customers benefited from it.
Basically, we worked to make the customers happy, because if we didn't, we knew they would leave. And they did occasionally. It wasn't uncommon for people to switch between one company and the other. For starters everyone did their best to set competitive prices. Out on the routes, we did our best to provide great service. If an animal had ripped a bag open overnight, we'd pick up the loose bits of trash laying around. Even if there were just loose bits of trash with no evidence of animal involvement (i.e. people just lazily threw loose trash next to their bin/bags), we'd still pick it up. If someone called and said we'd missed their pickup (even if we were 100% certain that they actually didn't have their trash out when we first went by and weren't contractually obligated to pick it up) we'd go back and pick it up, because keeping them happy meant keeping a customer.
Now that I live in a place with public trash pickup, the service is noticeably poorer. I know how hard the job is, so I try to keep by trash bags tidy and easy to pickup, but sometimes things happen. I live on a street with a lot of pedestrian traffic. When I leave in the morning, I'll sometimes notice trash that pedestrians have just thrown on the ground next to my bags. When I get home, the bags are gone, but the trash is still laying there, and I have to pick it up and bag it myself. On several occasions, I've come home to find that they missed my pickup or only took part of it. I'll call their service number and make a report, but no one even answers the phone (just voicemail), no one returns my calls, and no one comes back to make the pick up. I have to haul my stinky trash back inside and store it for another week. And the price isn't really that much lower either.
I can't say for certain why the public collection doesn't provide better service, but the simplest answer would seem to be that they just don't have any reason to. It's not like they can loose my business.
You seem to be saying "it's impossible because... physics". Though I haven't done the math, I understand why a city would want to run its own service, and I get how only having a single service would be the most efficient (e.g. not doubling up routes, staff, etc.). On the other hand, my uncle does the exact thing that you're saying is physically impossible and making very good money doing it. I'm not saying I agree with Cputerace on the cable thing, but your analogy and description of the practicality of private trash collection services just doesn't quite fit the real world. |
Mail delivery in the USA is a monopoly (the US Postal Service).
And even with a monopoly on letter carrying, UPS and FedEx are still sending trucks across those same routes just to deliver packages. My point stands.
>Fuel delivery is often a de-facto monopoly due to, again, the oil companies splitting the market.
There are 10+ different oil companies delivering fuel oil to houses just in my town.
>Which supports my point, that there is a "most efficient" route, because there obviously is.
No, your point was that multiple people running the same route would be inefficient (multiple trash pickup companies). I have proven to you that this is not true due to multiple companies already running the same route at the same time.
>Which would probably go out of business long term due to the previous factors.
the previous factors which already exist and work in every market out there.
>The more you deviate from the route the more fuel you use and the greater your costs are vs a business that sticks to the optimal routes.
Which is a completely different statement from "Government has to do it because it is not economical for multiple private companies to work the same routes", which is what you initially said.
>Another example is airlines.
yes
>This is the same reason the airlines fly similar routes.
yes
>Multiple airlines shouldn't exist for this reason.
NO. you don't get it. Multiple airlines exist so that there is constant downward pressure on prices. If there was no competition, then the company could charge whatever it wanted for the tickets, and milk it as much as possible. This is economics 101, I don't understand why you don't get that.
>That's why commercial carriers keep going bankrupt, the model is fundamentally inefficient.
No, they go bankrupt because that is part of how the free market regulates poor performing companies out of existence. If we had a single subsidized entity, it would not have to worry about going out of business because it would just ask for more money from the Government.
>"Competition" isn't the be-all, end-all of capitalism.
It is the single lynchpin that causes it to work. The fact that you don't understand this explains why you don't understand capitalism, and hence are afraid of it. |
Smoking is legal in the United States. That doesn't mean you can smoke in every restaurant.
No, but as a counter analogy, in the UK there is a law which means that all Bars and restaurants must serve tap water free of charge, meaning it is an obligation for them to do so. It isn't a choice that a business has to make, it is a right that they cannot deny to a customer or they break the law. You could also reverse that smoking argument to say that in certain areas of the US where smoking in restaurants is illegal, it is because the other customers have a right to not have to breath second hand smoke whilst inside the restaurant, simply saying use another restaurant (Or another cloud service) to non-smokers wouldn't be an option for the business in question, they have to faciliate that customer right.
Now my other post was phrased more as a question; I am curious as to whether the fair use policies in Europe are obligations which affect companies like Dropbox, or not. I guess the fair use policies probably aren't quite so robust, they certainly aren't here in the UK, but if there is another country which requires this (I don't think there is, i'm talking hypothetically here), I can't see how Dropbox can get around it. |
Piracy is stealing for a profit.
In that case, Kim Dotcom was pretty pro-piracy when he was raking in millions from ads on Megavideo. Mansions don't build themselves.
I think file sharing should be legal. I think third parties making bank serving ads for content they don't have the rights to should remain illegal.
The worst example in recent memory was Ninjavideo. The proprietor had a habit of yelling loudly about how "information should be free", but actually ended up making half a million bucks from a site that was mostly organized by anonymous volunteers and uploaders, showing copyrighted content. |
I know, but that would make it very easy to defeat their copyright checking.
Most hashing algorithms will change half the hash if just one bit of the file is changed. Changing a single bit in the file header would completely defeat their checks.
If Dropbox only checks a small range of data within files, their copyright checks would be largely immune to small changes. It could identify files with completely different headers, or even random 1 bit changes throughout the files.
Unless a bit in that small, checked range were changed, the file would still be identified as an infringing file. |
If you know what “file hashing against a blacklist” means, feel free to skip the rest of this post.
Can we get tech writers everywhere to include an easy |
boradband's definition is tied to agreements tied to money granted to cableco's regarding connectivity.
Historically, the money granted to them, (billions of dollars), was to ensure all of the US had access to 'broadband' speeds, and to get out of actually having to do anything or spend money, the cableco's lobbied to get broadband defined as '256 kbs' down from '10 mbs', (Taking in mind this was the late 90's). The current speed, btw, is more complex than a flat '4mbs', it's a real headache.
Redefining broadband again would force companies to adhere to what was actually meant by existing agreements. The redefining would normally be grounds for a lawsuit about corrupting the contract and dismissing obligations, but since it would just be returning to the definition at the time of the agreements that argument would fall rather flat. |
Yes, but that is beside the point. Hydrogen is not an energy resource that occurs naturally on Earth. Petroleum and other fossil fuels you can just find in the ground if you look in the right spot.
To obtain hydrogen for use as a fuel, you have to create it by expending more energy than you get out of it later. This energy you expend has to come from a power plant somewhere, so in the end it would currently be fueled by coal, petroleum and nuclear fission. You can see how it doesn't really solve the issue when you just move the emissions from millions of small engines to thousands of big power plants. Widespread use of hydrogen fuel could potentially help reduce our total emissions and so it's still a very interesting avenue of research, but it's no cure.
You'd have to first solve the bigger clean energy problem (be it through nuclear fusion, solar power, wind power, or whatever we come up with) before hydrogen fuel would really solve our emission issues. |
Tesla couldn't care less about the electric car technology. The real money is in the batteries... hence the reason they are investing in a multi-billion dollar battery factory and opened up their electric car/charger patents... if everybody adapts their (now free) technology, then they will absolutely dominate the battery market. |
Yeah, there's no accounting for taste, so it's really hard to say objectively that the Tesla's interior is better or worse than some other car's, but I agree with you there. To me, the Tesla's interior is easily its weakest point. It doesn't look like it's cheaply made or anything, and I'm sure it's functional, but aesthetically it's definitely a disappointment. Why are there weird-ass triangles on both sides of the center touch screen? What's up with the stretched out hexagonal shape around the driver display? And there is something very weird and wrong about the lines on the door panel: the top part (visible just below the side mirror in your picture) tapers to become too thin as you get closer to the front of the car. It should curve down a bit to cooperate with some of the other lines. It looks like a picture frame that isn't level.
The really odd thing about the Tesla's interior is the contrast with the exterior. The exterior is really quite nice. I wouldn't give it a 10 out of 10, but I really do like the lines of the car. It's not super distinctive, but it is well-proportioned with curves that are pretty close just right, and it doesn't seem to have a bad angle. That's way more than you can say for most cars, even some pretty expensive ones. It's not Porsche or Ferrari level of design, but it is way, way better than expected. |
My landlady has AT&T Uverse and for about 6 months, we had the WORST internet. It was getting dropped left and right and I'd have to call them up on a nightly basis for them to refresh the connection. I called so much that I believe their tech support put my number on some "blacklist", so whenever I called up I'd get some asshole who would say that it's a virus on my computer and that I need to pay a $50 fee for them to come and diagnose it for me. Out of frustration, I wound up purchasing an Asus RT-N66U and I have not had an issue since. On a side note, the technician guy was pretty cool. I helped him out a little and when he saw the crappy Netgear b/g adapter I had in my desktop, he gave me a brand new Dlink b/g/n adapter :D |
Ok, here's my experience if anyone cares. Tried calling Comcast to disable the Wifi Hotspot. Was on the phone 20+ minutes, was transferred 4 times and finally said eff this and hung up. After a year of having them, I finally logged in online. This wasn't easy as the tech who installed me and wrote the login id and password he created at the time of setup had, I sh*t you not, the handwriting of a 1st grader and I had to try several times to guess what he intended when he wrote it. Finally managed to get logged in and after several failed attempts, I managed to switch the Wifi off. This was thanks to the instructions provided by a fellow Redditor in a post I managed to find. |
Having your own router does nothing. They purposely send you a modem that has a router/wireless everything with it, and that's what has the xfinity hotspot bullshit. All I wanted was a replacement modem, and they sent that instead. I cancelled my shit, because they couldn't turn it off, so fuck that bullshit. Nothing felt so good as not paying comcast a dime anymore. Century Link is awesome, but even tmobiles unlimited data plan tethered to my PC and network was a lot better (and much cheaper). |
Road runner (the name of TWC in my area) does this as well, my internet kept dropping off and was obscenely slow and they tried to blame my router. My fix for this is to rent a modem for 1 month and as soon as I have their modem setup and have problems with it I schedule a service call. Took 4 service calls last time before they finally got all the issues on the line cleaned up, then returned their modem and plugged mine back in and re-provisioned. Also on the note of modem shopping, be careful about which one you get based on what they allow, also they will lie to you about whether a modem is supported on road runner, I've called and tried to provision a sb5101 which is supported for my plan level and the first guy tried to tell me "this modem type isn't supported anymore". I proceeded to tell him I've been using it for 3 years and just had it activated a month ago just fine and he proceeded to put me through to the modem provisioning department who actually knows what they're talking about. Basically just push to be transferred as fast as possible because the general tech support guy is probably gonna waste your time. |
Hijacking the top comment to reiterate what I've said every time I've seen this posted:
I strongly disagree with the reasoning behind a la carte pricing, and I believe it'll lead to worse quality in television in the years to come. There's no perfect solution to the problem that is cable television right now, but this is throwing water on a grease fire.
I believe bundling is still the best route and to prove so, I have a question for everyone here: If this bill had introduced ten years ago, how many of you would've chosen AMC?
Don't raise your hand, you fucking liar, no you wouldn't have. Ten years ago AMC was known solely for replaying old movies filled with commercials. No Mad Men, No Walking Dead, No Breaking Bad. It was a mediocre second-tier channel at best.
"Ok sure, but I totally would've bought that channel when those shows came on!" That's the problem, those shows would never have made it on television in the first place. Had this bill been introduced ten years ago, there's a fair shot AMC would've gone out of business like many other channels. Television programming is built on a deficit-financing model, which means that the studio basically loses a lot of money to produce a show and will only make it back when that show goes into syndication (around Season 5). You can get a studio to invest in it, but it has to air on a network for those five seasons to get to syndication. And that network has to get advertisers to want to buy commercials on that show, which means it has to have a built-in audience and the money to build a marketing campaign. Oh, and that network has to EXIST. Let's not forget that part.
AMC has certainly shifted the paradigm in basic cable programming. One could argue that FX did it first, but I doubt many of you would've chosen them before The Shield/Sons of Anarchy/The League/etc. aired. A&E is now getting into the game with "Bates Motel", but I don't see a bunch of subreddits dedicated to their "Biography" episodes. Who knows who the next major cable player will be? Bravo, Cinemax, Discovery, History, MTV, Starz, Sundance are all getting into the scripted world (some have been for a couple years now). Could one of them create the next "Breaking Bad"? Absolutely. But could they do it if no subscribes to their network first? Doubtful.
For those of you saying that if AMC had gone under/not existed, Breaking Bad would've just appeared on another network, you couldn't have picked a worse example to use to make your argument. Look at this article: [Bleak, Brutal, Brilliant 'Breaking Bad': Inside the Smash Hit That Almost Never Got Made] ( . Breaking Bad was consistently the little-show-that-could. It was already passed over by HBO, TNT, Showtime, and FX before AMC reticently took it on. You're telling me that fewer networks in existence would've helped this show out? Not to mention that BB was almost cancelled... on AMC! To use a whole lot of hyperbole, that's like getting fired from an unpaid internship. You have far lower standards and people really want you to succeed. There have been some great points against my argument, but Breaking Bad isn't one of them.
Do I have a perfect solution for you? No. But then again, I don't have to stick a dick in my mouth just to know I don't want it in my ass, either. |
Well it would never happen in America because in a sense it is a tax. Basically everyone that owns a TV has to pay a small fee to the BBC for the right to pick up channels on the airwaves. They actually haw trucks that drive around looking for signals from houses that have not paid so they can collect.
I know that sounds terrible, but it is a small fee, less that £100 per year I believe. The ability to not have to rely on advertisers gives the BBC tremendous freedom. They make sure to not only entertain, but to educate and inform as well. This is why the BBC produces so many great documentaries along with their quality television shows. Now they are a government agency so there is always a fear of censorship, but it's 2014 you can't keep information away from the people anymore so it shouldn't be of great concern. Oh one last thing, the only commercials run in between programming not during breaks. |
In Google's case, lots and lots of money - they have done it since pretty much the beginning. Their entire business is built around it.
In Apple's case, well, believe what you will, but Cook says that Apple's philosophy is "We don't need it, we don't want it. You are not our product", and "Our view is, when we design a new service, we try not to collect data." (both from the Charlie Rose interview), the latter generally being accepted to mean that they only collect the barest minimum data they need to actually do things (like taking credit card details to sell you stuff on the iTunes store [assuming you choose to even use a credit card, rather than an iTunes gift card]). If it were to come out that they were in fact selling personal data, then they would get so much bad publicity, it would probably be a disaster for them. They have built their entire public face about "We don't keep personal data if we can absolutely avoid it". I think that if they were to be caught not be doing that would so badly damage the company that it would be basically suicide to risk it. |
Yes... now that we have made the market NOT free and have a taxpayer subsidized monopoly... we should let ourselves do whatever we want. Because frankly too many people are making money off of innovation and we want a cut of that. |
You also get what you pay for. I've dealt with a few hundred people that are either overseas or came here from overseas. Only 5 or 6 were actually worth a damn.
But CTOs see it as 'I could hire 3 or 4 resources in india or 1 here for the same amount of money'. |
A wake up call that will fall on deaf ears. Companies are no longer run by management that plans for the future, for the most part. Management now is completely beholden to immediate results that affect share price. While, a hack could hurt share price at some murky time in the future, they aren't swayed because it costs money now to prepare and that affects the next upcoming earnings announcements, which in turn affect share prices, and therefore affect the value of stock compensation and bonuses given to those who are making the decisions today. |
SIPC doesn't back life and deposit policies, the insurers licensed in a given state will back each other thru a "state guarantee association"
You aren't supposed to talk about it because it essentially means that your B carrier and A carrier have essentially the same risk of failure (non payment to client) for permanent, most term and annuity blocks of business.
You are right about the very wealthy parking significant assets in life insurance, it is a loop hole the average Joe mostly has available but most financial professionals are too fucking stupid to exploit it. And if you find a professional that can exploit it there is a 95% chance he will fuck it up because he is a captive agent selling his company's shitty product. Your odds aint good there :)
If a full scale collapse occurred that took down a significant number of insurers whatever money they paid out would be worth close to jack fuck. At that point you'd rather have brass and beans. Seriously, insurers, that do real insurance (not AIG derivative trading shit) are prepared for pretty much the end of the fucking world. There aren't many things that are going to catch them with their pants down. |
Remember the last big Sony attack?
From wikipedia:
"The PlayStation Network outage was the result of an "external intrusion" on Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, in which personal details from approximately 77 million accounts were stolen and prevented users of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles from playing online through the service.[1][2][3][4] The attack occurred between April 17 and April 19, 2011,[1] forcing Sony to turn off the PlayStation Network on April 20. On May 4 Sony confirmed that personally identifiable information from each of the 77 million accounts appeared to have been stolen.[5] The outage lasted 24 days." |
The report seems to compare LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) of a solar installation to grid power (which has distribution plus wholesale generation folded into it).
The problem ls that the solar installation delivers its power from about 09:00 to 15:00 but demand peaks at 18:00 to 21:00 or so.
So the grid is still needed as backup, and grid power will become more expensive if solar becomes more prevalent, because the cost of the grid will be spread over fewer and fewer grid-supplied kW.hrs. |
Russia is teaming up with the USA to build ISS 2.0 once the current one's funding runs out in 2024 -- at least according to Russia Today and state news agency TASS.
> Update: After waiting to get in touch with colleagues in Russia, NASA responded to our inquiry and says "no new partnerships were announced."
> So far NASA hasn't announced or confirmed anything through its official channels. |
There are no actually compatibility issues - what /u/Kontu is stating is that it is not compliant to the specifications set forth for PCIe. As long as it is not - manufacturers will want to maintain 'Spec Compliance' for marketing purposes. |
I read the whole of the act for you guys, [the text is here](
A few differences from the past:
While private data was stored in NSA servers before collected from telecoms by court-order going back 3-5 years (allegedly to be accessed by about 20 background-checked agents; now the telecom company and any of its employees can access your private data). Now there is no more limit on how long a company should store the information. Presumably, a telecom can now store the information for 10 years.
Why would the telecom store the information for 10-15 years? Because under The USA Freedom Act, they are compensated reasonably for any expenses, including "facilities compensation." Meaning now instead of NSA building a big data center, they just pay Telecom company A, the money and they build it for them.
SEC. 106. COMPENSATION FOR ASSISTANCE.
But what about lawsuits for collection of information? Well.....:
SEC. 105. LIABILITY PROTECTION.
No cause of action shall lie in any court against a person who—
(A) produces tangible things or provides information, facilities , or technical assistance pursuant to an order issued or an emergency production
(eerily similiar to cispa).
But what about reform? Ah, don't worry now you can send a complaint/advocacy-letter to FISA court, if and only if, the FISA court judge says that it's necessary to see other views. See, now privacy advocates have a voice!
The goal of the bill is to move data collection/storage from government facilities to Corporate facilities (fully compensated), so that people stop complaining about government collection. See, the government isn't collecting it. It's just asking the telecoms to agree to a subpoena. Now there's a real profit motive, to store more and more data.
This is why some congressmen like Amash are pulling their support for the bill. It actually gives more access to more corporate employees and more government agencies, with liability protection and compensation, than when it was only the NSA.
[Rep Amash (the guy who tried to defund NSA) Statement on voting NO to Freedom Act.](
Summary: This is how the big-bros in congress channel the public's anger about NSA, to collect even more data for the NSA, to give even more money to corporations (now they have a new business [and jobs!] of building data centers for the NSA), while pretending to care about privacy. |
He's my Congressman and it's frustrating to have a guy like him in office representing you because he seems to be doing a lot of things right in a Congress that's doing so many things wrong (or doing so few things at all). You hear the drumbeat of "if the public disapproves of Congress, then they should vote them all out!" I'm just sitting here thinking "but my guy is doing a good job!" and I realize that that's what the majority of Americans think about their guy . Of course, I think I'm right and they're wrong but they probably think the same thing. I'm going to keep voting for Lieu and they're going to keep voting for Lamar Smith or Paul Ryan and nobody ends up winning and America's approval of Congress will continue to drop to historically low numbers. |
True.
AOL, however, evolved from a time when there really wasn't the Internet as we know it - they grew into the larger Internet like a vine grows around a tree. While there are some people who still think of AOL as "The internet," the greater portion of control that AOL had is gone.
Facebook seems to want to do the exact opposite - build up walls so you only see Facebook approved content, presented through Facebook's portal. It seems Facebook wants these people who have never been online before to think of Facebook as the internet, like AOL users used to think Usenet was an extension of AOL itself. |
you, sir/madam, are a veritable |
We used to have that problem in our Warehouse (DC).
Got a call late one afternoon; a DC employee was terminated the next morning, and we'd need to lock them out. I volunteered to arrive early, and do the dirty work.
Before I left that day, I spoke to the Operations manager (he knew about the termination) and told him that since it was common for DC staff to share ID/Passwords, I'd have to reset everyone's password for every system (just in case fired guy had someone's login). Thankfully he was more technically aware than the rest of his group and said to go ahead, and he would support me if I got flack.
Next morning, I got the call, I reset everything, network password, ERP, web-site, the lot. Called all the individuals with their network passwords, and emailed the balance to them.
As the people came in, I started getting the business for resetting everyone's passwords because they had to re-set everything, and it was a pain in the ass.
The DC manager tracks me down in the hallway, just as we're crossing paths with the OPS manager (DC Manager's boss) found me. DC manager calls me out. Ops manager drags us down to the DC, and gets everyone together. Reams them out for sharing their passwords, tells them not to do it again, and says that he told me to reset everyone's password, and they owe IT a debt of gratitude because I had to come in early to reset all their passwords, and fix the mess they made.
That was a great day, and I haven't had the problem since. |
I consider myself pretty smart and initially I thought that's what the camera did. Consider this: we live in a world where deafness is reversed by electronics, and technology is advancing every day. Eventually, we will have cameras that replace eyes. Today? Probably not, but its coming.
So when a news article starts with "A man installed a camera in his eye socket" my first thought is gonna be, "Does it connect with his brain?". |
Every point on this poster is factually correct concerning the lock-down of the iOS. Anyone saying anything else is either ignorant or stupid.
1) The distribution model of the apple app store is incompatible with free software and the GPL.
2) Every app has to be signed by Apple and downloaded from the App Store.
3) Everyone has the right to copy their music and books under the fair use clause. Not possible with DRM.
4) See [this gizmodo article]( |
You do realize that his point is that you can only download from the App store, right? The App store is an entirely closed environment in which Apple decides what will and will not be downloadable. This is in regards to iOS, not OSX. iOS is a closed system where only Apple approved products may be downloaded. This is his point. There is free software, but only if Apple approves it. Examples of free software not approved by Apple include Flash player and VLC, you cannot get these products w/o voiding your warranty; that is his point. |
Is that why there's so few free .NET libraries out there? When I did a stint as a .NET developer (worst six months of my life) I could never find open source libraries that would do what I needed. But if I wanted to pay $50-500 for a license I could find dozens of libraries that would do exactly what I wanted. |
The part that gets people riled up this time is that the ipad/iphone have these create SDKs, and great hardware features, and that, while this was always the case with phones, we're prevented from leveraging those features in obviously useful ways because of apple's decisions alone - not technical ones.
I can't use my (well, it's coming now I guess) iPhone to share my 3G connection to the rest of my condo over wifi? The techie in me says "Why the fuck not, it's perfectly capable hardware wise, and I could even write the damn software - they just wont LET me!".
In the past - the SDKs for phones were more obscure, the phones less capable, and we just didn't think of these types of situations. |
I wouldn't mind this - I'm not particularly an MS Fanboy (if I had it my way, we'd all be on Amigas) - but what worries me is that school is supposed to prepare you for business, and leaving kids to play with the wrong software is never going to help. I was in the first generation of computer-users at school, where it was insisted that we all used BBC Micros (because the gov. had done a deal and gotten them cheap). Normal bods were expected to shell out £399 (and this was in 1982) - whereas a ZX Spectrum cost £120. What do you think everyone bought? And how did that bode with the schools that were now all stuffed with computers hardly anyone had at home? The result was that lots of kids simply played games, and gave up trying to write programs that wouldn't be accepted at school (or couldn't be run at home). So it isn't as if there's a precedent for this, and it smacks of short-term savings while ignoring the long-term costs (which is a recurring government wheeze).
Google Docs is a cop-out, because it really is cut down compared to what a business needs to do with the backed of Excel, Word, Access and Outlook - Sharepoint and the like. I think they're trying the 'get everyone using it at home, then everyone will use it at work' method, but it won't work - people (and businesses) simply aren't prepared to have everything running somewhere else and be at the mercy of their internet connection. This has always been the achilles heel of thin clients, and just like the last two times they've tried to push it, no-one's really addressing these issues. |
If you mean worked with open office, then you're right - because in the private sector (=companies of any real size) no one does , as is bourne out by the job market. Colleges, and a lot of Gov. funded areas, I'm afraid to inform you, aren't really in the same ballpark as corporate IT environments on many, many levels (and I've worked at a few). I could write pages of differences, there are so many - to the point where, rightly or wrongly, working for college or Gov. as an IT 'first-job' means you almost certainly won't get a job in a bank without working for some sort of private company inbetween.
The reason lots of gov. enterprises and schools are looking at/ going for OO/ Linux/ anything else is because of the immediate money saved on paper, while ignorning the long-term real costs - you're saving money at the expense of making your students use software that isn't found elsewhere . Does that sound like government behaviour to you? And it may be 'exactly the same' to use for many students, but then you're walking down the path of 'well, they're all computers, aren't they?'.
For instance, how about your students that actually want to program backends for Access, or Excel, using Sharepoint or other apps common in the industry? If I have to interview two bods, and one has experience in OO, and the other in MSO, it's going to be MSO every single time - immediately, you have failed your students, and 90% of the people you deal with are going to have a nasty shock when they go into an interview and find out that pretending two apps are the same may work fine at college, but will put them pretty far down the list for employers. You're dealing with a mentality where even if OO was better , it wouldn't make any difference; you're out of the running.
And remember, that's just the end-users - if we go back to the example of the program-writing student going for an interview, am I going to employ the one that wrote a cool integration system for OO, or the one that's done it in MSO? You're supposed to be preparing them for the real world, not allowing them to play with whatever's coolest/ cheapest, just so that they can find out how much learning they wasted on s/w that no-one else uses (unless they never leave the gov. or education system). People using FF and then being shocked, shocked , that they have to use a locked-down IE with no control over their desktop/ apps experience the same thing - something that could easily be avoided if they'd been given the tools at college that companies actually use .
You may as well claim that because someone has used Lotus Notes/ Domino, they'll know their way around Outlook/ Exchange - after all, they do the same thing, don't they? It's that sort of assumption that will almost guarantee you don't get a post.
So no, the difference is far from 'price'. That's just what the powers-that-be pretend so that they don't have to ackowledge that going cheap on their students software will leave those students disadvantaged when they want to get a real job. |
On top of that, there is also money to be made in market share. People ARE likely to be very pissed about capped data plans, and if people are mad enough one of the large telecoms would likely see a bigger profit that could be made by poaching large numbers of disgruntled consumers by offering noncapped plans.
There is a downside to the noncapped counter stratagy. If capped networks make bigger profits, they could afford network upgrades that would draw customers back (analogous to being able to afford the infrastructure to allow 4G rather then 3G). |
Provided by Siemens AG
I'm actually pleasantly surprised that they openly acknowledged that this came from company PR. All too often there's a shady business of lobbyists and PR folks spoonfeeding overstretched journos ready-made articles of pretend-journalism in the hope of leaving the reader none the wiser, and I hate that. This however, openly acknowledging that you've been provided a story by such-and-such a company, this I find quite alright. Upmodded. |
I wanted my daughter to use her google account to talk to her mother who's an exchange student at UofMn. I thought that the Google+ hangouts were perfect for that because we might use it all three at once.
So I added my daughters account to Google+, stated her correct birthday and then BAM! I'm met with [this message](
She can't acces her email now and Google is going to DELETE her whole account??!
I've been kind of a "use google for EVERYTHING" guy, and have been recommending it to everybody around me too. I've been teaching my daughter how to use the internet and how it is important to have a single secure email address that you use for all the other services on the net. (Hell, my DOG has a Google account!)
She's a quick learner and has been using it for lots of stuff, and I use it for sharing photos and documents with her - and now Google is going to remove her access to all that because we wanted her to use Google+?
The word "Bullshit!" comes to mind but it just doesn't have the appropriate amount of stench attributed to it!
I read in the help documentation that I'm supposed to be able to vouch for her account, which is exactly what I would consider the right approach. The only catch is that there is in fact no way for me to DO THAT!
Now - WHY would Google do that?
I can't understand, because you shouldn't ever take privileges away from your flock ( I won't use the word customer here since we're the revenue generating product ) Google can stop people from accessing whatever new shit they like. But Google should never take away from people what was formerly their's.
And when you DO revoke services that were formerly being rendered (like deleting the WHOLE Google account of a person) You are only forcing them to either create a new falsified account or worse, making them incredibly mad, joining another service and possibly taking others along with them.
And since I'm on the topic, do they really consider it cool to demand a credit card or a scan of a person's national ID so you can keep your account, they are probably relying on the fact that people will do it since they have so much invested in it (I expect this ID requirement will apply for verifying your full name really soon)
And how come [Vic Gundotra]( doesn't use his real name on Google+ ?? |
If I create something, does it belong to me or society?
This would be more accurately thought as "if I arrange a sequence of bits in a particular order, do I have the right to prevent people who have seen that order from telling others about it?". The word 'create' has too strong connotations in this context.
>If it belongs to me, then shouldn't it be my own right to distribute it as I see fit?
This is a poor wording too. The question is about how others are allowed to distribute it.
>If I develop a gun that's amazing at killing people, should it be the right of others to take that information and copy it, even though I don't want people killing each other with the BFG-2011?
Here you confuse the right to take information, i.e., the question of privacy and the right to communicate information that you already have. |
Firefox's "Could not verify..." arises because it can't find a transvalid certificate torrentfreak.com is not sending ([an explanation of transvalid certificates](
Basically, torrentfreak.com should be sending one more intermediate cert in SSL handshake, but it doesn't. The reason this works for other people is that browsers cache valid intermediate certificates and can complete the chain of trust.
Dirty fix: go to (some random site with the same intermediate chain as torrentfreak.com I pulled from my SSL observatory database). Now if you reload torrentfreak, it should go without errors. |
You can freely run your own internal DNS server and have your own zones for those domains with records you control, and maintain that IP list that way. In doing so, you can configure machines on your network to only use your own DNS servers instead of relying on the centralized system. This would enable those sites to work even if the central SOPA-controlled DNS system's record is hijacked. I'm not sure if I explained that very well but it is essentially a technique/concept that has served many infosec people very well when dealing with malware. In that case, we call it a "DNS Sinkhole." If you do that, you only need to remember the IP address of the DNS servers with the records you want. Perhaps someone like EFF needs to throw up some DNS servers? I included a whitepaper URL which should give you an idea of how it works. There are also some good howtos.
[DNS Sinkhole Whitepaper](
[DNS Sinkhole Server ISO for easy setup!](
[DNS Sinkhole powered by slackware step-by-step guide](
TO BE CLEAR: This is not by any means a long-term solution, and would require a lot of work to maintain. It is a bandaid on a gaping wound....but I believe that is still better than a gaping wound and might at least allow some means of internet of communication to stay up in an emergency. |
This might be a repost, but here's his reply to any SOPA/PIPA/PROTECT IP emails.
Dear Jim,
Thank you for contacting me about S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (the PROTECT IP Act). I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me on this important issue.
As you may be aware, I am a cosponsor of the PROTECT IP Act. I believe that intellectual property (IP) enforcement is extremely important. IP-reliant companies account for more than $7.7 trillion of the United States economy and employ more than 19 million workers. We must protect American jobs from piracy, which has become rampant on the Internet. We don’t tolerate shoplifters in stores and we should not tolerate them online.
The PROTECT IP Act would authorize only the Attorney General to seek a court order to block foreign websites whose primary purpose is to sell or distribute pirated goods. Right now, a company has no way to enforce its rights if it finds that its products are being pirated or counterfeited on a website hosted overseas. The PROTECT IP Act gives the Attorney General (and not private companies) jurisdiction over foreign websites.
This bill is the successor to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), a bill that the 111th Congress never voted on. I had several concerns about COICA, but PROTECT IP contains significant improvements that addressed many of my concerns. I worked with Senator Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, to narrow the definition of an infringing site, and I was glad to see he removed the controversial provision that directed the Justice Department to publish a list of offending websites (also known as a "blacklist") without judicial process. After these improvements, I became a cosponsor of the PROTECT IP Act to protect intellectual property rights and the jobs that depend on them.
As you may be aware, there is similar legislation going through the House of Representatives—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This piece of legislation contains many provisions that are actually broader than the PROTECT IP Act. If both versions pass through their respective chambers, I will take a close look at the differences between the bills and will work to address your concerns.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to do so in the future on this or any other issue that may be important to you.
Sincerely,
Signature
Al Franken United States Senator |
I think you are using this to grind your personal axe with regards to the federal government. Frankly it's the other way around. This isn't because they think they are smarter, this is because they are ignorant. They don't understand how these things work, but are being paid huge sums of money by lobbyists to push this through, on the pretense that the big business this protects just can't get by without the assistance.
100 years ago it was the buggy whip manufacturers, and 70 years ago it was carterphone. It's all about a business having 2 choices - adapt, or litigate & lobby. The latter is FAR easier, and thus we have the last 10 years worth of nonsense from the MPAA and the RIAA. But hey it's ok, because this is America and we worship at the altar of capitalism.
The way to beat this is to break ourselves free of the 2 party duopoly, but I have no fucking clue how to do that, since the people who can change the game are the people who the game helps. |
Sometimes regular audits are unpopular? What about the notion that regular, thorough, and detailed accounting of all monies in/out/sideways are financial common sense for any enterprise from households to mega corps, and that failing to do so has potentially disastrous consequences in vital and legal regards? The Fed is our nation's money supply, and the GAO has always had the noble but impossible task of auditing how the US Gov - a behemoth by any standard - spends, moves, and utilizes PUBLIC money ---- all without any access or insight at all into the PRIVATE supplier of every last Treasury dime input when we borrow with our national American Express Unlimited Card. With interest of course. Want to know one thing that absolutely must be nationalized instead of privatized, and was until the 20th century at the behest of the Constitution? Money creation and regulation.
Tough titties, audits are essential to long term financial health. Not a single fuck given that sometimes it will create PR problems for fucking politicians. |
But hey it's ok, because this is America and we worship at the altar
> of capitalism.
I don't think reverence for capitalism is the issue in the story you've outlined. If your claim is correct, then the federal government is accepting "huge sums of money" to disrupt the normal functioning of markets by picking winners. At best, this is a reverence for the profits of certain types of businesses--not capitalism. At worst, it is a harmful and inefficient brand of crony-capitalism. |
Well as far as it being terrorism is concerned, assume that the Internet doesn't always work and is insecure and take all vital systems off it, then you won't have trouble.
The real worry here is that the US is comparing Al Qaeda, likely a legitimate terrorist group (whom they killed the leader of without trial), with Anonymous, which uses legitimate means (i.e. no botnets) of protesting against people, organisations, companies and governments who threaten the freedom of the general population. |
Actually, it is a pretty big deal, any sort of deterioration of the containment materials tends to be. Hastelloy-N still suffered from tellurium produced by the reaction, and a modification to the alloy was recommended as a result.
The core issue is that instead of solid hot radioactive nuclear fuel you have liquid very hot corrosive radioactive nuclear fuel that cannot be exposed to water or hydrogen. You are basically looking at a reactor that will gradually eat itself if there are contaminants in the fuel, so you will have to do continuous fuel reprocessing, which will eliminate a large fraction of these contaminants. Reactor materials can be more resistant to the effects of whatever is left. It is necessary to figure out comprehensively to which extent such issues can be addressed. The resulting design needs to be able to operate over a long period of time without prohibitively expensive maintenance and with enough robustness not to accidentally drown the surrounding area in hydrofluoric acid. |
Additionally, the technology for Uranium and H2O cooling was already being developed for submarine use. The fastest way to create civilian power was to scale up a sub reactor and stick it on land. So that's what the government did. Once regulations, experts, operators for those are trained it is very hard to go against the grain.
The new fleet of small modular reactors being developed (OPs link includes link to NuScale) come with a whole host of issues in U.S. Regulations. It will take 2-3 years before a new set of rules can be developed for these (and they are still Uranium based). Most rules in nuclear have been prescriptive thus far. "Pipes bearing 800+ degree Celsius water with diameter larger than 4 inches must be made of xyz". To ensure safety, new rules must be written for new designs. That is a huge disincentive to almost all corporate financial backing. |
Let me preface by saying I could be wrong. I have enough of a technical and scientific background to get the geist of the things, but I am no nuclear engineer.
I think there are three issues when it comes to poisoning:
1) LFTR is a breeder reactor
2) There isn't a lot of fuel in the reactor
3) There isn't a way to dynamically adjust the graphite moderator.
LFTR is in the class of molten salt reactors, specifically it is a uranium breeder. LFTR has an eta of 2.22. To burn the uranium in the core as well as breed uranium in the blanket takes 2 eta (eta 2?). In the 1958 report on the first prototype, .11 eta was absorbed by the reactor vessel, leaving .11 eta for...whatever.
If the Xenon is bubbled out, LFTR fuel only needs to be 0.7% UFi_4 by mole percent. The remaining reactor mass is neutron blind lithium or beryllium fluoride salt, or the fluoride salts of the material in the decay chain of uranium. I think they wanted low fuel percentage as a safety concern; that early prototype was originally conceived as an aircraft engine.
And for the last point, rather than dynamically regulate the core with control rods, the fuel in LFTR naturally condenses and disperses by fluid convection. If you get the right balance of salts, the core will tend toward critically passively. The only active process involves moving thorium and Protactinium-233 from the core to the blanket and moving uranium from the blanket to the core (all done via gas volatility columns). If you don't do that, the core will shut down when the fuel runs out.
You could build a molten salt reactor that wasn't a breeder. The original '64 reactor ran on a low enriched uranium fuel. In testing the breeder idea, the '64 prototype switched to U-233 for several months (possible as long as 6). You could build a non breeder MSR as a garbage disposal for all that U-238 and U-233 that is sitting in the waste pools at LWR, then you could up fuel density or ignore the poisons.
As for the Samarium, I have never read anything about it. Krypton was an issue at one point when they were using mixed uranium fuels, but it bubbled out with the Xenon. |
Yeah, it's a little scummy, but it's also the consumer's responsibility to ask questions before investing that much money into something. Unless you really know nothing about technology and how tech product lifecycles generally work, or have absolutely no idea that companies can use words like 'new' or 'state-of-the-art' without having to provide empirical data to back that up (barring blatant abuse of consumer rights, of course), then you should probably know better.
That being said, if I owned a multi-bazillion dollar company (my favorite kind of company) I'd probably do this as well, just because it's so widely accepted as a standard business practice. |
There is a lot of confusion about this, particularly caused by people getting Wine's name wrong and calling it WINdows Emulator.
This is from the official website. However, if you do some quick digging you can find that the original name stands for Win Emulator. If it went under that name at some point then I don't see how it's incorrect to continually call it that.
It also is technically an Emulator. To "emulate" means to imitate. An emulator would be any software that creates an environment for other software to run where it wasn't originally meant to. The WINE site seems to indicate they don't like to call it an emulator because "people think of game emulators". But it's more or less the same thing; one just operates in its own environment to emulate hardware and the other works as a compatibility layer. At the end of the day, both are emulators with different approaches. It is not incorrect to call it an emulator. For that matter, the Wikipedia article also states the name change was "primarily to differentiate Wine from other emulators". It seems they want to stand out from the crowd and be special. |
Depends. Early numbers show the S3 beating in I'd say 2/3rds the areas.
HOWEVER, these numbers are indicative of the Quad Core with 1GB of ram, an Exynos 4412 series processor that is used on most international models (i9300 variants).
The US SGSIII has LTE on most every carrier (T-Mobile does not, but I digress). When the SGSIII launched, they hadn't yet figured out how to get the Exynos 4412 chip they use in the i9300 model to not interfere with LTE. So US Variants (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T) all have a dual core Snapdragon S4 processor that works well with LTE. It's not as fast, but to make up for it they included 2GB of ram on these variants for multitasking etc.
I own a Sprint SGSIII that I love (and conversely I'm not a fan of the iPhone), but I'd be dishonest not to point out that no SGSIII has quadcore and 2GB of ram. Also, while all are indeed A9 based chipsets, so is the iPhone 5's A6. In fact, the A6 is a Cortex A9 based chipset with custom modifications that put it somewhere between A9 and A15 (original reports of specs made it look like it might be A15, but it's apparently Apple's attempt at their own custom Cortex A9 variant).
They've modified it so it's actually got more than the standard A9 going for it, which is where their speed / battery performance numbers are coming from.
But what it really boils down to is (international SGSIII) A9 1GB vs A9 1GB, each their own variants on the Cortex A9. Apple's improvements on the architecture seem to make it bascially as good, and in some areas better, despite the dual core design (just as the dual core S4 is nearly able to compete with the Exynos 4412) |
These escalating threats have been fairly commonplace recently. Usually what that means is that files get shared onto PD/Share quite a bit slower than they used to (.TS raws are usually "late" more often than not; same with BDMVs). Can't say anything about the manga/scanlation scene, but as far as I know, quite a few groups are asking for donations for them to buy the manga and scanlate it. I don't think this is because of recent changes though. Manga uploaders in Japan probably just quit. |
I think if Auernheimer had stopped at manually testing a few ICC IDs to prove that there was in fact a way to reveal emails and then informed AT&T of the flaw, he'd be okay.
You absolutely do not know this. Theres not much case law surrounding this and it'll be put to the whims of the jury. Not to mention if its illegal once, its illegal 1 million times.
This is a huge chilling effect on disclosure. HUGE. Except more people to say 'fuck it' and just sell exploits to the black market instead of trying to play AT&T's game and be sent to jail. Next time there's a zero day, we can thank court action like this.
We all lose when we treat guys like this like common criminals. Its also funny how AT&T is criminally negligent with my private information, but will suffer no consequences for it. |
b/ is so antagonistic, even among themselves, that many of them will gladly rat on anyone and everyone they hate. Never underestimate its power... if you post a picture you took or that has you in it on there, somebody will find out your name or at least the location the picture is from. And then they will tell on you if you said you did something illegal. |
And, in the end (in the first case at least) the person you get may have more information than you as to who did the crime and posted it, but you legally cannot negotiate a meaningful sentence reduction with sex offenders due to mandatory reporting laws and minimum sentencing laws. Thus meaning you essentially are forced to kill visitors to dragons' caves, rather than giving them a free pass in exchange for telling you where the dragons (the posters) or the head dragons (the people who committed the crime in the pictures/video... note that they are also dragons so the metaphor holds) are. Taking it slow is often the best response to a crime situation, but if you're going to have laws which restrict the positive leverage that agents can use on people ONE OR EVEN TWO DEGREES AWAY from the actual criminals, then you're never going to get to the sources of the problem (which are incidentally sometimes even a further degree or two upward from said criminals and are forcing them to do the actions). |
Something is seriously wrong when people grow up to be like this. As in we are not living normal/natural lives any longer. Idk what I am saying. I am not some hippie or bobo, it just seems as we rapidly transition from a natural existence to a synthetic paradigm we throw more people into unnatural states of being. It is perhaps one price we pay for choosing to go so far against the grain of the natural processes that seem to rule the rest of planet. Like I said I am no hippie, or maybe I am lol, but it just seems these people just don't feel they fit in with the world as it is today and they can't handle the pressures and responsibilities that go along with the modern human experience.
It's unnatural selection in a sense as those who are more likely to handle the growing stresses and pressures of modern life will be able to marry, have children and pass on their genetics. For those who can't hack it for whatever reason - it really doesn't matter what the reason is the only important factor is that it prevents people from becoming the fittest in the group - they are less likely to pass along their genetics because they fail at succeeding in modern life across the entire board.
Perhaps in another time these same ppl would be great in a less technologically driven society and those who excel now would suck at plowing the fields and doing tons of other types of manual labor or whatever. We are forcing people to sink or swim in a paradigm we created for ourselves. This all must be very interesting for anthropologists to watch unfold. I think this is unprecedented really. Especially at this speed. Perhaps something like this has happened before during the industrial revolution idk. I'm an arm chair everything, but I am not a hippie, fuck that. ;) jk jk |
I use paypal as one of the various ways to receive payments for my company and that part works okay most of the time. However, sometimes customers make a claim that's fraudulent and paypal will automatically remove the money from my account while they investigate. That can put you in a bind sometimes when its a rather large order and you needed those funds to move forward with the next order.
The worst was when I used them for credit/debit card processing. I strongly urge others to NOT use this service for their business. They will often without warning hold 10-30% of your funds "in case there's ever a need to refund a customer". First of all, I think it's up to me as the business owner, how I refund a customer and sure don't want my "bank" holding funds for me. Secondly, the 10-30% comes off the top of your balance in the account, not your profit. So they can get into money you need to use to order new products, payroll etc... this happened to me and it seriously F'd me up for about 75 days or so. They held so much money I was unable to do business. I called them to cancel my account and they made me wait something like 75 days for everything to clear out and they gave me a little of my money at a time during that period.
Since then I've tried a few other companies for credit card processing and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. |
From a personal account, the only two times I've had to use PayPal on ebay, I got fucked over. The first time I bought a microSD card. The seller had like a thousand positive feedback karma or whatever. It gets to be about a week after the expected delivery, and I got a little disappointed. So I go to my open orders and eBay shows that it shipped. I go to the seller's page, and eBay says that account never existed. I'm a little perplexed, but I think "it's ok, I used PayPal." So I go to PayPal, and it shows no transactions. Ok so I guess it just didn't get ordered then. Check my bank account, and the money definitely got withdrawn. I called PayPal's customer service for help, they tell me they have no record so they can't do anything. I ask my bank, and they said if it were my other credit card, it would have had theft protection and got it taken off. Anyway, I got a reality check that PayPal is NOT always a failsafe. |
You make a great point, although I would add that demographics are of particular importance when looking at a distribution model. Those who use Netflix and only pay $10 a month to get "the library", really aren't the same ones who pay $15 for a single DVD. In reality many of them had resorted to piracy, blockbuster, 2nd hand and alternative means for acquiring entertainment long before Netflix. Those who paid $15 a month for DVDs are still out there. The majority of Netflix users are former blockbuster goers and piracy doers like myself. |
You're spot on.
Eastern European here. Before Steam, I could only afford 2 original retail games per year, tops. The only way to play more games was to pirate. I even remembe buying a game which I was unable to play because of Starforce - in the end, I had to pirate it to play it properly. Fast-forward 6 years - I'm on Steam, my library has 250+ titles and I have bought half of them only to "legalize them retroactively". Great prices and most of all AVAILABILITY.
I really hope Netflix arrives in our countries as soon as possible. Regular TV broadcast is completely unwatchable. Majority of TV series is only being sold on DVDs (with ridiculous price tags) and Blu-rays are still expensive. When the price of DVDs dropped, I bought a lot of them and I don't have a lot of place to store the discs anymore. I only buy a few Blu-ray movies per year because of nice packaging and great picture. At the moment, I only pirate movies/series because I have literally no place to store them. Netflix should change a lot, you have no idea how gladly I'd pay for the service.
And the same applies to music - while the citizens of the first world countries use Spotify or buy music digitally, we're still supposed to buy the damn CDs. I really can't afford to pay 20-30 € for a retail album. The only CDs I've ever bought were from Finland (due to unavailability) and UK (due to lower prices - 25 € vs. £8 makes a lot of difference). One might argue that iTunes finally arrived here sometime ago - yes, that's correct. But its services over here are really shitty when compared to e.g. Steam. I can't download my previously purchased songs again in order to "save their bandwidth" (Valve has no problems with downloading tens of GBs per day). I'm unable to choose the desired quality/format of the files. And a lot more. I haven't used the service since my first and last purchase so I'm unable to specify the rest. |
Problem - you're censorship wouldn't allow anything but the gimped stuff. Similar issues in Canada as well as the language police here saying only bilingual shit can be played. |
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